The "confidence interval" line should have a percentage ("What's your 95% confidence interval?").
"You make a compelling case for infanticide."
"Can you link me to that study?"
"I think I'm going to solve psychology." ("I think I'm going to solve metaethics." "I think I'm going to solve Friendliness.")
"My elephant wants a brownie."
"Is that your true rejection?"
"I wanna be an upload!"
"Does that beat Reedspacer's Lower Bound?"
"Let's not throw all our money at the Society for Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies."
"I have akrasia."
"I'm cryocrastinating."
"Do that and you'll wind up with the universe tiled in paperclips."
"So after we take over the world..."
"I want to optimize for fungibility here."
"This looks like a collective action problem."
"We can dissolve this question." ("That's a dissolved question.")
"My model of you likes this."
"Have you read Goedel, Escher, Bach?"
"What do the statistics say about cases in this reference class?"
"We need whiteboards."
"I'm trying paleo."
"I might write rationalist fanfiction of that."
"That's just an applause light." ("That's just a semantic stopsign." "That's just the teacher's password.")
"POLITICS IS THE MINDKILLER"
"If keeping my current job has higher expected utility than founding a startup, I wish to believe that keeping my current job has higher expected utility than founding a startup..."
"I think he's just being metacontrarian."
"Arguments are soldiers!"
"Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change."
"There are no ontologically basic mental entities!"
"I'm an aspiring rationalist."
"Fun Theory!"
"The map is not the territory."
"Let's beware evaporative cooling, here."
"It's a sunk cost! Abandon it!"
"ERROR: POSTULATION OF GROUP SELECTION DETECTED"
"If you measure it and reward the measurement going up, you'll get what you measure, not what you want."
"Azahoth!"
"Death is bad."
This is too much fuuuuuuuun
"She's just signaling virtue."
"Money is the unit of caring."
"One-box!"
"Beliefs should constrain anticipations."
"Existential risk..."
"I'll cooperate if and only if the other person will cooperate if and only if I cooperate."
"I'm going to update on that."
"Tsuyoku naritai!"
"My utility function includes a term for the fulfillment of your utility function."
"Yeah, it's objective, but it's subjectively objective."
"I am a thousand shards of desire."
"Whoa, there's an inferential gap here that one of us is failing to bridge."
"My coherent extrapolated volition says..."
"Humans aren't agents." ("I'm trying to be more agenty." "Humans don't really have goals.")
"Wait, wait, this is turning into an argument about definitions."
"Look, just rejecting religion and astrology doesn't make someone rational."
"No, no, you shouldn't implement Really Extreme Altruism. Unless the alternative is doing it without, anyway..."
"I'll be the Gatekeeper, you be the AI."
"That's Near, this is Far."
"Don't fall into bottom-line thinking like that."
I think I'm done. If I think of any more I'll add them to this comment instead of making a new one.
"How do you operationalize that?"
"'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white."
"If I may generalize from one example here..."
"I'm suffering from halo effect."
"Warning: Dark Arts."
"Okay, but in the Least Convenient Possible World..."
"We want to raise the sanity waterline."
"You've fallen prey to the illusion of transparency."
"Bought some warm fuzzies today."
"What does the outside view say?"
"So the idea is that we make all scientific knowledge a sacred and closely guarded secret, so it will be treated with the reverence it deserves!"
"How could you test that belief?"
RATIONALISTS SAY ALL THE THINGS!
Solomonoff prior gives you 50%, that's pretty cool! :D
I hope someone will use Alicorn's (and other) quotes to make a good Eliza-bot. This could be an interesting AI challenge -- write a bot that will get positive karma on LW! If there are more bots, the bot with highest nonzero karma wins.
As a start, I copied all Alicorn's lines into a Markov text synthesizer . Some of the best results were:
"Whoa, there's an improvement, but it's subjectively objective."
"Okay, but every change is turning into bottom-line thinking like a collective action problem."
"If keeping my current job has higher expected utility than founding a brownie."
"I think he's just the unit of you shouldn't implement Really Extreme Altruism. Unless the teacher's password."
"If I wish to optimize for Rare Diseases in paperclips."
"My elephant wants a term for infanticide."
I burst out laughing while reading this, so of course my officemates wanted to know what was so funny.
I cannot remember the last time the gulf of inferential distances was so very very wide.
Here's a few, courtesy of applying JWZ's dadadodo to all the lines in the thread so far:
What does the best textbook on corrupted hardware. Dark Arts; Escher, Bach?
How could you credibly pre commit to see you as a compartmentalized belief?
I'm trying to be a cult.
Have super powers.
You've fallen prey to be condescending.
My current job has higher expected utility than you imagine; but in the sanity waterline.
Everyone is Far.
No idea is reliable? Have a lot of caring.
Conceptspace is the future.
Mysteriousness is a cult.
I'm going to be with the AI. I know the universe future.
Look, just generalize from the territory.
Everyone is bigger than you in Cute Puppies.
Emacs' M-x dissociated-press yields babble, but with some interesting words in it: "knowledgeneralize", "metacontrammer", "contrationalist", "choosequences", "the universal priory", "statististimate", "fanfused", "condescendista", "frobability", "dissolomonoff", "optimprovement", "estimagine", "cooperaterline", "pattern matchology". The only sensible sentence it's come up with is "I'm running on condescending".
No idea is reliable? Have a lot of caring.
I visualized that being said simultaneously with the middle-finger gesture.
From another generator:
"I'm going to solve metaethics." "I'm going, you're going to found the Society for infanticide."
""Snow is white" is failing to solve psychology."
"Wait, wait, "this is white" is a more technical explanation?"
"My utility function includes a semantic stopsign."
"If keeping my current job has little XML tags on it that say the Least Convenient Possible World...""
"Sure, I'd take over the sanity waterline."
"I'll be the symbol with ice cream trees."
"So after we take over the alternative universe that is the Least Convenient Possible World..."
"I want to tile the sanity waterline with the unit of a thing."
Not totally IT, but I tried it on Eliezer's "The 5-Second Level". Highlits include:
I won't socially kill you
Hope to reflect on consequentialist grounds
Say, what a vanilla ice cream, and not-indignation, and from green?
Associate to persuade anyone of how you were making the dreadful personal habit displays itself in a concrete example.
Rather you can't bear the 5-second level?
To develop methods of teaching rationality skills, you need more practice to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to have our feet on the other person.
Be sufficiently averse to the fire department and see if that suggests anything.
I hope someone will use Alicorn's (and other) quotes to make a good Eliza-bot.
Surely you mean Eliezer-bot.
Should it be made, it will of course be known as Elieza.
But in any case I think you need to keep in mind that a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory.
Imagining this in my head has sold me on this being a good idea. Or at least a mildly amusing idea that will have relatively minor negative externalities. (I'm reminded of Eliezer Facts)
"You should read the Sequences."
"It's not like Gandhi has little XML tags on that say 'moral' "
"It's not like natural selection put little XML tags there that say 'purpose'."
"Sure, I'd take a pill that made me bisexual."
"There's this really great fanfiction you should read."
"Oh man I wanna tile the universe with ice cream trees."
"I don't want to tile the universe with bananas and palm trees."
[Sequence that will be incredibly funny in context but is a terrible idea please for goodness' sake (literally) nobody film it]
"No, we're not a cult."
"We're not a cult or anything."
"It's not like organizations have little XML tags that say 'cult' and 'not cult'"
"Any organization with a good cause can have cult attractors"
"Look I'd explain it but there's a lot of inferential distance and I don't want to be condescending."
"We are not a cult. We are not a cult."
"You have no idea how BIG mindspace is."
"You have no idea how BIG optimization process space is."
"You have no idea how BIG thingspace is."
"Did you just generalize from fictional evidence?"
"You're a one-boxer, right?" (Said with no context.)
"You'd choose specks, right?" (Said with no context.)
"Mysteriousness is not a property of a thing."
"You're running on corrupted hardware."
"Replace the symbol with the substance."
"Could you regenerate that knowledge?"
"Consider a group you feel prejudiced against, frequentists for example."
"But what's the best textbook on that subject?"
"Is that a compartmentalized belief?
"I notice I am confused."
"Of course I have super-powers. Everyone does."
"Beliefs are properly probabilistic."
"Is that your confidence level inside or outside the argument?"
"Did you credibly pre-commit to that rule?"
"That's just what it feels like from the inside."
"Conceptspace is bigger than you imagine."
"No you don't believe you believe that."
"No, money is the unit of caring."
"If that doesn't work out for you, you can still make six figures as a programmer."
"Purpose is not an inherent property."
"You think intr...
"Yeah, I read all the papers cited in lukeprog's latest article."
A bunch of links almost no one clicks. It's like the Anti-TVTropes.
"We played reference class tennis."
"Those are just more available to you, not actually more likely."
"Are you more an aspiring rationalist, 'aspiring rationalist,' 'aspiring' rationalist, or aspiring 'rationalist'?"
"The invisible is implied here."
"Is that a disjunctive or conjunctive event?"
"It seemed hard until I hacked away at the edges."
"You didn't time yourself thinking about it before proposing solutions?"
"I have something to protect."
"Someone should type a transcript of that."
"I don't know if that's still an open problem, I've been following the HPMOR thread instead of that one." (Said to a Philosophy professor about a philosophical problem.)
"Is there a more technical explanation?
"Argument screens off authority."
"Go ahead and try to 'other optimize' me."
"That's one of my ugh fields."
"That's not a property, it's a dangling variable."
"ADBOC."
Shit and Bullshit Rationalists Don't Say:
"Gwern hasn't summarized any research on that."
"Did Yvain even edit that before posting?"
"What are his/her credentials?&qu...
If a "Shit Rationalists Say" thread would result in net positive utility, I want to believe that a "Shit Rationalists Say" thread would result in net positive utility.
If a "Shit Rationalists Say" thread would not result in net positive utility, I want to believe that a "Shit Rationalists Say" thread would not result in net positive utility.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
"Suppose we were all playing Prisoner's Dilemma with clones of ourselves..."
I heard this said at the Ohio meetup on Sunday; Yvain commented that, of all the meetups he'd been to, ours took the longest to reach that point.
I've thought a "shit your brain says" might be a good way of compactly presenting some cognitive biases.
"Foo is not about bar."
"What odds are you offering on that?"
"Taboo 'monkey'."
"If you're not getting bad result, you're spending too many resources on avoiding it."
"Rationalists should win."
"Sorry, I'm running on corrupted hardware."
I got into an argument recently over whether that episode was good or terrible. (I believe it is a good episode, specifically because of the broader context of the show. Fellow rationalist in question watched that episode FIRST, with no context, which is just about the worst place to do so)
Regardless, I have a heuristic about how much I am allowed to argue about My Little Pony before I should feel bad about myself, and... I felt a little bad that day.
(That day was today).
I did really hate the whole "Sometimes you just have to believe!" message. It felt almost like someone had thought MLP was becoming TOO rational and wanted to throw a bone to the Believer parents. :/
One huge category of utterances remains unrepresented:
"Ooh, is there a new Methods of Rationality chapter up yet?"
"I can't believe there's no new chapter yet."
"Have you read Methods of Rationality? You have to read it, OMG."
Your response just prompted me to check. I wonder if this is how the pigeons in Skinner's Box felt.
Took every quote posted in this thread so far and Markov-ised it. (Depth of 1, i.e., each word only depends on the word before it. A depth of 2 basically regurgitates the input in this case.)
Here are some of the results:
"How do you regenerate that beat Reedspacer's Lower Bound?"
"It's a more karma. I interpreted your map, not a group you feel prejudiced against, frequentists for infanticide."
"Look, just generalize from halo effect."
"Okay, but in this is rational under them to make six figures as a cult."
"Beliefs are just an inferential distance and my belief is the territory."
"That's just a survey should do you measure, not throw all the scientific knowledge a dissolved question."
"Any organization with the teacher's password."
"That's just rejecting religion and closely guarded secret, so it but there's no idea how BIG thingspace is."
"Foo is the karma system more likely."
"You make six figures as a thousand shards of inferential distance and I cooperate."
"Conceptspace is white."
"Go ahead and only if and it's objective, but I think he's just what the Nazis did!"
"...
"How do you know that?"
"Have I interpreted your position correctly?"
"That's uncomputable."
"That AI would destroy the world."
"That's a fact about your map, not about the territory."
"That's a duplicate quote."
"What does this have to with rationality?"
"That word doesn't carve reality at its joints."
"I want to do an AI Box experiment."
"Apply the reversal test! You're suggesting we kill all the old people."
"I wish I could self-modify to . . ."
"I'd say something politically incorrect about race, but it would start a flame war."
"I'd say something politically incorrect about gender, but it would start a flame war."
"I'd say something politically incorrect about my ability to say politically incorrect things, but it would start a flame war."
"Karma is being used to suppress dissent."
"Your position is incoherent unless you're a vegetarian."
"Rationality isn't that great."
"We should do a survey on this."
"That survey should have been bigger. We should do another survey."
"Way too much of the scientific lit...
The thread should really be called "Shit LWers Say."
We're not the only group of people calling ourselves "Rationalists", nor are we the most well-known of these groups (not by a long shot).
I'm guilty of all of these:
"Cached thought!"
"That's a wrong question."
"Have you read the Sequences?"
"According to Solomonoff Induction/the universal prior..."
"Stop prepending "rational" to post titles!"
"I know the forbidden idea, and it's not that bad."
"That's just a status/signalling game."
"There's a signalling hypothesis by Robin Hanson..."
"TDT/UDT says..."
Rationalist PUA:
"What's you number? [...] No not that. Your Erdos number."
Rationalist insults:
"...Frequentist."
While twirling a paperclip: "I do not love you, nor do I hate you." (well, more of a threat.)
"I bet (73%) that you're a really consistent person. The sort of person whose decisions are final. Like say, in Monty Hall."
"Name three.."
While twirling a paperclip: "I do not love you, nor do I hate you."
More of a threat, surely?
Some line in the video (maybe the "corrupted hardware" one) should be said by someone with a desk full of piles of papers (connoting unfinished, urgent work) on topics like FAI, and a computer screen with open windows on TvTropes, Fanfiction.net, and a LW post on akraisa.
I think I like this conceptually (I would get warm fuzzies if done right), except I'm trying to detach (in my own mind as well as others), the word "rationalist" from "the Less Wrong memeplex." Which is probably a pipe dream, and such a video would not contribute (much) to the issue one way or another, and "Shit Less Wrong folks say" doesn't have the same ring to it.
"You're going to [insert life plan here]? Why don't you just go work on Wall Street and donate your money to AMF?"
"This, modulo that."
"It's not obvious that..."
"...is the obvious low-hanging fruit."
"HPJEV is my fantasy jerkass boyfriend."
"Eat this rock salt."
"Eat this potassium salt."
"Have you played Mage: The Ascention?"
"Can you be a CEV machine and order food for me?"
"Scumbag aliefs!"
"Scumbag subconscious!"
"Scumbag physics!"
"I want to want to do that."
Wow, most of that looks really weird, and putting it all together like that seems to associate 'rationalist' with 'weird object-level beliefs'.
From RationalWiki:
...How to spot a LessWrongian in your sceptical discussion
In the outside world, the ugly manifests itself as LessWrong acolytes, minds freshly blown, metastasising to other sites, bringing the Good News for Modern Rationalists, without clearing their local jargon cache. Sceptical discussion spaces will often have people show up labelling themselves "rationalist" and being as irritating as teenage nerds who've just discovered Ayn Rand. Take one drink for each of:
"As rationalists, we should ..."
"As a rationalist, you
"Stop dissecting my hypothetical..."
"Do you operate under Crockers rules?"
"That is a question about quality of life, not about death badness!"
"It's not obvious that..."
"...is the obvious low-hanging fruit."
"HPJEV is my fantasy jerkass boyfriend."
"This, modulo that."
[EDIT: Not actually Michael Vassar.]
I assume everyone has run across at least one of the "Shit X's Say" format of videos? Such as Shit Skeptics Say. When done right it totally triggers the in-group warm-fuzzies. (Not to be confused with the nearly-identically formatted "Shit X's Say to Y's" which is mainly a way for Y's to complain about X's).
What sort of things do Rationalists often say that triggers this sort of in-group recognition which could be popped into a short video? A few I can think of...
You should sign up for cryonics. I want to see you in the future.
…intelligence explosion…
What’s your confidence interval?
You know what they say: one man’s Modus Ponens is another man’s Modus Tollens
This may sound a bit crazy right now, but hear me out…
What are your priors?
When the singularity comes that won’t be a problem anymore.
I like to think I’d do that, but I don’t fully trust myself. I am running on corrupted hardware after all.
I want to be with you, and I don’t foresee that changing in the near future.
…Bayesian statistics…
So Omega appears in front of you…
What would you say the probability of that event is, if your beliefs are true?
Others?