I like it, but stop using “ey”. For god’s sake, just use “they”.
PlaidX
Karma: 859
Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010
gets out the ladder and climbs up to the scoreboard
5 posts without a tasteless and unnecessary torture reference
replaces the 5 with a 0
climbs back down
Flat out refusing to do things. You’d be amazed what you can get away with not doing.
I’ve found that I have the opposite problem. When given the opportunity to try something new, I take it, thinking “maybe this time”, and invariably regret doing so.
Now I order the same food every time in restaurants, never go to shows, and am a happier person for it.
I love this article, but I disagree with the conclusion. You’re essentially saying that a post-singularity world would be too impatient to explore the stars. I grant you that thinking a million times faster would make someone very impatient, but living a million times longer seems likely to counterbalance that.
Back in the days of cristopher columbus, what stopped people from sailing off and finding new continents wasn’t laziness or impatience, it was ignorance and a high likelihood of dying at sea. If you knew you could build a rocket and fly it to mars or alpha centauri, and that it was 100% guaranteed to get there, and you’d have the mass and energy of an entire planet at your disposal once you did, (a wealth beyond imagining in this post-singularity world), I really doubt that any amount of transit time, or the minuscule resources necessary to make the rocket, would stand in anyone’s way for long.
ESPECIALLY given the increased diversity. Every acre on earth has the matter and energy to go into space, and if every one of those 126 billion acres has its own essentially isolated culture, I’d be very surprised if not a single one ever did, even onto the end of the earth.
Honestly I’d be surprised if they didn’t do it by tuesday. I’d expect a subjectively 10 billion year old civilization to be capable of some fairly long-term thinking.
Let me turn your question around. If your utility function puts value in the mere existence of people, regardless of how they interact with the larger world, doesn’t that mean having babies is as wonderful as killing people is terrible? Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?
Creepily heavy reliance on torture-based what-if scenarios.
Why does every other hypothetical situation on this site involve torture or horrible pain? What is wrong with you people?
Edit: I realize I’ve been unduly inflammatory about this. I’ll restrict myself in the future to offering non-torture alternative formulations of scenarios when appropriate.
I find even monogamous relationships burdonsomely complicated, and the pool of people I like enough to consider dating is extremely small. I have no moral objections to polyamory, but it makes me tired just thinking about it.
The latter. Actually, I guess I still consume a lot of unknown things, but now almost exclusively online, where when the thing sucks, you can instantly move on to something else.
Much better to download a movie and watch five minutes of it and delete it than to coordinate going to the theater with someone, buy overpriced popcorn, watch a bunch of ads, then sit through an hour and a half of something you don’t really like.
I can’t really tell whether this is me failing to appreciate some aspect of human experience, or just that the way people tend to do things is stupid.
I’ve heard that before, and I grant that there’s some validity to it, but that’s not all that’s going on here. 90% of the time, torture isn’t even relevant to the question the what-if is designed to answer.
The use of torture in these hypotheticals generally seems to have less to do with ANALYZING cognitive algorithms, and more to do with “getting tough” on cognitive algorithms. Grinding an axe or just wallowing in self-destructive paranoia.
If the point you’re making really only applies to torture, fine. But otherwise, it tends to read like “Maybe people will understand my point better if I CRANK MY RHETORIC UP TO 11 AND UNCOIL THE FIREHOSE AND HALHLTRRLGEBFBLE”
There’s a number of things that make me not want to self-identify as a lesswrong user, and not bring up lesswrong with people who might otherwise be interested in it, and this is one of the big ones.
If you ask me, the prevalence of torture scenarios on this site has very little to do with clarity and a great deal to do with a certain kind of autism-y obsession with things that might happen but probably won’t.
It’s the same mental machinery that makes people avoid sidewalk cracks or worry their parents have poisoned their food.
A lot of times it seems the “rationality” around here simply consists of an environment that enables certain neuroses and personality problems while suppressing more typical ones.
Nonsuperintelligent AI threat
If my qualia were actually those of a computer chip, then rather than feeling hot I would feel purple (or rather, some quale that no human language can describe), and if you asked me why I went back indoors even though I don’t have any particular objection to purple and the weather is not nearly severe enough to pose any serious threat to my health, I wouldn’t be able to answer you or in any way connect my qualia to my actions.
But in the simulation, you WOULD have an objection to purple, and you would call purple “hot”, right? Or is this some haywire simulation where the simulated people act normally except they’re completely baffled as to why they’re doing any of it? Either what you’re saying is incredibly stupid, or I don’t understand it. Wait, does that mean I’m in a simulation?
I also regret contact with the basilisk, but would not say it’s the only information I wish I didn’t know, nor am I entirely sure it was a good idea to censor it.
When it was originally posted I did not take it seriously, it only triggered “severe mental trauma” as others are saying, when I later read someone referring to it being censored, and some curiosity regarding it, and I updated on the fact that it was being taken that seriously by others here.
I do not think the idea holds water, and I feel I owe much of my severe mental trauma to an ongoing anxiety and depression stemming from a host of ordinary factors, isolation chief among them. I would STRONGLY advise everyone in this community to take their mental health more seriously, not so much in terms of basilisks as in terms of being human beings.
This community is, as it stands, ill-equipped to charge forth valiantly into the unknown. It is neurotic at best.
I would also like to apologize for whatever extent I was a player in the early formation of the cauldron of ideas which spawned the basilisk and I’m sure will spawn other basilisks in due time. I participated with a fairly callous abandon in the SL4 threads which prefigure these ideas.
Even at the time it was apparent to anyone paying attention that the general gist of these things was walking a worrisome path, and I basically thought “well, I can see my way clear through these brambles, if other people can’t, that’s their problem.”
We have responsibilities, to ourselves as much as to each other, beyond simply being logical. I have lately been reexamining much of my life, and have taken to practicing meditation. I find it to be a significant aid in combating general anxiety.
Also helpful: clonazepam.
[skims article]
Skim more. Got it.
For me, the important distinction between the salmon thing and the Mohammad thing is that getting zapped when you see a picture of a salmon is a reaction that doesn’t go away through exposure. It can’t be desensitized. Drawing Mohammad, or really any form of trolling, eventually gets savvy people to change the way they react.
That’s not to say that trolling is necessarily good, but it is functionally different than what’s happening with the salmon. See this article by Clay Shirky.
A good way to begin an argument is by asking questions about the other person’s position, to get it nailed down.
Flying saucers are real. They are likely not nuts-and-bolts spacecrafts, but they are actual physical things, the product of a superior science, and under the control of unknown entities. (95%)
Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.