If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
I'm thinking about writing a more comprehensive guide than Skatche's Rationalist's Guide to Psychoactive Drugs.
And I'm a bit worried that this kind of post falls under the new censorship laws.
My analysis:
Do your posts look like solicitation to possess illegal drugs with intend to distribute? (Hint: for anything short of "Please tell me where to buy drugs," the answer is probably no).
Could a malicious prosecutor convince a grand jury to indict Eliezer (or others) as co-conspirators based on what you have written? (Hint: probably not).
In short, you are probably fine. But I am not a "power" on LW.
Just to be clear, I doubt this is Eliezer's thought process. But I suspect it is a fairly accurate heuristic for what is and isn't acceptable.
Just wanted to point out that many contributors to the site are afflicted by what I call "theoritis", a propensity to advance a theory despite being green amateurs in the subject matter, and then have the temerity to argue about it with the (clearly-non-stupid) experts in the field. The field in question can be psychology, neuroscience, physics, math, computer science, you name it.
It is rare that people consider a reverse situation first: what would I think of an amateur who argues with me in the area of my competence? For example, if you are an auto mechanic, would you take seriously someone who tells you how to diagnose and fix car issues without ever having done any repairs first? If not, why would you argue about quantum mechanics with a physicist, with a decision theorist about utility functions,or with a mathematician about first-order logic, unless that's your area of expertise? Of course, looking back it what I post about, I am no exception.
OK, I cannot bring myself to add philosophy to the list of "don't argue with the experts, learn from them" topics, but maybe it's because I don't know anything about philosophy.
Can someone who's familiar with Mencius Moldbug's writing briefly summarize his opinions? I've tried reading Unqualified Reservations but I find his writing long-winded. He also refers to a lot of background knowledge I just don't have, e.g. I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from him calling something Calvinist.
This is a tall order. Nearly everyone I talk to seems to while getting the same basic models emphasise wildly different things about them. Their updates on the matter also vary considerably everything from utterly changing their politics to just mentally noting that you can make smart arguments for positions very divergent from the modern political consensus. Lots of people dislike his verbose style.
That is certainly the reason I haven't read all of his material so far.
I think the best way to get a summary is to discuss him with people here who have been read him. They will likely learn things too. When its too political continue the discussion either in the politics thread or in private correspondence.
I'm interested and willing to engage in such discussion. If you are too I'd ask you to perhaps make a list of the posts you have read so far? For now I'm assuming you began with one of the recommended essays like Idealism Is Not Great, Divine-right monarchy for the modern secular intellectual, Formalist Manifsto. Perhaps the introductory Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives or the Gentle Introduction sequences.
To this I would add the comment history of fellow LWer Vladimir_M wh...
The few times I raised this question in the past, my comments were met with either indifference or hostility. I will try to raise it one more time in this open thread. If you think the question deserves a downvote, could you please, in addition to downvoting me, leave a brief comment explaining your rationale for doing so? I promise to upvote all comments providing such explanations.
So, here's the question: What is the reason for defining the class of beings whose volitions are to be coherently extrapolated as the class of present human beings? Why present and not also future (or past!)? Why human and not, say, mammals, males, or friends of Eliezer Yudkowsky?
Note that the question is not: Why should we value only present people? This way of framing the problem already assumes that "we" (i.e., present human beings) are the subjects whose preferences are to be accorded relevance in the process of coherent extrapolation, and that the interests of any other being (present or future, human or nonhuman) should matter only to the extent that "we" value them. What I am asking for, rather, is a justification of the assumption that only "our" preferences matter.
Luke lists "Why extrapolate the values of humans alone? What counts as a human? Do values converge if extrapolated?" as an open question in So You Want to Save the World.
Would the choice to extrapolate the values of humans alone be an unjustified act of speciesism, or is it justified because humans are special in some way — perhaps because humans are the only beings who can reason about their own preferences? And what counts as a human? The problem is more complicated than one might imagine (Bostrom 2006; Bostrom & Sandberg 2011). Moreover, do we need to scan the values of all humans, or only some? These problems are less important if values converge upon extrapolation for a wide variety of agents, but it is far from clear that this is the case (Sobel 1999, Doring & Steinhoff 2009).
Thanks!
Of course, the premise that "humans are the only beings who can reason about their own preferences" could only justify the conclusion that some human beings are special, since there are members of the human species who lack that ability. Similar objections could be raised against any other proposed candidate property. This has long been recognized by moral philosophers.
The test was a simple assessment of the subjects' ability to sit and then rise unaided from the floor. The assessment was performed in 2002 adults of both sexes and with ages ranging from 51 to 80 years. The subjects were followed-up from the date of the baseline test until the date of death or 31 October 2011, a median follow-up of 6.3 years.
Before starting the test, they were told: "Without worrying about the speed of movement, try to sit and then to rise from the floor, using the minimum support that you believe is needed."
As might be predicted, I'm putting in a little work on improving my ability at the test-- I have no idea whether this an example of Goodhart's Law.
A couple of quick points about "reflective equilibrium":
I just recently noticed that when philosophers (and at least some LWers including Yvain) talk about "reflective equilibrium", they're (usually?) talking about a temporary state of coherence among one's considered judgement or intuitions ("There need be no assurance the reflective equilibrium is stable—we may modify it as new elements arise in our thinking"), whereas many other LWers (such as Eliezer) use it to refer to an eventual and stable state of coherence, for example after one has considered all possible moral arguments. I've personally always been assuming the latter meaning, and as a result have misinterpreted a number of posts and comments that meant to refer to the former. This seems worth pointing out in case anyone else has been similarly confused without realizing it.
I often wonder and ask others what non-trivial properties we can state about moral reasoning (i.e., besides that theoretically it must be some sort of an algorithm). One thing that I don't think we know yet is that for any given human, their moral judgments/intuitions are guaranteed to converge to some stable and cohe
Lead and crime Arguments that lead has a lot to do with crime levels, and discussion of why this has gotten so little attention.
Just to indulge in a little evolutionary psychology..... Punishing people and helping people are both strong drives, but spending a lot of money on lead abatement (the lead from gasoline is still in the soil, and it keeps coming back-- lead paint is still a problem, too) is pretty boring.
ETA: And worse, progress with lead abatement is literally invisible (you don't have a dam or a highway so it looks like you're doing something) and the good effects take some 15 or 20 years to be obvious.
The basic point is reasonable, but there are so many things that bother me about that article.
Drum's credulity varies a lot in this article. His lowest level is about where I stand. I have to wonder if that actually reflects his beliefs and the rest of it is forcing enthusiasm on himself because to reflect value rather than truth; that is, he is doing an expected value calculation. Certainly, he should be applauded for scope sensitivity.
Perhaps the biggest thing that bothers me is that Drum tries to have it both ways: small amounts of lead matter and big amounts of lead matter. It seems rather unlikely that this is true. Maybe 10μg/dL has a huge effect, but if so, I doubt that 20 has double that effect, and this ruins all the analysis of the first half of the article. This is important because there is a logical trade-off between saying that past lead reduction was useful and saying future lead reduction will be useful. In particular, Drum says that Kleiman says that if the US were to eliminate lead, it would reduce crime by 10%. Did he just make up this number, or does it come out of a model? I'd like to see the model because even if he pulled the model out of thin air, it forc...
So I'm fairly new to LessWrong, and have being going through some of the older posts, and I had some questions. Since commenting on 4 year old posts was probably unlikely to answer those questions or to generate any new discussion, I thought posting here might be more appropriate. If this is not proper community etiquette, I'm happy to be corrected.
Specifically, I'm trying to evaluate how I understand and feel about this post: The Level Above Mine
I have some very mixed feelings on this post, and the subject in general. (You might say I've noticed that I'm confused.) Sure. It's hard to evaluate reliably just how intelligent someone who is more intelligent than you is, just like a test that every student in a class aces doesn't allow you to identify which student knows the information the best, but doesn't the idea of a persistent ranking system, and the concern with it imply a belief in intelligence as a static factor? Less Wrong is a diverse community, but I was by and large under the impression that it was biased towards a growth mindset. Indeed, it seems in many ways the raison d'etre of LW relies on the assumption that it is possible to improve your intelligence. I would further...
"Intelligence" seems to consist of multiple different systems, but there are many tasks which recruit several of those systems simultaneously. That said, this doesn't exclude the possibility of a hierarchy - in some people all of those systems could be working well, in some people all of them could be working badly, and most folks would be somewhere in between. (Which would seem to match the genetic load theory of intelligence.) But of course, this is a partially ordered set rather than a pure hierarchy - different people can have the same overall score, but have different capabilities in various subtasks.
IQ in childhood is predictive of IQ scores in adulthood, but not completely reliably; adult scores are more stable. There have been many interventions which aimed to increase IQ, but so far none of them has worked out.
IQ is one of the strongest general predictors of life outcomes and work performance... but that "general" means that you can still predict performance on some specific task better via some other variable. Also, IQ is one of the best such predictors together with conscientiousness, which implies that hard work also matters a lot in life. We also kn...
What exactly is the function of the Rationality Quotes threads? They seem like nothing more that a litmus test for local orthodoxy.
LW has been loading slowly lately-- sometimes it times out. Has anyone else been having this problem?
Random idea inspired by the politics thread: Could we make a list of high quality expressions of various positions?
People who wished to better understand other views could then refer to this list for well expressed sources.
It seems like there might be some argument about who "really" understood a given point of view best, but we could resolve debates by having eg pastafarianism-mstevens for the article on pastafarianism I like best, and pastafarianism-openthreadguy for the one openthreadguy prefers.
Is rubber part of the Great Filter? This thought occurred to me while reading Charles Mann's "1493" about the biological exchange post Columbus.
Rubber was a major part of the industrial revolution (allowing insulation of electric lines, and is important in many industrial applications in preventing leaks) . Rubber only arose on a single continent for a small set of species. While synthetic rubber exists, for many purposes it isn't as of high quality as natural rubber. Moreover, having the industrial infrastructure to make synthetic rubber would be extremely difficult without modern rubber. Thus, a civilization just like ours but without rubber might not have been able to go through the industrial revolution. This situation may also be relevant to Great Filter issues in our future: if civilization collapses and rubber becomes wiped out in the collapse, is this another potential barrier to returning to a functional civilization, especially if there's less available coal and oil to make synthetic rubber easily?
Rubber doesn't sound that important to me. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of useful bits: it only went into European use in the late 1700s, at earliest, well after most datings of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions; most rubber is now synthesized from petroleum; many uses of insulation like transoceanic telegraphs used gutta-percha which is similar but not the same as rubber (and was superior to rubber for a long time); and much use is for motor-vehicle tires, which while a key part of modern civilization, does not seem necessary for cheap long-distance transportation of either goods or humans (consider railroads).
So rubber doesn't look like a defeater. If it didn't exist, we'd have more expensive goods, we'd have considerably different transportation systems, but we'd still have modern science, we'd still have modern industry, we'd still have cheap consumer goods and international trade, and so on and so forth.
Can anyone recommend a good therapist in San Francisco (or nearby) who's rationalism-friendly? I have some real problems with depression and anxiety, but the last time I tried to get help the guy told me I was paying too much attention to evidence and should think more spiritually and less rationally. Uh...huh. If you don't want to post publicly here, PM or email is fine.
Happy New Year, LWers, I'm on a 5 month vacation from uni, and don't have a job. Also, my computer was stolen in October, cutting short my progress in self-education.
Given all this free time I have now, which of these 2 options is better?
or
I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.
It seems to be common knowledge that exposure to blue light lowers melatonin and reduces sleepiness, and that we can thus sleep better if we wear orange glasses or use programs like Redshift that reduce the amount of blue light emanating from the strange glowing rectangles that follow us around everywhere.
So an idea I had is that maybe wearing blue glasses might increase alertness. I've been weirdly fatigued during the day lately, even though I've been using melatonin and redshift. But does the /absolute/ magnitude of the blue light matter, or the amount o...
Do the current moderation policies allow editors to add "next in sequence" and "previous in sequence" links to posts that don't already have such links, and are there any editors willing to do this? If not, can we change the policy to allow this? And I'd like to volunteer to add such links at least to the posts that I come across (I'm already a moderator but not an editor).
The hard problem of consciousness is starting to seem slightly less impossible to me than it used to.
Specifically, I remember reading someone's dismissal of the possibility of a reductionist explanation of consciousness, something along the lines of, "What? You think someone's going to come up with an explanation of consciousness, and everyone else will slap their forehead and say, 'Of course, that's it'"?
But that kind of argument from incredulity fails because it conflates explanation (writing down or speaking an argument that other humans will ...
The header backgrounds of Main and Discussion are similar but different. This irks me slightly.
My selfish strategy is to point it out so it irks more people and the minimal effort of changing it becomes worthwhile. Given the autism scores from the survey, I am confident that among the people reading this comment, a good part will be irked. However, I am not familiar with how changes to the design have been made in the past. I am taking this opportunity to make my first prediction on predictionbook.com
I have a query - exactly how interested are people here in improving the efficiency of their daily lives? To whit, would a discussion about efficient toilet habits be welcome or unwelcome? (No, I'm not joking, nor am I working up to a toilet joke, I'm entirely serious.)
How do you stop suicide, for individuals and or populations? I looked up antidepressants. They don't look so promising. Brief summary follows. Feel free to skip it.
All pharmacological antidepressants have scary side effects. All of them, sometimes individually or sometimes in combination, put you at risk for serotonin toxicity. Most all increase risk of sucide relative to no treatment. Tricyclic antidepressant are old, scary drugs; rarely prescribed. MAOIs kind of scary. Moclobemide is one of the newer, safer MAOIs. Weird dietary reactions. Still not as s...
John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?
...The flourish of HBD books and talk in the years around 2000 was, to switch metaphors, early growth from seeds too soon planted.Had the shoots been nourished by a healthy stream of scientific results, they might have grown strong enough to crack and split the asphalt of intellectual orthodoxy.But as things turned out, the maintenance crew has had no difficulty smothering the growth.
Even the few small triumphs of HBD—triumphs, I mean, of general acceptance by cognitive elites—have had an ambiguous quality about them.
For
My very first post on this site was about the mistreatment of Stephanie Grace related to the new chilling and shrinking of acceptable discourse in the late 2000s after the 90s thaw mentioned in the article.
I was impressed by the reasonableness of the discussion. And I continued to be impressed at how well LessWrong handled matters like these where for almost two years. However making the same post today on this site as a new member wouldn't be as well accepted as it was back then. If this had been the case then I would have taken the claim that this community is one "dedicated to refining the art of human rationality" with a larger grain of salt, I'm unsure if I would have lingered since I had read most of the sequences at that point but was unsure about whether to participate.
So since I'm unsure if it would be appreciated in the community had I arrived today why do I remain? Well in the mean time I've grown to greatly respect the sanity of many excellent commenter's and several people generating good articles post do post here, some have arrived after I started participating. And it is the most civil and intellectually honest internet forum I've ever seen. But despite ...
From watching you for a while, I think you're driven to off-handedly forecast doom and gloom because it suits your identity as someone strongly dissatisfied with their current world, signaling contrarianism and wallowing in dignified pessimism. And of course elitism and despair look cooler to you, and form a coherent narrative.
And I'm not going to judge this as something negative, or implore you to fix some "problem" with your personal feelings, I just suggest that you keep a skeptical perspective on your self-narrative somewhere in the back of your mind. As you surely already do.
Infographic of logical and rhetorical fallacies List organized into categories with an icon for each fallacy.
I thought I'd seen a survey result of when LWers thought the Singularity was plausible-- maybe a 50% over/under date, but I haven't been able to find it again. Does anyone remember such a thing?
The 2012 survey also had a "date of the Singularity" question, but Yvain didn't report on the results of that question, so you'll have to look at the raw data for that.
R> lw <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> lw <- as.integer(as.character(lw$Singularity))
R> summary(lw[lw > 2011 & lw < 5000])
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's
2010 2060 2080 2140 2150 4000 236
Had to filter because of idiots putting in values like 2147483647 or 30 or 1800.
Robert Kurzban clarifies the concept of the EEA (mostly by quoting various excerpts from Tooby & Cosmides). I think this is an important post for people to check out, given how often the concept of EEA is referenced on this site.
...In 1990, Tooby and Cosmides wrote (p. 387):
The concept of the EEA has been criticized under the misapprehension that it refers to a place, or to a typologically characterized habitat, and hence fails to reflect the variability of conditions organisms may have encountered.
From this it can be seen that even in 1990, they we
I have an important choice to make in a few months (about what type of education to pursue). I have changed my mind once already, and after hearing a presentation where the presenter clearly favored my old choice, I'm about to revert my decision - in fact, introspection tells me that my decision was already changed at some point during the presentation. In regards to my original change of mind, I may also have been affected by the friend who gave me the idea.
All of this worries me, and I've started making a list of everything I know as far as pros/cons go ...
Quick question: I want to read Godel Escher Bach, but are there any math or knowledge prerequisites to understanding it?
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/rational_suckers-99998 Slightly intrigued by this article about Braess' paradox. I understand the paradox well enough, but am confused by how he uses it to critisize super-rationality. But mostly I was amused that in the same comment where he says, 'Hofstader's "super-rationality" concept is inconsistent and illogical, and no single respectable game theorist takes it seriously.' he links to EY's The True Prisoners' Dilemma post.
Also, do people know if that claim about game theorists is true? Would most game theorists say that they would defect against copies of themselves in a one-shot PD?
I've stumbled upon this:
A place on the Moon where the Sun is always visible, never sets. Well, except for an eclipse, of course.
OK, I give up. We're living in a simulation. Science can't possibly work under these conditions.
Possibly of interest
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBmJay_qdNc
Whiteboard animation of a talk by Dan Ariely about dishonesty, rationalization, the "what the hell" effect, and bankers. The visual component made it really easy for me to watch.
I am looking for defenders of Hanson's Meat is Moral. On the surface, this seems like a very compelling argument to me. (I am a vegetarian, primarily for ethical reasons, and have been for two years. At this point the thought of eating meat is quite repulsive to me, and I'm not sure I could be convinced to go back even if I were convinced it were moral.)
It struck me, however, nothing in this argument is specific to animals, and that anyone who truly believes this should also support growing people for cannibalism, as long as those lives are just barely wor...
Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows” -- where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I've ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there's a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.
The full sentence is
And if you do manage to induce less farmland and more wild land, you'll have to realize that, per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows. So there is a tradeoff between producing more farm animals with worse lives, or fewer wild animals with better lives, if in fact wild animals live better lives.
or
per land area, farms are more efficient [than wilderness is] at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows.
Fancy meat substitutes like quorn are expensive. TVP and tofu are dirt cheap. Going with vegetable sources of protein that make no attempt to directly replace meat, like rice and beans or peanut butter, is also cheap.
BEST, a Bayesian replacement for frequentist t-tests I've been using in my self-experiments, now has an online JavaScript implementation: http://www.sumsar.net/best_online/
Hey -
Bit of an unusual request: Does anybody know of any good science books for physics? Specifically, books with not only the facts about physics, but the specific reasons and experiments for which those facts are believed?
I have an associate who is interested in the subject, and completely uninterested in reading something that presents current beliefs as facts. When explaining particle spin, it then took me something like four hours to find the relevant experiments performed for proving the existence of particle spin (and I have to confess the information I was able to find on such a fundamental element of modern physics left me a bit underwhelmed).
What kind of people do you all have in your heads? Do you find that having lots of people in your head (e.g. the way MoR!Harry has lots of people in his head) is helpful for making sense of the world around you and solving problems and so forth? How might I go about populating my head with more people, and what kind of people would it be useful to populate my head with?
There seems to be a reasonable attempt to get to Mars within a decade. See the Mars One website for details.
They intend to have people on Mars by 2023 (four of them), and it seems that a self-sustaining colony will be the eventual goal.
I've recently become interested in holding some competent opinions on FAI. Trying these on for size:
FAI is like a thermostat. The thermostat does not set individual particles in motion, but measures and responds to particles moving in a particular average range. Similarly, FAI measures whether the world is a Nice Place to Live and makes corrections as needed to keep it that way.
Before we can have mature FAI, there is the initial dynamic or immature FAI. This is a program with a very well thought out, tested, reliable architecture that not only contains
Can we have a way to save comments?
I often need to retrieve something I've read on Lesswrong but search isn't always helpful. Saving everything I read would limit the scope significantly.
Spec. Ops: The Line; a Rationalist twist?
I've played through Spec. Ops: the Line. Interesting though that game is, there's one aspect that I found very lacking; the intelligence and rationality of the protagonists, both instrumental and cognitive. It's not just in their poor decision-making, or their delusions, but also their complete lack of defenses in front of the horrors of war, both from them and from others. They act from the gut, they mismanage the feelings of guilt, obligation, and fear.
The game has a theme of helplessness in the face of chaos; it...
If in Newcomb's problem you replace Omega with James Randi, suddenly everyone is a one-boxer, as we assume there is some slight of hand involved to make the money appear in the box after we have made the choice. I am starting to wonder if Newcomb's problem is just simple map and territory- do we have sufficient evidence to believe that under any circumstance where someone two-boxes, they will receive less money than a one box? If we table the how it is going on, and focus only on the testable probability of whether Randi/Omega is consistently accurate, we...
Here's an anthropic question/exercise inspired by this fanfic (end of 2nd chapter specifically), I don't have the time to properly think about it but it seems like an interesting tests for current anthropic reasoning theories under esoteric/unusual conditions. The premise is as follows:
There exist a temporal beacon, acting as an anchor in time. An agent/agents may send their memories back to the anchored time, but as time goes on they may also die/be otherwise prevented from sending memories back. Every new iteration, the agent-copy at the time immediately...
Does the
"If you don't know what you need, take power"
quote have any origin before Final words? I searched for it but only found it in a post on heuristics that linked back there.
The quote appeals to me quite a lot, but I'd like more discussion around it and arguments for or against. (If you have any feel free to post here.)
I spent four hours today not working. Not doing things other than working, mind; I had the necessary files open, took notes designed to lead toward writing code, then spent most of the time simply... not working.
When it became apparent that akrasia was not going to give up, I went to sleep for four hours.
I was trying to work on a map format conversion function, with which my latest project would be able to move forward more quickly, toward my target demo date of March 2013, at which point I would attempt to secure funding and such.
Honestly, it's just a for...
If a middle-class couple in a first world country decide to create and raise a child, they have done
[pollid:379]
A long overdue response about "superrational" justification:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5d/link_reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_im_dying_young/872a
OP: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5d/link_reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_im_dying_young/786i
What percentage of the computer-using populace, or of LWers, do you think uses the Dvorak keyboard?
When sitting down to design one's life happiness is a worthy goal. In today's world our online life requires a large amount of attention and as such has a large influence on us, namely our happiness.
The question I'd like to ask is whether it is more likely to make you happy if you have one queue of e-mail messages that incorporates your work and personal life.
A pro argument could be made that by incorporating them you are creating a holistic smooth lifestyle. Such an argument is similar to advocating living near your workplace and having friendships with c...
My very first post on this site was about the mistreatment of Stephanie Grace related to the new chilling and shrinking of acceptable discourse in the late 2000s after the 90s thaw mentioned in the article.
I was impressed by the reasonableness of the discussion. And I continued to be impressed at how well LessWrong handled matters like these where for almost two years. However making the same post today on this site as a new member wouldn't be as well accepted as it was back then. If this had been the case then I would have taken the claim that this community is one "dedicated to refining the art of human rationality" with a larger grain of salt, I'm unsure if I would have lingered since I had read most of the sequences at that point but was unsure about whether to participate.
So since I'm unsure if it would be appreciated in the community had I arrived today why do I remain? Well in the mean time I've grown to greatly respect the sanity of many excellent commenter's and several people generating good articles post do post here, some have arrived after I started participating. And it is the most civil and intellectually honest internet forum I've ever seen. But despite this I'm unsure if it is rational of me to do so.
Speaking to some other people from here, who make comments like "more people follow your writing than mine can you please comment on my post?" or people using me as a go to example for some matters, apparently I've become a sort of Schilling point for a subculture within the rationalist subculture. I feel kind of sad about this. I preferred it back when Vladimir_M filled this role, he was far worthier than me.
I think we are at the start of a long winter in the West, only technological progress can keep us afloat if it won't falter. And even if it doesn't uFAI is the overwhelmingly likely outcome. I think I need a strong drink.
Pretty easy to test.