= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (541)
I've been on the opposite end of this-- someone believed, for complicated reasons, that I was an angel or living saint-- and I can confirm that it's really weird and that it caused me to avoid interacting with the person in question for a long time.
There's a substantial fraction of the total people who know me who believe I'm a beacon of human salvation, and even though that's exactly who I try to be, it still weirds me out.
I just wanted to note that people take everything you write very seriously and tend to up vote everything. They only go berserk and punish you heavily if you contradict your earlier self from the sequences. Which is funny if you think about it, shouldn't they assume that your.more recent position is the better one?
Anycase, I've thought up of an experiment that might interest you. Try posting all your regular interaction, except the stuff where your represent SingInst or do sort-of-moderator-like stuff, with a sock puppet account for 3 months. I wonder how your experience of LW would change. It would give you some information about how your status influences how people treat you here. Or perhaps you may be better off not knowing...
Of course maybe you've already tried this - if so, can you tell us the results? With graphs if you have them. Mainly I like graphs, but if you don't want to you don't have to.
This is a good idea. I am really in support of the graphs. There are not enough graphs here lately.
I agree; It must be done for science!
It would be an interesting experiment in the prevalence of the Halo effect of the LW community.
He really should do this experiment. At the conclusion of the test there will be delicious ca... M&Ms? Taste the rainbow Eliezer! And think of all the things we can learn!
If you guys care that much, perhaps you should make it worth Eliezer's time with some monetary commitments: conducting the experiment would require some cognitive overhead, use of time at the end to analyze & write it up, and naturally leads to some of his contributions being fragmented from the rest of his corpus.
EY can easily outsource the analysis, all posts and their karma are public anyway. Making a sock puppet is rather trivial and takes literally less than a minute.
Information might help us optimize newbie experience too, since if it is a new user name, we would get to see what the experience is like for a new poster that makes comments on the same level of quality as Eliezer.
I doubt it would be particularly hard for someone with access to the LW database to magically change ownership of all of the secondary account's posts.
heh.
Hmmm... contrary to what most people would say about themselves, I am nihilistic and generally do not care about the well being of people who I am not in regular contact with. I do have ideals which may work for the benefit of humankind, but this is mostly social conditioning and coincidence, there are just as many things I am attached to which have a net negative impact. Given that I have spent more time and money on video games than I have on saving lives, I would have a hard time classifying myself as a remotely good person.
However, I suspect that my interpretation of good is different than most humans. I don't really care if someone WANTS nobody to suffer, if you decide to go on a two thousand dollar vacation when you could easily have spent a day looking for efficient charities and made a donation, you have just demonstrated that your personal desires trump the continued existence of several human lives, or minimizing an existential risk. When I do things which are generally beneficial to humankind, I don't have to think very hard to discover a selfish motive for it, and when I see anyone else doing something good I generally follow the same thought process.
Haphazardly getting back on topic, Harries perception of Hermione seems extremely optimistic to me, and I don't think Quirrel would have a very hard time turning me to the dark side if it that meant actually fixing the flaws in the world at the expense of peoples trust and approval.
I don't that "good" exists outside of something that is important to humans. And for Goodness to be something that actually matters to humans, it needs to have a definition that is actually useful.
Sure, you can find a selfish motive for every "good" thing you do, even if that motive is "to make yourself feel better." But I think if the only reason you do something Good is to feel like a Good person... honestly, that's good enough for me.(As far as motivation goes anyway. To be an EFFECTIVE good person (i.e. "good at being good") you need to apply some intelligence to make sure you're actually helping people.
Every living person has the potential to do a lot more than they actually do. If you're judging goodness on an absolute scale, of course everyone fails to save thousands of lives. And yeah, you can think of that as "you are responsible for killing thousands of people." But that's not an actually healthy way to live. The reason most people aren't Gandhi is because being Gandhi is hard, and rewarding people for whatever good they DO accomplish is more effective at creating a wholesome world than punishing people who failed to save an additional 10 lives on any given day. I don't have solid evidence to back this up, but I'm pretty confident that if everyone measured goodness on an absolute scale, LESS good would get accomplished, not more. (Though if someone could cite studies regarding that assertion, I'd be appreciative).