I’d be wary of making a thing like that. Even ignoring the EU’s bizarre “Right to be forgotten” law, people should be allowed to change their opinion, and such a website would incentivise consistency only. Not truth; consistency.
Are you sure that’s what you want?
It doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to be mentioned otherwise, so I thought I should tell you this:
Lesswrong is writing a story, called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”. It’s just about what you’d expect; absolutely full of ideas from LW.com. I know it’s not the usual fare for this site, but I’m sure a lot of you have enjoyed Eliezer’s fiction as fiction; you’ll probably like this as well.
Who knows, maybe the author will even decide to decloak and tell us who to thank?
Hey, this year I was able to answer some of the calibration questions! Three yays for norse mythology.
Also apparently I’m a weird person.
Worst case, our laws of physics seem to be turing-computable.
Here’s another question, though: Will it drive 5% of my reading audience sane?
There are people who really, genuinely feel there’s no point in striving to live, because life isn’t nice. Even just showing them that life could be nice might be helpful, when it comes to things like getting signed up for cryonics.
Use a tool like f.lux to change the color temperature of your screen depending on time of day.
Your eyes will be much happier when it matches the surrounding room, and/or lowering the temperature when it’s close to bed-time will help you fall asleep.
That is not how people normally use the term “biological”, and in particular it’s not how Huw used it.
I feel pretty confident calling him a Cassandra.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but calling him a “Cassandra” means “He’s right, but no-one will believe him,” and I hope that isn’t what you meant!
An applicable morality tale here would be the boy that cried wolf, if he hadn’t retracted his post. I don’t remember if he had a name. (Elon Musk: Inverse Cassandra.)
I thought Europe was about a third the size it actually is, whee! On the bright side, at least I didn’t claim to be confident about that.
On the god/simulation questions, I answered them using the theory that they’re the same thing, but in retrospect perhaps that isn’t quite what you had in mind?
That was my first thought as well.
However, in the least convenient world all the other people are being run by an AI, who through reading your mind can ensure you don’t notice the difference. The AI, if it matters, enjoys roleplaying. There are no people other than you in your shard.
Well, that’s a pretty impressive “error” though. :-)
So to simplify—explaining the state of the world is fine, but there’s a difference between that and praising someone for it.
Your second point is very important.
It’s not just about lost opportunities to learn.. well, it mostly is, but consider socialisation. Kids are supposed to learn how to act in society from.. who, exactly? Obviously not the teachers, they aren’t around enough of the time to do it, and socialisation isn’t really in the curriculum anyway. So. Parents, typically, and hope you have good ones.
Historically, you’d learn from older siblings or friends, but families are smaller and age-sorting has almost entirely eliminated cross-age friendships. That’s bad; eliminating that problem might be a good start towards fixing schools.
November was NaNoWriMo.
I didn’t officially participate, but I nonetheless wrote about 20,000 words, same as the last few months—if I can keep that up, I should be a competent writer in about five years. Yay!
“Figure out the past state from the current state”. Or at least some close approximation of the past state.
Which involves attempting to time-reverse the laws of physics, on some level. Which is impossible, strictly speaking, but you may be able to get close enough for government purposes.
If. I don’t think they are; it would have been obvious to some scientist at one point or another, not to mention anyone who lives in close contact with them.
It seems more plausible to me that their apparent intelligence is another product of magic; that when you’re talking to a snake, you’re actually talking to a magic-induced AI of some kind that will, if you asked it to do something, control the snake afterwards to suit your purposes.
The laws of physics here are already AI-complete, so it doesn’t seem like a large leap to me.
That is not the most inconvenient possible world.
The conservative assumption to make here is that Dr. Evil is, in fact, evil; and that, after sufficient reflection, he is still evil. Perhaps he’s brain-damaged; it doesn’t matter.
Given that, will he be able to hijack CEV? Probably not, now that the scenario has been pointed out, but what other scenarios might be overlooked?
And never before has that sentence looked quite so horrifying.