When I was younger...
MrMind
Karma: 3,305
Cooperator here.
You’re never wrong injecting complexity, but rarely you’re right
Upvote post for those who have been hit by collateral damage in the Elo / Nier war, as it happened to me. I promise to upvote everyone who writes under this something that is not controversial.
If the problem is the sockpuppet army, while coders create a systematic solution, the community can help and show that the army of goodwilling men and women are stronger than any puppet master.
Survey taken.
A new derivation of the Born rule
Yudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown.
Truth is holistic
One thing to remember when talking about distinction/defusion is that it’s not a free operation: if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before. That is something that demands effort and energy. Sometimes, you need to store a lot more bits. You cannot simply become superintelligent by defusing everything in sight.
Sometimes, making a distinction is important, but some other times, erasing distinctions is more important. Rationality is about creating and erasing distinctions to achieve a more truthful or more useful model.
This is also why I vowed to never object that something is “more complicated” if I cannot offer a better model, because it’s always very easy to inject distinctions, the harder part is to make those distinctions matter.
To improve my position in the male hierarchy
To add the experience
To start the process of developing
Farther down the line
To me all of these seems rationalizazions.
I feel there’s nothing wrong in wanting to satisfy your impulse, sex is a need and should not be disregarded. No need to label it Dark Side, there’s nothing dark in it.
PlusMy current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,”
I don’t think is inexperience that gives off uncomfortable vibes, I would bet that it’s rather anxiety and repressed desire.
There is the possibility that the other party is able and willing to punish you for refusing to engage. Aside from promoting them from “treat as Hostile Arguer” to “treat as hostile, period”, I’m not sure what to do about this.
It’s a situation akin, in form if not in degree, to those of hostages in a prison camp. The usual suggestions indeed apply:
1 - submit and cooperate;
2 - study the environment;
3 - try to gain small victories;
4 - as soon as it’s feasible, get out.
In a weird dance of references, I found myself briefly researching the “Sun Miracle” of Fatima.
From a point of view of a mildly skeptic rationalitist, it’s already bad that almost anything written that we have comes from a single biased source (the writings of De Marchi), but also bad is that some witnesses, believer and not, reported not having seen any miracle. But what arose my curiosity is another: if you skim witnesses accounts, they tell the most divers(e) things. If you OR the accounts, what comes out is really a freak show: the sun revolving, emitting strobo lights, dancing in the sky, coming close to the earth drying up the soaking wet attendants.
If you otherwise AND the accounts, the only consistent element is this: the ‘sun’ was spinning. To which I say: what? How can something that has rotational symmetry be seen spinning? The only possible answer is that there was an optical element that broke the symmetry, but I have been unable to find out what was this element. Do you know anything about it?
Constructive mathemathics and its dual
Here you can find a mind map aggregating the opinions of every commenter up until the time of this comment.
I will further edit it as comments are added. If you want to make it editable from the community let me know (and suggest a service that does so!). If you think I have misrepresented your opinions let me know and I’ll fix it.
My analysis:LW is perceived badly for two reasons: low quality and obscurity to newcomers;
LW is perceived as a good thing on at least on three axis: as an archive for the Sequence and the Wiki; as a community aggregators for different movements / sources (EA, HPMOR, sporadic contributors, etc.); for its live services (sharing academic articles, chat, stupid questions thread, etc.);
the vast majority of people are in favor of keeping it open;
the highest value LW offers is as an aggregator of the Diasporists, and the main problem is the sharing of comments;
the most frequently proposed solutions include RSS feeds, subreddits and removing the distinction between Main and Discussion.
I like those suggestions too, I’m in favor of keeping it open.
… demonstrably friendly dictatorship? :)
Optimizing for attractiveness
The most important quality for a rationalist is to admit that you were wrong and change your mind accordingly: so I will say, as an excercise in strength and calibration, that I was totally wrong.
I thought, with a high degree of probability, that Clinton was going to be the next POTUS. Instead it’s Trump. My model of the world was wrong, and I’ll adjust accordingly.
We won the war against Eugene… for a brief instant.
I’m keeping score and calculating the number of downvotes/upvotes on the comment where I requested help against Eugene Nier downvotes campaign.
Well, there was a moment where 14 people upvoted and 20 puppets downvoted. Now we are at a point where 21 people upvoted and 30 puppets downvoted. This means that at least we forced Eugene to increase the count of his puppets to fight back. I count this as score for LW :)
#makelwniceagain
Yeah I do volunteer to, although it’s not clear to me how I could be of help.
The fact that Adam committed a crime is not unfalsifiable, it’s simply unfalsfied. There’s just not enough probability weight for her to change her mind, she even admitted that with evidence strong enough she would otherwise change her mind.
Eve is being rational in retaining her current prior in the lack of evidence: it’s not that she is assigning 0 to the probability of Adam being the killer, it’s just that in the face of uncertainty there’s no reason to update.
On the other hand I don’t see how you could do this to uphold the belief in God: absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I did the survey in all its parts, and upvoted every top level comment to promote LW’s census partecipation.
It was fun and not particularly long, although I miss the ‘global prisoner dilemma’ of the last survey.