Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

orthonormal

37 Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

1st Apr 2013

6 min read

37

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

(This is the fifth incarnation of the welcome thread; once a post gets over 500 comments, it stops showing them all by default, so we make a new one. Besides, a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you have any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

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It's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts; veteran users look through the recent comments thread quite often (there's a separate recent comments thread for the Discussion section, for whatever reason), and a conversation begun anywhere will pick up contributors that way. There's also a succession of open comment threads for discussion of anything remotely related to rationality.

Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.

LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.

SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.

A few notes about the community

If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.

If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new article" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)

If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome! I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma- honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have meetups in various parts of the world. Check the wiki page for places with regular meetups, or the upcoming (irregular) meetups page. There's also a Facebook group. If you have your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it.

If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter

A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.

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37 Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

by orthonormal

1st Apr 2013

6 min read

1746

37

A few notes about the site mechanics

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

Open ThreadsSite Meta

Personal Blog

37

New Comment

Rendering 0/1746 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:25 PM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

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[anonymous]13y00

Thank you for the material, arundelo, Manfred, and TheOtherDave. Still getting the hang of the forum, so I hope this reaches everyone.

My original question came because I was worried about brain uploading. If I digitized my mind tomorrow, would I still love my wife? Would I still want to write novels? And would these things hold true as time passed?

Let’s say I went for full-body emulation. My entire body is now a simulation. Resources and computing power are not an issue. There are also no limits to what I can do within the virtual world. I have complete freedom to change whatever I want, including myself. If I wanted to look like a bodybuilder, I could, and if I wanted to make pain taste like licorice, I could do that too.

So I’m hanging out in my virtual apartment when I feel the need to go to the bathroom. Force of habit is so strong that I’m sitting down before I realize: “This is ridiculous. I’m a simulation, I don’t need to poop!” And because I can change anything, I make it so I no longer need to poop, ever. After some thought, I make it so I don’t need to eat or sleep either. I can now devote ALL my time to reading comic books, watching Seinfeld reruns, and being with my wife (who was also digitized.)

After a while I decide I don’t like comic books as much as I like Seinfeld. Since I’m all about efficiency, I edit out (or outgrow) my need to read comic books. Suddenly I couldn’t care less about them, which leaves me more time for Seinfeld.

Eventually I decide I don’t love my wife as much as I love Seinfeld. I spend the next billion years watching and re-watching the adventures of Jerry, George, and Elaine, blessed be their names.

Then I decide that I enjoy Seinfeld because it makes my brain feel good. I change it so I feel that way ALL THE TIME. I attain perfect peace and non-desire. I find nirvana and effectively cease to exist.

All of the basic AI drives assume that the mind in question has at least ONE goal. It will preserve itself in order to achieve that goal, optimize and grow in order to achieve that goal, even think up new ways to achieve that goal. It may even preserve its own values to continue achieving the goal... but it will ALWAYS have that one goal.

Here are my new questions:

Is it possible for intelligence to exist without goals? Can a mind stand for nothing in particular?
Given the complete freedom to change, would a mind inevitably reduce itself to a single goal? Optimize itself into a corner, as it were?
If such a mind had a finite goal (like watch Seinfeld a trillion times) what would happen if it achieved total fulfillment of its goal? Would it self-terminate, or would it not care to do even that?
How much consciousness do you need to enjoy something?

If it’s true that a pure mind will inevitably cease to be an active force in the universe, it implies a few things:

A. That an uploaded version of me should not be given complete freedom lest he become a virtual lotus-eater.

B. That the alternative would be to upload myself to an android body sufficiently like my old body that I retain my old personality.

C. That AIs, whether synthetic or formerly human, should not be given complete freedom because their values and goals would change to match the system they inhabit. If I were uploaded to a car, I might find myself preferring gasoline and spare parts to love and human kindness.

TheOtherDave13y00

What are you trying to achieve with these questions?

If you just think the questions are entertaining to think about, you might find reading the Sequences worthwhile, as they and the discussions around them explore many of these questions at some length.

If you're trying to explore something more targeted, I've failed to decipher what it might be.

It may even preserve its own values to continue achieving the goal

This is backwards. An intelligent system selects goals that, if achieved, optimize the world according to its values.

I change it so I feel

... (read more)

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