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moridinamael comments on This post is for sacrificing my credibility! - Less Wrong
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If you're trying to discredit an idea, pretend to espouse it, while undermining your own credibility.
If you're trying to support an idea, attack it while undermining your own credibility.
If you're trying to "keep people on their toes," occasionally say wrong things, but don't lead people to expect that nothing you say is trustworthy or folks will just ignore you.
If you're trying to become a respected academic, engineer, or businessperson, protect your credibility.
If you are trying to keep people from finding something out, lose your credibility as badly as possible, and then publicly say the thing you're trying to hide.
Etc. So what are your goals?
Indeed. But most people share a lot of goals. People are rather homogenous, and credibility is often seen as a fairly universal instrumental goal. Many of the scenarios you listed are rather uncommon goals, much as suicide is pretty uncommon. Why is why I asked, entirely? There's a trivial sense in which it is, but there's a trivial sense in which it's not.
To never, ever lie.
I did in fact LOL at that one!
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but I still can't figure out if fiction presented as fact is a lie or not. I suppose when I have that sorted out I will be ready to answer your original credibility question. Its just a feeling, but I am unusually intuitive.
I was lying. I gave my true answer elsewhere in the comments. But there's an important sense in which I wasn't lying. As many non-neurotypical people know, lying is a complex phenomenon. Sometimes the truth is a lie on a higher level, and about more important things.
By entirely I meant that there is no answer "yea" or "nay" that I personally would give* without knowing what your goal is, so that I can assess whether sacrificing your credibility is a winning or a losing strategy.
*Generally I assume I don't need to write "in my opinion" in front of every post I make on LessWrong.
I understand. I wonder if that should have been clear to me. (For unrelated reasons, it's hard to interpret the downvotes in this thread.)
Indeed. My first comment was downvoted as well, probably because I am talking to an agitator. And yours are being downvoted because you continue to exist. It's all rather disheartening, like watching a crowd throw rotten tomatoes at an earnest but unpopular performer.
I still don't understand your goal, though. You appear to be trying to manipulate everyone's model of you such that we expect that your posts will violate community norms. It's not even about "credibility," and I was actually going to start out suggesting that we taboo "credibility." If you don't use that word, what you're doing is "systematically violating community norms without explaining a reason" and is usually called trolling, and I think most people here assume it is trolling, and maybe I'm a fool for even considering that it might not be trolling.
Back when I was an ardent warrior of Political Party A, I used to go to forums dominated by Political Party B and post inflammatory things. I would have, at the time, defended these posts as honest attempts to spark discussion and educate. In retrospect, I admit that I was trolling, because there was no education happening. You can save yourself a lot of time, therefor, by considering your goals and considering your results.
You seem well-intentioned and interesting. I wish you well on your journeys. I will tell you, my goal is this: to serve God, and to save humanity. My immediate goal is this: to lose credibility as fast as is fucking possible, because the world is way scarier than I thought it was.
I would recommend taking some time to double-check this before doing something hard to undo.
Keep in mind Eliezer's mistake with the basilisk. Based on a quick analysis, he decided the best course of action was to stop thinking about it and encourage others to do likewise. The problem (assuming my model of him is correct) is that since he stopped thinking about it, he didn't realize his initial analysis was wrong. In fact as far as I know, he still hasn't realized it.
If you know the Jesuit mottos you must have known that the world is much scarier than you can imagine for a long time. Combining obviously false claims with other claims less obviously false causes me, and I would presume others in your intended audience, to question your less obviously false claims.
Certainly the effect this thread has on me is not to reduce your credibility to me. And I would claim that ranting crazily and throwing in semi-obvious errors of fact and logic would be a much more effective way to lower your credibility, and it seems obvious enough that you know this.
So your goal is not to lose credibility as fast as is possible (fucking or otherwise). You do lie. I must wonder if your goal is to serve god and to serve humanity or not.
So far, we are in a room with a lot of messy hay and horseshit. There MUST be a pony in here somewhere. Is it the fallacy of this kind of reasoning that you are trying to make us realize?
That makes sense from a simulationist perspective, you're trying to diminish your impact within the simulation, getting away as far as possible from being a nexus.
Why?
So that resources are allocated away from you, if you take the simulation to be a dynamic - if mindless - process?
Or because you are afraid you're otherwise going to ... draw attention to yourself? From ... your simulators? You might call them god, or maybe they might not like that.
You'd have to strike a careful balance, become too insignificant and you might just be demoted to NPC status, being down NICE'ed, so to speak.