Be sure to screen shot any comment you make that you want to preserve, or comments by others that should be preserved. LessWrong is now the sort of site where critical comments silently vanish that cannot by any sane stretch be called trolling.
If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing. This is the Internet, where that sort of behaviour ensures preservation. A bot to automatically preserve all comments to LW would be ridiculously simple, for example, if MIRI could no longer be trusted to be honest.
Really, MIRI. Just what the hell do you think you're achieving with this?
I worked on and off for SI as a contractor; currently, I'm not. (Not that that should justify deleting comments.)
That might be a bit drastic, but I too am worried about the deletion of perfectly legitimate (IMO) discussion.
Do keep in mind that screenshots are not always reliable, though.
Oh, absolutely :-) Multiple saved copies are a little more trustworthy.
Capturebot2 is reasonably trustworthy for its intended purpose (documenting the sort of site that actually gets into a habit of trying to burn the evidence). Of course, I'm saying that as one of the two people who in fact has the power to edit Capturebot's saved PNGs ...
I keep being told that there are no resources for my ideas for automatically fighting trolls, so after a user admits to being a troll I've been going through manually and deleting comments that strike me as trollish - in the sense of intended to provoke. I also suspect we have fake accounts upvoting and hence do not refrain from deleting upvoted comments.
I'm not particularly happy with the way things are, but don't see an obvious way to make them better without somebody being willing to devote an awful lot of full-time-equivalent work to modifying the LW codebase.
And yes, this forum practices (gasp!) censorship. It always has since the day I started deleting Caledonian's comments on Overcoming Bias because he was successfully making posting no-longer-fun for me. Before that, the SL4 mailing list was subject to threads frequently being terminated. We have always been up-front about pruning the tree, and nowadays there's an official Deletion Policy page. Please stop acting like this is some sort of shocking surreptitious secret.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy
Note that this includes deletion of replies to trolls, although I often just downvote those instead.
It woul...
My experience has been exactly contrary: young communities thrive without gardening, but as they grow they either devolve into low average value (digg as it was, most large subreddits) or are heavily pruned (HN, r/askscience). If there's an influx of people, heavy moderation is mandatory if you want to avoid regression to the mean.
If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing.
On the gripping hand, systematically refraining from deleting (or better, shadowbanning) trolls is one of the stupidest things you can do if you want to maintain a community.
I'm relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll. The point of deleting even his reasonable comments would be to get him to stop commenting at all. I'm not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.
I'm relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll.
They're right to do so.
I'm not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.
There are certainly some others, but I'm not sure naming names is really appropriate.
Didn't Will_Newsome say several times that he was trolling and post material designed to get downvoted? Not sure that's quite a comparison to eridu.
(To give a recent example, we banned a user from #lesswrong for mailbombing with porn sites another user; they did this partially because they were offended and partially to get themselves banned and stop spending time there. The ban is perfectly justified, yet I would not have called them a troll before or after.)
Didn't Will_Newsome say several times that he was trolling and post material designed to get downvoted? Not sure that's quite a comparison to eridu.
Yes, he did. No, I wasn't comparing them to each other, but it is the case that unlike eridu or Dmytry, Will_Newsome did not trigger the “since he posted lots of trollish comments, let's delete reasonable comments by him as well” reaction in the mods, as far as I can remember.
One example after I posted that comment: Capture, burnt remains. There's been a pile of others (mostly not in fact Dmytry, before you make that claim), but the current site code no longer leaves a really embarrassingly obvious string of "Comment deleted".
Really, are you seriously claiming you thought I was just making it up?
Really, are you seriously claiming you thought I was just making it up?
Requesting evidence is good behavior and should not be discouraged.
Requesting evidence is good behavior. Combining it with a counteraccusation of trolling slides the whole comment into the negative, for me.
Anatoly is right. Accusation without proof is trolling, even if the proof exists. Thank you for providing at least a small part. But why so coy about the others?
So, I mentioned here that I might write a "(pure) mathematics for rationalists" post. Would other people be interested in such a post, and if so, what sort of concerns would you want it to address? If there are lots of LWers trying to learn mathematics I would also like to know what their goals are in doing so.
(Edit, 2/10: Thanks for the responses, everyone. I'm in the process of writing this.)
I'm interested in heuristics for assembling or specific suggestions for a ruthless course aimed for giving a well-rounded math education (that doesn't trade thorough understanding of a diverse set of tools for better expertise in any particular area).
For example, I find the following techniques useful:
- Focus on the simplest texts I don't yet understand well, not on the hardest texts I can follow
- Assemble a list of leading US and UK schools and make sure that I've considered topics and textbooks mentioned in their curricula
- Given a text, find related texts with Amazon's "Customers also bought these" lists, in Amazon reviews, with web search
- Don't miss the "gems", which are often not mentioned in standard courses, but can be found on blogs and forums
- Look for lists of recommended books (there are surprisingly few of such lists that are of any value)
What makes specific recommendations valuable for me:
- Particularly good texts that may be absent from standard curricula, such as Pierce's "Introduction to Information Theory", Courant & Robbins's "What Is Mathematics?", Stillwell's texts, Needham's "Visual Complex Analysis", Hilbert
There are various meta-level questions left unanswered by textbooks, such as "how do I go about deciding which textbooks to read in a particular subject," "how do I go about deciding which subjects to study," "what resources other than textbooks are good for learning math," and "say, what's the big picture here, anyway?" The goal would not be to regurgitate the content of any particular textbook.
I also expect rationalists to be more goal-oriented than most people, so my recommendations for them would be different from my recommendations for people who just want to learn whatever math is cool and interesting. My recommendations would depend heavily on what those goals are, which is why I'd like to know what those goals are.
"how do I go about deciding which textbooks to read in a particular subject,"
You probably know this anyway Qiaochu, given your involvement in the various math stackexchanges. But others here might find it useful.
This is my Google search string for mathematics textbooks on the stackexchanges:
"coding theory" books | book | reading | texts | list | "reference request" site:math.stackexchange.com | site:stats.stackexchange.com | site:mathoverflow.net | site:crypto.stackexchange.com | site:quant.stackexchange.com | site:scicomp.stackexchange.com | site:cstheory.stackexchange.com | site:cs.stackexchange.com
Replace "coding theory" with the area you want to learn, and you end up getting a nice list.
LessWrong has a lot of threads that go like:
Someone: "Gee, it would sure be nice if we had this cool new feature on LessWrong!"
EY/similar person: "Gee, it sure would. Too bad we don't have any development resources."
How would one go about volunteering to do this sort of thing?
I assume that if volunteer work is accepted, it would require testing to prove that it is a quality and non-malicious change before they actually run it on the servers.
I attempted to volunteer (I'm a web developer) but that didn't go anywhere. First, I wanted to help LW grow (in my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread). Then I realized that LW was at serious risk for eternal September and growing it would risk hastening progress toward cultural collapse. So, I did several more threads on that to see if anyone had good arguments about us not being at risk, or good suggestions on how to stop it. I compiled a list of suggestions and held a vote asking people whether they think there is a significant risk and which solution, if any, they wanted. The result was that the majority of respondents think there is a significant risk, and this was presented to Luke, but he said he doesn't want to do anything at this time.
That was, to put it mildly, a bit of a buzz kill in regards to my volunteering energy level.
My advice to you is to make sure of the following things:
That you and Luke (yes, Luke seems to be the contact person) both agree on a project that is to be done. Luke liked the idea of growing LW, but he didn't like the idea of preventing cultural collapse. I can't, in good conscience, grow LW if there is a significant risk of it c
So... this is a really personal issue and I'm not sure I have any business bringing it up here, but I'm going to anyway:
I've been on and off suicidal for the past 8 or so years (I'm 18, btw), but I've been especially depressed for the last couple of months. My exact emotions are pretty complicated and the motivations behind my death wish differ from moment to moment. 2 days ago I decided to commit to killing myself and I've spent the time between then and now readying myself for suicide. In the past 10 minutes I've had a change of heart brought on by guilt.
Help.
I imagine the wise thing to do would be to seek professional assistance, but I don't want to for various reasons. I've told several friends that I want to die, but they don't really believe me because of the casual way I bring it up and my disposition towards seeking attention. There was a case of suicide by someone in this community awhile ago and I believe some of the commenters on that thread offered to talk to anyone who was feeling self destructive, but that was some time ago, so I'd like to inquire as to whether the offer still stands.
I think I'm likely to have more in common with the average Lesswronger than with an...
It is ok and not at all inappropriate to seek help here. I myself suffer from depression, so I do know the kind of pain you`re in- right now, as I write this post, I nearly weep tears of sorrow for the fact that you hurt so much right now, and my heart flies out to you.
Please do not kill yourself!
Although it may seem very far away right now, the pain can go away, and you can be happy again. As for an immediate plan of action I would recommend the following things:
first, numb the pain so you do not get worse. Thats not a longterm-solution, its just until this cry of help does help you. What worked for me was watching old TV-Series and Starcraft-2 casts.
second: I certainly do not know your reasons why you do not wish to seek seek professional assistance, but I do understand this reluctance of yours. I myself needed over a year to make the call; a time which I now wish to be much shorter. So i ask you to reconsider: professional help is the fastest form of sustainable relief you can get and is probably the best method to minimize the total amount of suffering. For this, I would find it fantastical if you would not only talk about the reasons why you hurt, but also about the r
It is ok and not at all inappropriate to seek help here.
I think it is. We are not suicide experts, we know nothing about how to help, and our attempts to help can easily backfire. And this is assuming that we are not being trolled, attacked, or drama queened (anyone can say that they have contributions under another account). Let us recall that pdf23ds asked for LW help with his sleep problems which did nothing, and LWers attempting to follow up on his posted suicide note apparently did not solve the problem.
The big sites like Wikipedia generally have a policy of:
- not encouraging amateurs to engage in therapy-over-the-internet and other-optimization
- having the admins escalate to looking up IP addresses and contacting locals
- providing the concerned user with a suicide hotline number
I don't see any reason that this should not be implemented on LW as well.
It changed the way I thought about everything. I had to reanalyze every belief I held and was far too busy doing that to be particularly sad.
More importantly though, it gave me hope. The general air of optimism and confidence and defiance made me feel proud to be a part of it. Before finding this place, the thing that bothered me most about life was that it was absolutely certain to end. After reading the Methods of Rationality, I realized that I didn't have to go down without a fight so long as I had even a chance of winning.
Besides all that, Lesswrong gave me a sense of belonging. People here seem so similar to me, which is a pretty rare thing. Some of them seem atypical in almost exactly the way I'm atypical. Their quirks are basically my quirks. And the way they act, you'd get the idea that they think those things actually make them better people. It's a pretty powerful emotion when you come across it for the first time.
I gave a talk in Chicago on using Ideological Turing Tests to avoid some mindkill-y problems and have better, more interesting arguments. The video is now up.
In an Ideological Turing Test, you answer one set of questions honestly and another as your best model of your ideological opponent. It's a nice way to spot and burn strawmen and to get curious about why your opponent thinks the thing zer does instead of just angry that they won't concede. Other material included: tips on skipping generic argument scripts and cribbing from LARPing to build a line of retreat.
Would this be of interest as a discussion post? I assume anyone interested just pops over chez moi to read up.
Since its inception in early 2009, has this community ever (1) changed its collective opinion on something (2) had a debate in which there were two sides and there was a clear victor?
(1) I am hesitant to describe this community as having collective opinions, and (2) do the Amanda Knox posts count?
Fun example of the bystander effect in everyday life: last night, I hosted a Twelfth Night party, where people came over and all read the the play aloud and ate boozy cake ("Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there will be no more cakes and ale?")
We all had a lovely time, and someone asked why we hadn't done this before. And I realized that it was because Shakespeare could happen any time, so we were never pushed to schedule it any particular time. We only managed Twelfth Night because it's pegged to the actual holiday of Twelfth Night.
In some kind of identity crisis I am looking for a well-paying, preferably mathematical, career where I can use broad knowledge of physics, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, economics ... I was thinking actuary or statistician. Any similar thoughts?
I was thinking whether Mensa could be used for CFAR purposes (raising the rationality waterline), and I would like to hear your opinions. Also, I am interested how many LWers are in Mensa, and how many think that Mensa is useful for anything more than satisfying social needs of its members.
For me personally, Mensa was a huge disappointment. (I am not sure how much that reflects only Mensa in Slovakia, and how much applies for other countries too. I know many people in other countries are disappointed too, but it also seems to me that Mensa in other countries does more useful activities.) The easiest way to explain it is that when I first heard about Mensa, I imagined something like CFAR Minicamps. It did not occur to me that someone would spend their energy to create a worldwide organization for highly intelligent people, only to do... nothing. Because that is exactly what most Mensa members do, in my experience. They meet, they talk about something, but usually only to signal their own superiority, then they solve puzzles. Everyone wants to be a leader; almost no one is willing to be a team player. So all they do is confirm each other's superiority, and then lament about why the w...
Might work, depends on how inconspicuous and patient your were. Certainly not the first time people have been trying to recruit from/take over another organisation. Writing about it on the internet however will make what you're doing so much more obvious if someone started noticing.
There will be <=3 MLP-related posts on LessWrong in January 2013 (80%; marked right):
Since people are whining about the MLP-fics that LW is ruined, ruined, while I think it’s a temporary spurt exhausting a limited reservoir of such posts.
The MLP discussions were obviously going to die down, as indeed they have; 'Friendship is Optimal' is done, 'Myou've got to be kidding' has ceased to draw any attention and slowed updates, and Vaniver still hasn't done anything with his. The problem solved itself. People here can be such drama queens.
Link: NYT op-ed on publication bias in medicine.
I hadn't realized some of the measures in place to counter publication bias in medicine but am sad to see that these have had an insufficient effect. It's reassuring at least to see that significant players are both aware of the situation and interested in improvement.
Of interest for the data science angle. Also it includes the word "bayesian" and links to Paul Graham. That's got to make it more or less on-topic, right?
I recently took this collection of text messages (from Hilary Mason's collection of research-quality data sets ), and attempted to build a simple Bayesian spam filter for text messages.
This was mostly just a fun exercise. I wasn't expecting to produce a usable product (and I didn't), but as an exercise it was pretty informative and well worth my time. I've put some observations in rot13, as anyone else undertaking this exercise may benefit from observing them by themselves.
Vg'f n irel tbbq qrzbafgengvba bs cbjre nanylfvf pbaprcgf, naq gur genqr-bss orgjrra frafvgvivgl naq fcrpvsvpvgl. Jura znxvat gjrnxf gb gur pynffvsvre, vg ernyyl unzzref ubzr gur vqrn gung ryvzvangvat glcr-V reebef pneevrf gur pbfg bs zber glcr-VV reebef.
Gur birenyy zrgubq (anvir onlrf pynffvsvpngvba) frrzf gb or fvtavsvpnagyl yrff hfrshy sbe grkg zrffntrf guna sbe rznvy zrffntrf. Gurer ner n ahzore bs boivbhf ernfbaf sbe guvf, naq n srj yrff boivbhf barf. Grkg zrffntrf ner n ybg fubegre guna rznvyf (hfhnyyl yrff guna 140 punenpgref, juvyr rznvy...
What's the community norm on cross posting? Suppose I have a couple of relatively short ideas I want to write about and post on my blog, but I also think the LW community might be interested (I do). I could post them as discussion posts here and on my blog, or just post them on my blog and links to them as discussion posts. I prefer the former, but is there a norm against it?
Thanks.
Its pretty common to do the first option, usually with a note and link letting people know upfront that its a cross-post.
Here's a question perhaps not posed too often. I'm new here, and finding the sheer amount of effort people seem to put into the status quo topics quite daunting. I recognize the objective value in many of the things discussed, in that by discussing them there is moral benefit. But day-to-day, I find myself envious rather than spurred to action that people are able to put forth the effort.
For far too long, I've been frustrated and in a mental lull, and I find little to attribute this to except a decrease in effort about the things I know I am capable o...
What if I told you that you that I had a reform proposal that would give us nearly all of the same benefits we gain from spending on Medicine and Education in First World Nations but for half of the cost? While this is a radical and bold course of action that would require substantial political capital to acheive, I'm not as madly optimistic as to expect the funding freed up to be spend on Efficient Charity or Existential Risk Mitigation (that is what Altruistic Piracy is for). Even slightly lower taxes resulting in higher economic growth lifting more peop...
Yes, but he reaches that conclusion on extremely tenuous grounds.
“search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts,” is categorized into four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. Proficient, the highest level, is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” As an example of this level of performance, they cite comparing the viewpoints in two texts. This level seems to be roughly the level required to read Common Sense.
Seems on what basis? You don't have to be able to make complex inferences to be able to read Common Sense. Ideally, you should be at this reading level in order to make informed opinions based on complicated political texts, but then, you should also be at this level in order to try and parse the Bible, and readership of that certainly isn't restricted to the 'Proficient' category. I can certainly attest that one hundred percent of any of my English classes in high school could have read Common Sense and written an essay on the content, many of them would simply have been uninsightful and full of regurgitated cached thoughts.
Besides, Payne was follow...
I feel like I have been reading a fairly large amount of news that can be summed up as "Technology is replacing employment."
For instance, this piece came out today:
And this person compiled a huge list of links about the topic that had come out recently:
http://theleisuresociety.tumblr.com/post/39057729530/the-tech-debate-blasts-off-a-linkfest
I don't mind just discussing the topic in general (Although I don't know if I even have an clear opinion, ...
I'm currently a Ph.D. student in mathematics, which seems like it's not unheard of around here, and I'm beginning to realize (about halfway through the expected life of my program) that I'm not particularly interested in staying in academics.
What sorts of other career options are there, coming from pure mathematics?
And in particular I don't do anything related to graph theory, probability theory, or other fields with obvious connections to other career paths; what are some skills that would complement a PhD in mathematics on a resume?
The top of my list ri...
I'm not particularly interested in staying in academics.
Join the club. Over the past couple months I more or less decided that the guy I've been seeing for a year is the guy I want to spend my life with, which makes jaunting cross-country for six to ten years on post-docs much less appealing.
What sorts of other career options are there, coming from pure mathematics?
IIRC, you're American. There's a good amount of government work available: DoD, DoE, national labs, and so on. I'm aware of some people who parlayed their math PhD into the equivalent of an engineering MS, with all the job opportunities that opens up.
Programming is the obvious choice, but I'm told one would want a paper trail (a git account, a blog, etc.) of contributions to various projects.
It also sounds like you're still young enough to pivot a bit in your choice of field -- do you have an advisor yet?
When you say "DoD, DoE, national labs, etc," how are you generating that list?
Unfortunately, it's not a helpful rule: I'm listing places that hired people I know.
And where can I read up on the sorts of positions they tend to have openings in?
You can search usajobs.gov: This position for instance, or this one, both seem feasible for an arbitrary American math PhD.
Is the CFAR logo a line below all the other logos in Discussion for anyone else? (Edit: It's okay now.)
Found on Wikipedia:
There is an ongoing controversy in metaphysics about whether or not there are, in addition to actual, existing things, non-actual or nonexistent things. [...] Note that "actual" may not mean the same as "existing". Perhaps there exist things that are merely possible, but not actual. (Maybe they exist in other universes, and these universes are other "possible worlds"--possible alternatives to the actual world.) Perhaps some actual things are nonexistent. (Sherlock Holmes seems to be an actual example of a fictional character; one might think there are many other characters Arthur Conan Doyle might have invented, though he actually invented Holmes.)
IIRC he self-identified as such. And what he said did fit with the definition in the lead of the English Wikipedia article on radical feminism.
German speakers - trying to improve my german I'm looking for good blog recommendations. Ideally dealing with similar topics as seen here (rationality, AI, philosophy) but any thoughtful, well written essays would do. Some good people to follow? I like Thomas Metzinger as a reference point for you. Thank you!
I'm preparing to read more books (technical and non-technical) than I usually read in fields outside of my comfort zone. This is not something I have ever really tried or needed to do in the past. Any basic tips for retaining information from these books? Ideas I've thought of include taking notes in WorkFlowy and then maybe putting the notes into Anki. I am not currently convinced of the value of learning speed-reading techniques (certainly that doesn't seem helpful for the technical books).
There's something weird about how my mind works. The latest example was with this article. The first time I tried reading it, my eyes sort of glided off the page and I couldn't understand anything. I waited a day, without thinking about the article at all, then tried reading it again. And suddenly everything was completely obvious and I couldn't see any difficulty. The same thing happens with math problems (when I was a kid I would often wake up with a solution to some problem I heard the day before), complicated programming tasks, etc. Any ideas why this happens?
The Human Brain Project seems to have garnered some media attention recently. None of it particularly deep or informative, what are your thoughts?
eridu's now-deleted comments supporting radical feminism definitely didn't fit that pattern. Most of them were trollish by any reasonable standard, but some weren't that bad and I guess were deleted just because of who their author was.
I've just noticed that the “Top Contributors, 30 Days” sidebar has many more entries now. Seeing my own username there feels kind-of weird to me, for some reason.
This catalog of shaming tactics from a rather polarizing organization A Voice For Men is quite interesting, regardless of whether you approve their agenda, and is probably applicable to many other cases where an attacker uses the emotion of shame to achieve their goals. I'm wondering what cognitive biases are in play here? Having been on the receiving end of many of these attacks, I cannot calmly think through the answer on my own.
I'm planning on teaching myself a programming language (probably Python, via LPTHW) and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on whether Anki would be helpful in this endeavor. Normally, I'd just go ahead and do it, but some of my friends who know how to code said it wouldn't be helpful, even though they were hesitant to give reasons when pushed.
Just leaving a note here; I've dropped Coursera "Drugs and the Brain"
Dropped after finishing the first section's quiz; presentation was weirdly scattershot, going into great depth on some details and overviewing others, assumed a lot of chemistry & physics background, and the material turned out to be too low-level to be useful to me in reading up on nootropics even though I was initially pleased nicotine would be discussed throughout the course.
It does leave me time to do Data Analysis, which is going well so far (it's essentially applied R).
Why do some posts have pink borders?
I can't quite figure it out. I gather it has something to do with being new, since newer posts are more likely to be pink and every reply to a pink post seems to be pink. But it's not purely chronological (since some of the most recent comments do not have pink borders when I view the thread), and it's not purely based on being new since the last time you've viewed a thread (since I've seen pink borders around my own posts).
I'm glad that you mentioned that, because it reminded me of something. I frequently feel like an NPC, but I also get a truly vast amount of false alarms on my existential crisis meter for some reason. I mean, I know I've been depressed before, but even attempting to account for that, some of my internal thought processes feel ridiculous in retrospect. Let me give you an example:
"Life has no purpose, I don't care whether I live or die, everyone is going to abandon me when I inevitably fail."
Eats Food.
"Wait, I was just hungry."
I mean, that sounds absurd to type, but I really have had that happen.
I am not saying that your specific Existential crisis is a false alarm. (You may have already established that it isn't.) But there might have been other people reading who aren't aware that Existential False alarms exist, and your mention of being an NPC reminded me of that.
Why do I have memories of reading critique in the comments to multiple articles, if this is the case? Granted, I should probably go collect such comments to verify said memories, but... that would take a lot of searching... and isn't really the optimal thing to use that time/effort for...
Funny dreams you had that could happen thread
I had a dream about Mencius Moldbug the other day, he was making some sort of point and it ended with "and what do we call [thing that satisfies some description]? Rejecta." But I just looked it up and that's not even an English word, it just occurs in places like "rejecta mathematica"
Link: A Snapshot of Foundational Attitudes Toward Quantum Mechanics, a paper giving results of a survey of physicists at a conference on the foundations of QM. Lot's of opinions!
LW will probably be particularly interested in question 12, particularly the prevalence of Copenhagen Interpretation (42%) and information based interpretations (24%) beating out many-worlds (18%). Unfortunately, the survey did not include "shut up and calculate" as an option. Also of interest is question 8 on predicting when a useful quantum computer will exist with no r...
Question: how low exactly (approximately) would a Solomonoff prior's probability for something like "Coming up with this thought means that you automatically [get an FAI recipe in the mail] / [go to super-fun heaven] / [get to live for 3^^^^3 happy years]." be? (Those specific examples are fine, but if you can come up with something of similarly vast utility that's more likely, that'd be even better.)
Is it something on the order of 1/10^40 or 1/10^100 or 1/10^200 or less? (Sorry for anchoring you.)
(I'm thinking of an alternative Pascal's Mugging "solution" to which this is relevant.)
ignore me.
experimenting with deleting comments.
ignore me.
experiment with deleting comments.
ignore me.
experiment with deleting comments.
Regarding this:
I'm using wget and grep to find examples in a less biased manner. There's a lot of deleted comments. A common pattern is that someone from MIRI makes particularly arrogant/self praiseful claim (e.g. Luke claims extreme self scepticism skills), then some responses get deleted. Dmytry (talk) 12:37, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
You do realize you can't tell the difference between someone deleting their own comment and a moderator deleting their comment?
I don't know what Dmytry is doing, but it is possible to tell the difference. If I delete my comment, it is not visible on my user page. Whereas, if the moderators delete a comment, it vanishes in context (and its permalink shows "deleted comment"), but the contents are visible on the user page.
A few more details. If I delete my comment, its permalink is an error. I cannot seem to delete a comment without deleting its replies, while moderators can (and users could in the past). If I delete the reply and then the comment, the permalink shows a deleted comment (as if deleted by moderators), but it is not listed on my user page.
I'm exploring some elements of the philosophy of existence (ontology) and while reading about ontological arguments I was reminded again about the description of God as the "unmoved mover".
It occurred to me that although we can't say anything meaningful about the ultimate origin of motion, we can describe the mover that is not changed by the motion from a mathematical perspective, it is called relativity -- a static description of dynamic systems.
Probably a redundant link, since most of us check smbc anyways, but this comic kind of confirms his transhumanist leanings.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.