Hi folks! Building up on the recent experiment and the #LessWrongMoreNice meme, this thread is devoted to any and all expressions of gratitude. Special rules for communication and voting apply here. Please play along!
A lot of research shows that expressing gratitude improves mental and physical health, qualities that most of us want to increase. So in this thread, please express anything you are grateful for, big or small, one-time or continuing, and feel free to post stuff that you would not normally post to Less Wrong. Encourage and support others in what they post in comments, and upvote posts that you like, while downvoting those that don't express the spirit of this thread.
If you want to discuss this thread, please do so in response to this open thread comment.
I'm grateful to you for following the spirit of this thread!
The scarier thought is how often we're manipulated that way when people don't bungle their jobs. The few heuristics we use to identify such mischief are trivially misled (for example, establishing plausibility by posting on inconsequential other topics (at least on LW that incurs a measurable cognitive footprint, which is however not the case on, say, Reddit), and then there's always Poe's law to consider). Shills man, shills everywhere!
As they dictum goes, just cuz you're paranoid ...
Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway's apparent paranoid delusions of being under FBI surveillance ... only eventually it turned out he actually was. Well, at least if my family keep playing their roles well enough, from a functional blackbox perspective the distinction may not matter that much anyways. I wonder how they got the children to be such good actors, though. Mind chip implants?
As an aside, it's kind of curious that Prof. Tsipursky does his, let's say "social engineering", under his real name.
Anyways, good entertainment. Though on this forum, it's more of a guilty pleasure (drama is but a weed in our garth of rationality).
Interesting that your perspective is that I'm manipulating LWs, as opposed to genuinely trying to get InIn participants engaged in LW.
Let's imagine two worlds: one where I was, and one where I wasn't. You have evidence that I have accomplished quite a bit in my activities, which should tell you something about my abilities.
If I was trying to manipulate LWs, I would not do it so obviously. There's plenty of subtle maneuvers that could be do... (read more)