Even so, ISTM that picking through the linked article for its many flaws in reasoning would have been more interesting even than not-quite-endorsing its conclusions.

What I find interesting is the question, what motivates an influential blogger with a large audience to pass on this particular kind of factoid?

The ICCI blog has an explanation based on relevance theory and "the joy of superstition", but unfortunately (?) it involves Paul the Octopus:

We may get pleasure from having our expectations of relevance aroused. We often indulge in this pleasure for its own sake rather than for the cognitive benefits that only truly relevant information may bring. This, I would argue, is why, for instance, we read light fiction. This is why I could not resist the temptation of writing a post about Paul the octopus even before feeling confident that I had anything of relevance to say about it.

(ETA: note the parallel between the above and "I post these things because they are interesting, not because they're right". And to be lucid, my own expectations of relevance get aroused for the same reasons as most everyone else's; I just happen to be lucky enough to know a blog where I can raise the discussion to the meta level.)

it's at least a little silly for Kottke to say he's posting it because it's 'interesting' and not because it's 'right'

Yup, that's the bit I thought made it appropriate for LW.

It reminded me of my speculations on "asymmetric intellectual warfare" - we are bombarded all day long with things that are "interesting" in one sense or another but should still be dismissed outright, if only because paying attention to all of them would leave us with nothing left over for worthwhile items.

But we can also note regularities in the patterns of which claims of this kind get raised to the level of serious consideration. I'm still perplexed by how seriously mainstream media takes claims of "electrosensitivity", but not totally surprised: there is something that seems "culturally appropriate" to the claims. The rate at which cell phones have spread through our culture has made "radio waves" more available as a potential source of worry, and has tended to legitimize a particular subset of all possible absurd claims.

I disagree with the idea that modal realism, whether right or not, changes the chances of any particular hypothesis like that being true. I am not saying that we can never have a rational belief about whether or not modal realism is true: There may or may not be a philosophical justification for modal realism. However, I do think that whether modal realism applies has no bearing on the probability of you being in some situation, such as in a computer simulation. I think this issue needs debating, so for that purpose I have asserted this is a rule, which I call "The Principle of Modal Realism Equivalence", and that gives us something well-defined to argue for or against. I define and assert the rule, and give a (short) justification of it here: http://www.paul-almond.com/ModalRealismEquivalence.pdf.

But what if you should anticipate things very differently, if your memory has been altered? If I assigned a high probability to my memory having been altered, then I should expect that the technology exists to alter memories, and all manner of even stranger things that that would imply. Figuring out what prior to assign to a case like that, or whether it can be done at all, is what I'm struggling with.

No, it's not meaningless, because if it's true, the matrix's implementers could decide to intervene (or for that matter create an afterlife simulation for all of us). If it's true, there's also the possibility of the simulation ending prematurely.

"Where'd you get your universal prior, Neo?"

Eliezer seems to think (or, at least he did at the time) that this isn't a solvable problem. To phrase the question in a way more relevant to recent discussions, are those statements in any way similar to "a halting oracle exists"?

My argument is that you ALMOST certainly don't care about ants at all, but that there is some extremely small uncertainty about what your values are. The disutility of getting a dust speck in your eye also has that argument.

It's arbitrarily chosen from the dust speck being -1, I find it easier to imagine one second of torture than years for comparing to something that happens in less than a second. It's just an example.

I consider these results perfectly intuitive, why shouldn't they be? 3^^^3 is a really big number, it makes sense you have to be really careful around it.

Hold on -- those are important articles to read, and they do move you toward a resolution of that problem. But I don't think they fully dissolve/answer the exact question daedalus2u is asking.

For example, EY has written this article, grappling with but ultimately not resolving the question of whether you should care about "other copies" of you, why you are not indifferent between yourself vs. someone else jumping off a cliff, etc.

I don't deny that the existing articles do resolve some of the problems daedulus2u is posing, but they don't cover everything he asked.

Unless I've missed something?

Significantly raise the minimum karma level.

Another technical solution. Not trivial to implement, but also contains significant side benefits.

• Find some subset of sequences and other highly ranked posts that are "super-core" and has large consensus not just in karma, but also in agreement by high-karma members (say top ten).
• Create a multiple choice test and implement it online, which is external technologies exist for already I am sure.

Some karma + passing test gets top posting privileges.

I have to confess I abused my newly acquired posting privileges and probably diluted the site's value with a couple of posts. Thank goodness they were rather short :). I took the hint though and took to participating in the comment discussion and reading sequences until I am ready to contribute at a higher level.

Kuro5hin had an editorial system, where all posts started out in a special section where they were separate and only visible to logged in users. Commenters would label their comments as either "topical" or "editorial", and all editorial comments would be deleted when the post left editing; and votes cast during editing would determine where the post went (front page, less prominent section, or deleted).

Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.

We upvote much more than we downvote - just look at the mean comment and post scores. Also, the number of downvotes a user can make is capped at their karma.

Michael Vassar doesn't think so, but he's never had a post voted as highly as my first one was.

I didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with your post, but newer posts get a much higher level of karma than old ones, which must be taken into account. Some of the core sequence posts have only 2 karma, for example.

I suppose there's a few options including: See who's willing to run workshops and then once that's known, people can choose whether to join or not. If none of the top contributors could be convinced to run them then they may still be useful for people of a lower level of post writing ability (which I suspect is where I am, at the moment). The other thing is, even regardless of who ran the workshops, the ability to get faster feedback and to redraft gives a chance to develop an article more thoroughly before posting it properly and may give a sense of where improvements can be made and where the gaps in thinking and writing are.

But I guess that questions like that are secondary to the question of whether enough people think it's a good enough idea and whether anyone would be willing to run workshops at all.

I don't know of any LWers who have used PB enough to really have a solid level of normal. My own PB stats are badly distorted by all my janitorial work.

I suspect not many LWers have put in the work for calibration; at least, I see very few scores posted at http://lesswrong.com/lw/1f8/test_your_calibration/

So, I couldn't say. It would be nice if we were all calibrated. (But incidentally you can be perfectly calibrated and not have 5/10 of 50% items happen; it could just be a bad week for you.)

So TDT fails on counterfactual mugging, as far as you understand it to work, and the reasoning I gave here is in error?

I say for now because those who know about this are going to keep looking at it and determine it safe/rebut it/make it moot.

Technically, you didn't say "for now".

I'm deeply confused by this logic. There was one post where due to a potentially weird quirk of some small fraction of the population, reading that post could create harm. I fail to see how the vast majority of other posts are therefore harmful. This is all the more the case because this breaks the flow of a lot of posts and a lot of very interesting arguments and points you've made.

ETA: To be more clear, leaving LW doesn't mean you need to delete the posts.

I understand. I've been thinking about quitting LessWrong so that I can devote more time to earning money for paperclips.

So you've deleted the posts you've made in the past. This is harmful for the blog, disrupts the record and makes the comments by other people on those posts unavailable.

For example, consider these posts, and comments on them, that you deleted:

• 11 core rationalist skills (39 points, 33 comments, promoted)
• The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It (23 points, 108 comments, promoted)
• Supporting the underdog is explained by Hanson’s Near/Far distinction (20 points, 18 comments, promoted)
• Max Tegmark on our place in history: "We're Not Insignificant After All" (14 points, 68 comments)

I believe it's against community blog ethics to delete posts in this manner. I'd like them restored.

Edit: Roko accepted this argument and said he's OK with restoring the posts under an anonymous username (if it's technically possible).

I am not Professor Quirrell in real life.

I'm not sure we should believe you.

A side effect of banning one post, I think;

In a certain sense, it is.

Notice: I am not Professor Quirrell in real life.

Of course, we already established that you're Light Yagami.

Notice: I am not Professor Quirrell in real life.

Indeed. You are open about your ambition to take over the world, rather than hiding behind the identity of an academic.

Notice: I am not Professor Quirrell in real life.

And that is exactly what Professor Quirrell would say!

Well, thanks for explanation.

I think the "repeating myself" that you refer to is quite excusable, though, unless you have a better idea for what to do when people keep asking the same question that you've answered in the very first post.

In retrospect, I do regret a lot of those. I thought I was doing a favor by informing others about my experience with the advice that was being offered. At least everyone got a chance to show off how great they are, right?

See my reply to CronoDAS regarding the possibility of a fifth lottery win.

I admit I don't know the odds of one person winning four jackpots of over a million dollars each by pure chance. However, my guess is that they are fairly low. But maybe I'm wrong.

Regardless, one can just as easily ask "What are the odds that someone who knows how to cheat at lotteries by this time would have won four of them while cheating on at least one of them?"

Surely the answer to this is: better odds than the answer to the previous question.

There is something else involved as well. We can consider the two hypotheses: 1) she won four lotteries by pure luck; 2) she won four lotteries by cheating. The first hypothesis would predict that she will never win another lottery (like ordinary people.) The second hypothesis would predict that there is a good chance she will win another in her lifetime.

Agreeing with the second hypothesis, I predict with significant probability that she will win another. If she does, your credence in the proposition that it happened by chance must take a huge blow. In fact, would you agree that in this event, you would admit it to be more likely that she cheated?

If so, then consider what would have happened if I had raised the same issue after she had won three of them...

What are the alternative hypotheses? Magic? A simulation with interference from the simulator?

I'm not denying the possibility of alternatives, it's just that they all seem less likely the two low probability hypotheses originally considered (chance and cheating).

It still works as a signal, because (1) signing a comment requires some extra effort, and (2) it is harder to retract a comment that has been signed (since the signature remains valid proof of authorship even if the original comment is edited or deleted). A little bit of real cost and utility goes a long way.

But PGP's security and quality pretty much make up for that loss in signaling seriousness, don't you think?

Unless you're signalling that you know about signalling including acknowledging your own signalling. :)

That would also have the advantage of hopefully requiring different credentials to access, so it would be marginally harder to change the recorded public key while signing a forged post with it.