What evidence would convince you that your life’s work isn’t relevant or useful?
ModusPonies
Karma: 1,311
If you want to maximize respect from a broad, nonspecific community (e.g. neighbors and colleagues), that’s a good strategy. If you want to maximize respect from a particular subculture, you could do better with a more specific strategy. For example, to impress your political allies, worry about upcoming elections. To impress members of your alumni organization, worry about the state of your sports team or the university president’s competence. To impress folks on LessWrong, worry about a robot apocalypse.
My best guess is that it started because Eliezer worries about a robot apocalypse, and he’s got the highest status around here. By now, a bunch of other respected community members are also worried about FAI, so it’s about affiliating with a whole high-status group rather than imitating a single leader.
Funny you should say that. I’m currently about a third of the way through writing an anti-death fic written as a reaction to Eternal and some similar stories. Let me know when I can read yours; I’m quite curious to see how you approached it.
I have a resource that could help someone’s project: my time. I’m a novice programmer looking to gain some practical experience, and I’d be willing to work, say, 20 hours a week for free, at least for a month or two. PM me if you think I might be able to help out.
Probably. No promises, but I’ll seriously consider any request.
I’m not actually sure what areas I’d most like to focus on. A big part of why I’m making this offer is to learn what’s out there so I can answer that question. Currently, Java is the only language I’m familiar with, but I’d love to branch out.
As cool as that would be, that’s a bigger job than I’d want to accept on my own. I’d have to teach myself a whole lot of code, which would probably take more time than I could justify devoting to a one-shot project.
Figuring out how to do this is now on my list of cool projects to do when I have time. I’d estimate a one in three chance I’ll actually finish this one.
Oh, I remember that one. It was setting off my LW sense even before you got to the bit with the dragon. I’ll try to take a look at the second version later tonight, unless the original reviewer or someone else does it first.
Can you link me some of those anti-death stories you’re thinking of? I’ve seen quite a few about ponies coping with death, but aside from yours, I don’t know of any that engage with the idea of overcoming death as a whole. I’d be interested to see what people have written on the subject.
This is quite good. I like how you managed to make the ponytopia both extremely attractive and more than a little creepy at the same time. I feel like you presented the situation without trying to argue it was either good or bad, leaving that decision to the reader, and I quite like that approach.
From a storytelling perspective, I only had two real complaints. One is your beginning. There’s no conflict until halfway through the first chapter, when Lars and Hanna start arguing. You do a good job setting up the premise before then, but it still makes for a slow start, and I can easily imagine myself recommending this to people with a “no, really, it gets better, stick with it” disclaimer. The second is that there are lengthy stretches where the story consists only of talking heads, with no action or movement. Chapter 4 was the most notable example.
I also found myself wondering about the ethics of creating a sentient being like Butterscotch tailored specifically to the desires of someone else (assuming they weren’t lying about her sentience; I don’t know how you’d test that). I realize you can’t fit everything into the story, but I thought that might have been a cool topic. You made me think about the ethics in ways you didn’t directly discuss, so you’re clearly doing something right.
Grammar note: the possessive form of “Light Sparks” is “Light Sparks’s,” since his name is a singular noun.
Wonderful job with the MMO aspects of life in Equestria. After the “what the literal fuck” line, I had to step away from the computer for a minute to savor it before I could keep reading.
If/when you submit this to Equestria Daily, feel free to let me know. I’m one of the prereaders, and while I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging something I feel this philosophically invested in, I’d at least try to make sure it didn’t get discarded for lack of pony in the very beginning. (We receive, and reject, a fair number of stories that are about bronies rather than ponies. This is a borderline case, but the pony content increases as the story progresses, and I can tell people to look at the post-uploading chapters before deciding.)
1) To explain why I downvoted this thread. I like MLP and I like Less Wrong, but I don’t want MLP discussion to become a significant fraction of what goes on here. I remember two other MLP fanfic threads posted in the last day or two, one of them by you. That’s more than I want to see.
2) A monthly thread is actually a good idea, and I now intend to make one in October. It would give us a place to talk about these things while keeping it from flooding the discussion page. A similar approach works pretty well for the HPMOR folks.
EDIT: After reading PhilGoetz’s response, I no longer think a monthly thread would be a good idea.
The prologue serves an important function, so I’d leave it in. Fittingly, you’ve got the same problem as the tutorial level in a video game: you establish a lot of important information, but it’s dull and low-stakes. It would help a lot if you rewrite the scene with a conflict. It could be in the game (you can surely have a more exciting tutorial than walking around looking at plants; maybe make the playtester settle an argument between NPCs or solve a puzzle), or better yet, in the real world (maybe the playtester is a corporate spy, or she’s there with a friend who she’s having a fight with, or something).
I think this thread is pretty compelling evidence that MLP fanfiction has a substantial audience old enough to appreciate this sort of thing. If you want more evidence, five minutes on Google should suffice.
Edit: I should not have posted this. I regret my troll-feeding ways.
I’d say it helps, but not enough. There’s a bit of a conflict, but it’s in the background and the stakes are low. I don’t actually care if Rebecca has to buy her friend a copy of the game. Maybe raise the stakes? As it is, the most interesting part was “The idea of Jennifer telling her that she told her so wasn’t appealing though.” (Aside: I’d consider reworking that sentence so you’re juggling fewer pronouns. I had to read it twice.) You might want to play up the social aspect of the bet. I’d go so far as to suggest putting Jennifer in the room with Rebecca.
That would be very weak evidence that you could take over a country with such methods. It would be strong evidence that you could take over a website with such methods.
Other: all of these seem like plausible models with a nonzero amount of predictive power. I don’t see how the truth of one of these implies that the others are false. Representationalism and sense-datum theory seem the most useful, I guess, but my real answer is “I don’t know, ask a neurologist.”
Thanks for writing this. It’s always great to see an article with specific techniques backed up by examples.
I’ll commit to reading this version by Saturday at the very latest, and hopefully sooner. In the meantime, rather than posting ahead of schedule, consider making the gdoc private except for readers you specifically allow. (If anyone’s posted a copy of the whole thing, I couldn’t find it with thirty seconds on Google.)
I don’t think Holden was looking for endorsements from “donors and high-status potential endorsers”. I interpreted his post as looking for endorsements from experts on AI. The former would be evidence that SI could go on to raise money and impress people, and the latter would be evidence that SI’s mission is theoretically sound. (The strength of that evidence is debatable, of course.) Given that, looking for endorsements from AI experts seems like it would be A) a good idea and B) consistent with the rest of GiveWell’s methodology.