For achievement of what purpose?

Time Savings.

Imagine that Alice and Bob go into a room and Alice explains an interesting idea to Bob. They leave the room together after time t.

If a method exists, whereby Alice and Bob can instead leave the room in t-x time, with Bob knowing the same information, then this method of communicating can be said to yield a time savings of x compared to the previous method.

I should start waiting before replying to you :p

There certainly is a place for communication of one's position, but not where the position is already known, and is being used as an argument.

Why not? My view is you take a normal conversation/discussion, and then proceed as fast as you can toward resolution (being careful that it's the same resolution).

More importantly it removed lesswrong as a place where FAI and decision theory can be discussed in any depth beyond superficial advocacy.

The problem is more than the notion that secret knowledge is bad - it's that secret knowledge increasingly isn't possible, and increasingly isn't knowledge.

If it's science, you almost can't do it on your own and you almost can't do it as a secret. If it's engineering, your DRM or other constraints will last precisely as long as no-one is interested in breaking them. If it's politics, your conspiracy will last as long as you aren't found out and can insulate yourself from the effects ... that one works a bit better, actually.

More importantly it removed lesswrong as a place where FAI and decision theory can be discussed in any depth beyond superficial advocacy.

I don't believe this is true to any significant extent. Why do you believe that? What kind of questions are not actually discussed that could've been discussed otherwise?

Ah, I thought you were talking about whether the decision solved the problem, not whether the failed decision was justifiable in terms of the theory.

I do think that if a decision theory leads to quite as spectacular a failure in practice as this one did, then the decision theory is strongly suspect.

As such, whether the decision was justifiable is less interesting except in terms of revealing the thinking processes of the person doing the justification (clinginess to pet decision theory, etc).

But that it was in fact net negative doesn't directly argue that given the information at hand when the decision was made, it had net negative expectation, and so that the decision was incorrect.

More than enough information about human behavior was available at the time. Negative consequences of the kind observed were not remotely hard to predict.

It's not "moving forward", it's moving to a separate question.

I like the precision of your thought.

All this time I thought we were discussing if blocking future censorship by EY was a rational thing to do -- but it's not what we were discussing at all.

You really are in it for the details -- if we could find a way of estimating around hard problems to solve the above question, that's only vaguely interesting to you -- you want to know the answers to these questions.

At least that's what I'm hearing.

It sounds like the above was your way of saying you're in favor of blocking future EY censorship, which gratifies me.

I'm going to do the following things in the hope of gratifying you:

1. Writing up a post on less wrong for developing political muscles. I've noticed several other posters seem less than savvy about social dynamics, so perhaps a crash course is in order. (I know that there are certainly several in the archives, I guarantee I'll bring several new insights [with references] to the table).

2. Reread all your comments, and come back at these issues tomorrow night with a more exact approach. Please accept my apology for what I assume seemed a bizarre discussion, and thanks for thinking like that.

Night!