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pslunch comments on The genie knows, but doesn't care - Less Wrong
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Comments (515)
Warning as before: XiXiDu = Alexander Kruel.
I'm confused as to the reason for the warning/outing, especially since the community seems to be doing an excellent job of dealing with his somewhat disjointed arguments. Downvotes, refutation, or banning in extreme cases are all viable forum-preserving responses. Publishing a dissenter's name seems at best bad manners and at worst rather crass intimidation.
I only did a quick search on him and although some of the behavior was quite obnoxious, is there anything I've missed that justifies this?
XiXiDu wasn't attempting or requesting anonymity - his LW profile openly lists his true name - and Alexander Kruel is someone with known problems (and a blog openly run under his true name) whom RobbBB might not know offhand was the same person as "XiXiDu" although this is public knowledge, nor might RobbBB realize that XiXiDu had the same irredeemable status as Loosemore.
I would not randomly out an LW poster for purposes of intimidation - I don't think I've ever looked at a username's associated private email address. Ever. Actually I'm not even sure offhand if our registration process requires/verifies that or not, since I was created as a pre-existing user at the dawn of time.
I do consider RobbBB's work highly valuable and I don't want him to feel disheartened by mistakenly thinking that a couple of eternal and irredeemable semitrolls are representative samples. Due to Civilizational Inadequacy, I don't think it's possible to ever convince the field of AI or philosophy of anything even as basic as the Orthogonality Thesis, but even I am not cynical enough to think that Loosemore or Kruel are representative samples.
Thanks, Eliezer! I knew who XiXiDu is. (And if I hadn't, I think the content of his posts makes it easy to infer.)
There are a variety of reasons I find this discussion useful at the moment, and decided to stir it up. In particular, ground-floor disputes like this can be handy for forcing me to taboo inferential-gap-laden ideas and to convert premises I haven't thought about at much length into actual arguments. But one of my reasons is not 'I think this is representative of what serious FAI discussions look like (or ought to look like)', no.
Glad to hear. It is interesting data that you managed to bring in 3 big name trolls for a single thread, considering their previous dispersion and lack of interest.
Kruel hasn't threatened to sue anyone for calling him an idiot, at least!
Pardon me, I've missed something. Who has threatened to sue someone for calling him an idiot? I'd have liked to see the inevitable "truth" defence.
Link.
Thank you for the clarification. While I have a certain hesitance to throw around terms like "irredeemable", I do understand the frustration with a certain, let's say, overconfident and persistent brand of misunderstanding and how difficult it can be to maintain a public forum in its presence.
My one suggestion is that, if the goal was to avoid RobbBB's (wonderfully high-quality comments, by the way) confusion, a private message might have been better. If the goal was more generally to minimize the confusion for those of us who are newer or less versed in LessWrong lore, more description might have been useful ("a known and persistent troll" or whatever) rather than just providing a name from the enemies list.
Agreed.
Though actually, Eliezer used similar phrasing regarding Richard Loosemore and got downvoted for it (not just by me). Admittedly, "persistent troll" is less extreme than "permanent idiot," but even so, the statement could be phrased to be more useful.
I'd suggest, "We've presented similar arguments to [person] already, and [he or she] remained unconvinced. Ponder carefully before deciding to spend much time arguing with [him or her]."
Not only is it less offensive this way, it does a better job of explaining itself. (Note: the "ponder carefully" section is quoting Eliezer; that part of his post was fine.)
[citation needed]
In all seriousness, as far as I know, almost no one in the world-at-large even knows about the Less Wrong community. Whenever I mention "Less Wrong" to someone, the reaction I get is "What are you talking about?" So I'm not sure how the rest of the world logically could have an opinion about Eliezer Yudkowsky, or people who believe the same things as him.
If you really want to convince people whom you believe are in a cult that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a deluded lunatic, you shouldn't make false assertions without evidence, or true statements worded in a way that could easily be interpreted as conveying something fairly obviously false.
As for me personally, if Eliezer is a deluded lunatic, then I am a deluded lunatic, and I would like to know that as soon as possible if that is the case. If you were mistaken, and Eliezer knew what he was talking about, would you prefer to know the same, and publicly retract your previously statements? If that happened, and you did, I know I for one would congratulate you publicly.
I dunno, I had seen plenty of evidence that "the rest of the world are all idiots" (assuming I understand you correctly) long before encountering LessWrong. I don't think that's an echo chamber (although other things may be.)
(Although I must admit LessWrong has a long way to go. This community is far from perfect.)
"The rest of the world"?
I'm aware of one small community that believes this (RationalWiki). I'm also aware of a sort of cloud of people who, while they may quite emphatically reject LessWrong, nonetheless seem to mostly hang out around people who know about it. Beyond that ... I don't think LessWrong is high profile enough; maybe those involved in some related fields might have opinions on it, having encountered LWers in the course of their work ...
Well ... yeah. Downvoted, that is, and if you keep starting arguments in the middle of unrelated threads, yes, they will probably be deleted.
However, if you wish to actually argue against specific claims routinely made on this site, I for one will certainly try to give you a fair hearing.
I would advise you to check out the discussions surrounding previous discussions on those topics (to make sure you have responses for the most common arguments), and generally be very careful to avoid making poor or confused arguments LWers have been trained to identify among the opposition.
I routinely use LessWrong articles whenever I need to reference a concept common here in a discussion, and thus far have seen little evidence for your claim. Then again, maybe I was talking to the wrong people.
What criteria did you have in mind for "very smart"? Or, for that matter, "look over your discussions?" Are you suggesting giving people links to the Sequences, randomly selected discussion threads, or simply the front page?