WrongBot comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (653)
I'm sorry, but from the perspective of someone with no prior knowledge of Actual Freedom, you sound as though you're saying that there is a magical mental state that fixes every problem that evolution baked into the brain over hundreds of millions of years and that the only people who have ever successfully achieved this mental state in all of human history are the devoted followers of a particular charismatic leader who doesn't believe in last names.
If you wish to distinguish yourself from people who are promoting cults, you need to not sound like someone promoting a cult.
Please don't feed the trolls!
Seconded. Times like this I wish moderators would delete obviously bad threads; downvoting the original comment into oblivion doesn't seem enough.
Would a system to automatically delete comments with a low enough score be supported by the community? So that comments would collapse at -3 and be deleted at, say, -10 or -20. I'm not in favor of the idea, but I'm interested to hear if others would be.
Currently you can choose the threshold for hiding comments: click on "preferences" on the right. I've turned mine off, because I like to see all the comments. I'd be open to adding an option for "don't even show there was a comment here," but I'd like the comments to be preserved in case someone wants to see them.
Maybe not deleted but simply locked so that no-one can post in them. Should stop any painful soul-draining, ultimately pointless arguements. Of course, if the subject is posted again then it's definitely spamming, and the mods should delete the repost and ban those responsible,
I'd support deleting heavily downvoted comments that do not have upvoted descendants.
That's actually the official policy for sufficiently bad trolls, but the moderator is Eliezer and if he doesn't notice it he doesn't notice. Feel free to email him and point this thread out.
There are two issues here. One is whether Actual Freedom's approach produces the claimed effects and whether those effects actually improve people's lives, and the other is whether it's a cult. There's a minor question of whether Actual Freedom is the only path to get those effects.
I don't think it sounds all that much like a cult-- they aren't asking for money, they aren't asking for devotion to a leader, and they're saying they have a simple method of getting access to an intrinsic ability.
Whether it's as absolutely true as they say is a harder question, though it might improve quality of life without working all the time. Whether it's safe is a harder question-- it sounds like a sort of self-modification which is would be very hard to reverse.
Whether no other system produces comparable results is unknowable.