I suspect a bug. I have no recollection of turning personal blog posts on, but I still see the tag on next to Latest. It’s entirely possible that I forgot about this, but that doesn’t sound like a thing I’d do.
(That said, just realizing I can set a personal blog post penalty of −25 is going to make LessWrong much more tolerable.)
These coronavirus posts are otherwise an excellent community resource and you are making them less valuable.
While I understand that this was first written for your own personal blog and then republished here, I do not believe that the entire section on Trump is appropriate in a LessWrong context. Not just in terms of Politics is the Mind Killer over the contentious claims you make, but primarily over the assertion that you can make contentious claims and shut down discussion over them. This seems like a very serious norms violation regarding what LessWrong is about.
This entire sequence was great. I now have something that I can point people to so we have common knowledge.
One more-related-to-this-than-you-would-first-think thing I’ve wanted to do for a while but that would require a lot of work and which might not come together, and which is motivated by this post, is to tell (15) The Journey of the Sensitive One. It would look over the story of the artist Jewel, as told, in explicit content in chronological order across her first five albums.
I skipped the link on my first read-through, but I shouldn’t have. Section 1 is mostly a rehash of Newcomb, but section 2 is absolutely phenomenal. I can kinda see where you’re going with the whole, “There is mindset that instinctively and unselfishly opposes everything of value,” after reading about The Sensitive Problem, which I assume you see as having the Maze Nature.
I have never really listened to any of Jewel’s music other than passively hearing Who will save your soul? on the radio. But I’m now intrigued after reading Hidysmith’s article and listening to The Sensitive One in its entirety. Since the full article would be a lot of effort for you, at least what would the playlist be? Maybe I can gleam additional information from just that.
I finished reading both of his books earlier this year. Postmortems is worth its weight in gold; even when I disagreed with conclusions, the historical perspective was invaluable. The story of UO is interesting, where Koster tries to push a product that his players do not want, and once he had left, the UO team launches the “Trammel” server where there’s no ability to attack other players and the userbase doubles! LWers should probably read these chapters with Goodhart’s Law and the concept of legibility/Seeing Like a State in mind.
(You might also want to go find a copy of Star Wars Galaxies off ebay and try playing it on the SWGEmu servers, though I’d warn you that it hasn’t aged very well. Combat is almost non-functional and rubber-bandy. But seeing its crafting system in action is kinda worth it, if you’re interested in alternative MMO design. I put little weight in Koster’s attempts at social engineering, but very much admire his simulationist bent to other areas of game design. “Start with the Sim.”)
A Theory of Fun, however, isn’t worth your time. It’s a very casual overview of his theory with a side of culture war and several later chapters which are merely sermons about how important video games are. It was written long before we had the phrase “replication crisis” and cites a bunch of psychology from that time.
I donated about $20,000, most of that in ETH. (Employer matching programs add another $12,000 on top of that.)
The conflict you feel resonates with me. The parts of the greater rationalist community that make me feel uncomfortable are firmly White; I disagree with most of their moral framework and am often annoyed that many of their moral proclamations are unquestioned and are assumed to be ‘good’; ie, effective altruism, animal rights charities, etc.
A large part of what drives me is a Blue/Black desire to know things to help myself and make my life more awesome. Unlike Sarah above, I am excited by Blue words (“knowing”, “understanding”) because they cash out in better ways to achieve my Black desires.
Whatever MIRI’s public persona is, I think of their most exciting research as Blue/Black. The study of decision theory is firmly about enlightened self interest, especially when you start thinking of the differences between PrudentBot and FairBot. Let the two of us trade, TDT/FDT style, to our mutual benefit. Any constraints on our behaviour are not imposed, as White might, but are consensual self-modifications to our decision processes so that we may maximize our individual utility through superior understanding.
(Comment copied from the old site; where are we supposed to be commenting during this transitory period?)
if you took the survey and hit ‘submit’, your information was saved and you don’t have to take it again.
I’m not sure this is true.
I took the survey over two sessions, where I filled out most of the multiple choice questions in the first session, and most of the long form questions in the second. When I did my final submitting, I also downloaded a copy of my answers. I was annoyed to find that it didn’t contain my long form responses. At the time, I had assumed that this was just an export error, but you might want to verify that across sessions, at least long form responses from the additional sessions get saved.
if you took the survey and hit ‘submit’, your information was saved and you don’t have to take it again.
I’m not sure this is true.
I took the survey over two sessions, where I filled out most of the multiple choice questions in the first session, and most of the long form questions in the second. When I did my final submitting, I also downloaded a copy of my answers. I was annoyed to find that it didn’t contain my long form responses. At the time, I had assumed that this was just an export error, but you might want to verify that across sessions, at least long form responses from the additional sessions get saved.
Survey taken!
I have previously been critical of Effective Altruism, comparing it to trying to be an Effective CooperateBot (example).
If we were to extend Effective CooperateBot to the other sorts of players in prisoner’s dilemmas, by analogy we’d call egoists Effective FairBot / Effective PrudentBot, depending on how your brand of egoism deals with CooperateBots.
That’s a mouthfull and might be too technical, but it might be a nice way of reframing the question; when you said ‘egoism,’ I didn’t know exactly what you meant.
I also enjoyed the linked Politics Is Upstream of Science, which went in-depth on the state interventions in science talked about in the beginning of this piece.
As a person who donates to MIRI and tries to not associate this with my powerword, I’d like to encourage people to not attempt to unmask psuedonyms.
Now, now, I’m entirely down with the use of ponies to make points about rationality.
Easy entrance is how September happened, both on LessWrong and on Usenet.
My personal bias here is that I see little hope for most of the application level network protocols built in the 80s and 90s, but have high hope for future federated protocols. Urbit in particular since a certain subtribe of the LW diaspora will already be moving there as soon as it’s ready.
I will take minor exception to your exceptions. One of the big lessons of LessWrong for me is how different decision processes react in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. In your exceptions, you don’t condition your behaviour on the expected behaviour of your trading partner. The greatest lesson I took away from LessWrong was Don’t Be CooperateBot. I would however, endorse FairBot versions of your statements:
“I am the kind of person who keeps promises to the kind of person who keeps promises,” and “I am a person who can be relied upon to cooperate with people who can be relied upon to cooperate.”
(You’ll notice that I cut out the loyalty part on that second one. I am undecided here. A lot of social technology at least vaguely pattern matches to CliqueBot, which is how I generally map loyalty to the prisoner’s dilemma. However, I’m not going to endorse it as optimal.)
Survey achieved.
That’s the account that I got the spam from AND they just messaged me again.
The value of the Effective Altruism movement.
I don’t think an oops is necessary here in this case (beyond just not crossing the norm again), but this is still appreciated. Thank you.