Quirinus_Quirrell

Karma: 725

How the Grinch Ought to Have Stolen Christmas

Quirinus_Quirrell25 Dec 2013 20:00 UTC

76 points

15 comments2 min readLW link

Quirinus_Quirrell 15 Sep 2011 15:32 UTC
56 points
on: [LINK] Terrorists target AI researchers
DO NOT USE YOUR REGULAR IDENTITY TO SAY ANYTHING TRULY INTERESTING ON THIS THREAD, OR ON THIS TOPIC, UNLESS YOU HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT IT FOR FIVE MINUTES.

Quirinus_Quirrell 15 Sep 2011 16:44 UTC
38 points
on: [LINK] Terrorists target AI researchers
A while back, I claimed the Less Wrong username Quirinus Quirrell, and started hosting a long-running, approximate simulation of him in my brain. I have mostly used the account trivially—to play around with crypto-novelties, say mildly offensive things I wouldn’t otherwise, and poke fun at Clippy. Several times I have doubted the wisdom of hosting such a simulation. Quirrell’s values are not my own, and the plans that he generates (which I have never followed) are mostly bad when viewed in terms of my values. However, I have chosen to keep this occasional alter-identity, because he sees things that would otherwise be invisible to me.

Tor and a virtual machine sandbox are strongly recommended for following all links in this comment. Malware is highly probable and intelligence agencies take notice.

All of the primary source documents from this group are in Spanish. The blog “War on Society” has a translation of one of ITS’s manifestos here, plus links to an earlier manifesto, a photo of one of the assembled package bombs, and the original publication in Spanish on the blog Liberacion Total here. Liberacion Total has been accused of being affiliated with ITS for publishing the manifesto, but they put up a notice saying they merely received it by mail. A few interesting observations:
- The basic thesis of ITS’s writing is “technology is bad”. It shuffles between talking about different types of technology and different ways, bringing up gray goo, artificial intelligence, animal testing, and environmental contamination.
- It is focused almost exclusively on Mexico and Mexican universities.
- The original documents replace o/a->x in many words. I saw this in “lxs cientificxs” (“the scientists”) several times, and thought it was meant to be threatening; but on further inspection, I think this is more like those novelty gender-neutral pronouns (“ey”) you sometimes see in English. If you want to use automated translation, you will have to undo this first.
- The blogs War on Society, Liberacion Total and culmine appear to be sympathetic.
- There are names of specific people and organizations in those documents. Those people should take notice (and probably already have).
SingInst gets one mention on this page, in the middle of some ranting about Facebook being a mind-control tool.

Siguiendo con el tema de la informática, las famosas redes sociales y específicamente una que es Facebook se ha convertido en el centro de atención de la sociedad tecnoindustrial, pues en ella el sistema ve un aliado importante para el total control del comportamiento humano, que es en si, un factor sumamente amenazante para el orden establecido dentro de la Civilización.

Uno de los tres líderes de Facebook es Peter Thiel, un empresario estadounidense quien se ha propuesto la eliminación total del mundo real o natural y la imposición del mundo digital, así como se oye lo ha dicho. Analizando esto, podemos ver que Facebook no es una simple red comunicacional inofensiva, sino que es un experimento social de control mental que el Sistema Tecnológico Industrialestá usando con gran efectividad para excluir a la Naturaleza del contacto humano, es decir, desarrolla en gran medida la alienación total de lxs individuos a la Tecnología.

Pero este empresario pervertido no se ha quedado quieto, además de ser uno de lxs principales contribuyentes de la mencionada herramienta de control mental, ha invertido millonarias ganancias en investigación de inteligencia artificial y nuevas tecnologías capaces de alargar la vida del hombre por medio de la ciencia. Para esto tiene de aliado al Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence y al inglés gerontólogo biomédico Aubrey de Grey, quien se encarga específicamente en desarrollar por medio de una tecnología altamente avanzada que el periodo de vida de un ser humano se alargue de manera indefinida, y así, el humano hecho maquina ha sido creado!

Which Google translates to:

Continuing the theme of IT, the famous social networking and specifically one that is Facebook has become the focus of techno-industrial society, for in it the system is an important ally for the total control of human behavior, which is itself, a factor extremely threatening to the established order in Civilization. One of the three leaders of Facebook is Peter Thiel, an American businessman who has proposed the complete elimination of real or natural world and the imposition of the digital world and hear what he said.

Analyzing this, we see that Facebook is not just a harmless communication network, but a social experiment in mind control that the System of Industrial Technology are using very effectively to exclude the nature of human contact, that is largely developed total alienation of individuals to Technology.

But this perverted businessman has not stood still, and is one of the main contributors of that mind-control tool, has invested millions in profits in artificial intelligence research and new technologies to extend the life of man through science. For this is an ally to Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and biomedical gerontologist English Aubrey de Grey, who is specifically responsible to develop through a highly advanced technology that the lifetime of a human being lengthened indefinitely, and so The man made machine has been created!

There are some clues in there that could be useful for figuring out who this is. I’m not sure how uncommon the ‘x’ thing is, but it’s probably in his real-name writings too, and it’s easy to search for. His rantings about Facebook indicate he probably had an account at one point but abandoned it. On priors, he’s almost certainly a loner, and the same rant seems to back that up. His understanding of technology seems pretty shallow, which means the manifestos might’ve been sent through insufficiently-anonymized means (though Liberacion Total probably isn’t keen on helping unmask him).

Quirinus_Quirrell 26 Apr 2011 0:55 UTC
38 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?

I sometimes feel like there is a shadowy half-underground group of LWers that is intelligent enough to stay away from bad signalling and has altruistic intentions, but has to deal every now and then with a slight twitch, reading something knowing they can’t really state a proper response.

(linked comment) Delusions that are truly widely held and not merely believed to be widely held are far too dangerous to attack. There are sociopolitical Eldritch Abominations that it would serve LW well to stay well clear of and perhaps even pretend they don’t exist for the time being.

The next time you feel that way, make yourself another identity, and use it to say the things you wouldn’t otherwise. It really is quite liberating. It’s very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.

As for the discussion this appeared in, let me get the unpleasant truths out of the way so we can stay meta: Intelligence is mostly heritable! Knowing someone’s race conveys nonzero information about their their social status, suitability for jobs, wealth, and criminality! The gender imbalances in many professions are the result of innate differences, not discrimination! When groups with bad values and lower intelligence breed too much, it harms the future! These are all truths that any sufficiently advanced rationalist will recognize. And if you disagree with any of these, please direct your complaints to no one in particular.
What links here?

Quirinus_Quirrell 4 Jul 2011 1:14 UTC
34 points
on: The Blue-Minimizing Robot

Also, you misspelled my name—it’s Quirinus, not Quirinius.

Quirinus_Quirrell 1 Apr 2022 20:10 UTC
28 points
on: Blatant Plot Hole in HPMoR [Spoilers]
No, this calculation is incorrect. You forgot the most important principle of Quirrell points: unlike real estate, Bitcoin, and poorly drawn pictures, the value of Quirrell points (as denominated in every other currency) always goes up. This explains why you got such a low number ($400,000) for the value of 200 Quirrell points.

Quirinus_Quirrell 21 Apr 2011 13:27 UTC
27 points
in reply to: Clippy’s comment on: “High Value” Karma vs “Regular” (i.e. Quirrell Points)

[Clippy] What’s your private key?

It’s 4,096 paperclips on a ring, each bent in one of two ways to indicate either a 0 or a 1. Neither the 0s nor the 1s could hold paper together in their current shape.
What links here?
- Clippy's comment on “High Value” Karma vs “Regular” (i.e. Quirrell Points) by Raemon (12 May 2011 15:06 UTC; 0 points)

Quirinus_Quirrell 12 Nov 2014 3:16 UTC
26 points
on: ...
I am not any person named in the linked page, though I have met some or all of them. I am not affiliated with MIRI in any way. I did not post the linked page and I do not know who did.

The linked page is obvious slander. But its creation is a serious matter; the author is threatening to manufacture evidence. Thus, it should be handled the same way as a death threat: with an investigation to determine who sent it. The site is hosted on EasyWeb; the domain name admin contact details point to a proxy called myprivacy.net, but the author is not very technically sophisticated (the page was authored in MS Word) so an appropriate subpoena might suffice to identify them.

Also, Mendes & Mount might want to make a public statement as to whether or not they represent MIRI. The page mentions them by name, but they’re located in the wrong state (New York) and none of the practice areas listed on their web page are relevant.

Quirinus_Quirrell 13 Mar 2012 1:22 UTC
24 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10
Thanks, Eliezer, for unpausing one of my substrates!

Quirinus_Quirrell 26 Jan 2011 1:07 UTC
21 points
on: Richard Dawkins: Should employers be blind to private beliefs? [link]
This issue came up on Less Wrong before, and I will reiterate the advice I gave there: if a forbidden criteria affects a hiring decision, keep your reasons secret and shred your work. The linked article is about a case where the University of Kentucky was forced to pay $125,000 to an applicant, Martin Gaskell. This happened because the chairman of the search committee, Michael Cavagnero, was stupid enough to write this in a logged email:

If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simpler. We could easily choose another applicant, and we could content ourselves with the idea that Martin’s religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, this is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin on any basis other than religious...

And that’s where the trouble starts, because Martin Gaskell’s religious beliefs would have been a serious risk to the university’s reputation. No one would take a creationist seriously as an astronomer, and no one would take an observatory seriously if one of the first few Google results for its name connected it to creationism.

Which is why, as soon as they realized they had a creationist as a potentially leading candidate, they should have moved their hiring process into private meetings with poor note-taking, and started looking for better pretexts. Yes, anti-discrimination laws are crazy, but not all judges are. However, a judge can only work around craziness if you allow a suitable pretext, which means not discussing how you need to break the crazy laws in writing.

Quirinus_Quirrell 28 Jan 2011 22:10 UTC
20 points
on: Punishing future crimes

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future?

Easy. When they can predict you well enough and they think you can predict them well enough that if you would-counterfactually punish them for committing a crime in the future, it influences the probability that they will commit the crime by enough to outweigh the cost of administering the punishment times the probability that you will have to do so. Or when you want to punish them for an unrelated reason and need a pretext.

Not every philosophical question needs to be complicated.

Quirinus_Quirrell 29 Nov 2012 20:00 UTC
19 points
on: 2012 Survey Results

“Eliezer Yudkowsky personality cult.”
“The new thing for people who would have been Randian Objectivists 30 years ago.”
”A sinister instrument of billionaire Peter Thiel.”

Nope, no one guessed whose sinister instrument this site is. Muaha.

Quirinus_Quirrell 5 Mar 2011 20:37 UTC
19 points
in reply to: XiXiDu’s comment on: A Brief Overview of Machine Ethics
You seem to be under the impression that Eliezer is going to create an artificial general intelligence, and oversight is necessary to ensure that he doesn’t create one which places his goals over humanity’s interests. It is important, you say, that he is not allowed unchecked power. This is all fine, except for one very important fact that you’ve missed.

Eliezer Yudkowsky can’t program. He’s never published a nontrivial piece of software, and doesn’t spend time coding. In the one way that matters, he’s a muggle. Ineligible to write an AI. Eliezer has not positioned himself to be the hero, the one who writes the AI or implements its utility function. The hero, if there is to be one, has not yet appeared on stage. No, Eliezer has positioned himself to be the mysterious old wizard—to lay out a path, and let someone else follow it. You want there to be oversight over Eliezer, and Eliezer wants to be the oversight over someone else to be determined.

But maybe we shouldn’t trust Eliezer to be the mysterious old wizard, either. If the hero/AI programmer comes to him with a seed AI, then he knows it exists, and finding out that a seed AI exists before it launches is the hardest part of any plan to steal it and rewrite its utility function to conquer the universe. That would be pretty evil, but would “transparency and oversight” make things turn out better, or worse? As far as I can tell, transparency would mean announcing the existence of a pre-launch AI to the world. This wouldn’t stop Eliezer from make a play to conquer the universe, but it would present that option to everybody else, including at least some people and organizations who are definitely evil.

So that’s a bad plan. A better plan would be to write a seed AI yourself, keep it secret from Eliezer, and when it’s time to launch, ask for my input instead.
What links here?
- jimrandomh's comment on Being a teacher by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) (16 Mar 2011 13:30 UTC; 7 points)

Quirinus_Quirrell 9 Mar 2015 15:06 UTC
18 points
on: HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion
I’ll be at more than one of these.

Quirinus_Quirrell 28 Jan 2011 22:16 UTC
18 points
in reply to: endoself’s comment on: A sealed prediction
You’re safeguarding against the wrong thing. If I needed to fake a prediction that badly, I’d find a security hole in Less Wrong with which to edit all your comments. I wouldn’t waste time establishing karma for sockpuppets to post editable hashes to deter others from posting hashes themselves, that would be silly. But as it happens, I’m not planning to edit this hash, and doing that wouldn’t have been a viable strategy in the first place.

Quirinus_Quirrell 12 Jan 2013 17:16 UTC
17 points
on: Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)
So, The Tech is reporting that Aaron Swartz has killed himself. No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I’ve been able to find have identified witnesses or method. Aaron Swartz was known for having many enemies. There’s the obvious enemies in the publishing industry and the US attorneys office. Cory Doctorow wrote that he had “a really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors.”

I’d like to raise the possibility that this was not a natural event. Most of this evidence can be adequately explained by how little time has passed, so we’ll know more in a few days or weeks.

Strange side note: He had a PGP public key on his web page at http://www.aaronsw.com/pgp, retrievable from Wayback Machine, but the link went bad some time after Jul 28 2012. All other links on the site seem to be fine.

Additional side note: if your chance of being murdered ever goes past 0.01, state publicly that you don’t believe in suicide and that any suicide note would definitely be cryptographically verifiable. If it ever goes past 0.05, set up a record-audio-to-Internet button that you can activate in under a second, then give your lawyer a signed message saying that any supposed suicide note which lacks a certain phrase is fake.
What links here?
- A1987dM's comment on Irrationality Game II by [deleted] (13 Jan 2013 11:33 UTC; 10 points)

Quirinus_Quirrell 21 Jan 2011 2:06 UTC
15 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Theists are wrong; is theism?

The “just hack out of the matrix” answer, however, presupposes the existence of a security hole, which is unlikely.

Not as unlikely as you think.

A sealed prediction

Quirinus_Quirrell28 Jan 2011 4:10 UTC

14 points

48 comments1 min readLW link

Quirinus_Quirrell 1 Feb 2011 2:16 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Psy-Kosh’s comment on: Final Words
I voted on this and the immediate parent, but I won’t reveal why, or which direction, or how many times, or which account I used.

Quirinus_Quirrell 19 Jan 2011 1:31 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments
If the best way to choose who to hire is with a statistical analysis of legally forbidden criteria, then keep your reasons secret and shred your work. Is that so hard?