Gave 200 $ this time.
Gastogh
More seriously, Internet shows a lot about what people truly like, since there’s so much choice, and it’s not constrained by issues like practicality and prices. Notice total lack of interest in realistic violence and gore and anything more than one standard deviation outside of sexual norms of the society, and none of these due to lack of availability.
Eh? Total lack of interest? Have you ever been on 4chan? Realistic violence threads crop up regularly over there, and it’s notorious for catering to almost any kind of sexual deviance the average person can think of. (Out of curiosity: what would you consider “more than one standard deviation” outside the sexual norms of the society? How about two?) I say almost, because 4chan is regulated and it isn’t the go-to place for quite everything; child pornography nets its posters permabans pretty quickly and it doesn’t have the dedicated guro boards of its Japanese counterpart. Which is to say nothing of blood sports like traditional bullfighting or cockfights, for which even a quick search on YouTube can offer some clips (relatively mellow and barely containing any actual blood as they are).
Stuff like that may not match the tastes of the majority, but that hardly implies a lack of interest. There is a practical issue with availability and it comes from laws, regulation and prices (in the case of adult content that passes the legal filters). There are heavy selection effects at play here, since there are penalties for uploading and hosting certain kinds of content, penalties that aren’t handed out for uploading cute kitten videos on YouTube.
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Some possibilities:
There have been deliberate efforts at community-building, as evidenced by all the meetup-threads and one whole sequence, which may suggest that one is supposed to identify with the locals. Even relatively innocuous things like introduction and census threads can contribute to this if one chooses to take a less than charitable view of them, since they focus on LW itself instead of any “interesting idea” external to LW.
Labeling and occasionally hostile rhetoric: Google gives dozens of hits for terms like “lesswrongian” and “LWian”, and there have been recurring dismissive attitudes regarding The Others and their intelligence and general ability. This includes all snide digs at “Frequentists”, casual remarks to the effect of how people who don’t follow certain precepts are “insane”, etc.
The demographic homogeneity probably doesn’t help.
- 11 Feb 2013 4:12 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on [Link] Detachment by (
I found HK’s analysis largely sound (based on what I could follow, anyway), but it didn’t have much of an effect on my donation practices. The following outlines my reasoning for doing what I do.
I have no feasible way to evaluate SIAI’s work firsthand. I couldn’t do that even if their findings were publicly available, and it’s my default policy to reject the idea of donating to anyone whose claims I can’t understand. If donating were a purely technical question, and if it came down to nothing but my estimate of SIAI’s chances of actually making groundbreaking research, I wouldn’t bet on them to be the first to build an AGI, never mind a FAI. (Also, on a more cynical note, if SIAI were simply an elaborate con job instead of a genuine research effort, I honestly wouldn’t expect to see much of a difference.)
However, I can accept the core arguments for fast AI and uFAI to such a degree that I think the issue needs addressing, whatever that answer turns out to be. I view the AI risk PR work SIAI does as their most important contribution to date. Even if they never publish anything again, starting today, and even if they’ll never have a line of code to show for anything, I estimate their net result to be positive simply for raising awareness about what looks to me like a legitimate concern. Someone should be asking those questions, and so far I haven’t seen anyone else do that. To that end, I still estimate donating to SIAI to be worthwhile. At least for the time being.
For example, Butler (1863) argues that machines will need us to help them reproduce,
I’m not sure if this is going to win you any points. Maybe for thoroughness, but citing something almost 150 years old in the field of AI doesn’t reflect particularly well on the citer’s perceived understanding of what’s up to scratch and not in this day and age. It kind of reads like a strawnman; “the arguments for this position are so weak we have to go back to the nineteenth century to find any.” That may actually be the case, but if so, it might not be worth the trouble to include it even for the sake of thoroughness.
That aside, if there is any well thought out and not obviously wishful-thinking-mode reasons to suppose the machines would need us for something, add me to the interest list. All I’ve seen of this thinking is B-grade, author-on-board humanism in scifi where someone really really wants to believe humanity is Very Special in the Grand Scheme of Things.
As of February 8, 2012, sunlight takes 11.9 hours to get to Pioneer 11 at its approximate distance. (Wikipedia)
It’s been on its way since April 1973 (for right about 39 years), so assuming a steady speed, it would’ve passed the six-hour limit roughly 19,5 years ago, or in late 1992.
I have no strong preference either way on this issue, but I suspect that spacing the updates out is more useful.
One reason for this is that a lot of updates means that the story spends more time on the first page of ff.net’s HP story list. The HP fandom is one of the most active ones and stories tend to get bumped off the first page quite fast. To that end, I also think it would be a good idea to occasionally update the story at some other time of the day than the usual 7 PM Pacific Time. Who knows, maybe that alone would bring in some readers who miss the story again and again for no other reason except that it’s updated at an inconvenient time of day.
The communal aspect shouldn’t be overlooked, either, and having time to discuss chapters is definitely a legitimate reason to draw out the process. This doesn’t apply to everyone, of course; I gave myself five minutes to think of solutions for the end of chapter 80 and refrained from discussing them with anyone, and I doubt I’m the only one who plays the game that way.
IMO, the optimal update rate would be once per four or five days. Enough time for folks to talk things over if they wish, but not so long that the anticipation has the time to collapse.
Kudos to the one who formulated the questions. I found them unusually easy to answer, at large.
I’m only puzzled at the lack of an umbrella option for the humanities in the question on profession. Were they meant to fall into the category of social sciences?
Simple tradition, I expect. In many situations and cultures, consuming alcohol is simply the done thing, and not doing the done thing a surefire way of standing out. I’d also guess that people who drink in these situations expect everyone to know the social norms and agree with them (even if it’s only an unconscious background assumption), and so they’ll see not wanting to drink as wanting to stand out. And you know what that means.
I mostly steer clear of AI posts like this, but I wanted to give props for the drawing of unsurpassable elegance.
I took the survey. A couple of points:
“I talk about controversial topics, like atheism and utilitarianism, with others in my community.” The question is kind of vague, and as such will probably lead to vague answers. For example, this presupposes that atheism is controversial. So, if I answered “Strongly disagree,” will that be interpreted as my not talking about controversial topics, or as my not talking about atheism? If I talk about atheism and it’s hip and cool (and no one speaks up against me because the local culture is heavy on negative politeness), which option should I pick?
The “childhood situation” section is a bit weird. For one, it’d be helpful to spell out the concrete age range you’re thinking of. For two, most people, children or otherwise, don’t talk about stuff like utilitarianism. I mean, most people of any age probably don’t even know what it means, and I wouldn’t bet money on my being able to produce a serviceable definition, either. I wonder if it will mean anything if the results for that question come up like 80% “Strongly Disagree”. (V urerol thrff gung gurl jvyy.)
- 21 May 2012 17:22 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on [POLL RESULTS] LessWrong Members and their Local Communities by (
Why do you think that having Asperger’s gives you immunity to revulsion at the quality of a review?
No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I’ve been able to find have identified witnesses or method.
Some of this information has been released since the posting of the parent, but because the tone of the post feels like it was jumping a gun or two, I wanted to throw this out there:
There are good reasons why the media might not want to go into detail on these things, especially when the person in question was young, famous and popular. The relatively recent Bridgend suicide spiral was (is?) a prime example of such neglected media ethics, but the effect itself is nothing new.
Also: some things are always bound to get out via the social grapevine, but the lack of detailed official statements within a day or two is hardly even weak evidence for anything. I’ll bet the “possibility that this was not a natural event” also occurred to the police, and immediately publishing relevant details of what might have become a criminal investigation just seems plain dumb.
If it’s a highly sought-after high-status job, there may be oodles of takers for every getter. The sheer amount of competition may force their hand, and the “it’s a job” may be simply a case of this.
Another possibility is the sunk cost fallacy. If the job requirements are strict enough and the people who eventually get the job have had to sacrifice enough getting there, that alone may be enough to get them to stick with it. Add some social pressure for spice as desired. Stir with self-deception and serve with verbal rationalizations.
A further quote from the same paragraph, emphasis mine:
Nonetheless, it remains possible that Paleolithic societies never practiced cannibalism, and that the damage to recovered human bones was either the result of ritual post-mortem bone cleaning or predation by carnivores such as saber tooth cats, lions and hyenas.
Just for kicks, I might also assume the (contrarian?) position that cannibalism is by no means unconditionally “really insane,” which seems to be what you’re holding it out as an example of. Sure, it has its (ups and) downs, but I’m not on board for really insane. Killing someone à la Mayan human sacrifice seems to me crazier and more harmful than eating someone’s body as a burial rite at a time when food may well be scarce.
That said, I agree with your thrust; namely, that we have no good reason to believe the paleolithic folks were anyhow significantly smarter or more moral than us.
I read the first half, skimmed the second, and glanced at a handful of the slides. Based on that, I would say it’s mostly introductory material with nothing new for those who have read the sequences. IOW, a summary of the lecture would basically be a summary of a summary of LW.
It would help if you could elaborate on what you mean by “informed”.
Seconded. It seems to me like it’s not even possible to mount properly informed criticism if much of the findings are just sitting unpublished somewhere. I’m hopeful that this is actually getting fixed sometime this year, but it doesn’t seem fair to not release information and then criticize the critics for being uninformed.
I have heard that some females play relatively cruel psychological games with each other when compared to male culture. Is this true?
I would say no. I’m with Konkvistador; the male and female games simply take on different forms. Still, on the psychological-physical axis of abuse, women tend toward the psychological more than men, so I’d expect them to be commensurately more adept at purely psychological abuse.
However, regarding the big picture, there’s nothing “relatively less cruel” about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment. I’ve wondered more than a few times at how often the psychological effects of physical interactions tend to be overlooked. Even aside from, say, the actual physical pain of losing a fight, there’s still all the other stuff. It’s not like the memory of a fight lost in front of everybody suddenly vanishes or is instantly overcome. Physical pains intentionally inflicted on you by others always come with corresponding mental counterparts, while the reverse is not true.
Why is malice addictive?
I’m talking about malice which goes way beyond anything which could be expected to raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success.
There’s probably a whole syndrome of things that contribute to this, including but not limited to:
“Improving the odds of reproductive success” is for the long term and for the ancestral environment. Online trolling and abusing one’s kids in the privacy of one’s home are products of an environment radically different from our evolutionary one. There’s simply no good and noble reason for them, just the same old cognitive reflexes playing themselves out in unnatural surroundings.
Humans have the tendency to blame the victim. You treat someone like trash long enough and you’ll start to buy into the idea that they deserve it and it’s for the best. “I’m not unreasonable or cruel—if only he weren’t such a lazy, thick-headed idiot...” Rinse and repeat long enough until all feelings of guilt go away, and possibly until all feelings of any kind go away and the abuse continues simply out of habit.
Trolling and lashing out at people online (and off-line) is a way to assert oneself. For people with low enough social skills and off-line status, it may be the only way of doing so. The harsher one acts, the more likely it is to produce an effect, which leads to vicious trolling being viciously enjoyable.
Malice isn’t the only thing that’s addictive—power in general is addictive, and that also goes for ways of exerting it. And, of course, since the other person is still an idiot who has it coming for being so thin-skinned, why not have a bit of fun?
Upvoting for capturing the remark for those of us who didn’t catch it before it was edited out. Yvain has the best puns.