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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong
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Upvoted.
I'm starting to think this will not end well. We've started down a much too familiar non-theist and religionist conversation path.
I'm inclined to agree. But I'm still mystified as to why our gracious patron Eliezer Y. saw fit to anoint this particular religious believer (out of all the many, many, educated and articulate religious believers who speak English in this world) with the special dispensation of karma points out of thin air. Beyond that, I'm further surprised that the LessWrong community at large was so enthusiastic in upvoting these insights into how to seduce impressionable people into a false, irrational, and personally costly religious cult.
Because Divia and Will and I talked to him for a couple of hours and he had tremendously useful practical advice, like "Telling people to greet first-time newcomers and be nice to them is the difference between a 50% retention rate and a 90% retention rate."
I was kind of surprised that, when I was a Fellow, Anna told me "maybe you should go make friends with this person" exactly twice. Because if it turned out to be a bad idea, or if I turned out to be an unsuitable person to perform this sort of task, she should have done it only once (or foreseen this unsuitability and never done it at all). But it seemed unlikely that there were only two people for whom this was a good idea.
Only 2 out of how many?
Out of everybody who showed up at a meetup. Out of everybody who corresponded with her and might be useful to keep within arm's reach even if they weren't suited for the Fellows program. Out of... a lot of people.
What led to this mutli-hour talk? Had one of you known him before, or...?
Nope, he showed up at a Thursday LW meetup in Mountain View and he was like "Actually I just got back from a two-year stint organizing self-sustaining Mormon communities in India" and I was like "Awesome, got any advice for us?" and he was like "Yeah" and then it became clear the discussion was going to go on for a while and we decided to reconvene Tuesday so we could talk in detail.