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Mitchell_Porter comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Hello. I expect you won't like me because I'm Christian and female and don't want to be turned into an immortal computer-brain-thing that acts more like Eliezer thinks it should. I've been lurking for a long time. The first time I found this place I followed a link to OvercomingBias from AnneC's blog and from there, without quite realizing it, found myself archive-binging and following another link here. But then I stopped and left and then later I got linked to the Sequences from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A combination of the whole evaporative cooling thing and looking at an old post that wondered why there weren't more women convinced me to join. You guys are attracting a really narrow demographic and I was starting to wonder whether you were just going to turn into a cult and I should ignore you.
...And I figure I can still leave if that ends up happening, but if everyone followed the logic I just espoused, it'll raise the probability that you start worshiping the possibility of becoming immortal polyamorous whatever and taking over the world. I'd rather hang around and keep the Singularity from being an AI that forcibly exterminates all morality and all people who don't agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Not that any of you (especially EY) WANT that, exactly. But anyway, my point is, With Folded Hands is a pretty bad failure mode for the worst-case scenario where EC occurs and EY gets to AI first.
Okay, ready to be shouted down. I'll be counting the downvotes as they roll in, I guess. You guys really hate Christians, after all. (Am I actually allowed to be here or am I banned for my religion?) I'll probably just leave soon anyway. Nothing good can come of this. I don't know why I'm doing this. I shouldn't be here; you don't want me here, not to mention I probably shouldn't bother talking to people who only want me to hate God. Why am I even here again? Seriously, why am I not just lurking? That would make more sense.
I'll bet US$1000 that this is Will_Newsome.
Why did you frame it that way, rather than that AspiringKnitter wasn't a Christian, or was someone with a long history of trolling, or somesuch? It's much less likely to get a particular identity right than to establish that a poster is lying about who they are.
Well, Newsome was a Catholic for a while at least! (Or something like one).
Unfortunately, I don't have the spare money to take the other side of the bet, but Will showed a tendency to head off into foggy abstractions which I haven't seen in Aspiring Knitter.
Will_Newsome does not seem, one would say, incompetent. I have never read a post by him in which he seemed to be unknowingly committing some faux pas. He should be perfectly capable of suppressing that particular aspect of his posting style.
That's remarkably confident. This doesn't really read like Newsome to me (and how would one find out with sufficient certainty to decide a bet for that much?).
Just how confident is it? It's a large figure and colloquially people tend to confuse size of bet with degree of confidence - saying a bigger number is more of a dramatic social move. But ultimately to make a bet at even odds all Mitchell needs is to be confident that if someone takes him up on the bet then he has 50% or more chance of being correct. The size of the bet only matters indirectly as an incentive for others to do more research before betting.
Mitchell's actual confidence is some unspecified figure between 0.5 and 1 and is heavily influenced by how overconfident he expects others to be.
This would only be true if money had linear utility value [1]. I, for example, would not take a $1000 bet at even odds even if I had 75% confidence of winning, because with my present financial status I just can't afford to lose $1000. But I would take such a bet of $100.
The utility of winning $1000 is not the negative of the utility of losing $1000.
[1] or, to be precise, if it were approximately linear in the range of current net assets +/- $1000
From what I have inferred about Michael's financial status the approximation seemed safe enough.
Fair enough in this case, but it's important to avoid assuming that the approximation is universally applicable.
Risk aversion and other considerations like gambler's ruin usually mean that people insist on substantial edges over just >50%. This can be ameliorated by wealth, but as far as I know, Porter is at best middle-class and not, say, a millionaire.
So your points are true and irrelevant.
We obviously use the term 'irrelevant' to mean different things.
In a case with extremely asymmetric information like this one they actually are almost the same thing, since the only payoff you can reasonably expect is the rhetorical effect of offering the bet. Offering bets the other party can refuse and the other party has effectively perfect information about can only lose money (if money is the only thing the other party cares about and they act at least vaguely rationally).
I have no idea who this Newsome character is, but I bet US$1 that there's no easy way to implement the answer to the question,
without invading someone's privacy, so I'm not going to play.
Agree on a trusted third party (gwern, Alicorn, NancyLebowitz ... high-karma longtimers who showed up in this thread), and have AK call them on the phone, confirming details, then have the third party confirm that it's not Will_Newsome.
... though the main problem would be, do people agree to bet before or after AK agrees to such a scheme?
How would gwern, Alicorn or NancyLebowitz confirm that anything I said by phone meant AspiringKnitter isn't Will Newsome? They could confirm that they talked to a person. How could they confirm that that person had made AspiringKnitter's posts? How could they determine that that person had not made Will Newsome's posts?
At the very least, they could dictate an arbitrary passage (or an MD5 hash) to this person who claims to be AK, and ask them to post this passage as a comment on this thread, coming from AK's account. This would not definitively prove that the person is AK, but it might serve as a strong piece of supporting evidence.
In addition, once the "AK" persona and the "WillNewsome" persona each post a sufficiently large corpus of text, we could run some textual analysis algorithms on it to determine if their writing styles are similar; Markov Chains are surprisingly good at this (considering how simple they are to implement).
The problem of determining a person's identity on the Internet, and doing so in a reasonably safe way, is an interesting challenge. But in practice, I don't really think it matters that much, in this case. I care about what the "AK" persona writes, not about who they are pretending not to be.
How about doing this already, with all the stuff they've written before the original bet?
I know Will Newsome in real life. If a means of arbitrating this bet is invented, I will identify AspiringKnitter as being him or not by visual or voice for a small cut of the stakes. (If it doesn't involve using Skype, telephone, or an equivalent, and it's not dreadfully inconvenient, I'll do it for free.)
A sidetrack: People seem to be conflating AspiringKnitter's identity as a Christian and a woman. Female is an important part of not being Will Newsome, but suppose that AspiringKnitter were a male Christian and not Will Newsome. Would that make a difference to any part of this discussion?
More identity issues: My name is Nancy Lebovitz with a v, not a w.
Sorry 'bout the spelling of your name, I wonder if I didn't make the same mistake before ...
Well, the biggest thing AK being a male non-Will Christian would change, is that he would lose an easy way to prove to a third party that he's not Will Newsome and thus win a thousand bucks (though the important part is not exactly being female, it's having a recognizably female voice on the phone, which is still pretty highly correlated).
Rationalist lesson that I've derived from the frequency that people get my name wrong: It's typical for people to get it wrong even if I say it more than once, spell it for them, and show it to them in writing. I'm flattered if any of my friends start getting it right in less than a year.
Correct spelling and pronunciation of my name is a simple, well-defined, objective matter, and I'm in there advocating for it, though I cut people slack if they're emotionally stressed.
This situation suggests that a tremendous amount of what seems like accurate perception is actually sloppy filling in of blanks. Less Wrong has a lot about cognitive biases, but not so much about perceptual biases.
This is a feature, not a bug. Natural language has lots of redundancy, and if we read one letter at a time rather than in word-sized chunks we would read much more slowly.
I think you have causality reversed here. It's the redundancy of our languages that's the "feature" -- or, more precisely, the workaround for the previously existing hardware limitation. If our perceptual systems did less "filling in of blanks," it seems likely that our languages would be less redundant -- at least in certain ways.
And what do I have to do to win your bet, given that I'm not him (and hadn't even heard of him before)? After all, even if you saw me in person, you could claim I was paid off by this guy to pretend to be AspiringKnitter. Or shall I just raise my right hand?
I don't see why this guy wouldn't offer such a bet, knowing he can always claim I'm lying if I try to provide proof. No downside, so it doesn't matter how unlikely it is, he could accuse any given person of sockpuppeting. The expected return can't be negative. That said, the odds here being worse than one in a million, I don't know why he went to all that trouble for an expected return of less than a cent. There being no way I can prove who I am, I don't know why I went to all the trouble of saying this, either, though, so maybe we're all just a little irrational.
Let's first confirm that you're willing to pay up, if you are who I say you are. I will certainly pay up if I'm wrong...
That's problematic since if I were Newsome, I wouldn't agree. Hence, if AspiringKnitter is Will_Newsome, then AspiringKnitter won't even agree to pay up.
Not actually being Will_Newsome, I'm having trouble considering what I would do in the case where I turned out to be him. But if I took your bet, I'd agree to it. I can't see how such a bet could possibly get me anything, though, since I can't see how I'd prove that I'm not him even though I'm really not him.
All right, how about this. If I presented evidence already in the public domain which made it extremely obvious that you are Will Newsome, would you pay up?
By the way, when I announced my belief about who you are, I didn't have personal profit in mind. I was just expressing confidence in my reasoning.
There is no such evidence. What do you have in mind that would prove that?
You write stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences which exhibit abnormal disclosure of self while still actually making sense (if one can be bothered parsing them). Not only do you share this trait with Will, the themes and the phrasing are the same. You have a deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought, yet you also advocate Christian metaphysics and monogamy. Again, that's Will.
That's not yet "extremely obvious", but it should certainly raise suspicions. I expect that a very strong case could be made by detailed textual comparison.
AspiringKnitter's arguments for Christianity are quite different from Will's, though.
(Also, at the risk of sounding harsh towards Will, she's been considerably more coherent.)
I think if Will knew how to write this non-abstractly, he would have a valuable skill he does not presently possess, and he would use that skill more often.
Wow, is that all of your information? You either have a lot of money to blow, or you're holding back.
“Deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought” can be explained by her having lurked a lot, and the rest of those features are not rare IME (even though they are under-represented on LW).
I put some text from recent comments by both AspiringKnitter and Will_Newsome into I write like; it suggested that AspiringKnitter writes "like" Arthur Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey and other books) while Will_Newsome writes "like" Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books). I've never read either, but it does look like a convenient textual comparison doesn't trivially point to them being the same.
Also, if AspiringKnitter is a sockpuppet, it's at least an interesting one.
When I put your first paragraph in that confabulator, it says "Vladimir Nabokov". If I remove the words "Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books)" from the paragraph, it says "H.P. Lovecraft". It doesn't seem to cut possible texts into clusters well enough.
Can you provide examples?
He can look like a moron or jerk, though, and there is even less risk for you in accepting it: he can necessarily only demand the $1000 from Will_Newsome.
I said
I think it's time to close out this somewhat underspecified offer of a bet. So far, AspiringKnitter and Eliezer expressed interest but only if a method of resolving the bet could be determined, Alicorn offered to play a role in resolving the bet in return for a share of the winnings, and dlthomas offered up $15.
I will leave the possibility of joining the bet open for another 24 hours, starting from the moment this comment is posted. I won't look at the site during that time. Then I'll return, see who (if anyone) still wants a piece of the action, and will also attempt to resolve any remaining conflicts about who gets to participate and on what terms. You are allowed to say "I want to join the bet, but this is conditional upon resolving such-and-such issue of procedure, arbitration, etc." Those details can be sorted out later. This is just the last chance to shortlist yourself as a potential bettor.
I'll be back in 24 hours.
And the winners are... dlthomas, who gets $15, and ITakeBets, who gets $100, for being bold enough to bet unconditionally. I accept their bets, I formally concede them, aaaand we're done.
You know I followed your talk about betting but never once considered that I could win money for realz if I took you up on it. The difficulty of proving such things made the subject seem just abstract. Oops.
And thus concludes the funniest thread on LessWrong in a very long time. Thanks, folks.
Thank you.
What did they win money for?
Betting money. That is how such things work.
You're such a dick. Haha. Upvoted.
You not being Will_Newsome. (I can't imagine how bizarre it must be to be watching this conversation from your perspective.)
Wait, but what changed that caused Mitchell_Porter to realize that?
I didn't exactly realize it, but I reduced the probability. My goal was never to make a bet, my goal was to sockblock Will. But in the end I found his protestations somewhat convincing; he actually sounded for a moment like someone earnestly defending himself, rather than like a joker. And I wasn't in the mood to re-run my comparison between the Gospel of Will and the Knitter's Apocryphon. So I tried to retire the bet in a fair way, since having an ostentatious unsubstantiated accusation of sockpuppetry in the air is almost as corrosive to community trust as it is to be beset by the real thing. (ETA: I posted this before I saw Kevin's comment, by the way!)
"Next time just don't be a dick and you won't lose a hundred bucks," says the unreflective part of my brain whose connotations I don't necessarily endorse but who I think does have a legitimate point.
I think he just gave up and didn't want to be the guy sowing seeds of discontent with no evidence. That kind of thing is bad for communities.
No idea. Don't have to show your cards if you fold...
Mitchell asked Will directly at http://lesswrong.com/lw/b9/welcome_to_less_wrong/5jby so perhaps he just trusts Will not to lie when using the Will_Newsome account.
I'll stake $500 if eligible.
When would the answer need to be known by?
I am interested.
Edit: Putting up $100, regardless of anyone else's participation, and I'm prepared to demonstrate that I'm not Will_Newsome if that is somehow necessary.
I'll stake $100 against you, if and only if Eliezer also participates.
(Replying rather than editing, to make sure that my comment displays as un-edited.)
I should also stipulate that I am not, nor have I ever been, Will Newsome.
It's not impossible that I was once Will Newsome, I suppose, nor even that I currently am. But if so, I'm unaware of the fact.
I am a known magus, so even an Imperius curse is not out of the question.
Turns out LW is a Chesterton-esque farce in which all posters are secretly Wills trolling Wills.
Then I'm really wasting time here.
Yes, I all are!
Or you've been neglecting to treat your Spontaneous Duplication.
I'll bet US$10 you have significant outside information.
He doesn't.
See, I'd like to believe you, but a thousand dollars is a lot of money.
Take him up on his bet, then.
(Not that I have any intention of showing up anywhere just to show you who I am and am not. Unless you're going to pay ME that $1000.)
What about if I bet you $500 that you're not WillNewsome? That way you can prove your separate existence to me, get paid, and I can use the proof you give me to take a thousand from MitchellPorter. In fact, I'll go as high as 700 dollars if you agree to prove yourself to me and MitchellPorter.
Of course, this offer is isomorphic to you taking Mitchell's bet and sending 300-500 dollars to me for no reason, and you're not taking his bet currently, so I don't expect you to be convinced by this offering either.
What possible proof could I offer you? I can't take you up on the bet because, while I'm not Newsome, I can't think of anything I could do that he couldn't fake if this were a sockpuppet account. If we met in person, I could be the very same person as Newsome anyway; he could really secretly be a she. Or the person you meet could be paid by Newsome to pretend to be AspiringKnitter.
Well, I don't know what proof you could offer me; but if we genuinely put 500 dollars either way on the line, I am certain we'd rapidly agree on a standard of proof that satisfied us both.
Nope, plenty of people onsite have met Will. I mean, I suppose it is not strictly impossible, but I would be surprised if he were able to present that convincingly as a dude and then later present as convincingly as a girl. Bonus points if you have long hair.
Excellent question. One way to deal with it is for all the relevant agents to agree on a bet that's actually specified... that is, instead of betting that "AspiringKnitter is/isn't the same person as WillNewsome," bet that "two verifiably different people will present themselves to a trusted third party identifying as WillNewsome and AspiringKnitter" and agree on a mechanism of verifying their difference (e.g., Skype).
You're of course right that these are two different questions, and the latter doesn't prove the former, but if y'all agree to bet on the latter then the former becomes irrelevant. It would be silly of anyone to agree to the latter if their goal was to establish the former, but my guess is that isn't actually the goal of anyone involved.
Just in case this matters, I don't actually care. For all I know, you and shokwave are the same person; it really doesn't affect my life in any way. This is the Internet, if I'm not willing to take people's personas at face value, then I do best not to engage with them at all.
Yeah, you take the bet. Free money! Show up on Skype.
And get accused of being this person's sister impersonating his sockpuppet?
As far as we know.
That's really odd. If there were some way to settle the bet I'd take it.
For what it's worth, I thought Mitchell's hypothesis seemed crazy at first, then looked through user:AspiringKnitter's comment history and read a number of things that made me update substantially toward it. (Though I found nothing that made it "extremely obvious", and it's hard to weigh this sort of evidence against low priors.)
Out of curiosity, what's your estimate of the likelihood that you'd update substantially toward a similar hypothesis involving other LW users? ...involving other users who have identified as theists or partial theists?
It used to be possible - perhaps it still is? - to make donations to SIAI targeted towards particular proposed research projects. If you are interested in taking up this bet, we should do a side deal whereby, if I win, your $1000 would go to me via SIAI in support of some project that is of mutual interest.
Here is an experiment that could solve this.
If someone takes the bet and some of the proceeds go to trike, they might agree to check the logs and compare IPs (a matching IP or even a proxy as a detection avoidance attempt could be interpreted as AK=WN). Of course, AK would have to consent.
I can't believe I'm getting involved in this, but...
Will could know someone in AK's supposed location who is posting for him (from emails). Is Mitchell_Porter willing to donate $1000 to airfare for either AK or an impartial third party to converse with AK in person about similar-level subject matter? Even this wouldn't be airtight.
I'm still surprised that our collective ingenuity has yet to find a practical solution. I don't think anybody is trying very hard but it's still surprising how little our knowledge of cryptography and such is helping us.
Anyway yeah, I really don't think IPs provide much evidence. As wedrifid said if the IPs don't match it only means that at least I'm putting a minimal amount of effort into anonymity.
Why didn't you suggest asking Will_Newsome?
DIdn't think about it. He would have to consent, too. Fortunately, any interest in the issue seems to have waned.
Ask him what? To raise his right arm if he is telling the truth?
I missed where he explicitly made a claim about it one way or the other.
--A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. LeGuin
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouDidntAsk
If he is AK then he made an explicit claim about it. So either he is not AK or he is lying - a raise your right hand situation.
I simply had not considered the logical implications of AspiringKnitter making the claim that she is not WillNewsome, and had only noticed that no similar claim had appeared under the name of WillNewsome.
It would be interesting if one claimed to be them both and the other claimed to be separate people. If WillNewsome claimed to be both of them and AspiringKnitter did not, then we would know he was lying. So that is something possible to learn from asking WillNewsome explicitly. I hadn't considered this when I made my original comment, which was made without thinking deeply.
Um? Supposing I'd created both accounts, I could certainly claim as Will that both accounts were me, and claim as AK that they weren't, and in that case Will would be telling the truth.
Me too.
ETA: And I really mean no offense, but I'm sort of surprised that folk don't immediately see things like this... is it a skill maybe?
But if Will is AK, then Will claimed both that they were and were not the same person (using different screen names).
This was my initial interpretation as well, but on reflection I think lessdazed meant "ask him if it's okay if his IP is checked." Although that puts us in a strange situation in that he's then able to sabotage the credibility of another member through refusal, but if we don't require his permission we are perhaps violating his privacy...
Briefly, my impulse was "but how much privacy is lost in demonstrating A is (probably - proxies, etc) not a sock puppet of B"? If there's no other information leaked, I see no reason to protect against a result of "BAD/NOTBAD" on privacy grounds. However, that is not what we are asking - we're asking if two posters come from the same IP address. So really, we need to decide whether posters cohabiting should be able to keep that cohabitation private - which seems far more weighty a question.
I probably phrased it wrong. AK does not have to consent, but I would be surprised if the site admins would bother getting in the middle of this silly debate unless both parties ask for it and provide some incentive to do so.
Yes, it may be legal to check people's IP addresses, but that doesn't mean it's morally okay to do so without asking; and if one does check, it's best to do so privately (i.e. not publicize any identifying information, only the information "yup, it's the same IP as another user").
No, but it still is morally ok. In fact it is usually the use of multiple accounts that is frowned upon, morally questionable or an outright breach of ToS - not the identification thereof.
I don't think sock puppets are always frowned down upon - if Clippy and QuirinusQuirrel were sock puppets of regular users (I think Quirrell is, but not Clippy), they are "good faith" ones (as long as they don't double downvote etc.), and I expect "outing" them would be frowned upon.
If AK is a sock puppet, then yeah, it's something morally questionable the admins should deal with. But I wouldn't extend that to all sock puppets.
Quirrell overtly claims to be a sock puppet or something like one (it's kind of complicated), whereas Clippy has been consistent in its claim to be the online avatar of a paperclip-maximizing AI. That said, I think most people here believe (like good Bayesians) that Clippy is more likely to be a sockpuppet of an existing user.
Huh. Can you clarify what is morally questionable about another user posting pseudonymously under the AK account?
For example, suppose hypothetically that I was the user who'd created, and was posting as, AK, and suppose I don't consider myself to have violated any moral constraints in so doing. What am I missing?
Having multiple sock puppets can be a dishonest way to give the impression that certain views are held by more members than in reality. This isn't really a problem for novelty sockpuppets (Clippy and Quirrel), since those clearly indicate their status.
What's also iffy in this case is the possibility of AK lying about who she claims to be, and wasting everybody's time (which is likely to go hand-in-hand with AK being a sockpuppet of someone else).
If you are posting as AK and are actually female and Christian but would rather that fact not be known about your more famous "TheOtherDave" identity, then I don't have any objection (as long as you don't double vote, or show up twice in the same thread to support the same position, etc.).
OK, thanks for clarifying.
I can see where double-voting is a problem, both for official votes (e.g., karma-counts) and unofficial ones (e.g., discussions on controversial issues).
I can also see where people lying about their actual demographics, experiences, etc. can be problematic, though of course that's not limited to sockpuppetry. That is, I might actually be female and Christian, or seventeen and Muslim, or Canadian and Theosophist, or what-have-you, and still only have one account.
Hmm. I am generally a strong supporter of anonymity and pseudonymity. I think we just have to accept that multiple internet folks may come from the same meatspace body. You are right that sockpuppets made for rhetorical purposes are morally questionable, but that's mostly because rhetoric itself is morally questionable.
My preferred approach is to pretend that names, numbers, and reputations don't matter. Judge only the work, and not the name attached to it or how many comments claim to like it. Of course this is difficult, like the rest of rationality; we do tend to fail on these by default, but that part is our own problem.
Sockpuppetry and astroturfing is pretty clearly a problem, and being rational is not a complete defense. I'm going to have to think about this problem more, and maybe make a post.
Clippy is too.
Weren't you just telling me that it is morally wrong for the admins to even look at the IP addresses?
When it comes to well behaved sockpuppetts "Don't ask, don't tell" seems to work.
Wow. Now that you mention it, perhaps someone should ask AspiringKnitter what she thinks of dubstep...
Holy crap. I've never had a comment downvoted this fast, and I thought this was a pretty funny joke to boot. My mental estimate was that the original comment would end up resting at around +4 or +5. Where did I err?
I left it alone because I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Dubstep? Will likes, dislikes and/or does something involving dubstep? (Google tells me it is a kind of dance music.)
Explanation: Will once (in)famously claimed that watching certain dubstep videos would bolster some of your math intuitions.
(Er, well, math intuitions in a few specific fields, and only one or two rather specific dubstep videos. I'm not, ya know, actually crazy. The important thing is that that video is, as the kids would offensively say, "sicker than Hitler's kill/death ratio".) newayz I upvoted your original comment.
Do we count assists now?
And if so, who gets the credit for deaths by old age?
Post edited to reflect this, apologies for misrepresenting you.
I guess the subject is a bit touchy now.
You're clearly out of touch with the populace. :) I'm only willing to risk 10% of my probability mass on your prediction.
I'll take up to $15 of that, at even odds. Possibly more, if the odds can be skewed in my favor.
I have a general heuristic that making one on one bets is not worthwhile as a way to gain money, as the other party's willingness to bet indicates they don't expect to lose money to me. I would also be surprised if a bet of this size, between two members of a rationalist website, paid off to either side (though I guess paying off as a donation to SIAI would not be so surprising). At this point though, I am guessing the bet will not go through.
Was there supposed to be a time limit on that bet offer? It seems like as long as the offer is available you and everyone else will have an incentive not to show all the evidence as a fully-informed betting opponent is less profitable.