Yes my experience matches closely to yours. If I’m fasting I’ll typically stop eating after 10am breakfast and I’ll be most hungry around 6pm the next day. So a bit more than 24 hours. After that there’s clear hunger, but it’s a different sort, not as immediate.
frontier64(weir)
Karma: 178
This is the same country that just lied to and detained the number one tennis player in the world?
I don’t think your posts suggest or says anywhere that the CIA knew about Epstein’s ongoing pedophilic operation. If you think it does you should quote that relevant section instead of telling me to re-read the post. But if you’re saying here that you do think that the CIA knew about Epstein’s pedophilic operation then that’s well and good.
Now, the analysis that I’m thinking of is connecting this inference to the ability of conspirators to murder Epstein. The fact that the CIA knows about and actively encourages the pimping out of underaged girls implies that the CIA really is full of absolute rule-followers who would kill their own grandmother if the agency asked them to. That means that it really doesn’t make any sense to trust any report made by them or a sister agency on potential security breaches at Epstein’s jail.
edit: tone
Given the conditions that Epstein ran a conspiracy in which he personally had sex with underaged women plus provided young underaged women for other powerful persons to have sex with, and that he was a CIA agent, how likely is it that the CIA did not know of his pedophile ring?
[Also on UI for the deleter’s part of it, it’s great that the site saves a draft of all potential comments I type in the reply box even if I close the page. I don’t really know if that’s an intended feature for drafting or just for saving your work if you accidentally close your browser or something. I use it for drafting short comments. Unlike draft posts however there’s no list of my draft comments anywhere that I can find. Means I have to separately keep track of comments I’m drafting and plan on posting later and that removes most of the benefit for drafting of saving comments on the site. A list on my profile for comment drafts similar to post drafts would be pretty nice I think. Or maybe an indicator on posts that I have a pending draft comment for. It would definitely stop me from submitting comments as a form of first draft and then editing 5 times before deleting.]
I think you’re not optimizing for the goal Make the Sale and instead optimizing for Make the Customer Comfortable.
Sales is a complicated field with a bunch of techniques. There’s some highly skilled practitioners and there’s really strong selection pressure. This implies that the really effective sales techniques, unlike the really effective rationality techniques, are complicated and can’t be easily learned.
I’m not salesy and I know it. I’m better making agreements with folks when I follow rote advice from salesy people rather than doing what feels natural or trying to figure it out myself. It’s better for me to follow rote advice that I don’t even understand. And it’s not because my natural communication skills are terrible. My job (that has little to do with sales) is 80% persuading smart, critical people that my technical explanation of this field is correct and that they should adopt it for themselves. But sales, definitely sales in the context you’re talking about, it’s a very different kind of persuasion.
When sending a formal e-mail my natural response would be very similar to yours. Keep everything comfortable, provide all necessary information, keep it brief, keep it sensible. That’s how you optimize for efficient communication between intelligent folks. But making a sale is not about good communication. Sales and efficient communication aren’t necessarily opposed to each other, but it’s perfectly reasonable that the e-mail which best conveys your ideas is a terrible e-mail for making a sale.
My mom is a very salesy person. Her job is selling and upselling services to customers. Show people how it’s worth spending 30% extra to get premium services from her rather than cheaper and lower quality services elsewhere. Have them figure out how it’s better to spend thousands when it’s really worth it even if they only planned on spending a few hundred. It hurts to listen to her talk on the phone sometimes. I can tell when somebody is in a rush and they just want information. And when I sense that I make sure to quickly cut to the chase. I think she can tell too. Nevertheless, when the customer wants to just cut to the chase that’s always when she slows everything down. She talks about needless emotional stories, obvious deflections, boring filler. Sometimes I cringe when someone matter of factly asks about the price and my mother talks for minutes about what the customer must be feeling and how they should deal with it and how they really need to take care of it this way (which costs a lot of money btw). Rarely, customers are very direct and my mom is forced to either tell them the prices or they’ll hang up the phone. But more often she’s able to mellow people out and get them committed to pay more than they expected they would going into the conversation.
I really don’t know why it works. Maybe people treat long conversations as sunk costs, maybe it’s that folks respect someone who sticks to their guns, or maybe its a bunch of factors that I don’t know or understand. All I know is that her sales style works, the same style works for other people too, and it has nothing to do with clear communication.
So my general criticism for ideas such as:
When replying to a business email you should answer every question as completely as you can.
Is that this shouldn’t be taken for granted. Maybe your Chinese friend is better off not answering every question if it keeps the customer in an ongoing dialogue with her.
A customer can always get lower prices by routing around you. They buy from you because it is simpler. Your job is to make buying things easy. You create convenience. An eager salesperson makes buying effortless.
Like, maybe not. Definitely not that your friend’s job is to make buying things easy. Her job is to get people to buy things and how difficult or easy it is doesn’t matter unless that’s correlated to the job. Maybe getting people to focus more on a transaction makes them more inclined to pour even more money into it. They’re thinking about how to close this damn deal all the time so your business must be pretty important to them.
I’ll bet there’s different sales styles for different situations. Maybe your post is only meant to comment on this one particular type of sales and maybe your clear communication style is very effective for this type of sales scenario. My mom’s salesyness probably wouldn’t work if she was working behind a gas station counter trying to sell cigarettes. I love sales as a communications example because clear rational discourse is definitely not the optimal strategy.
Definitely reads like a thinly veiled threat of some sort combined with a bit of fear-mongering. Especially given that factually, the statement looks false on its face, given that unvaccinated largely already have previous infection and Omicron seems more mild compared to other variants.
This happens exceedingly rarely. The thing you should understand about the American court system before judging it is that non-murderers rarely get sent to prison for more than a year for a first-time offense. If it’s truly non-violent drug possession or dealing then in all likelihood a first-time offender won’t get more than probation. The prison system is not creating felons by punishing people too harshly.
Look at the kid sent to prison for 7 years for threatening to shoot up his school on runescape. That’s one of those examples of a way over-harsh punishment only given to send a message. The kid didn’t fall in with a bad crowd because he was never a bad person. Prison doesn’t force good people to become murderers when they get out. This kid did his unjust sentence, got out, and he’s still a nice a dude.
It’s fairly easy to picture violent criminals as similar to you but unlucky to have grown up in a worse situation or been screwed by the system. It’s hard to understand them as they are: people who are incredibly different from you and have a value system that is not aligned with society.
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
This is observation, not inference.
(I mean, sure, it’s inference in the sense that, like… photons hit my retinas and I interpret them as words written in the English language and so on. But it seems to me that there’s a real, important difference between this kind of inference and the kind of inference I’ve been criticizing.
You don’t understand what an inference is and your strawman reasoning of why this comment is inference wouldn’t fool anybody. “nothing even remotely like” is a subjective determination. It’s comparing two things and judging how similar you think they are. I think it’ similar to what he said. You think it’s dissimilar. But I’m fine with you saying it with as much assertiveness as you do because again, I don’t have your rule about inferences and hedging words.
We have disagreements about how assertive your comments are, you think they aren’t that assertive, or if they’re assertive they’re non-inferences, and assume they naturally fit into your stated communicative standards. I’ve demonstrated how that’s not true. A regular person might think, ok then if people can have reasonable disagreements as to how something can be interpreted as an inference. maybe I shouldn’t be telling others to use these weird communicative protocols that entirely rely on my own subjective classification of things as inference or not. You don’t do that. You write with more misplaced confidence than I have ever done in this thread. I’m not going to keep responding if you’re going to make incredibly poor strawmans of what I’m saying and fail to realize your own communicative failures.
I don’t have the conversational norm of rote performance of using weasel words. If I think X is true with high probability based on circumstantial evidence I’m probably just going to say “X”. I don’t think tacking on “I think” to the front of that adds much content. Anybody’s free to disagree with me as much as they want and that has nothing to do with whether I say “I think” or “it seems to me.” Everything is an inference.
But also, I actually don’t think I’m asking for that much effort from you. I don’t think it takes much effort to add words like “presumably”, “I think”, “it seems to me”, and then I would not have made the first bit of my comment. And that’s the only bit of my comment that feels to me like asking you to put extra effort in.
So it’s not that it’s a bunch of extra effort to just add your chosen phrases to my comments. It’s that it’s extra effort to change my writing style based on your stated communicative preference. I might do that for some people in some cases, but not for you or most any other lw poster in an online forum.
What irks me though is that you don’t follow the communicative rules you’re asking me to follow. And that’s why your comments are disturbing. You’re asking me to hamstring my rhetorical ability using these practices that you yourself don’t even follow.
I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the accusation is, but it doesn’t ring true
where actually there was a lot of discussion and you just… think Vaniver was lying/mistaken-about-his-reasons?
I repeat: blueiris said nothing even remotely like the thing you claim is not allowed.
Where is your hedging? Where is your “I think” or “Probably”. These are as assertive as any of my comments. And they’re all inferences. Of course your comments elsewhere and the couple posts of yours that I’ve read before all have assertive statements about things that can only be inferences. That’s how people communicate and the posts don’t suffer for it. Most people have the ability to read “X” and understand that well of course the person saying “X” doesn’t mean they’ve personally observed X and believe it with 99.9999% probability. They mean they think X is true.
This is a common, dark, rhetorical trick. You’re asking me to hamstring my ability to communicate while taking full advantage of the communicative tools at your disposal. So when I see a comment where, “I’m chiding you for not flagging it as inference” I have absolutely no desire to acquiesce to the restrictive conversational rules being asked of me.
For one, you seem to be simply asserting without evidence or justification things that I think you should more properly flag as inferences, and explain why you think them.
this post attracted plenty of new/outside community members who have downvoted the comment because it’s negative about Aella.
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Lot of vaguely positive comments from users who have few comments and posts, even less than me, who joined the site recently.
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3: An account made after the date of this post and only comments things defending this post.
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4: “your own feelings of discomfort and resentment towards a woman for holding more influence and using her social influence to speak to her view of the world” Frankly this should be a ban too given Ruby’s stated guidelines.
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5 see 3 above.
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6: etc.
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Linked to from twitter account with not a ton of followers but substantial engagement. Circumstantial evidence that those twitter followers who either already have lw accounts will be inclined to follow link and comment+vote on comments in post.
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Simple math suggests that −63 karma over 38 votes is indicative of a lot of low karma users downvoting rather than a few high karma users downvoting or strong downvoting. Especially given that I don’t think there’s many folks who would upvote or strong upvote the comment. Just look at comments at equivalent positive scores. Typically only at 25-30 votes because of the way karma works as I’ve seen it.
This was obvious to me from just glancing over the post. It wasn’t obvious to you but I don’t know how much effort you put into figuring it out one way or the other. Maybe you already noticed all this and don’t think it indicates the comment was vote brigaded. If that’s the case I don’t know what evidence would convince you otherwise.
You also asked me:
Alternatively, do you think downvote counts affected Ruby’s final decision?
You’re aware that this is a question as to the inner workings of Ruby’s mind correct? You’re literally asking me to mind read here. And I responded with my most likely explanation for what I think was going on in his head and then you chide me for giving you an inference based on circumstantial evidence. Pretty ridiculous. It’s like I’m talking to Modesto who also asks me to make claims on issues that are very tough to make a claim on. Ruby noticed the downvotes, said he cared about them, and has not banned other comments that are content-wise very similar but have less downvotes. That’s very good evidence that the downvotes mattered to the final decision as far as evidence goes.
Well, whatever Ruby is accusing blueiris of doing, is something blueiris did in this very thread. I think that’s significant here. If Ruby says that blueiris did something, I can just look for myself and see whether that’s the case. Sometimes it’s not obvious, like something could have multiple competing interpretations, but like… there’s no specific relevant knowledge that Ruby has here that I don’t, and this is pretty close to common knowledge between Ruby and the reader of his comment.
I think you’re misunderstanding my comment on this part. Ruby says Blueiris’s comment is partially banworthy because he’s accusing Aella of exploiting a morally gray area without examples and justifications. Blueiris provides the examples and justifications. You may not like the examples and justifications, you may think they fall flat, etc., but blueiris does provide them and I think he makes some good points about evidence of manipulative behavior on the part of Aella and a willingness to exploit people. Yet Ruby makes the very same kind of accusations against blueiris and provides no better examples than did blueiris. Either both comments are ok or neither are.
Apparently this is a forum where you’re not allowed to say that porn is bad and working in porn is bad because porn producers make it easy for children to access it and porn gives them a warped view of sex which negatively affects their future social behavior.
Ridiculous strawman. blueiris said nothing even remotely like this.
Not a ridiculous strawman because it’s accurate. Moderators allow reliance on negative intuition for a plethora of other things, but apparently not for porn. Why is that? I’m still relying on negative intuitions even with my comment on porn there. Who’s to say it’s necessarily bad for kids to have a warped view of sex? Who’s to say kids having negative future social behavior is a bad thing overall? Negative intuition.
I also think comments like yours have a lot of badness that should be pushed back against. You’re asking for high levels of effort from your counterparty while not putting in much yourself. You’re saying there’s a lot of surface-level badness going on with my comments but not actually providing any interpretation or explanation of the situation yourself that disagrees. You say my explanation of the Ialdaboath thing[1] and how strongly the moderators connected his offline behavior to his lw postings “doesn’t ring true to me.” But you don’t provide any differing interpretation. It’s easy to just say something’s bad. It’s even easier to say something’s bad without even saying how. People can do that all day. It’s better to say something’s bad and this other thing is right and better than the bad thing.
Of course at that time too many commenters are asserting that the mods are not being open by explaining exactly how the allegations fit into the banning. The post ostensibly say that they’re not relevant. The top comment says that the mods aren’t being open about admitting that the allegations played a central, if not the supreme, role in the banning. My commenting back then was of a similar sort. I think most comments back then were made with the understanding that Ialdabaoth was being banned because of the allegations and the mods weren’t being open about it. ↩︎
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do you think downvote counts affected Ruby’s final decision?
Yes of course. There wouldn’t be any controversy over this comment if it wasn’t heavily downvoted. People have been saying stuff like this on lw for years and it’s not been ban worthy. Ruby is being swayed by entirely the wrong factors and frankly it’s a little annoying to continue using a forum where a moderator is banning users because they were on the wrong end of a coordinated downvote brigade like this. The reason that the comment sits at −63 over 38 votes — I don’t think I’ve ever seen another comment go that low before — is because this post attracted plenty of new/outside community members who have downvoted the comment because it’s negative about Aella. Otherwise I would see a similar comment sitting at 0 or slightly negative.
My main issue is that Ruby himself isn’t even explaining why the ban is not ok.
A very strong element of the badness in the first comment above (“Your whole career...”) is leveraging negative intuitions and associations about working in porn that feel misguided and also without justification or explanation of relevance. Similarly, while I feel that accusations that someone is exploiting morally-grey areas really needs to be backed up with examples and relevance to the post.
What does this even mean? People accuse others all the time of exploiting morally grey areas without giving good examples. Half the posts about Leverage and MIRI and whatever are people arguing that they’re exploiting moral gray areas or implicitly accusing them of being morally depraved while providing either flimsy evidence or weird diatribes about demons and spirits. This post is accusing Aella’s father and many other people of being morally depraved. Telling people to cut off their empathy for other people. If anything should be banned for leveraging negative intuitions or accusations it’s this post.
Ruby’s comment is saying that blueiris is exploiting moral gray areas and he cites just one specific example while he says such accusations “[need] to be backed up with examples.” Of course blueiris himself gave an example of Aella exploiting moral gray areas but I guess it wasn’t a good enough example or something. Also are we at the point where saying that there’s moral issues with porn isn’t allowable anymore? Because that’s what the first half of Ruby’s comment suggests. Apparently this is a forum where you’re not allowed to say that porn is bad and working in porn is bad because porn producers make it easy for children to access it and porn gives them a warped view of sex which negatively affects their future social behavior.
without justification or explanation of relevance
We’re allowed to assume things are bad. When we talk about unfriendly AI we implicitly assume that it’s bad without having to explain why or justify it. Iadalboath was banned because he did bad things that were unrelated to his rational posts and nobody in the mod team ever decided to justify or explain how his non-rationalist activities were relevant to banning him on this forum. That’s all blueiris was doing here, hey this poster has said other things in different forums which should impact your impression of this post.
leveraging negative intuitions and associations about
So we’re not allowed to leverage negative intuitions? Half the sequences is leveraging negative intuitions. Dying is bad, so let’s solve it! Leveraging intuitions is just a natural part of conversation. And if we’re to apply this ‘leveraging negative intuitions’ thing to Aella’s post, yeah you get the point.
All in all, banning blueiris like this was a terrible decision by the moderators. I don’t agree with parts of his comments, and I think overall they are poorly worded. He’s also getting combative with people in weird ways, even some that are anti-ban. But he’s also made some good points in his comment and that’s why he shouldn’t be banned. Because now we’re going to lose out on more of the sorts of excellent phrases like, “can talk herself out of any overtown window,” as was pointed out already. I have an immediate liking to this phrase and can see implicitly who it could apply to. But now he’s been banned and I’m sure his impression of the community has gone down and we’ve lost all future opportunity for good comments and turns of phrase of his.
I think blueiris could have gotten his point across and not faced any sort of downvoting or banning if he just used the standard modern jargon of Lesswrong. Which is basically what Ruby suggests. That’s kind of embarrassing for the community as well. Ruby’s aware that the Blueiris got donwvoted heavily mostly because because he didn’t use the silly forum jargon.
Whatever portions of your comment that are still viewable aren’t ban worthy in the least. Downvote amounts, especially on a post that has plenty of new commenters and was heavily advertised elsewhere, shouldn’t affect a moderator’s banning decision. I see from his comment that Ruby disagrees with this, but really don’t understand why. The types of content that beget downvotes isn’t the type of comment that begets deletion.
And the fact that Aella has every ability to just delete your comment if she would like to, without having to follow any rules, kinda cuts against the whole idea of moderator invention in a case like this at all.
I don’t agree with much of anything you’re saying in these comments though. There’s definitely other seriously negative comments besides yourself. The author tweeting someone else doesn’t have any relevance to this discussion at all. I think the post should be allowed just as your comments should be allowed.
If you or someone else accused him of sexual assault I never saw it. That might just be because it was out there and I never looked deep enough to find it, or because it didn’t exist. I do remember reading a lot of accusatory posts about Ialdabaoth so I put a higher probability on the latter explanation.
I only saw allegations of manipulative, disgusting, and fetishistic sexual behavior. Never heard an allegation that Ialdabaoth assaulted someone without their consent. I saw the posts and they had the style of saying a bunch of truly disgusting things about Ialdabaoth, but never laying out the components of sexual assault or making that specific accusation. If Ialdabaoth did sexually assault someone, knowledgeable parties should inform local police and direct them to the victims if they haven’t done so already. The statute of limitations certainly hasn’t passed by this time.
It would be pretty easy to solve this if you showed me an example of someone accusing him of sexual assault back a few years ago.
I was also remembering the Ialdaboth situation from a while ago. There were some standard cancel culture sexual harassment accusations made against him. The other posts I was trying to refer to were the leverage and MIRI tirades as you said (I think there were a few separate posts about Leverage?). I didn’t do more than skim any of them so I don’t know if any of them were actually interesting or had any sensible accusations of abuse. I did get the same impression that you did, the posts were terribly written and full of the kinds of mystical mumbo-jumbo people write when there’s nothing real for them to write about.
I think you’re inferrring my comment to be supportive of the abuse accusations, is that right? Something along the lines of, ‘The rationalist community has a sexist history of aiding abusers and that’s a problem.’ Just want to make clear that I’m not trying to say that at all. I have no idea if there’s more or less abusers among rationalists than the average or if the community is better or worse than most. My only claim here is that women who have some combination of the weird social behaviors that are closely associated with rationality are more susceptible to sexual abuse.
ETA: More on Ialdabaoth, his case is a prime example of the weird failings of people who are somewhat attached to rationalism. They see no problem with 30-40 year old men having depraved sexual relationships with 19 year old women. In fact sometimes they’ll live in the same house with them and not think that behavior is a problem. If they don’t care and don’t see it as their problem that’s fine with me. I’m not asking anybody to be a savior. But the issue is that they don’t see it as a problem at all. Somehow rationalism leads some percentage of folks to entirely forget all the societal knowledge of sexual relations that we’ve gained over the past few centuries.
It seems to me that a lot of people, among “rationalists” and so on, do things and behave in ways that (a) make themselves much more vulnerable to abuse and abusers, for no really good reason at all
The recent string of posts where women point out weird, abusive, and cultish behavior among some community leader rationalists really cemented this understanding for me. I’ll bet the surface rationalist culture doesn’t provide any protection against potential abusers. Of course actually behaving rationally provides some of the best protection, but writing long blog posts, living in California, being promiscuous, and being open to weird ideas doesn’t make one rational. And that sort of behavior certainly doesn’t protect against abusers. It probably helps abusers take advantage of people who live that way.
Someone whose life was half ruined because they fell in with an abusive cult leader in the Berkeley community is less rational than the average person, regardless of whatever signifier they use to refer to themselves.
I should say that by my understanding Aella doesn’t fit the rational-in-culture-only stigma. Seems that she has a pretty set goal and works towards that goal in a rational way.
My understanding of why autogenyphiles end up in relationships with other males is because of their high levels of eroticism and inability to find suitable female partners. Transsexuals end up with other transsexuals of the same biological sex at a much higher rate than do regular males or females. This fits the theory that they desire to be with a woman, but find difficulty doing so and thus end up with another transsexual, a near approximation. Additionally the proportion of men who would accept a relationship with a transsexual is higher than the similar proportion of women. The end result of transsexuals in gay relationships isn’t entirely a product of their own behavior.
So observing autogenyphiles getting into gay relationships doesn’t need to imply an inherent attraction to men, which cuts against the idea of autogenyphilia. Just that the autogenyphiles situation in life makes gay relationships much more likely to occur than relationships with women.
edit: The fact that a blasé comment like this gets negative karma on this forum is pretty absurd
If you were an evil genius with, say, $1B of computing power, what is the most harm you could possibly do to society?
AI risk is existential and currently theoretical. Learning what a malicious actor could do with $1B of compute today will not help focus your thinking on the risks posed by AGI. It’s like trying to focus your thinking on the risks of global nuclear war by asking, “What’s the worst a terrorist could do with a few tons of TNT?” It’s not that the scale is wrong, it’s that the risks are completely different. That doesn’t mean that a terrorist with 100,000 tons of TNT isn’t an important problem, but it’s not the problem that Thomas Schelling and the nuclear deterrence experts were working on during the cold war.
What is the most evil AI that could be built, today?
This is an entirely different question and the answer is there isn’t any public evidence that anybody has the ability to create an evil AI today. I don’t want to belabor the point, but nobody knew how to split an atom in 1937, yet in 1945 the US dropped two atomic bombs on hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
when a clerk suspected that a $20 bill was fake
Which was in fact true.
They granted his exemption and then revoked it after he entered the country. Then they kept him locked up in a dirty hotel instead of just letting stay in a private residence with his other support staff. It’s a really poor opinion to think that’s ok treatment.