Insert_Idionym_Here comments on Mandatory Secret Identities - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 April 2009 06:10PM

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Comment author: DaFranker 11 August 2012 11:42:07PM *  3 points [-]

Failure mode: My "something to protect" is to spread rationality throughout the world and to raise the sanity waterline, which is best achieved by having my own rationality dojo.

Beware the meta.

Comment author: Insert_Idionym_Here 12 August 2012 03:42:32AM 0 points [-]

I agree. I think that failure mode might then be better avoided by restricting possible "somethings", as opposed to adding another requirement on to one's reasons for wanting to be rational.

Comment author: DaFranker 12 August 2012 05:13:04PM 2 points [-]

Yes, but that's an exercise implicitly left to the reader. Formulating it this way is somewhat intuitively easier to understand, and if you've read the other sequences this should be simple enough to reduce to something that pretty much fits (restriction of "things to protect") in beliefspace.

Essentially, this article, the way I understand it, mostly points at an "empirical cluster in conceptspace" of possible failure modes, and proposes possible solutions to some of them, so that the reader can deduce and infer the empirical cluster of solutions to those failure modes.

The general rule could be put as "Make rationality your best means, but never let it become an end in any way." - though I suspect that I'm making a generalization that's a bit too simplistic here. I've been reading the sequences in jumbled order, and I'm particularly bad at reduction, which is one of the Sequences I haven't finished reading yet.