Sorry to complain, but I opened the site to see what was going on, and Main has gone to utter crap.
"Is spirituality irrational?" and "3 reasons it's irrational to demand 'rationalism' in social-justice activism" are now heavily-commented recent posts in Main. Meanwhile, "Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People" was published a short while ago, and nothing about it appears on this site.
Looks like this site has slid into the River of Low Domain-Knowledge, Easy-to-Discuss General Stuff, rather than staying up in the nice Forest of Stuff LW Purports to be About.
Context: Main is currently disabled; LessWrong 2.0
LessWrong is actively being redesigned. Until further notice, posts to Main have been disabled. Once the redesign is complete, LW may have multiple subs, none of which might be called 'Main', but one or more of which will be designated as where the nice Forest of Classic LW Stuff you're hoping to find here. The only posts in Main recently are meetup posts and the survey, which were promoted there for visibility. Apparently, usage statistics show for the last several months Discussion has been getting much more attention than Main, so Discussion is where non-crap is. Of course, there is no more explicit division between crap and non-crap you'd expect the 'Main'/'Discussion' divide to reflect. Try finding other ways to filter out crap, like reading the top posts from the previous week.
Don't apologize. I've been waiting for weeks for someone to complain, to make sure that it wasn't just me who felt this was an actual problem.
Just a random thing I wanted to say before I forget it:
It is okay to be rational and happy.
Why am I even saying this? Did anyone claim the opposite? Well, I haven't heard anyone say explicitly "no, as a rational person you must be always serious and grim", but sometimes people behave as if they believed that. Why could it be so?
There are many bad things in the world. Knowing and understanding more will make you see more of those bad things, which logically can make you sad. On the other hand, fools are believed to be ignorant and happy. So it's like we have an intuitive idea that intelligence or wisdom or rationality (I am not going to distinguish between these things properly; this is a comment on a blog, not a doctoral thesis) correlate negatively with happiness. Of course this isn't always true -- for example a paranoid person can be less rational, see more dangers, and thus be less happy -- but in general the idea seems plausible.
However, this is confusing two things: knowing in general that a bad thing exists, and thinking about it obsessively all the time. It is the latter that can make you sad 24/7. People in difficult situations often do have happy moments; they f...
Interesting astrophysics development in our solar system with astrobiological implications: the rings and inner moons of Saturn, everything closer than Titan, may be young, forming between 100 million and 1 billion years ago rather than at the dawn of the solar system.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07071
Recent measurements of Saturn's moon system suggest that it evolves due to tides quicker than was previously believed, with moons moving ourwards more rapidly due to bigger tidal bulges on Saturn transferring more energy. This would explain the large quantity of heat pouring out of Enceladus and powering its geysers and oceans. Tidal forces go down with the cube of distance so closer moons should move out much faster than further moons. Using new figures one can trace back the orbits of the inner moons and see that they should have hit various orbital resonances during the history of the solar system as the ratios of orbital periods changed, which would have left imprints in the system in the form of effects on the rings and changes to the orbits of the moons that we see no evidence of. Conclusion is the system is younger than the age at which backtracking would produce those even...
user account: "Lamp" is banned for being eugine_nier. This is an update in case anyone was wondering.
so far accounts have been:
(that I know of, I think there were more in between too that I forgot.)
If I could send this guy a message it would be this: You are quite literally wasting our time. And by "our" I mean; the moderators and the people who could be spending their time improving the place, coding and implementing a better place; instead are spending their time getting rid of you over and over. DON'T COME BACK. You are literally killing LW.
I don't want to get into the community's time or the time of the people you debate with; or the time of anyone who reads this post here. That time also adds up. Seriously.
If one banned troll (and AFAIK, we only have one who's bothering to come back, and doing so badly enough to get caught repeatedly) is enough to kill LW, we're in pretty bad shape.
Thanks to the mods for continuing to remove his accounts, but please try not to spend any more thought on him than you feel is beneficial.
You're getting dramatic for no good reason. I don't think that in reality people didn't submit patches because they were too busy with Eugine. Just didn't happen.
You are literally killing LW
Nope. Availability bias is a fallacy. Eugine is a very minor problem for LW.
I'm not sure Eugine is sucking up nearly that much moderator time. I expect his bigoted comments do more damage because we're likely to lose some good commenters.
Interesting molecular biology/neuroscience development: magnetically sensitive ion channels.
Some researchers through a series of trial and error screens managed to tether a tension sensitive ion chanel to an iron storage protein such that in the presence of strong magnetic fields (think rare earth magnets) the channels are pulled open and able to induce action potentials in electrically active cells.
Upon expression in sensory nerves on zebrafish, the fish reacted to swimming into magnetic fields as if they were being poked. Upon expression in deep brai...
This is a meta thread for the Positivity Thread.
All opinions about the Positivity Thread as a whole or about specific comments therein belong here.
It's hard for destruction to be nice.
Disagree. If you genuinely wish to help someone by destroying something by truth, and you fully take into account their subjective experience of the situation, you can be nice while destroying things.
Should we try to promote the most valuable/important (maybe older?) Less Wrong content on the front page? Currently the front page features a bunch of links and featured articles that don't seem to be organized in any systematic way. Maybe Less Wrong would be more attractive/useful to new people if they could access the best the site has to offer directly from the front page (or at least more if it, and in a systematic way)?
Want to tell the future? Ask an PhD, unemployed, media-experienced, female, high-self-rated-relevance-of-expertise, right wing, realist, optimist, cognitively-foxy, extremist with integratively complex thought protocols, according to the evidence in Tetlock's Expert Political Judgement book exerpts tables for: 'individual difference predictors of calibration of subjective probability forecasts, and variable loadings in rotated factor matrix from maximum likelihood factors analysis (quartimin rototation) of belief systems item' >wtf does that mean?<
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ngj/open_thread_april_4_april_10_2016/d7q6
In a follow up of unprecedented proportions - our disappointing protagonist Aladdin returns in the long awaited sequel Lamp2.
Following gwern's post about Melatonin, I did a self-trial of melatonin to see if it improved my sleep.
Objective: To see whether I (myself only) should take melatonin regularly or not. Therefore: Have a clinically significant decrease in sleep time or increase in daytime awakeness. Clinically significant=statistically different & meaningful (i.e. 1 minute difference is not worth the effort, for example)
Note that at baseline, I never have trouble falling asleep, and I never have trouble staying asleep. Melatonin is theoretically advantageous in inducing...
Review of state-of-the-arts in artificial intelligence. Present and future of AI.
Vladimir Shakirov
http://immortality-roadmap.com/review-of-state-of-the-arts.pdf
The article has some interesting insights in latest deep learning successes. It is an example of hyper-optimistic thinking about AI timing (which is hyper-pessimistic, if we look on risks), as 2020-2030 for the authors seems like a plausible dates of AI arrival.
Some quotes: "The difference between year 2011 and year 2016 is enormous. The difference between 2016 and 2021 would be even much mor...
From experience, it results in better life quality if you call out bulls**ters without being angry inside about it.
From Omnilibrium:
Many people are aware of Alicorn's post on polyhacking. There are a few things which have been written on bihacking, though I haven't seen bihacking discussed within the rationalist community as widely as polyhacking has been. Bihacking is the process of actively trying to become bisexual.
First, there are a couple sources which suggest that people can have "epiphanies", after which they become bisexual, or perhaps just recognize their latent bisexuality. This may be due to the fact that they are able to tell themselves different stories about the...
To avoid only reading filtered evidence, people interested in polyhacking might also look at this SSC thread.
Yvain's latest post at SSC is, among other things, about the dynamics of tribes:
Scholars call the process of creating a new tribe “ethnogenesis” ... My model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying flag, development, and dissolution.
Homework assignment: apply the four-stage model to LessWrong.
(meta: I'm not sure if I should make a Discussion post for this, so I'm posting here. Feedback most welcome)
I'm exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.
Most productivity methods suggest the obvious, to keep wasteful activities in check. It could be gaming, chatting, checking news websites. They all share a common trait: you don't gain any significant utility (nor money, nor fun, nor rest) for spending more time on it. You achieve the same result by spending a little time on it, rather t...
Remembering the existence of the term ‘compersion’ gives me hope that I may overcome some jealousy I have felt lately :) At the back of my mind I fear the only reason the girl I'm dating is into me is because of transference from her ex boyfriend who's vibe I apparently give off, convenience since I live close by, and the 'rebound' of a recent breakup
Why would you take head of information that doesn't help you? it's up to you
Effective Altruist? No, I participate in the effective altruism community because I'm Hindu and needa game the Karma yoga system
Oftentimes, I am confused because I didn't lock in my algorithm. This makes my behavior incongruent.
you failed at it
Perhaps. Or perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn't a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o'-text.
if that meaning is a misshapen piece of jelly weakly flopping around
Which, it seems to me, it wasn't and you have given no reason to think it was. What you have (quite correctly but, in my view, pointlessly) complained about is that an uncharitably literal reading of what I wrote is very vague. True enough; I think the only way to avoid vagueness and wrongness was more wall-o'-text than I was prepared to waste people's time with.
Of course, the ensuing discussion has produced more text and more timewasting than if I'd just written the long and boring version in the first place. Perhaps what I write will tend further in the wall-o'-text direction in future. If so, it will be wordier and more boring, and the only real benefit will be that it will be a bit less vulnerable to one particular sort of bad-faith objection. I do not think that would be a benefit to LW.
Descending briefly to the object level, let me at this point state the original claim[1] more carefully:
[1] It may be worth an explicit reminder that it wasn't a statement of my opinion but an attempt to indicate what sort of thing someone else had been saying. My elaboration here will be on both dxu's original comment and my sketchy and incomplete summary of what s/he was saying.
Suppose you adopt the approach dxu summarized as "when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately". Then discussions in which someone other than you makes some statement that doesn't have all its details firmly nailed down are liable to feature sniping from you when the other guy makes some such statement. Since actually most discussion, even here, involves plenty of such statements, this doesn't have to happen a very large fraction of the time for it to be quite common.
Such discussions tend not to be much fun for the other party, for several reasons. They may feel personally attacked, which is an unpleasant feeling whether or not any sort of personal attack is actually intended. They may find that they have to devote an order of magnitude more time to the discussion than would be necessary without your bloody-mindedness. They may fear getting a reputation for long-windedness and pedantry, when in fact all they are doing is attempting to forestall your sniping.
(Lots of "They may ..." there. I suggest that maybe half of all people you do it to will find the experience unpleasant; maybe 1/4 of the time when you do it they will find themselves devoting far more time to the discussion than it warrants in itself; maybe 1/4 of people you do it to will for some time afterward feel at least some temptation to write defensively.)
You might argue that such a discussion is worth the unpleasantness because it results in clarifying what the other guy meant (or exposing his fuzzy thinking, if what he meant is not susceptible of clarification). But that may well not be the outcome. Much of the time (probably more than half) the other guy will decline to get into a lengthy and possibly unpleasant argument; in these cases, no clarification ensues, whatever productive discussion you could have had instead is forestalled, and no one wins. When they are willing to engage, there is a danger (let's say, again, p>0.5) that the other guy gets annoyed and defensive -- I am stipulating here that there is no chance at all that you would do such a thing -- and what follows is more ego-fight than useful discussion, and again the loss exceeds the gain. The rest of the time, perhaps you do in fact get a useful clarification; very good, but I suggest that in these cases -- where the other guy did mean something specific, was able to figure out what it was, and was disposed to be helpful -- a less aggressive approach would also have elicited the clarification.
The fact is that almost all discussion outside academic journals (and plenty inside them) involves plenty of statements that don't have all their details firmly nailed down, and that could be sniped at in this fashion. So once this pattern is noticed (which of course it has been, here on LW) -- especially when, as here, the person doing the sniping is very active and clearly has time to do a lot of sniping if he chooses -- many participants (let's say >= 10% of active participants, probably more) will feel some pressure to choose between writing defensively (at the cost of extra effort, increased boredom for their readers, reduced clarity for those not reading with aggressive uncharity, etc.) and getting sniped at unpleasantly. Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).
The overall result is -- in dxu's view, as I understand it, and also as it happens in mine -- that your conversational style is bad for LW. It's probably good for you, though: sniping is fun, and is an effective way to pick up karma if you happen to care about that. Chalk up one more victory for Moloch.
perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn't a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o'-text
In such situations I usually choose to not say anything and let it go.
When both of your options lose, the only way to win is not to play :-)
Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).
Since we've been talking about trade-offs, let me point out that there is one here, too. Let's imagine a wonderful world where people like me are absent and everyone is very nice,...
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.