Thank you. I will try to do more of that.
:) You can be as direct as you want to with me. (Normal smilie to prevent the tiny sad moments.)
Interesting. Religious people seem a lot less scary to me than this. My impression is that the teeth have been taken out of traditional christianity. There are a few christian terrorists left in north america, but they seem like holdouts raging bitterly against the death of their religion. They are still in the majority in some places, though, and can persecute people there.
Okay, good point. I agree that religion is losing ground. However, I've witnessed some pretty creepy stuff coming out of the churches. Some of them are saying the end is near and doing things like having events to educate about it. Now, that experience was one that I had in a particular location which happens to be very religious. I'm not sure that it was representative of what the churches are up to in general. I admit ignorance when it comes to what average churches are doing. But if there's enough end-times kindling being thrown into the pit here, people who were previously losing faith may flare up into zealous Christians with the right spark. Trying to build what might be interpreted as an Antichrist would be quite the spark. The imminent arrival of an Antichrist may be seen as a fulfillment of the end times prophecies and be seen as a sign that the Christian religion really is true after all.
A lot is at stake here in the mind of the Christian. If it's not the end of the world, opposing a machine "God" is still going to look like a good idea - it's dangerous. If it is the end of the world, they'd better get their s--- in gear and become all super-religious and go to battle against Satan because judgment day is coming and if they don't, they're going to be condemned. Being grateful to God and following a bunch of rules is pretty hard, especially when you can't actually SEE the God in question. How people are responding to the mundane religious stuff shouldn't be seen as a sign of how they'll react when something exceptional happens.
Being terrified out of your mind that someone is building a super-intelligent mind is easy. This takes no effort at all. Heck, at least half of LessWrong would probably be terrified in this case. Being extra terrified because of end times prophecies doesn't take any thought or effort. And fear will kill their minds, perhaps making religious feelings more likely. That, to me, seems to be a likely possibility in the event that someone attempts to build a machine "God". You're seeing a decline in religion and appear to be thinking that it's going to continue decreasing. I see a decline in religion and I think it may decrease but also see the potential for the right kinds of things to trigger a conflagration of religious fervor.
There are other memes that add an interesting twist: The bible told them that a lot of people would lose faith before the Antichrist comes. Their own lack of faith might be taken as evidence that the bible is correct.
And I have to wonder how Christianity survived things like the plagues that wiped out half of Europe. They must have been pretty disenchanted with God - unless they interpreted it as the end of the world and became too terrified of eternal condemnation to question why God would allow such horrible things to happen.
Perhaps one of the ways the Christianity meme defends itself is to flood the minds of the religious with fear at the exact moments in history when they would have the most reason to question their faith.
Last year's Gallup poll says that 78% of Americans are Christan. Even if they've lost some steam, if the majority still uses that word to self-identify, we should really acknowledge the possibility that some event could trigger zealous reactions.
I have been told that before Hitler came to power, the intelligentsia of Germany was laughing at him thinking it would never happen. It's a common flaw of nerds to underestimate the violence and irrationality that the average person is capable of. I think this is because we use ourselves as a model and think they'll behave, feel and think a lot more like we do than they actually will. I try to compensate for this bias as much as possible.
Various people raised concerns that growth might ruin the culture after reading my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread. There has been some discussion about whether endless September, a phenomenon that kills online discussion groups, is a significant threat to LessWrong and what can be done. I really care about it, so I volunteered to code a solution myself for free if needed. Luke invited debate on the subject (the debate is here) and will be sent the results of this poll and asked to make a decision. It was suggested by him in an email that I wait a little while and then post my poll (meta threads are apparently annoying to some, so we let people cool off). Here it is, preceded by a Cliff's notes summary of the concerns.
Why this is worth your consideration:
- Yvain and I checked the IQ figures in the survey against other data this time, and the good news is that it's more believable that the average LessWronger is gifted. The bad news is that LessWrong's IQ average has decreased on each survey. It can be argued that it's not decreasing by a lot or we don't have enough data, but if the data is good, LessWrong's average has lost 52% of it's giftedness since March of 2009.
- Eliezer documented the arrival of poseurs (people who superficially copycat cultural behaviors - they are reported to over-run subcultures) which he termed "Undiscriminating Skeptics".
- Efforts to grow LessWrong could trigger an overwhelming deluge of newbies.
- LessWrong registrations have been increasing fast and it's possible that growth could outstrip acculturation capacity. (Chart here)
- The Singularity Summit appears to cause a deluge of new users that may have similar effect to the September deluges of college freshman that endless September is named after. (This chart shows a spike correlated with the 2011 summit where 921 users joined that month, which is roughly equal to the total number of active users LW tends to have in a month if you go by the surveys or Vladmir's wget.)
- A Slashdot effect could result in a tsunami of new users if a publication with lots of readers like the Wall Street Journal (they used LessWrong data in this article) decides to write an article on LessWrong.
- The sequences contain a lot of the culture and are long meaning that "TLDR" may make LessWrong vulnerable to cultural disintegration. (New users may not know how detailed LW culture is or that the sequences contain so much culture. I didn't.)
- Eliezer said in August that the site was "seriously going to hell" due to trolls.
- A lot of people raised concerns.
Two Theories on How Online Cultures Die:
Overwhelming user influx.
There are too many new users to be acculturated by older members, so they form their own, larger new culture and dominate the group.
Trending toward the mean.
A group forms because people who are very different want a place to be different together. The group attracts more people that are closer to mainstream than people who are equally different because there are more mainstream people than different people. The larger group attracts people who are even less different in the original group's way for similar reasons. The original group is slowly overwhelmed by people who will never understand because they are too different.
Poll Link:
Endless September Poll.
Request for Feedback:
In addition to constructive criticism, I'd also like the following:
Your observations of a decline or increase in quality, culture or enjoyment at LessWrong, if any.
Ideas to protect the culture.
Ideas for tracking cultural erosion.