I’ve stopped trying to make myself do things I don’t want to do. Burned out at work, quit my job, became long-term unemployed. The world is going off-kilter, the horizons for comprehensible futures are shrinking, and I don’t see any grand individual-scale quest to claw your way from the damned into the elect.
rsaarelm
Karma: 418
How many users you can point to who started out making posts that regularly got downvoted to negative karma and later became good contributors? Or, alternatively, specific ideas that were initially only presented by users who got regularly downvoted that were later recognized as correct and valuable? My starting assumption is that it’s basically wishful thinking that this would happen much under any community circumstances, people who write badly will mostly keep writing badly and people who end up writing outstanding stuff mostly start out writing better than average stuff.
On the exponentially self-improving part, No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices.
Please do not vote without an explanatory comment (votes are convenient for moderators, but are poor intellectual etiquette, sans information that would permit the “updating” of beliefs).
This post has terrible writing style, based on your posting history you’ve been here for a year, writing similarly badly styled posts, people have commented on the style, and you have neither engaged the comments nor tried to improve your writing style. Why shouldn’t people just downvote and move on at this point?
Is this your first time running into Zack’s stuff? You sound like you’re talking to someone showing up out of nowhere with a no-context crackpot manuscript and has zero engagement with community. Zack’s post is about his actual engagement with the community over a decade, we’ve seen a bunch of the previous engagement (in pretty much the register we see here so this doesn’t look like an ongoing psychotic break), he’s responsive to comments and his thesis generally makes sense. This isn’t drive-by crackpottery and it’s on LessWrong because it’s about LessWrong.
Record-keeping isn’t enough to make you a scientist. People might be making careful records and then analyzing them badly, and if there’s no actual effect going on selection effect will leave you with a community of misanalyzers.
The PDF is shown in full for me when I scroll down the academia.edu page, here’s an archive.is capture in case this is some sort of intermittent A/B testing thing.
There might not be, but it’s not a thing in vacuum, it was coined with political intent and it’s tangled with that intent.
Blithely adopting a term that seems to have been coined just for the purposes of doing a smear job makes you look like either a useful idiot or an enemy agent.
The post reads like a half-assed college essay where you’re going through the motions of writing without things really coming together. Heavy on the structure, there’s no clear thread of rhetoric progressing through it, and it’s hard to get a clear sense where you’re coming from with the whole thing. The overall impression is just list of disjointed arguments, essay over.
I’ve been gaming some 35 years and I don’t play any multiplayer games at all. I don’t think I remember the ten or so people in my social hangouts who regularly talk about what they’re playing talk much about PVP either, they seem to be playing single-player simulator, grand strategy and CRPG games or cooperative multiplayer games mostly.
All else being equal, do you prefer to live in a society where many members are madmen and idiots or in a society where few members are madmen and idiots?
“It can’t happen and it would also be bad if it happened” seems to be a somewhat tempting way to argue these topics. When trying to convince an audience that thinks “it probably can happen and we want to make it happen in a way that gets it right”, it seems much worse than sticking strictly to either “it can’t happen” or “we don’t know how to get it right for us if it happens”. When you switch to talking about how it would be bad, you come off as scared and lying about the part where you assert it is impossible. It has the same feel as an 18th century theologian presenting a somewhat shaky proof for the existence of God and then reminding the audience that life in a godless world would be unbearably horrible, in the hope that this might make them less likely to start poking holes into the proof.
Ted Kaczynski
This sounds drastic enough that it makes me wonder, since the claimed reason was that Said’s commenting style was driving high-quality contributors away from the site, do you have a plan to follow up and see if there is any sort of measurable increase in comment quality, site mood or good contributors becoming more active moving forward?
Also, is this thing an experiment with a set duration, or a permanent measure? If it’s permanent, it has a very rubber room vibe to it, where you don’t outright ban someone but continually humiliate them if they keep coming by and wish they’ll eventually get the hint.
(That person is more responsible than any other single individual for Eliezer not being around much these days.)
Wait, the only thing I remember Said and Eliezer arguing about was Eliezer’s glowfic. Eliezer dropped out of LW over an argument about how he was writing about tabletop RPG rules in his fanfiction?
There are already social security means-testing regimes that prod able-bodied applicants to apply for jobs and to spend their existing savings before granting them payments. If sex work and organ sales are fully normalized, these might get extended into denying social security payments until people have tried to support themselves by selling a kidney and doing sex work.
The shift we’re looking at is going from program code that’s very close to a computer’s inner workings to natural human language for specifying systems, but where the specification must still unambiguously describe the business interest the program needs to solve. We already have a profession for unambiguously specifying complex systems with multiple stakeholders and possibly complex interactions between its parts in natural language. It’s called a legislator and it’s very much not an unskilled job.
I understand esoteric as something that’s often either fundamentally difficult to grasp (ie. an esoteric concept described in a short cryptic text might not be comprehensively explainable with a text five times longer that would be straightforward to write by anyone who understands the subject matter) or intentionally written in a way to keep it obscured from a cursory reading. The definition of hieratic doesn’t really connote conceptual difficulty beyond mundane technical complexity or a particular intention to keep things hidden, just that writing can be made much more terse if you assume an audience that is already familiar with what it’s talking about.
James Gleick’s Genius cites a transcript of “Address to Far Rockaway High School” from 1965 (or 1966 according to this from California Institute of Technology archives for Feynman talking about how he got a not-exceptionally-high 125 for his IQ score. Couldn’t find an online version of the transcript anywhere with a quick search.