That sounds like someone who rationalizes, which is something we should be avoiding.
It’s weird that trying to rationalize something can go against rationality, but that’s English for you.
Edit: I assume this was downvoted so heavily because I failed do the constructive thing by providing a suggestion of my own. Sorry about that.
How about something based on the name of the site? LWite, LWer, LWan? Or maybe a more pronounceable version like Lewite, etc.
I also think the farther into the future you get the less interested future people will be in reviving (by comparison) the mentally inferior.
This sounds possible but not at all obvious. It seems to me that so far, interest in historical people and compassion for the mentally inferior have if anything increased over time. This certainly doesn’t mean they’ll continue to do so out into the far future, but it does mean I’d need some really good reasons to support expecting them to.
Cost of facilities per person should go down significantly as the number of people gets large, right?
It’s counterintuitive to say that being dead is basically null value. If I’m choosing between two courses of action, and one difference is that one of them will involve me dying, that’s a strong factor in making me prefer the other option.
I can think of possible explanations for this that preserve the claim that being dead has value zero, but I’m not seeing a way that would do so only in non-cryonics cases.
Right. The whole point is that what karma really controls for is appearing useful to the community, not being useful to the community.
I agree that it has a purpose, and that we’re better off with it. I don’t think it’s sufficient on its own, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that obsessing over it is the same as focusing on improving the community. At best, it improves only a small aspect of the community; at worst, the subgoal “think about karma and get points” takes over at the expense of all else.
But you wouldn’t choose to die rather than walk through the city, would you?
It’s hard for me to take the nightmare science fiction scenarios too seriously when the default actions comes with a well established, nonfictional nightmare: you don’t sign up for cryonics, you die, and that’s the end.
That’s starting to sound like a general argument for shorter lifetimes over longer ones. Is there a reason this wouldn’t apply just as well to living for five more years versus fifty? There’s more room for extreme positive or negative experiences in the extra 45 years.
We are all attempting to make ourselves appear more useful to the community
That gets to the heart of why I don’t think the karma system is worth too much emphasis. Shouldn’t we instead be attempting to make ourselves more useful to the community?
Like so many things, it feels like it trivializes but it is there for a purpose.
That’s true. I do think we’re better off with it than we would be without it, but it shouldn’t get attention disproportionate to its purpose. It’s a means to an end, nothing more.
Describing this as being averse to risks doesn’t make much sense to me. Couldn’t a pro-cryonics person equally well justify her decision as being motivated by risk aversion? By choosing not to be preserved in the event of death, you risk missing out on futures that are worth living in. If you want to take this into bizarre and unlikely science fiction ideas, as with your dystopian cannon fodder speculation, you could easily construct nightmare scenarios where cryonics is the better choice. Simply declaring yourself to have “high risk aversion” doesn’t really support one side over the other here.
This reminds me of a similar trope concerning wills: someone could avoid even thinking about setting up a will, because that would be “tempting fate,” or take the opposite position: that not having a will is tempting fate, and makes it dramatically more likely that you’ll get hit by a bus the next day. Of course, neither side there is very reasonable.
Does it have to be a dolphin, or would successful revival of a mouse count?
Try not to look up if that’s been done before you answer. If you do know, try to imagine whether you’d count it as evidence, if you didn’t already know.
Don’t worry. I’d guess that posting this comment resulted in other people downvoting the article to compensate.
Which makes me think the karma limit on downvotes doesn’t prevent downvotes (among high-karma members) so much as make them something that’s done indirectly by posting a comment, rather than clicking “vote down.”
That comment could equally well have gone in “The ideas you’re not ready to post,” come to think of it.
I like that motto a lot. Another one that bears on this is Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”
In the case of wanting to deemphasize politeness, this would suggest being more lenient in the amount of rudeness you allow from others, but not increasing it in your output. Sort of the principle behind Crocker’s Rules.
“Folks from the outside often see ‘philosophy’ as something without internal divisions (like people from the outside of any culture).”
Aren’t those people just straightforwardly wrong? If anything, philosophy has too many internal divisions.
It may be that we’ll hear more about that other project after the end of April.
Is there a way for us to see on our own how many downvotes and upvotes we’ve given?
I mean, I guess there is a way to check your total downvotes now, but I’d have to downvote a lot of posts to get the information that way.
I’m concerned that this makes the ability to downvote a limited resource. That’s good in some ways, but as long as we’re talking about “what if someone created a whole bunch of accounts to mess things up” scenarios, it raises an unpleasant possibility.
If someone mass-created accounts to post flame bait and complete garbage, we’d respond by voting them down severely, which restricts the ability to use downvotes productively in actual discourse.
I don’t know much about the way this site is set up. Was that scenario already considered, but viewed as unlikely for reasons I’m not seeing?
Those of you excited about this: aside from the presumed difficulty of implementing it, would it be even better if there were an option to actually vote −0.3 on a post, instead of voting −1 with 30% probability? And would it be even more of an improvement if you could choose to vote anywhere in the [-1, 1] range, so that you could mark something −0.7 or +0.25?
Those suggestions probably seem like an exaggeration, but I really do think we’re all getting too worked up over the minutia of the karma system. This isn’t a game. These numbers aren’t our high scores. It feels like there’s too much temptation to regard them that way, and further complexity to the system will only increase that.
Marathons do involve a significant amount of pain/discomfort, but I wouldn’t consider that to be the main motivation to them.
Why does it sound more like 1 than .5? If I believed the probability of my home getting struck by a meteorite was as high as .5, I would definitely make preparations.