I endorse discussion of virtue ethics on LW mostly because I haven’t seen many arguments for why I should use it or discussions of how using it works. I’ve seen a lot of pro-utilitarianism and “how to do things with utilitarianism” pieces and a lot of discussion of deontology in the form of credible precommitments and also as heuristics and rule utilitarianism, but I haven’t really seen a virtue ethics piece that remotely approaches Yvain’s Consequentialism FAQ in terms of readability and usability.
ilzolende
Karma: 464
I recently registered to vote and did not see his party listed as an option, even though I have never heard of the “Americans Elect Party” and it is an option. I mostly pay attention when other people mention him. Also, I kind of wish the Transhumanist Party would issue some statements about ballot issues besides “vote for Istvan”.
Speculating wildly about your real subject: Either uploading (why should you care if you can’t have the real galaxy or the real gasoline engine, if you can’t tell the difference) or something to do with p-zombies or qualia or whatnot (she cares about the internal properties even if everything is the same when she drives it). Leaning towards the former because “Fuller Chen” sounds like a nanotech reference (although I am aware fullerene is not nanobots).
Also, I don’t see how Galaxy wanting a gasoline engine just because she likes gasoline engines is more irrational than me wanting to have human life continue to exist just because I like the continued existence of humanity.
I would probably believe something signed with my own PGP key enough to thoroughly investigate it. If I found something packaged with a blood sample I probably would not be willing to pay to check the sample, because I’m a minor and the costs of testing a DNA sample are something like a year of income for me. Since I wouldn’t verify the sample I would probably take the message about as seriously as I’d take anything else in my own handwriting with my signature, which is to say I’d put in several hours of effort but not much more unless I found confirming evidence. If I found a video of myself saying things, accompanied by a PGP sig and a PGP-signed transcript, which did not include any subtle signals of coercion that I could have potentially sent, I’d be very confident.
Naively, I’d say to write it as short text and sign it with my public key, but that was under the assumption that my recent memories were being wiped.
If all my memories are being wiped there isn’t really a “me” to send the message to in any reasonable sense. Even if it’s just all my episodic memories I would see amnesiac!ilzolende as a member of my in-group but not as me.
I suppose I could try to package the message with a blood sample (with a lock on a timer), any sample coercively obtained would have much higher cortisol levels (edit: or show signs of sedatives or something).
Hah, the decoy account is trivially easy to determine to be not-mine, the idea is less “permanently trick someone into thinking it’s my main account” and more “distract someone while I log into it so that it can send an automated email, then keep them from powering down my computer for 30 seconds while the program sends the email, because I can’t get it to do that in the background just via Automator”.
Also, in that sort of scenario there really isn’t that much I have to hide. There are some computer of my computer usage that I would strongly prefer not to disclose, but at that point I wouldn’t be concerned about “linking ilzolende to my real identity” or “what if my friends/parents/future employers know about my actions” or “what if something I did was actually intellectual property theft” or “what if I had to change all my passwords that would be really annoying”.
If there was something I really didn’t want to disclose I would probably do it from other people’s computers using Tor Browser or a TAILS DVD with URLs I memorized. There isn’t something I value my privacy for that much, so I don’t do that. (Although I’m considering getting a TAILS USB for using with the school computers mostly to make the “the fact that this browser didn’t tell me that Website X was not a reason I chose the browser, I use it for privacy, the fact that it apparently circumvents the filter is just a side effect, what am I supposed to do, check if the website is blocked from a different computer before I visit it?” claim.)
Honestly, a lot of my motives here are more “normalize security/privacy” and “make sure that if something goes wrong I can say that I took a ton of preventative measures” than “losing control of my data would be a complete disaster”. If I were truly concerned about privacy, I wouldn’t have participated in a study involving MRI scans and DNA analysis from a blood draw and whatnot for ~%100. I mostly don’t like the state of affairs where people have more information about me than I do.
I have a superficial measure against this, which is having two user accounts, one of which is superficially similar to mine. If it is easy to send two images which unlock with different passwords then that could be an anti-rubberhose cryptanalysis measure?
Also, Kevin Simler’s Melting Asphalt is great and has lots of insightful essays about things. Warning: Still doesn’t have archives, you’re going to need to go through the meta posts to read old things.
I like Eneasz Brodski’s Death is Bad. Not as moralizing as the title sounds, has lots of fun book reviews.
This is not a program I wrote but while we’re posting things I have a guide to setting up Automator on a mac to send out an email on login on my blog.
I think that I explained the about-letter-looks-words without using them, and the other person seemed to understand me, and then he changed the thing that I tried to explain, so I think I was able to explain it.
I am happy that you think this was not easy, but actually it was easier than a class where I use words that are not from this place but from across the big body of water. I could take longer to write things and I have to talk sort of quickly in that class. Also, I know these words better.
Maybe it’s not, but it’s super-conspicuous and might be useful for reputation-building. Also, if you want to practice dealing with blood draws in a not-being-sick context it could be useful. (I haven’t donated yet though because age restrictions.)
It seems like other people have built solutions that use steganography with the image pixels themselves, given that I see examples on Wikipedia.
I can’t be remotely useful with the text stuff, though, my coding skills are such that I still have trouble generating token frequency histograms from text files and my most persuasive “chatbot” relayed an entirely pregenerated script to the user, only took 1 bit of user input, and was written on a graphing calculator. (I still got my Theory of Knowledge to feel empathy for it and be unwilling to let me delete it in exchange for a cookie, though, so it did prove my point that people can feel empathy for morally irrelevant things, like a program shorter than your above comment.)
I think this writing is very good, but the way the words look is not normal. The words have letters with more lines than they need to have, stuck onto the ends of other lines, but the other writing on the Less Wrong shared computer thing uses letters with only as many lines as they need, and the words under each other are closer together.
If you just want some stuff full of fantasy themes that LessWrong will not spoil, read The Steerswoman and its sequels.
For future reference changing specific details may be a good idea, such that if your girlfriend reads the post stripped of its username she would not say “the poster is describing me”. This is what Yvain does when discussing specific patients.
I know that sixes_and_sevens probably wants a software solution here, but if they are willing to put up with sending lots of extra data they could just declare the third letter of every sixth word or use some other similarly arbitrary rule to determine which letters were pieces of data in the secret message.
There’s also lots of tools to steganographically embed data in images.
Does James Miller let his students take d% dice to his tests?
I am thinking of recommending this to people, all of whom are unlikely to pay. Is having people acquire this for $0 who would otherwise not have read it beneficial or harmful to MIRI? (If the answer is “harmful because of paying for people to download it”, I can email it to my friends with a payment link instead of directing them to your website.)
I would expect this to fail, in that modern browsers attempt to demand HTTPS versions of known sites when they exist, and faking Wikipedia’s cert would take work. MitM-ing websites isn’t as easy as it used to be.