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rhollerith comments on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate - Less Wrong
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Those who suspect me of advocating my unconventional moral position to signal my edgy innovativeness or my nonconformity should consider that I have held the position since 1992, but only since 2007 have I posted about it or discussed it with anyone but a handful of friends.
Unfortunately, they can't consider that you have have held the position since 1992 -- all they can consider is that you claim to have done so. You could get your handful of friends to testify, I suppose...
Cyan points out, correctly, that all the reader can consider is that I claim to have held a certain position since 1992. But that is useful information for evaluating my claim that I am not just signaling because a person is less likely to have deceived himself about having held a position than about his motivations for a sequence of speech acts! And I can add a second piece of useful information in the form of the following archived email. Of course I could be lying when I say that I found the following message on my hard drive, but participants in this conversation willing to lie outright are (much) less frequent than participants who have somehow managed to deceive themselves about whether they really held a certain position since 1992, who in turn are less frequent than participants who have somehow managed to deceive themselves about their real motivation for advocating a certain position.
I don't disagree with the above post -- I just wanted to make a pedantic distinction between claims and facts in evidence. (Also, my choice of the pronoun "they" rather than "we" was deliberate.)
I don't believe you.
Don't believe my advocacy of the moral position is not really just signaling or don't believe I've held the moral position since 1992?
I don't know how long you've held the position, or much care - I don't think it's relevant. But it is signaling, I think, for 2 reasons:
This is the sort of thing that causes unnecessary splintering in groups. I have a very visceral reaction to this sort of signaling (which I would label preening, actually). Perhaps I should examine that.
I believe rhollerith. I met him the other week and talked in some detail; he strikes me as someone who's actually trying. Also, he shared the intellectual roots of his moral position, and the roots make sense as part of a life-story that involves being strongly influenced by John David Garcia's apparently similar moral system some time ago.
Hollerith doesn't mean he was applying his moral position to AI design since '92, he means that since '92, he's been following out a possible theory of value that doesn't assign intrinsic value to human life, to human happiness, or to similar subjective states. I'm not sure why people are stating their disbelief.
Off-topic until May, all.