in regard to: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nv8/do_you_want_to_be_like_kuro5hin_because_this_is/
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here are my recent posts:
There are more, but you can also go to my (new) website - http://www.bearlamp.com.au and see them all.
Upvote post for those who have been hit by collateral damage in the Elo / Nier war, as it happened to me. I promise to upvote everyone who writes under this something that is not controversial.
If the problem is the sockpuppet army, while coders create a systematic solution, the community can help and show that the army of goodwilling men and women are stronger than any puppet master.
We won the war against Eugene... for a brief instant.
I'm keeping score and calculating the number of downvotes/upvotes on the comment where I requested help against Eugene Nier downvotes campaign.
Well, there was a moment where 14 people upvoted and 20 puppets downvoted. Now we are at a point where 21 people upvoted and 30 puppets downvoted. This means that at least we forced Eugene to increase the count of his puppets to fight back. I count this as score for LW :)
#makelwniceagain
I don't think that opposing strategic voting by strategic voting is an improvement. (Noise + more noise != signal.) I also don't see how forcing Eugine to increase the number of sockpuppets is a good thing, especially if the difference is between 20 and 30.
Thanks for trying! I just think this is a wrong direction.
Here's the problem with talking x-risk with cynics who believe humanity is a net negative, and also a couple possible solutions.
Frequently, when discussing the great filter, or averting nuclear war, someone will bring up the notion that it would be a good thing. Humanity has such a bad track record with environmental responsibility or human rights abuses toward less advanced civilizations, that the planet, and by extension the universe, would be better off without us. Or so the argument goes. I've even seen some countersignaling severe enough to argue, somewhat seriously, in favor of building more nukes and weapons, out of a vague but general hatred for our collective insanity, politics, pettiness, etc.
Obviously these aren't exactly careful, step by step arguments, where if I refute some point they'll reverse their decision and decide we should spread humanity to the stars. It's a very general, diffuse dissatisfaction, and if I were to refute any one part, the response would be "ok sure, but what about [lists a thousand other things that are wrong with the world]". It's like fighting fog, because it's not their true objection, at least not quite. It's not like either of u...
I think there's also a near/far thing going on. I can't find it now, but somewhere in the rationalist diaspora someone discussed a study showing that people will donate more to help a smaller number of injured birds. That's one reason why charity adds focus on 1 person or family's story, rather than faceless statistics.
Combining this with what you pointed out, maybe a fun place to take the discussion would be to suggest that we start with a specific one of our friends. "Exactly. Let's start with Bob. Alice next, then you. I'll volunteer to go last. After all, I wouldn't want you guys to have to suffer through the loss of all your friends, one by one. No need to thank me, it is it's own reward."
EDIT: I was thinking of scope insensitivity, but couldn't remember the name. It's not just a LW concept, but also an empirically studied bias with a Wikipedia page and everything.
However, I mis-remembered it above. It's true that I could cherry pick numbers and say that donations went down with scope in one case, but I'm guessing that's probably not statistically significant. People are probably willing to donate a little more, not less, to have an impact a hundred times as large. P...
Man burns down house remotely over the internet, for insurance, no accident.
Edit: was only posited, but ivestigators rigged up the supposed instrument of doom, a network printer with a piece of string.
Anyone know where I can find melatonin tablets <300 mcg? Splitting 300 mcg into 75 mcg quarters still gives me morning sleepiness, thinking smaller dose will reduce remaining melatonin upon wake time. Thanks.
Software to measure preferences?
I have a set of questions, in which a person faces a choice, which changes the odds of two moderately-positive but mutually-exclusive outcomes. Eg, with Choice #1, there is a 10% chance of X and a 20% chance of Y, while with Choice #2, there is a 15% chance of X and a 10% chance of Y. I want to find out if there are any recognizable patterns in which options the agent will choose. Is there any software already freely available which can be used to help figure this out?
"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier
"various scenarios that require trust: deciding if one should trust a prediction, choosing between models, improving an untrustworthy classifier, and identifying why a classifier should not be trusted. "
I think it would be interesting if we weigh the benefits of human desire modification in all its forms (ranging from strategies like delayed gratification to brain pleasure centre stimulation: covered very well in this fun theory sequence article ) against the costs of continuous improvement.
Some of these costs :
Hi, I'm curious what rationalists (you) think of this video if you have time:
Why Rationality Is WRONG! - A Critique Of Rationalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaV6S45AD1w 1 h 22 min 47 s
Personally, I don't know much about all of the different obstacles in figuring out the truth so I can't do this myself. I simply bought it because it made sense to me, but if you can somehow go meta on the already meta, I would appreciate it.
I tried listening to the video on the 1.5× speed. Even so, the density of ideas is horribly low. It's something like:
Science is successful, but that makes scientists overconfident. By 'rationalists' I mean people who believe they already understand everything.
Those fools don't understand that "what they understand" is just a tiny fraction of the universe. Also, they don't realize that the universe is not rational; for example the animals are not rational. Existence itself has nothing to do with rationality or logic. Rationalists believe that the universe is rational, but that's just their projection. Rationality is an emergent property. Existence doesn't need logic, but logic needs existence, therefore existence is primary.
You can't use logic to prove whether the sun is shining or not; you have to look out of the window. You can invent an explanation for empirical facts, but there are hundreds of other equally valid explanations.
That was the first 16 minutes, then I became too bored to continue.
My opinion?
Well, of course if you define a "rationalist" as a strawman, you can easily prove the strawman is foolish. You don't need more than one hour to convince me...
I agree with the other commenters about this.
So I thought "maybe it gets more interesting later on" and skipped to 50:00. At which point he isn't bothering to make any arguments, merely preening over how he understands the world so much more deeply than rationalists, who will come and bother him with their "arguments" and "contradictions" and he can just see that they "haven't got any awareness" and trying to engage with them would be like trying to teach calculus to a dog, and that the mechanism used to brainwash suicide bombers and fundam...
Oh god. This is really bad.
Someone should tell him about the straw vulcan.
The more we (lw'ers) are tied to the word "Rationality". That should happen less. If you feel personally affected by the idea that someone says this part of your identity is wrong, then maybe it's time to be more fox and less hedgehog.
"Researchers discover machines can learn by simply observing, without being told what to look for"
Giving "rewards" for discovering rules, Turing Learning.
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/4761.html
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11721-016-0126-1
And China and Russia have the best coders for algorithms
https://arc.applause.com/2016/08/30/best-software-developers-in-the-world/
can anyone get this page to open? It's a stanford report on AI, all 2,800 pages...
My girlfriend and I disagreed about focussing on poor vs richer countries in terms of doing good. She made an argument along the lines of:
'In poorer countries the consumer goods are targeted to that class of poor people so making difference in inequality in places like Australia is more important than in poor countries because they are deprived of a supply of goods because the consumer culture is targeted towards the wealthier middle class.'
What do you make of it?
Here we again have usage of the word "arational" without an indication of what's meant with it. Earlier in this thread there was a charge that the video mixes two distinct context together. If you want to learn you could take that suggestion to become more clear and speak about what you mean.
Arational is independent of reasoning and understanding. It is what it is, any map is not the arational.
I'm made up of neurons that exist in the physical world.
That's a logical conclusion, a map. You haven't seen your own neurons and even if you could in this very moment, you couldn't be the neurons which you are seeing. You are constant, you can become aware of the neurons which you observing somehow, but you know that it's not you. Even if you somehow could look into your brain, there would always be a middle-man, a mirror, a computer, screen, the software that runs the computer and so forth.
If you exclude all of which you think is you, you will be left with you, no doubt. By that, I mean truly excluding all the senses, thoughts and everything which you think is you. All non-constants. You do not change. The body changes, thoughts changes, senses, feelings changes. You cannot be something which changes, you can become aware of the changes.
When you have increased your awareness in this way, and after you have excluded everything you think is you (including the I thought) and in desperation, your brain will finally show you who you are. Which might be the arational.
Speculation: Being arational does not require a map, even if some may call it "void" "nothingness" "nothing and everything" or the experience "enlightenment". Since you become arational, you were and already are everything. Technically, you are your environment and the environment doesn't exist or revolve around a "you" I think, from neurophilosophy or something.
When talking subjective experiences of experiencing things, whatever it is might actually be objective.
Now these are extraordinary claims which for me is speculation, it is a map like any other and I was just thinking out loud, even if it might not be relevant to the discussion. Sorry about that.
Noticing that you don't understand is a good first step. It's usually required for learning. Learning is hard when one already thinks one understands. In rationalist terms that's the skill of "noticing confusion"
In the same way, you wouldn't buy an expensive object if you already had said expensive object, because you think you already have something, you don't think you need something.
Basically you argue that there the meaning of language as if language is made up of plantonic ideals and in the next sentence you say that everything is just a map and therefore there's no such thing as the meaning. That's internally inconsistent.
I don't understand again, I mean that language is a map, all communication, every letter, every word, it's a human projection. I t ' s a h u m a n p r o j e c t i o n a n d n o t t t r u e .
As far as the substance goes, you argue against "is_a" statements and that "A is not B" when that isn't claimed. The claim is "A references B". Reference is a concept that's distinct from identity ("is_a").
I understand that everything is a reference, and some might not think about it. But what's the different between "is x" and "references to x" it's just a shortcut to say "is x"? Even if "is x" might be argued is flawed, like you think I mean, so the counter argument is "I reference to x, which means, is x in my language" but what I mean is that everything is a map, human projection, reference or not. The arational exists outside of reasoning etc.
Arational is independent of reasoning and understanding. It is what it is, any map is not the arational.
Are you advocating cartesian dualism?
That's a logical conclusion, a map. You haven't seen your own neurons and even if you could in this very moment, you couldn't be the neurons which you are seeing.
You confuse ontology and epistology. It might not be possible for me to prove that I'm made up of neurons but that doesn't mean that I'm not made up of neurons. You can't go from one to the other easily.
...I don't understand again, I mean that languag
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