I think one possibility you're not considering, and one which applies frequently when mispronunciation is used as a negative signal, is the case of a shibboleth. A mispronunciation becomes a shibboleth when it's frequently discussed, joked about, known in the field. If you fail the shibboleth test, that's evidence that you're not familiar enough with the field to have encountered the test before, and that may legitimately be a negative signal.

E.g. consider the mispronunciation of nuclear as nu-cu-lar, which carries a stigma and is liable to get you mocked. The mispronunciation has become, by itself, a widely known symbol. There are genuine linguistic reasons for this mispronunciation, and many people grow up with it "innocently", so to speak, but then correct themselves as they start studying physics, because they've heard or read about its shibboleth status; even if you're self-taught and get most of your knowledge from books, it's difficult to miss it. Thus if you pronounce nu-cu-lar, I can infer that either you haven't seen its shibboleth status discussed/maintained, which hints that you haven't been much around physics, in verbal or written form; or that you've seen that, but didn't care to update - your c), which happens rather infrequently.

Contrast this with many possible and actual mispronunciations in physics that did not achieve a shibboleth status - in those cases, I think most often people don't care. Is "boson" pronounced with [s] or [z]? The dictionary happily lists both. Names are mangled on a regular based without listeners batting an eye as long as they understand who it is. And so forth. Even if the listener could plausibly infer your a), I haven't found it to be a strong negative signal in many circles.

Is there some reason why it's not technically possible?

It seems to me that on lesswrong there is an overemphasis on status as a human motivator. For example, I think it's possible for a scientist to want to make an important discovery not to gain status in the scientific community but for the beauty of knowledge.

I think you miss the point of how status is related to motivation. Relatively few people actually think "I want status and so I will do X". Instead, they just actually want to do X because that is what they feel like doing. However when we wish to model or predict how humans will behave the status concept is powerful. "What would we expect people to do in this situation assuming they were optimized to do what would work to gain social status in their environment of adaptation?" often gives good predictions of what people will do.

Note that people's feelings and desires being real and sincere does not make a behavior less about status. Likewise, a behavior being about status does not make feelings and desires less 'real'.

"Possible" is not a refutation of a general statement, only of an absolute one.

Rather, I suspect the emphasis is to compensate for nerds of various sorts - that being who makes up most of the LessWrong audience - placing far less emphasis on status than most people, thus failing to understand the overwhelming power of tribal politics in almost every human interaction.

Remember: we grew this great big brain just to do tribal politics. We grew general intelligence as a better way to do tribal politics. We discovered quantum mechanics and built a huge technological civilisation as side-effects of a mechanism to do tribal politics better. So I'd say that stuff is likely important to dealing effectively with other people, i.e., winning.

Good question, though :-)

I'm unsure of whether it is overused. However, I'm not convinced that the heavy emphasis on status pays much of its rent. What do the overarching status hypotheses predict that we would expect not to see if they weren't the case?

It's certainly possible, but that doesn't mean that status isn't a powerful motivator, and one which we're far more likely to underestimate.

The "hammer that makes you see all problems as nails" bit is a description I've used myself though, in regards to Robin Hanson in particular with his treatment of status and signalling. On Overcoming Bias far more than here I get the impression that a lot of the essays develop out of posing a question and asking "is there a way I can use status and signalling to explain this?"

Interesting. If you know of any other similar codifications of Rules for AIs that have been proposed or promulgated for other potential AI playgrounds, I would be interested in seeing links.

A question about this:

AI editors may not port themselves to other editors' machines unless invited so to do.

Does the "other editor's machines" refer to the machines hosting other Wikipedian AIs, or does it refer to machines owned by human Wikipedians? I notice one curious feature of this rule - it seems to proscribe behaviors not directly of concern to Wikipedia itself, but rather behaviors which victimize members of the Wikipedia community. A sanction against AIs who engage in this activity is not mentioned. Presumably, the sanction would be loss of editing privileges. Is this assumption correct?

Everything is possible. Quantum immortality refers to subjective anticipation, a ranking of future observations according to their importance for future plans that one can prepare and carry out with an impact on environment (utility). Since an agent can't personally carry out plans in possible worlds where it's dead, these worlds have low priority in reflection on possible plans, thus most of anticipation is concentrated where the agent survives, however improbable that is.

On the other hand, one doesn't prepare plans for carrying out in the past, and so the heuristic of subjective anticipation doesn't apply. There is no salient decision-theoretic measure to be concentrated in the possible worlds where the agent operated in the past.

There have been a few open threads in the discussion section- the concern was that some subjects were too minor to deserve separate discussion posts.

Some stuff is just too trivial for a discussion post, but is sufficiently on-topic to post at all. January's got 40 comments.