Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Working Mantras - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 August 2009 10:08PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 August 2009 07:18:08PM 9 points [-]

Upvoted, but FYI, it's really hard for people to know whether or not that sort of thing is humor or malice - I was actually trying to guess that (thinking that it would be funny/rational as humor/look-into-the-dark), and ended up leaning toward malice by prior probability (guess I should have realized prior frequencies are skewed on this particular website, but I'd been reading older OBLW posts and looking at the lower-quality comments there, that may have skewed my intuitive estimate).

You've got to go further over the top to make it clear that it's humor - talk about my gasping dying breath, "If only... I'd been.. less... overconfident" or something like that. (Actually, even that might not be over-the-top enough. "If only I'd been... less confident... about my own relative meta-rationality..." would do it, that tells everyone you're an insider.)