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AspiringKnitter comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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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.
By the time reflective and wannabe-moral people are done tying themselves up in knots, what they usually communicate is nothing; or, if they do communicate, you can hardly tell them apart from the people who truly can't.
Point of curiosity: if you took the point above and rewrote it the way you think AspiringKnitter would say it, how would you say it?
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.
I just got H.P. Lovecraft, Dan Brown, and Edgar Allan Poe for three different comments. I am somewhat curious as to whether this page clusters better than random assignment.
ETA: @#%#! I just got Dan Brown again, this time for the last post I wrote. This site is insulting me!
Apparently I write like Stephenie Meyer. And you feel insulted?
Looks like you are right. Two of my (larger, to give the algorithm more to work with) texts from other sources gave Cory Doctorow (technical piece) and again Lovecraft (a Hacker News comment about drug dogs?)
Sorry, and thanks for the correction.
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.