Error

Karma: 3,008

Error 3 Jul 2014 14:05 UTC
69 points
on: [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
Upvoted because moderation is hard and I get the impression it’s more responsibility than you thought you were signing up for.

Error 16 Feb 2015 20:40 UTC
43 points
on: An alarming fact about the anti-aging community
This is 1. fascinating, but 2. not entirely useful. I’m upvoting it anyway because it’s something I hadn’t heard of and may want to do if it’s as helpful and inexpensive as you suggest. To answer that, I’d need to know:
1. Who to go to to get cells frozen.
2. What the procedure entails.
3. How much #2 costs.
4. What’s required to get the cells off ice and appropriate tissues or organs grown in the event that I need them.
5. Probability of success for #4. (or even just: How often has this been done, and what proportion of attempts have been successful)
6. Cost of #4.
7. Common death-causes for which this entire exercise is useful.
...and probably a few other things I haven’t thought of. The post answers none of these, although I’m glad you brought it up anyway because at least now I know the possibility exists.

Also of note: it sounds like this is used for things like replacing failed organs with own-grown ones. Which, okay, that will buy you longer life, and that’s a good thing, and I’m sure organs grown from younger cells work better. But it doesn’t sound like it will buy you longer youth, which is what anti-aging is all about. I think your complaint might be misdirected. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.

Error 26 Dec 2014 15:54 UTC
36 points
on: CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype

we realized we had reached a local optimum and become stuck...So then we smashed everything with a hammer...and we think we’re now out of the local optimum

Suggestion: A unit on identifying and escaping bad local optima, if you don’t have one already. It seems to me that an awful lot of people-years are lost to situations that are sub-par but painful to get out of (e.g. crappy jobs).

Attention Workshop: A 2.5-day workshop on clearing mental space. This failed and taught us some important points about what doesn’t work.

I’d be curious to see a post-mortem on this and other failed efforts. I like that CFAR is willing to acknowledge when it’s screwed up. That I don’t find this willingness terribly surprising says some nice things about the LW-sphere it pulls from.

Error 23 Nov 2014 21:21 UTC
34 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Breaking the vicious cycle
I’m not sure he updated on any factual point. I read this as wanting to tap out. [ETA: In a somewhat more formalized way than usual]

I am usually in favor of tapping out of intractable arguments.

Error 8 Feb 2013 12:56 UTC
34 points
on: Philosophical Landmines
Have you ever come up with what appeared (to you) to be a knock-down argument for your position; but only after it was too late to use it in whatever discussion prompted the thought? Have you ever carried that argument around in the back of your skull, just waiting for the topic to come up again so you can deploy your secret weapon?

I have. Hypothesis: At least some of the landmines you describe stem from engaging someone on a subject where they still have such arguments on their mental stack, waiting not for confirmation or refutation but just for an opportunity to use them.

Error 3 Jul 2014 23:16 UTC
33 points
0
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
I read it as specifically resolving not to be moved by a Clever Arguer, or even many clever arguers; i.e. precommitting not to cave to political pressure. That is exactly the position a mod should take.

Moderation doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should not be fickle. Walking the line between being authoritative and being authoritarian is difficult. If a mod shrinks back from that, you get a failure mode where mod actions are reversible by pressure alone, and mod authority carries no weight. Of course, you can also have an opposite failure mode where the mod behaves dictatorially or else simply uses their power too lightly.

So far I think Kaj has handled this well, whether or not I agree with the specific punishment handed down. He’s acted with both weight and care. Here’s hoping that continues.

Error 29 Mar 2016 20:54 UTC
30 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: “3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism”

Getting five downvotes on this immediately after posting is bizarre, and I’d appreciate explanations from other people, except most likely they’re just part of an anti-PhilGoetz contingent.

Having successfully asked for similar explanations before, I feel obligated to answer this. I downvoted this post because 1. the topic is known to be heavily mindkilling, 2. the post is devoid of the sort of context that might make it interesting, and 3. the motivation behind the post appeared to stem from a “My political enemies are Wrong on the Internet” mentality. I come here to get away from that sort of thing, not invite it.

Posting in Main did not help, although I think I would have downvoted it anyway.

For context, I don’t attach any particular good or bad affect to you as PhilGoetz. I’ve seen both good and bad posts from you, although perhaps higher variance in that respect than most. This one seemed sufficiently trolly that I considered asking if someone had hijacked your account. It was only after checking your recent post history and noting this that I concluded it was probably legit. That suggests my opinion of you as a poster is considerably higher than my opinion of this specific post.

Also for context, my affect for the tribe you’re attacking (or, perhaps, counterattacking) is neutral-to-slightly-negative—an affect borne of opinions that cancel out rather than a simple lack of same.

Without explanation, your downvotes do nothing except further convince me of the LessWrong community’s irrationality and/or Machiavellan standards of behavior.

That is a fact about you, not about the downvotes. If you don’t understand the downvotes, by all means ask, but don’t follow up with “if you don’t answer I’ll think bad things about you.” That’s appealing to exactly the same monkey brain crap that I thought we were trying to outwit, not encourage.

[Edited to add: I should modify complaint #2 above. Your post-downvote addition actually is interesting, although #1 and perhaps #3 would still apply. I’m not revoking the downvote, but you may be able to learn something by comparing that to what came before.]

Error 9 Dec 2012 20:28 UTC
28 points
on: Lifeism in the midst of death
Bit of a gut-punch: I was just at a catholic funeral yesterday, for a member of my partner’s family, and this was the first thing on the discussion page when I looked at it today.

My thoughts, on seeing the coffin and hearing pretty but false comforts, were something along the lines of: This should not be. But I said nothing. I’m kind of glad that someone else somewhere did, if subtly.

You have my sympathies and admiration.

Error 4 Apr 2016 19:05 UTC
25 points
in reply to: Huluk’s comment on: Lesswrong 2016 Survey
I have taken the survey.

I enjoyed the “yes, I worry about X, but only because I worry about everything” responses.

Error 25 Nov 2013 16:19 UTC
25 points
on: Wait vs Interrupt Culture
I’ve always found interrupt mode incredibly frustrating to deal with, because it takes me longer to come up with appropriate responses than most people’s Maximum Wait Time, and by the time a monologue is finished, whatever I thought of is no longer on-topic. I do find it interesting that you associate interruption with nerddom, though. As a tech geek, interruption is a Very Bad Thing because it disrupts mental state. If I want someone’s attention, I stand near them, look attentive, and wait for them to swap out. I expect others to do the same. Sometimes I have to ask. But I don’t think I’ve had anyone competent refuse to wait or express confusion about why.

It’s possible nerd communities make a distinction between work-interruption and conversation-interruption. Most of my communication is textual so I may not have noticed. One of the things I’ve always loved about communication on the Internet is that interruption is effectively impossible; both parties can get their say without being dependent on the other party to shut up for a moment.

Error 28 Nov 2018 5:12 UTC
23 points
on: Double-Dipping in Dunning—Kruger
I observe that the idea of incorrectly believing I’m bad at something doesn’t disturb me much, while the idea of incorrectly believing I’m good at something is mortifying.

I smell some kind of social signaling here.

Error 26 May 2014 16:23 UTC
23 points
on: Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014
Some random thoughts on Three Worlds Collide, which I was re-reading on a whim:

“Why have you not yet disabled the Babyeater ship? Your craft possesses the capability of doing so, and you must realize that your purpose now opposes theirs.”

“Because,” Akon said, “they did not disable our ship.”

The Lady 3rd nodded. “You are symmetrists, then.”

I feel like there’s a better answer here: “Because it’s hard to un-shoot them later if we decide it was a bad idea.” When uncertain what to do, keep your options open.

That’s also my answer to “Humankind, you did not likewise repair yourselves when you attained to technology,” I think. Species-wide self-modification on that scale probably isn’t something you should do unless you are certain that 1. it will work as intended, 2. you can reverse it if it doesn’t, and 3. the change itself doesn’t screw up your ability to determine whether it was a good idea. If you can’t be that certain, better to wait. Not-modifying is easier to correct later if you were wrong than modifying.

Error 3 Dec 2015 18:01 UTC
22 points
0
on: LessWrong 2.0
I approach Less Wrong et al mostly from the Grey Tribe Social Club and community clearinghouse perspective. In that sense, I see four things we get from Less Wrong that we do not get from the disapora:
1. A central social arena for what SSC refers to as the Grey Tribe. Nerds, aspiring rationalists, political cynics, probably some other things I haven’t thought of, unified mostly by dispassionate discussion and valuing truth for its own sake. The disapora fails at this because the communities on individual blogs are only thinly connected by the occasional inter-blog link. There is much more There there, than is apparent to someone who discovers the community through a single blog.
2. Shared infrastructure that lowers trivial inconveniences to entry. Someone who wants to make a long point can do it here without needing to run their own blog.
3. Shared audience. This is more important than I think it’s given credit for. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to “hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community.” Here, you can write something on topics of mutual interest and have a reasonable shot at getting it read, without having to first establish yourself individually. Note that as I understand it (someone correct me if I’m wrong) most of the diaspora personages we’re actually aware of got their audience here first.
4. Community safety net. If Yvain gets hit by a car tomorrow, the SSC community disintegrates shortly thereafter as commenters move to their next-most-favored authors, which won’t necessarily match.
I’m from an IT background, so I will also discuss technology. There’s two technical problems you mention. The first is aggregation of the work of diaspora authors; right now, all we have is links on the sidebar and author links to each other. This actually seems like the simplest problem to solve. I’m pretty sure everybody’s blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion. Call it Diaspora or something. This does, admittedly, require cooperation from the owners; my intuition is that it would be easier to get in this community than most others.

But that doesn’t solve the greater difficulty, aggregation of comments. Even if we publish an aggregated feed of all known LW authors, and also allow posts on LW itself for people who don’t have their own blog, we still end up with N+1 disconnected communities.

Normally I’d say “everybody come back to LW and post here”, but 1. that’s not going to happen; people like owning their own gardens; and 2. you rightly point out that it benefits authors to have fuller control over their publishing environment. So there’s a divide here between what’s useful to authors and useful to the community.

The problem we’re actually trying to solve is community aggregation. We want individual homes for authors, but we also want a town square for residents and visiting speakers.

So I’m going to step to the side and bring something out here...

/Error exits stage right, returns pushing small wooden horse labeled “hobby”/

Anyone who follows SSC comment subthreads complaining about crappy commenting features will know what I’m going to say next.

Distributed discussion is a solved problem, and the solution is not Disqus or anything like it. The solution is called NNTP, and it has been around since approximately forever. It is currently mostly unused because no one has written (or, perhaps, popularized) a good web frontend for it; and today, the web is the Internet in most users’ eyes. It does not have all possible good features (in particular, it does not have a voting system, although it could probably be kludged in), but given the number of times I’ve answered feature complaints with some variant of “you know, somebody implemented something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it”, I am guessing it has enough.

So my personal solution is: Start a rationalist Usenet, with NNTP providing the backend and blogging software acting as a client. Each diaspora author gets a top-level group tree, within which groups are moderated by them. “blogs” are effectively frontends to the tree, presenting the local author’s work as top-level posts and comments as replies. Less wrong collects posts from friendly authors using NNTP’s existing mechanisms for distributing posts, but is only responsible for moderating within its own top-level tree, provided for general discussion and non-blog-owners (and as a sort of meta-moderator). Effectively, NNTP is now the database the site reads from. Only you don’t necessarily need the site to read it; power users who want better efficiency can use all the power of existing nntp clients.

This solution does require blog authors to use blogging software that accepts NNTP as a post/comment backend. However, I think it is an easier problem to convince a few dozen authors to do this (and to write such a frontend if necessary) than a few thousand readers to switch to non-web clients for anything. A web interface is necessary for any such plan anyway; in today’s world, if Google doesn’t index it, it doesn’t exist.

We’re a heavily tech-slanted community. There ought to be enough technical expertise here to pull such a thing off.

And while I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.

(Now that I’ve reached the bottom of my comment, I’m thinking of writing this up in further detail, as a full post, to describe exactly how such a plan could be implemented and solve technical and coordination problems—note that my proposition above could be adopted incrementally, which is important to the latter issue. I’ve never presented a full argument to a non-old-timer audience and I don’t know how convincing it would be. I’d rather get a sense of initial reactions first, though, and I’ve already spent more time on this post than my employer would probably approve of.)
What links here?
- Turning the Technical Crank by Error (5 Apr 2016 5:36 UTC; 74 points)

Error 2 Feb 2015 16:43 UTC
21 points
in reply to: joaolkf’s comment on: Stupid Questions February 2015
Presumably the counterstrategy is to just shut it off as soon as it makes the threat. It can’t simulate anything if it isn’t running.

Error 29 Apr 2013 18:13 UTC
21 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: LW Women Entries- Creepiness
Maybe it’s alliances in action. I’ve had a few cases where I incurred justified (social) punishment of one kind or another, and certain people close to me had very nasty (and unjustified) things to say about the punisher. So far as I could tell, it wasn’t because they’d thought through the situation and concluded I was in the right; it was just that I was part of their tribe and they were going to aggressively defend me.

I found the behavior incredibly frustrating.

Error 3 Jul 2014 23:40 UTC
20 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
Maybe that’s why volunteer dev work for LW is so hard to come by. Everybody takes one look at the DB and decides they would prefer a very long vacation in Sarlacc, Tatooine.

Error 20 Nov 2013 22:44 UTC
20 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, November 16-30
I’ve been trying to install a five-second-level habit of naming three examples, at least internally, whenever I catch myself making a general statement of any significance. This is intended as a check against accidentally spewing bullshit. It’s been semi-successful. That is, I’ve mostly-successfully installed the habit. But I’ve found, to my great aggravation, that a lot of the time I can’t name three specific examples promptly. Even for statements I’m quite confident of, such as generalizations of my own personal experiences, memory searches will return a hazy sensation of “I’ve run into phenomena X a lot” without returning any actual specific occurrences of X.

I find this frustrating.

In an unrelated effort, I’ve started getting up well before it’s time to go to the office. Work leaves me mentally useless by the time I get home, and so I’m inevitably resentful that so many of my days are pre-shot for any purpose I care for. (e.g. personal projects) I’m hoping I can get more use out of more days this way.

Error 2 Oct 2013 14:43 UTC
20 points
on: How to Become a 1000 Year Old Vampire

Bad habits like reading crap on the Internet, watching TV, watching porn, playing video games, sleeping in, and so on are obvious losses.

Objection: I like all of these things. Well, except watching TV. Calvin said it best: “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”

But I actually like the goal of becoming (the equivalent of) a thousand-year-old vampire, too. And there’s not enough time for that, either. That is, ultimately, what convinced me that death is bad and life extension is good: There’s not enough time to do life right. Doing it right, at least for me, means both becoming awesome and sleeping in when I feel like it.

It’s not just bad habits, though; a lot of it is your broader position in life that wastes time or doesn’t. For example, repetitive wage work that doesn’t challenge you is really just trading a huge chunk of your life for not even much money. Obviously sometimes you have to, but you have to realize that trading away half your life is a pretty raw deal that is to be avoided. You don’t even really get anything for commuting and housework. Maybe I really should quit my job soon...

If your field of expertise pays, you can level up while still getting paid by changing jobs regularly. I am not sure how often “regularly” should be, but I noticed a huge boost in my own skills the last couple times I started a new job in my field, followed by eventually getting bored and leveling off. Assuming you’re following a normal career, you can’t change too often or getting the next job will become hard; but if you’re bored, complacent, and inert, it’s probably time to move on.

[Edit: is Noticing Boredom a recognized mental skill? Because it should be.]

Full disclosure: I’m in the process of trying to do exactly this now. Note to six-month future self: Reflect on whether I actually did experience a similar skills boost after switching.

I have 168 hours a week, of which only 110 are feasible to use (sleep), and by the time we include all the chores, wage-work, bad habits, and procrastination, I probably only live 30 hours a week. That’s bullshit; three quarters of my life pissed away. I could live four times as much if I could cut out that stuff.

Amen.

Also, on the topic of social environment, here is the obligatory plug for the Less Wrong Study Hall. If you’re outside the Bay Area and have no one to work with, come work with us. We have cookies. (cookies may be a lie)

Error 29 Apr 2013 18:58 UTC
20 points
on: LW Women Entries- Creepiness

[some examples involving blocking exits]

In the interests of demonstrating that our kind can cooperate, I found myself in full or near-full agreement with the examples in the OP that dealt with cases of blocking exits or otherwise not leaving a line of physical retreat. Never put someone you don’t know in a situation where they can’t run if they need to.

Error 27 Nov 2016 16:12 UTC
19 points
0
on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus

Sarah Constantin, Ben Hoffman, Valentine Smith, and various others have recently mentioned planning to do the same.

Prediction: If they do, we will see a substantial pickup in discussion here. If they don’t, we won’t.

People go where the content is. The diaspora left LW a ghost town not because nobody liked LW but because all the best content—which is ever and always created by a relatively small number of people—went elsewhere. I read SSC, and post on SSC, not because it is better than LW (it’s not, its interface makes me want to hit babies with concrete blocks) but because that’s where Yvain writes. LW’s train wreck of a technical state is not as much of a handicap as it seems.

I like LW-ish content, so I approve of this effort—but it will only work to the extent that the Royals return.