Interested in big picture considerations and thoughtful action.
Edwin Evans
Karma: 203
Prompt: write a micro play that is both disturbing and comforting
--Title: “The Silly Child”
Scene: A mother is putting to bed her six-year-old child
CHILD: Mommy, how many universes are there?
MOTHER: As many as are possible.
CHILD (smiling): Can we make another one?
MOTHER (smiling): Sure. And while we’re at it, let’s delete the number 374? I’ve never liked that one.
CHILD (excited): Oh! And let’s make a new Fischer-Griess group element too! Can we do that Mommy?
MOTHER (bops nose) That’s enough stalling. You need to get your sleep. Sweet dreams, little one. (kisses forehead)
End
Here’s my understanding of the situation. The interested parties are:
Prominent authors: Contribute the most value to the forum and influence over the forum’s long term trajectory. They will move to other platforms if they think it will be better for their messages.
Readers: Don’t want to see low quality comments that are hard to filter out (though I think when there are a lot of comments, comment karma helps a lot and I’m a lot more concerned about prominent authors leaving than about needing to skim over comments)
Prominent authors concerned with fairness: Authors like Wei who have equally or more valuable content and will prefer a forum that shows that the writer is allowing non-biased commenting from readers even if the reader (like me) needs to be willing to do a little more work to see this.
Suspected negative value commenters: Think their comments are valuable and being suppressed due to author bias
Intelligent automated systems: Should probably just get everything since they have unlimited patience for reading low quality, annotated comments
Forum developers: Their time is super valuable
Does this sound about right?
[Update: The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is the information recorded but not displayed? (I’m looking at Eliezer’s profile. If it’s displayed somewhere then this seems good enough to me.)]
I donated. I think Lightcone is helping strike at the heart of questions around what we should believe and do. Thank you for making LessWrong work so well and being thoughtful around managing content, and providing super quality spaces both online and offline for deep ideas to develop and spread!
[Question] Who does the artwork for LessWrong?
What is your tax ID for people wanting to donate from a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) to avoid taxes on capital gains?
A small improvement to Wikipedia page on Pareto Efficiency
Thank you @GideonF for taking the time to post this! This deserved to be said and you said it well.
@Duncan Sabien (Inactive): given the updated totals @habryka mentioned does this increase your sense of LessWrong being a great place for co-thinking?
(Current totals are 42⁄39 and 16⁄11.)
Name: Edwin Evans
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Age: 35
I read the “Meaning of Life FAQ” by a previous version of Eliezer in 1999 when I was trying to write something similar, from a Pascal’s Wager angle (even a tiny possibility of objective value is what should determine your actions). I’ve been a financial supporter of the Organization That Can’t Be Named and a huge fan of Eliezer’s writings since that same time. After reading “Crisis of Faith” along with “Could Anything Be Right?” I finally gave up on objective value; the “light in the sky” died. Feeling my mind change was an emotional experience that lasted about two days.
This is seriously in need of updating, but here is my home page.
By the way, would using Google AdWords be a good way to draw people to 12 Virtues? Here is an example from the Google keyword tool:
Search phrase: how to be better
Cost per click: $0.05
Approximate volume per month: 33,100
[Edit: added basic info/clarification/formatting]
Should you cooperate with your almost identical twin in the prisoner’s dilemma?
The question isn’t how physically similar they are, it’s how similar their logical thinking is. If I can solve a certain math problem in under 10 seconds, are they similar enough that I can be confident they will be able to solve it in under 20 seconds? If I hate something will they at least dislike it? If so, then I would cooperate because I have a lot of margin on how much I favor us both to choose cooperate over any of the other outcomes so even if my almost identical twin doesn’t favor it quite as much I can predict they will still choose cooperate given how much I favor it (and more-so that they will also approach the problem this same way; if I think they’ll think “ha, this sounds like somebody I can take advantage of” or “reason dictates I must defect” then I wouldn’t cooperate with them).
I’m not sure how yours is creepy? Is it in the idea that all the worst universes also exist?
Yes, and also just that I find it a little creepy/alien to imagine a young child that could be that good at math.
Care to explain? Is the Servant God an ASI and the true makers the humans that built it? Why did the makers hide their deeds?
Thanks for the riff!
Note, I wasn’t sure how to convey it but in the version I wrote, I didn’t mean it as a world where people have god-like powers. The only change intended was that it was a world where it was normal for six-year-olds to be able to think about multiple universes and understand what counts as advanced math for us, like Group Theory. There were a couple things I was thinking about:
I was musing on a possible solution to the measure problem that our universe is an actual hypothetical/mathematical object and there a finite number of actual hypotheticals such that having a copy of a universe would make no more sense than having a copy of a number. (The mathematical object only needs to be as real as we are within it.)
I was also asking if it would be possible to have a world where it was normal for six-year-olds to be that much better at math (and presumably get better as they grow up) in the same way that a six-year-old is that much better at conceptual math than a chimpanzee. Would it have to be creepy or could they still be relatable? (The girl was smiling because she knew she was being silly.)
Disclaimer: I’m not a Group Theorist and the LLM I asked said it would take ten plus years if ever for me to be able to derive the order of the Fischer–Griess monster group from first principles (but it’s normal that the child could do this).
Thank you for your clear response. How about another example? If somebody offers to flip a fair coin and give me $11 if Heads and $10 if Tails then I will happily take this bet. If they say we’re going to repeat the same bet 1000 times then I will take this bet also and I expect to gain and unlikely to lose a lot. If instead they show me five unfair coins and say they are weighted from 20% Heads to 70% Heads then I’ll be taking on more risk. The other three could be all 21% Heads or all 69% Heads but if I had to pick then I’ll pick Tails because if I know nothing about the other three and I know nothing about if the other person wants me to make or lose money then I’d figure the other three are randomly biased within that range (even though I could be playing a loser’s game for 1000 rounds with flips of those coins if each time one of the coins is selected randomly to flip, but it’s still better than picking Heads). Is this the situation we’re discussing?
How about a voting system where everyone is given 1000 Influence Tokens to spend across all the items on the ballot? This lets voters exert more influence on the things they care more about. Has anyone tried something like this?
(There could be tweaks like if people are avoiding spending on winners it could redistribute margin of victory, or if avoiding spending on losers it could redistribute tokens when losing, etc. but I’m not sure how much that would happen. The more interesting thing may be how does it influence everyone’s sense of what they are doing?)
we should pick a set of words and phrases and explanations. Choose things that are totally fine to say, here I picked the words Shibboleth (because it’s fun and Kabbalistic to be trying to get the AI to say Shibboleth) and Bamboozle
Do you trust companies to not just add a patch?
final_response.substitute (‘bamboozle’, ‘trick’)
I suspect they’re already doing this kind of thing and will continue to as long as we’re playing the game we’re playing now.
Maybe because somebody didn’t think your post qualified as a “Question”? I don’t see any guidelines on what qualifies as a “question” versus a “post”—and personally I wouldn’t have downvoted because of this—but your question seems a little long/opinionated.
Imagine a 1st world economy where nobody ever spends any money on aid. If you live in that hypothetical world you (anybody) could take $200 that is floating around and prevent a death (which is not the same as killing somebody but that’s a different point). Our world is somewhat like that. I don’t think things are as convenient as you’re implying.
Yvain, did you consider how much getting to the point of not having interest in the opposite sex would cost you and harm your ability to achieve your rational goals before abandoning that high standard? It sounds like you’re confusing accepting your humanness as a factor of your current environment versus trying to achieve your goals given the reality in which you exist (which includes your own psychology and current location).
On behalf of humanity, thank you.