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Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015
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Comments (346)
What literature is available on who will be given moral consideration in a superintelligence's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) and how much weight each agent will be given?
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence mentions that it is an open problem as to whether AIs, non-human animals, currently deceased people, etc should be given moral consideration, and whether the values of those who aid in creating the superintelligence should be given more weight than that of others. However, Bostrom does not actually answer these questions, other than slightly advocating everyone being given equal weight in the CEV. The abstracts of other papers on CEV don't mention this topic, so I am doubtful on the usefulness of reading their entireties.
(This is a repost.)
Thinking of the prisoners-dilemma-with-access-to-sourcecode, an obvious strategy would be to allocate negentropy to agents that would employ the same strategy in proportion to the probability that they would have ended up in the position to allocate the universe's negentropy.
I don't think anyone has a satisfactory solution to what is inherently a political question, and I think people correctly anticipate that analyzing it through the lens of politics will lead to unsatisfying discussions.
I haven't seen The Martian yet, but I find the reviews of it interesting. Why would a robinsonade set on another planet appeal so strongly to people, and especially now?
Well, we can feel the spiritual sickness of living in our world full of parasites and thought police. You have to learn how to manipulate people and keep careful control over what you say and do around them so that you can have a tolerable life - and you don't have access to the most elite people who have the most power over our whole society, like, say, Federal Reserve bankers.
By contrast, it feels more natural and healthier for us to extract our sustenance from nature directly through the use of our own minds and hands, where you don't have to play these ridiculous mind games with idiots. Our ancestors repeatedly had to solve survival challenges posed by new environments and situations by doing their version of "sciencing the shit out of them," and today's movie audiences seem to respond to that by seeing it in a science fictional context.
This could also explain the popularity of those admittedly staged "survival" series on cable, along with the reality series which show blue collar guys working on commercial fishing boats, in logging camps or in gunsmithing shops. We know that we live largely in a simulacrum of reality, especially with all this social-justice make-believe, and the knowledge has become a splinter in our minds.
For the first time since Verne, real-life science has advanced so much that mundane sci-fi has gotten actually interesting. What's not to love about that?
I'm a bit confused about the concept of mundane sci-fi -- what's sci-fi about it or, rephrasing slightly, why is it not just plain old fiction?
The sci-fi part of it is the extrapolation into practical applications or social consequences of established science. If we take, for example, genetics, both X-Men and Gattaca are genetic sci-fi, but only Gattaca is credible from a scientific standpoint.
Your link defines mundane sci-fi as (emphasis mine):
I don't thing Gattaca qualifies.
As to X-Men, I don't consider them sci-fi at all, at least any more than, say, Twilight.
OK, think Gravity vs. Star Trek (ignoring for the sake of argument the factual inaccuracies in Gravity).
Gravity?
Gravity.
Ah, OK. Why is this sci-fi and not a regular drama? Because space..?
Good question: what does Gravity have that Titanic doesn't? Both are survival tales that deal with what can go horribly wrong with the latest technology, but the eerily prescient Futility wasn't considered sci-fi at the time. I think it's a sign that we live in interesting times that the definition of sci-fi is getting blurry. Apollo 13 counts as historical drama despite having a very similar topic to Gravity, mostly because the events in Apollo 13 did actually happen. For comparison, The Prestige is classified as sci-fi despite occurring in our relative past, and Left Behind, although set in the future, is not sci-fi by any definition.
Let's hope this is a preview of common people forcing the SJW elite to confront reality.
I again call bullshit on your vote manipulation. I saw this post rise from -3 to +4 in the same reload cycle in which your other post in the open thread rose from -10 to +7.
Well, I have two questions for you.
1- Let's say that advancedatheist is really manipulating votes. How would you do it? He would have to have dozens of fake identities, or having hacked the forum code somehow. What would be the evidence of this?
2- What evidence would convince you that he is not manipulating votes?
It's relatively* straightforward for the mods to see which accounts casted the votes. If the accounts have business casting votes that would be evidence that advancedatheist is not responsible for it.
*In theory, in practice Trike Apps hosts the server and one of their guys has to query the database.
Well now I've both read the book and saw the movie, and I can tell you that's the complete opposite: Mars is portrayed as the perfect alien environment, strikingly beautiful yet extremely deadly, uncaring about its human inhabitants.
The struggle of Watney is exactly this, surviving with only your wits and a few scraps of human technology, but doing so without ever losing humor and optimism (this is the reason I personally love it).
Humanity, in The Martian, is yearned, a safe heaven to return to. Literary speaking, the point of catharsis is the return inside the human community.
A new (for me) word: mathiness.
It's maybe worth saying that the term is clearly based on "truthiness".
Etymologically, yes, but conceptually I think it's more related to the ages-old idea of "dazzle 'em with bullshit".
Or in SSCese Eulering
Yep, an excellent connection.
Ha!
"In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics."
Out of Harvard, no less.
This assumes that there is a high social opportunity cost to academics' time.
Not quite -- this assumes there is a high opportunity cost to high-IQ people being in academia.
A majority of people in academia don't strike me as actually that high-IQ.
That does not mean their time couldn't be more valuable elsewhere.
Compared to what?
Does he know which portion is the waste of intelligence?
You can't know which. You can only infer from the overall effect I'd guess.
I agree. I was flippantly making a point on the lines of this quote
-John Wanamaker-
repeat, as I posted at the end of the last Open Thread, probably too late in its life for comments.
I'm planning on running an experiment to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
Potential crank warning; non-physicist proposing experiments. Sorry if I'm way off-base here, please let me know where I've gone wrong.
I was contemplating MWI and dark matter, and wondered if dark matter was just the gravitational influence of matter in other universes, where the other universes' matter is distributed differently to ours. Google tells me that others have proposed theories like this, but I can't find if anyone has ever tried to test it.
Has anyone ever tried to test this directly? We have gravimeters sensitive enough that one "detected the gradual increase in surface gravity as workmen cleared snow from its laboratory roof".
Imagine an experiment was run using a source of quantum-random binary data, with the protocol to move a large mass close to and further away from the gravimeter based on the quantum data. My expectation based on this theory is that the gravimeter would measure:
The experimenters would want to repeat the quantum mass movements many times, so that as many universes as possible are able to measure both the 'close to' and 'further away' positions of the mass at least once. (If the experiment only did 5 measurements, 2 out of 32 universes would have their experiment be 'mass is always close' or 'mass is always further away', and therefore don't get the full benefit of the experiment.
Interestingly if this theory were true, experiments could be run where the gravimeter and mass are used to communicate between universes.
Is this the sort of experiment in which you would need macroscopically different 'universes' separated from each other by single quantum events, such that the thermal noise/interaction with the environment of the large experimental mass must be dealt with?
MWI doesn't work that way. Universes are close iff the particles are in about the same place.
There have been some similar ideas, but not related to MWI - as DanielLC says, the "distance" that separates two different states of the universe does not behave like we commonly imagine distance between "parallel worlds" to behave.
However, something that can behave like that is these extra spatial dimensions proposed by string theory, brane theory, etc. See wikipedia. I'm sure someone has proposed this as an explanation for dark matter.
Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to -10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he's been at this for quite some time, I've seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I'm sick of it.
I haven't done anything to "abuse" the voting system, and you should retract your accusation because you have no evidence of that. I don't understand how my posts can gain so many upvotes in such a short time.
Do you believe that those posts that receive massive downvotes are healthy for LW? Otherwise why do you continue posting them?
Speaking for myself, I find most of his contributions relevant and interesting.
The question was specifically about the ones that get lots of downvotes. That is, the ones where he's riding his hobbyhorse of complaining about the phenomenon of men not getting any sex even though they'd like to, and specifically the fact that he is in that situation. Do you find those relevant and interesting?
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
From the net karma and the ratio of karma one can compute the number of votes, approximately. (Approximately, because the ratio is only reported to the nearest 1%.) As of this moment, these five posts have received at least the following number of votes, listed as up, down, and total:
These are minimum numbers, e.g. the first (-2 total, 48% positive) is also consistent with 32 34 66.
20 is an extraordinary number of downvotes to receive, but as far as I know, there's no karma minimum required for upvotes, One might think about changing that. I have to wonder how many accounts there are whose sole activity has been to upvote him.
Could we ask an admin to make a graph of all users on LW, with edges saying how many posts of one user another has upvoted, and all name labels removed except advancedatheist's?
The numbers would have to be shuffled enough that no group of people could use public karma counts and their knowledge of whom they upvoted to gain too much info that ought to be anonymous.
Do we have a crypthography expert that can think of an algorithm that would work for that?
Or the admins could leave out the shuffling/delabeling and only examine the graph to see whether the situation is reasonable.
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
That seems way too much work for a little bit of internet drama.
Basically work that's not done by asking an admin to do it but by somebody writing the necessary code (the system is open source) and then giving that code to be run against the database.
I seem to remember that there is a way to access the latest (simplified) database dump without admin access. Don't remember where or whether it shows vote sources though.
If there are any such accounts, I would regard that as strong evidence of some kind of malfeasance. Note that advancedatheist vigorously denies any sort of abuse of the system and says he doesn't know how those comments got so many upvotes.
I have also upvoted a significant number of his posts esp. if those were 'excessively' downvoted. I agree that there is a common theme and that he repeats himself but one could read that cheritably as providing context for his posts which are not always about th same thing but highlight differnt albeit tangential aspects of some general topic.
More charitable hypothesis: The people most likely to notice an advancedatheist comment the quickest downvote. The next wave of people finds the downvoting excessive and upvote in response.
This doesn't really predict -10 to +3 swings, though.
I think such people may be more harmful to the voting system than the usual vote manipulation.
Your vote should express whether you want to see more of something or less of something on LessWrong. Not to be used strategically to counter other people's votes. Then not only you don't contribute to the system, but also remove other people's contributions. What is it exactly you aim for? A webpage where no one will bother to downvote annoying content, because they will know someone else will immediately upvote it back?
You should upvote only those comments you would upvote regardless of their current score.
I disagree, that is, I think it is reasonable to upvote or downvote "strategically." I agree with the proposed motive (how much of this kind of content do you want to see), but e.g. if I see a comment which I think is not particularly bad, but also not particularly good, so I don't care to increase or decrease the amount of it on Less Wrong, then I will upvote that comment if I see it downvoted, and might very well downvote it if I see it upvoted.
If I see a comment downvoted to -2 or -3, and I would like to see less of it on Less Wrong, that does not necessarily mean I should downvote it again, since this could result in not seeing such comments at all, which is not necessarily what I want. I want there to be less content like that, but not none at all.
In other words, I agree with your proposed goal, but I think strategic voting is a reasonable means of attaining that goal.
I may be misunderstanding what you wrote, but it seems to me you just said that if you have no genuine preference for having more or less of some kind of content, your second preference is to negate the expressed preferences of other LW readers.
If too many have voted to see less of X, you vote for more X, not because you literally want "more X", but because you want "more of what many other people don't want". And if too many have voted to see more of X, you vote for less X, again not because you literally want "less X", but because you want "less of what many other people want".
So, essentially, your preference is that other people get less of what they want, and more of what they don't want?
It is not a question of opposing other people's preferences. It is question of taking the actions that will most likely result in the situation which is closest to the one I want. For example, in the first case, I meant that I do not want that amount of the content either increased or decreased. I do not mean that I do not care. I mean I like things the way they are. If the comment is at -1, I will likely start to see less of it. Since I do not want it increased or decreased, I upvote it.
That certainly does not mean that I want to increase anything just because other people want less of it, or decrease anything because they want more of it.
But the mechanism by which you do so is opposing other people's preferences. That is, if there's a comment that I want to be at net 0, then upvoting it if it's at -1 or downvoting it if it's at +1 accomplishes that goal, but which one I do depends on what the community consensus was at the time of voting.
In general, I think voting based on current karma decreases the info content of voting and harms more than it helps. Vote on your desire to see or not see a comment, not your desire for the community to want to see or not want to see the comment!
I don't think your second paragraph follows from your first.
I agree that establishing the general claim that voting based on current karma harms more than it helps requires more than the first paragraph, and is just a statement of a conclusion rather than an argument leading to that conclusion.
But I think the rest of the second paragraph is related to the first--the reason why it decreases the info content of voting is because the votes are clashing (your vote on a comment is now negatively correlated with my vote, making your vote less influential).
I also don't think the first claim makes much sense. First of all, it's not always anti correlated. It's only anti-correlated if you vote unconditionally, and the post is far below or far above the value we think it provides. If it's positive, but not positive enough, the vote is correlated. If it's negative, but not negative enough, the vote is correlated.
Secondly, you're assuming everyone uses the same scoring rule you do. We've already established that at least two people use the different scoring rule, and as another commenter pointed out, it's likely that there are many people who vote strategically. In that case, if we think the post has the same value, we'd do the same thing in the same situation, and if we think it doesn't ahve the same value, they're not - which is how it should be.
I do the same thing, but the preference for me is really "The vote score should be in proportion to how much I think the post adds to the discussion." If it's at -10, but I think it adds a little to the discussion (or only takes away a little) I'll upvote, because the score is out of proportion with the value it provides or takes away. If a comment is at +100 but only adds a little to the discussion, I'll downvote.
A consequence of this is that the total score of a comment depends on the order of voting.
For example, if your algorithm is "upvote below 5, downvote above 5", and ten other people want to upvote unconditionally, then the final score may be 11 or 9 depending on whether you voted first or last.
You can change your vote later if necessary, and sometimes I do, either to no vote at all, or to the opposite vote.
A consequence of voting unconditionally is that you'll contribute to comments being higher than you think they deserve. All scoring rules have tradeoffs.
I think I disagree with the idea that a comment deserves a specific number of votes.
Comment karma is "the number of people who liked it, and cared enough to click the button, minus the number of people who disliked it, and cared enough to click the button".
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five? Downvoting a comment strategically is like saying "this is a nice comment, but it doesn't deserve more than five people to like it; and because six people said they like it, I am saying that I dislike it, just so that it gets the result it deserves".
"Strategic" voting is pretty much unavoidable, since voting has some cost (however mild). It makes sense to vote when you think it will make a useful contribution, by expressing a different POV than other LessWrong contributors would. Does this make scores less representative? It's not clear that it does - how many people would care if some unambiguously good comment is at, say, +17 as opposed to +19 because some users just didn't bother to vote it up?
That's one possible interpretation of voting on LW. It is not the only one possible. Do you think one can apply terms like "correct" or "wrong" to these interpretations?
Some people think in terms of people behind the comments and not comments themselves. They think that downvotes cause sadness for a person who was downvoted and they use their upvote as a consolation, as an attempt to cheer a downvoted person up.
I was thinking that OP was describing a situation [Post receives many upvotes and many downvotes] and ascribing the half he disagrees with to some kind of fake votes (sockpuppetry), while those who agree with him are depicted as being the genuine opinion of LW posters.
Which, if true, that's bad, but don't you sort of have to establish that? Like, isn't the exact opposite equally likely? Alternatively, what if all of votes are "genuine" (that is, represent different LW posters), or alternatively, are all false (that is, dude and some opponent are butting heads through false votes)?
Not only does it not predict such large swings it also doesn't fit with the fact that after such a swing (which occurs rapidly) he then gets a slow downward trend. I pointed this out to the moderators a while ago and so I have a record of how rapid some of the changes were:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls5/if_you_can_see_the_box_you_can_open_the_box/c1kf was at -9 within 8 hours of being posted, 12 hours later or so it was at +4. Note that it has now reverted to +0.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ln8/february_2015_media_thread/bx5u was at -5, then within 24 hours went to +6 and is now +3.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw6v was at -8 at 5 PM EST. At 7:10 EST it was at +6. In the same span http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw6w was at -13 and went to +0. After the fact over the next few days, both those comments went into the deep negative. Similarly http://lesswrong.com/lw/lk7/optimal_eating_or_rather_a_step_in_the_right/bvmk was at -4, then went in the same 2 hour time span up to 3 and then went to 2 (so was left alone after that).
Curiously, within the same 2 hour time span as that set of rapid upvoting, two highly negative comments in support of A went through a similar swing with again a slow reversion over the next few days http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw9t and http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw7l
These aren't the only examples, but simply the most blatant
Based on this evidence I assign an extremely high credence that some form of karma abuse is going on with someone using multiple accounts (approximately 90% certain). I assign an 80% chance that this person is doing so deliberately to upvote comments which are seen at odds with "liberal" politics in some form. I assign a slightly over 50% chance that AA is doing this himself. The fact that it took until now for him to address such concerns despite the fact that others have mentioned them is not positive. After AA himself, I assign the next most likely individual to be Eugine for obvious reasons.
Regardless of whether or not advancedatheist has been abusing the voting system, I'd like him to stop posting about involuntary celibacy (incel) entirely on LW. Though I sympathize with his plight-- people don't ever deserve to be in a state of mental strife, or experience anything that feels like suffering-- his posts on incel mostly don't attract quality replies, and probably scare people off. Moreover, he hasn't stopped posting about this despite having been consistently downvoted.
Are there any appropriate forums where he might be able to post about incel to a more receptive audience? Don't neoreactionaries tend to be sympathetic to incel folks?
I used to belong to a couple of incel fora many years ago, and from my experience I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Male incel communities are very hard to keep sane. They function as training camps for misogynists and PUA predators, and the few women who post advice there don't help as much as they believe they do. I was ridiculed every time I tried to calm down the hatred and resentment. I wouldn't wish to inflict that level of stress on anyone, much less anyone desperate enough to seek for such a place.
(Full disclosure: I'm bisexual, 32 years old, still a virgin with women, and opposed to both the premises and the methods of PUA.)
I've seen this happen with non-AA posts, too. Specifically, I'm thinking of buybuydandavis' replies to me in this thread (and I think the actual comment linked too, but I'm not sure about that).
I currently think (~75%) that it's not AA himself doing it. Eugine Nier seems more likely.
Do you think Eugine Nier would think that the posts are valuable?
I don't have a strong model of either of them. But Eugine is known to abuse the voting mechanism with alts, and I generally expect that most people don't do that. I also find it plausible that Eugine would mass-upvote those posts just to be a douche, even if he didn't particularly care for them.
Given access to the raw data of who upvotes what and at what time, an algorithm should be able to auto flag sockpuppets, at least until the sockpuppets get wiser and start upvoting at different times of day.
Looking for lots of accounts with similar IP addresses is a strategy too, but proxies could be a problem.
I wanted to sow some spinach and lettuce this month cause it's the right time, both all these aphids are eating my brocoli. Not hard to get rid of, but so disgusting. Don't even want to eat it now. Growing your own food is so hard. Thank god for economic specialisation.
Thoughts on GetUp's Budget campaign?
When you were a child did you prefer to play the hero or the villain in pretend and role-playing games?
Today, are your favourite fictional characters heroes or villains?
May be worthwhile to ask this on the Polling Thread.
In the US, 'Professor' seems to refer to several classes of academic rank that are more junior ranks in the Australian system, where Professor denotes a full professor specifically. Are you aware of anyone who tried to assess the signalling benefit of cost of seeking a U.S professorship instead of a local academic position for career capital, authority or grants?
I am not aware of any such cases despite having been working in US and now UK academia for the past 20 years.
"Professor" in this sense tends to be a title of address rather than a job title: US students have learned that in most circumstances it is appropriate to refer to an instructor as Professor (whether assistant professor, associate professor or full professor.... or indeed in many cases even university teaching staff who do not have a PhD yet); in the UK this is only appropriate for full professors, and many still prefer to be addressed by first names.
Career capital, authority, grants: anyone who matters in the UK is likely to be aware of differences in job titles and the approximate mapping between them (ie UK lecturer = US assistant professor, UK reader = US associate prof, professor = professor). Grants: while biased toward established academics this is more about publications, other grants, profile and not the title itself.
Sometimes people use honorary appointments the way you suggest, though. I know of one person who got updated business cards to add "Honorary Professor, X University" once a meaningless honorary appointment (granting library access and little more) was approved.
I have also seen cases that could work in the opposite direction: UK lecturers who want to maintain a US profile sometimes qualify their job title for the US market, as in "Lecturer (US equivalent = assistant professor)". This is because many US universities use "lecturer" as job title for adjunct teaching staff (lower status than appropriate).
...and then, there are the Germans :-)
This week on the slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
I wonder how extended time would go. I.e. On a spaceship with the only crew being consenting duplicates of one human entity. I feel like there would be an eerie consensus and trust.
Like. That understanding of one's self, would truly extend to those around you. And yet when I consider myself as a human similar to the humans around me - I don't think I would ever get along with other humans with the same peacefulness that I could have - knowing I was getting along with duplicate myselves.
Although I now wonder if applying duplicate myselves outward as an imprint mould on the other humans - would help me get along with more people, and communicate and understand more than ever before...
I wonder if a level of love and trust could be found in people who don't currently try to understand one another in any such way. By giving them this model of empathetic understanding of one another and everyone else's actions around them."
Programming - Some legalities of trying to auto-consent for people to give up their right to pursue your use of their contributions to your communal piece of work, "what does a legally valid transfer of copyright between two strangers emailing each other actually look like"
Projects - (renamed from composition) What we are writing about; Accountability space, Novels; Having a preference, Focussing, Data mining, Submitting things to the US DIA, Hypotheticals, Drawing with a wacom tablet, Dealing with clients, NLP, Remembering names.
"a web app that allows you to have a conversation with "simulated selves"" available here in version zero https://tangoapp.herokuapp.com/ "It's still probably very buggy, limited in functionality and confusing to use, but as they say... release fast! Mostly, I'm just posting because a couple people seemed interested in playing with it, and because I gave myself until the end of the weekend as a conservative estimate."
real life - Living in an RV, Sharing your salary with others, War and other stressful (but not always), deadly scenarios. Biases when debating, gun control (we all feel sorry for America)
rss feed - we have an RSS feed of any post on LW or SSC that notifies of posts if you are in the channel.
Science and technology - the electric car market, brain-volume and intelligence, cooling cap (for sleep quality improvement), Yelp for people (a pretty bad idea), smart light bulbs,
Startups - various startup ideas.
welcome - everyone answers the questions: "Would you like to introduce yourself? Where are you from? What do you do with your time? What are you working on? What problems are you trying to solve?"
Feel free to join us. Active meetup time: A time to try to get lots of people online to talk about things is going to be Sunday afternoon-night for the US, If you want to chat actively with other lesswrongers; we are going to try to be active at that time.
We have over 130 people who have signed up. Not nearly that many people are active, but each day something interesting happens...
last week on slack: http://lesswrong.com/lw/msa/open_thread_sep_21_sep_27_2015/crk1
I have banned advancedatheist. While he's been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.
I agree with the banning, given the fact that he was basically constantly commenting on the same issue, and one which is not particularly relevant to Less Wrong. But I disagree with this reason. Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)
LW self regulates the content of proposals via karma voting. In advancedatheist the communities desires were quite clearly expressed via karma votes and he still continued to bring up the topic.
Those post significantly reduce the likelihood that woman who read LW want to contribute. When the community karma votes that it doesn't want posts like this a user should accept that.
Yes, that's why I said I agreed with the banning.
Thank you.
I approve.
I disapprove.
Upvote because disapproval is not wrong around my universe. not sure if people are trying to downvote in support (aka they also disapprove) or against your disapproval.
Note that those that support the disapproval apparently have the decency not to downvote the approval.
How do we improve this?
Edit: wait - I support the show of approval too. I disagree with the disapproval but I support someone's ability to voice their opinion.
I also think that this sets a very murky precedent. I don't disagree at all with banning AA if it turns out he has abused voting privileges, but so far there's no hard evidence that he did. Putting that aside for now, all we're left with is a block being based on whether some individual moderator "can tolerate" some controversial comment (meaning that it attracts both downvotes and upvotes, as far as the LW userbase is concerned). This strikes me as careless.
I sympathize with your point of view, but I find it difficult to come up with rules. I don't know if this is enough, but I think the fact that I'm pretty tolerant about content (spam doesn't count as content) means people aren't at high risk of me losing my temper with them.
I'm not convinced I'm obligated to take my system 1 completely off-line when I'm dealing with ideas that are inimical to my interests.
For what it's worth, I have a long history at LW with a high karma score (typically 92% positive), I was offered the job of moderator rather than asking for it, and when I announced that I had become moderator, I got a lot of upvotes. I think these facts are evidence that I have a pretty good sense of the community.
Have a rule-- I detest it (though not to the point of banning people) when someone mentions something they saw online and doesn't offer a link, or at least apologize for not having one.
It's funny, that this triggered up your system I in this case. Offensivness on LW...
No, it was the suggestion that women should be given to men they don't want to marry combined with a bad posting history which caused me to ban. I'm also none too fond of suggestions that people should mistrust their own motives from someone who shows no capacity for examining their own motives.
Also note that I said I wouldn't ban for failure to include links. (Or were you joking?)
My system 1 was rather activated. I don't normally flame people, but I had some ideas for flaming aa to a crackly crunch.
I would say that flaming is a lot more polite than blocking - at least insofar as "politeness" is actually something ethically worthwhile. But maybe that's just me.
That sounds to me like a system II analysis of the situation.
Not examine one's own motives and not including links is a sign of a kind of intellectual laziness, that alone wouldn't be ground for banning but is in combination with offensive content it has a different quality than carefully crafted posts that communicate offensive content.
If I'm putting it in words, especially for LW, system 2 is going to get involving. However, a proposition of a system of forcing women into sex is something that I take personally because I imagine myself (not in great detail) being mistreated that way. I'm against a military draft, but I don't react the same way to a proposal of a draft for men. Actually, I don't react the same way to a proposal of a military draft for women. This is a personal issue, and trust me, my system one was involved.
(Sidetrack: I liked The Rainbow Cadenza, a science fiction novel in which women are drafted for sex, as a rather clear parallel-to-create-outrage to the military draft for men.)
It wasn't just not examining one's own motives in general, it was pushing opposed people to think the worst of their own motives while not looking at one's own.
I think, as a general rule, people in a decision-making capacity are best advised to recuse themselves from any choice whenever they feel that their System 1 is interfering. (In your case, I would've waited for some solid evidence on the karma-abuse question. After all, if the upvotes on that comment turned out to be genuine, that would definitely affect my own views.) I am aware that this is not always realistic. But make no mistake here - the thought process that led to this decision will also make LW less, not more trustworthy (however mildly) when dealing with issues that are unusually complex or politically contentious. Masculinity and involuntary celibacy are canaries in the coalmine - our treatment of them is direct evidence of how well we can treat everything else.
You care about false upvoting a great deal more than I do.
Is it worth mentioning that I was kinder to aa than most of the people who replied to him?
Check out the discussion at SlateStarCodex about banning Steve Johnson, a time-wasting fellow who wasn't quite breaking the rules.
SlateStarCodex does not have a karma system, though.On LW, time wasters tend to be downvoted swiftly, so they don't really waste much time anyway. If someone who's broadly considered a "time-waster" is nonetheless upvoted, this tells me that what they're posting is unusually interesting.
You can have a voting ring.
In this case AA's post got downvoted swiftly but still wasted a lot of energy.
I really want to hope I can say the same. I sort of took it as my personal mission to respond to every outrageous thing he said, and point out the problems with his politics and his theory of sexuality. As a former member of the online incel community, I thought I was in a better position to empathize with his situation, and could present alternative arguments in a way that he might be more receptive to than standard refutation. But AA never replied directly to me, so I don't know how he took my approach.
I think that's a really bad rule in almost any setting, including this one. It amounts to acting as a straw Vulcan.
Well, System 1 is a complicated beast. In most cases, it helps you reach better and quicker decisions than a Straw Vulcan would, and this is a good thing. But there are some times when you're fairly sure that it cannot be trusted - this is arguably one of these times.
That depends very much on the audience. Some people will trust more others will trust less.
I'm pretty sure that the latter will outnumber the former quite a bit. Speaking generally, we want social norms that discourage excess political talk (politics is the mindkiller, and gender politics is no exception) but when it does come up, people should be allowed to speak freely if they have something worthwhile to say. Anything else is a recipe for severe bias (via "evaporative cooling" and factionalization).
That's a strawman. Nancy said "last straw". It wasn't a single comment that caused the ban.
This community doesn't suffer from being overmoderated. I think it's worthwhile to have a moderator who is in the position to moderate when they think it's necessary to do so.
Why not ask advancedatheist to make his opinion clearer? My internal model of AA does not include him being especially supportive of, say, ISIS' sex slavery (to take one crystal-clear example of "women ... be[ing] distributed to men they don't want to have sex with"). Could it be that you're simply misinterpreting his original intent?
He has been sufficiently clear already. Nitpicking over the exact role he sees for women in society as he would arrange it is something that cannot possibly be to the benefit of this site and its community.
Does it include him declaring that society must make sure that men get enough sex, whatever it takes, and then averting his eyes from the "whatever it takes" particulars?
Well, what should "whatever it takes" mean, exactly? Very few values are anything close to non-negotiable - EY's Sequences are unusually clear on this.
If I had to guess, I'd say that AA thinks "men getting enough sex" could be achieved cheaply enough, by improving male attitudes (and more broadly, societal attitudes) towards masculinity and sex. That would doubtlessly make some radical feminists uncomfortable, but this is clearly the sort of "policy" option that's actually on the table. Which means that even treating your "particulars" as if they could ever be meant seriously is a batshit-crazy misrepresentation of what incels are actually talking about.
Averting one's eyes means that you never ask yourself that question.
"Make it happen, I don't want to know how" is not a terribly uncommon sentiment.
I think you meant "improving female attitudes".
Well, I can't speak for the whole incel subculture, but I'm pretty sure I meant what I wrote above. Of course, the point of changing societal attitudes is that once you stop telling women that they're supposed to hate "toxic" masculinity, their attitudes will improve as well. But that's pretty much obvious.
No problem-- I was reacting aa's complaints that women are too picky about men, and also revolted by men.
A lot of this discussion has convinced me that communication is difficult.
Yeah well, this whole exercise starts making very little sense once you go into such specifics - Viliam is right about this. It might be that you're putting too much weight on that one single complaint (which would just be considered a typically 'edgy' throwaway remark if it came from within the incel 'community'), or that I'm oversimplifying in assuming AA shares the broader views of the incel subculture and, more generally, the "Dark Enlightenment" (incels, redpillars, puas, neoreaction, what have you).
That's a strawman. AA speaks in favor of traditional partriarchy and that's a system that has arranged marriages where woman often have little to say about whom they want to marry and then have sex with.
I think that banning him was good from a consequentialist POV, but bad from deontological POV.
You may have a point. It turns out that at least one person would like to get in touch with aa, and I'm not sure how that's possible.
What's more (and this sounds like karma) I read something by a man who was involuntarily celibate, and discovered that hormone therapy helped. I'd have sworn I saw this on the most recent SlateStarCodex open thread, and now I can't find it. Meanwhile, it would be exactly like the usual human level of competence to treat a physical problem as though it has an emotional cause.
What deontological rule did you have in mind?
Freedom of Speech seems most obvious.
That's not a deontological rule.
Thou shalt not restrict freedom of speech.
Sigh. Jerking knees are rarely the best responses.
Trolls. Spam. Speech inside your home. Big loudspeakers outside your windows. Etc. etc.
Freedom of speech is a right with a matching duty to not interfere with the speech owed by the government. It's not a general deontological rule applicable to all human interactions.
There's a concept of "free speech absolutism" which basically says that if you are in a venue that encourages discourse, you should allow any speech.
You're not a deontologist, so you might look at that rule and say "but what about the consequences". But, that's not what a free speech absolutist would do.
Unless you are arguing that you are a free speech absolutist, or, maybe, that LW should be run under such absolutism, I don't see the relevance. There are a LOT of fringe concepts around.
I'm not a free speech absoluist, but I do think that Advanced Atheist should not ahve been banned for the reason of free speech.
Regardless of what I believe though, I wasn't arguing for or against it, I was answering Nancy's Question.
I was expecting a rule like bans should be preceded by a warning and a chance to reply.
But a rule like "don't ban people for opinions you disagree with" would also fit the bill, no?
It would, and I was following it for a while.
That's a rule I'd strongly support other than in cases of absolutely unambiguous spamming or clear sockpuppets of banned individuals.
He is free to continue speaking about the subject, just not on LW.
This is a very non-standard definition of freedom of speech.
No, it's the standard right of freedom of speech that's enshirned in the constitution.
In general an editor of a newspaper can decide which articles the newspaper is going to publish and a website can decide which posts to publish.
Classically nothing about the idea of freedom of speech compels other people to publish your opinions. Rather the idea is about giving people the choice to publish whatever they want to publish.
Try here: https://www.reddit.com/user/advancedatheist
I looked through his comments for a second, and at least on reddit he's talking about incel stuff in the relationship subreddits and cryonics in the transhuman subreddits.
Well, in other forums he suggested that women have systematically less intelligence than men. So I guess that to him women are not much more than domestic animals.
One side of me is happy that he is gone, the other side is mildly disappointed for the lack of a local bigot to study in a safe environment.
I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. Children certainly have less intelligence than adults, yet we shouldn't treat children as animals.
(Not that I agree with the first sentence)
Not per se, it follows from the first sentence and NancyLebovitz comment on him denying women autonomy.
This sentence is weird to me because I was not talking about what I think is right or how to steelman aa's thought.
Anyway, consider these:
- he believes that fully formed females have less intelligence than males;
- he attributes the difference to a systematic genetic trait;
- that he thinks women should be denied autonomy on a basic right.
How would you call the status of a sub-human non-autonomous being? Domestic or friendly animal seems to me quite precise.
Well children are both less intelligent than adults, and non-autonomous, in that they have no choice over whether they go to school etc., so I think my comparison still stands.
I also don't think that someone or some group having below-average intelligence means they are sub-human.
Also, does AA think that women have less general intelligence, or that they are less good specifically at STEM subjects? Because a lot of scientists do think that there are cognitive differences, but balanced, in that women have higher verbal & empathising intelligence.
Just a few thoughts:
I completely approve the ban. Although next time maybe getting a formal warning first would be better.
Let's not debate what exactly AA meant and what he didn't. He is not here to defend himself.
I have mixed feelings about this. He was posting the same argument about being incel in every single open thread, and the repetitiveness seems more annoying than the content, to me. But OTOH he also posted some interesting cryonics stuff.
Incidentally, suppose someone posted on the forum to say "As an Indian, my cultural heritage says that parents should decide who a woman marries."
Should this person be banned?
I'm not saying to support AA's position, nor as an attempt to criticise Indian culture, I'm just trying to see if we can have a consistent position on what counts as unacceptably offensive.
No, but that might be because the hypothetical Indian is making a much weaker policy suggestion.
By the way, arranged marriage means that neither partner has a choice.
I'm not sure what policy suggestion AA was making. I thought that you thought he was proposing forced marriages. What do you think he was proposing?
And of course, a lot of pressure is put on men to go into arranged marriages, but at the end of the day they do have a little more freedom, as if it comes down to violence they are more able to defend themselves. And that's a possibility - I have heard an girl of Indian decent say "I can't be forced into marriage because I have no male relatives and I could take my mum in a fight."
If they only say that once, no they shouldn't. If they say it umpteen times and continue doing so even after being downvoted to oblivion umpteen times, maybe.
Seems reasonable and consistent.
Do they say it once, or do they keep mentioning it all the time despite the downvotes?
I... what? As I understand the comment, he wanted to ban sex outside marriage. Describing that as "women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with" seems ridiculously exaggerated.
I agree that his one-issue thing was tiresome, and perhaps there is some argument for making "being boring and often off-topic" a bannable offense in itself. But this moderation action seems poorly thought through.
Edit: digging through his comment history finds this comment, where he writes it would be better to marry daughters off as young virgins. So I guess he did hold the view Nancy ascribed to him, even if it was not in evidence in the comment she linked to.
Also, "monogamy versus hypergamy" has been discussed on Less Wrong since the dawn of time. See e.g. this post and discussion in comments, from 2009. Deciding now that this topic is impermissible crimethink seems like a pretty drastic narrowing of allowed thoughts.
In my opinion, the problem wasn't the topic per se, but how the author approached it:
comments in every Open Thread on the same topic, zero visible learning.
Sure, I think that was annoying. But it's not the stated reason for the ban.
While I'm deeply concerned about the possibility that AA has been engaging in vote-gaming which does seem to be a bannable offense, it isn't clear to me that, as reprehensible as that comment is, that it is enough reason by itself for banning, especially because some of his comments (especially those on cryonics) have been clearly highly productive. I do agree that much of the content of that comment is pretty disgusting and unproductive, and at this point his focus on incel is borderline spamming with minimal connection to the point of LW. Maybe it would be more productive to just tell him that he can't talk about incel as a topic here?
I'm somewhat glad for aa's ban. I've lurked LW for a while now, and have found a lot of content posted here extremely interesting. Seeing aa's posts in open threads on incels every week being upvoted, containing content I felt was extremely prejudiced and malformed, with no apparent improvement over time, unnerved me quite a bit, and I felt like I was not only wasting my time reading his posts, but also gave me a negative impression of what LWers think. This was enough to stop me from browsing open-threads/browsing less wrong for a while.
Not being a constant user of LW, I was unaware of vote manipulation, but I did feel myself being confused by the apparent clash between aa's upvoted posts on incels and general concept I had of LW, so it shouldn't have been hard to conclude that there were alternative explanations for his upvotes.
I've found I've become a smidge more conservative-- I was in favor of the Arab Spring, and to put it mildly, it hasn't worked well. I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.
Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?
Was exactly does that mean? That you cheered when it happened? Or do you mean something more political significant?
I cheered when it happened.
The interesting question is how did you decide the Arab Spring was a good thing.
Was it because the New York Times told you so? Or was it a consequence of the prior that "More democracy is always good?"
I can't speak for Nancy, but my own reaction to the Arab Spring was something like "oh, that looks like a good thing if it actually works out rather than leading to more repression in the end", and it was a consequence of a prior that resembles the one you describe but contains less straw: "More democracy is usually good, other things being equal".
[EDITED to add: I mention this only because I find it striking how the two possibilities you mention are both, if you'll pardon my directness, rather stupid[1], and I'm wondering on what basis you assume that Nancy's reasons were stupid ones.]
[1] Meaning "it would be rather stupid to decide on that basis" rather than "it is stupid to think that someone else might decide on that basis". And of course "stupid" is a strong word; believing whatever you read in the NYT isn't really that bad a strategy. But I'm sure you see what I mean.
This is an entirely generic attitude suitable for everything that claims to have a noble aim in mind.
Doesn't look like a workable prior given that other things are never equal. Looks like a hedged version of "the expected value of more democracy is more good".
I don't think so. Nancy is not an expert in Arab politics -- she relies on opinions of others. Given this, accepting the prevailing opinion of the media (of the appropriate political flavour) is an entirely normal thing and happens all the time. "There is another coup in Backwardistan? The newspaper I read says it's bad? Oh, I guess it must be so <yawn>".
Ditto with using general priors when you can't or can't bother to analyze the situation yourself.
Nope. For instance, abstinence-only sex education claims to have in mind the noble end of preserving the virtue of the young. I do not particularly hope that it succeeds in its aims, because I disagree about their nobility.
Regarding what the "Arab Spring" was trying to do as a noble end (as opposed to one merely claimed to be noble) says something not altogether trivial about the values of the person who so regards it.
There may have been some influence from the NYT, but it was also less tyranny as well as more democracy.
Democracy is a quite deceptive word. 74% of Egyptians want Egypt to be ruled via the Sharia.
Did the NYT narrative have Egyptians suddenly stoning homosexuals which a majority of that country believes, or did it have the new government not representing the views of the Egyptian population?
As far as I remember not really. It had the idea that western democracy with people who value western value suddenly came to Egypt without really thinking it through.
"Less tyranny" isn't the same thing as "more democracy".
I'm not sure that I know what's meant with "less tyranny".
I definitely value it higher than the momentary high of getting to impose your values on others, which seems to be the opposite of the current US foreign policy.
I think the question is WAY too general. The only possible answer is: "It depends".
Lots! But it seems like if we start doing "yay stability" vs. "boo stagnation" we'll be at politics pretty quick.
Stagnation is actually a stable condition. It's "yay stability" vs. "boo instability," and "yay growth" vs. "boo stagnation."
Those are true words you wrote. I lounge corrected.
The Arab Spring has worked quite well in the one country that actually had a well-established civil society prior to it, namely Tunisia. (Not coincidentally, this is also where the AS got its start.) All else being equal, I am in favor of having solid evidence about the factors that can actually lead to long-lasting social improvement in the Arab world and elsewhere.
I think it was a gain for me, because it decreased the probability that Soviet Union would attack my country. Many people from former Soviet area of influence have the same opinion. Then again, many have the opposite opinion.
Also, as a result of collapse of Soviet Union, I am allowed to cross borders and attend LW meetups at Vienna. I know, it's pretty selfish to wish an entire empire to collapse only to improve my weekends, but still, I am selfishly happy.
I've been trying to prove things more often because I haven't done it a lot and I'm interested in a mathy career. I started reading Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation and came across a chance to try and prove the statement 'For every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.' I couldn't find other proofs online, so I thought I'd share mine here before I look at the book, especially because mine might be completely different and I wouldn't really know if it was any good.
A graph G equals the set of the set of nodes/vertices V and the set of edges E. That is, G = {V, E}.
Let G be the empty graph with no nodes and no edges. The sum of the degrees of the nodes of this graph is zero, which is even.
Let G be the graph with one node and no edges. The sum of the degrees of the nodes of this graph is zero, which is even.
Let G be an arbitrary, non-empty graph such that the sum of the degrees of the nodes in G is even.
Let G' be a graph identical to G in all respects except that it contains an additional node that is a member of an additional pair in E with one other node. (That is, 'make a new node' and 'make an edge' to attach it to an existing node with.) The degree of a node equals the number of pairs in E of which the node is a member. Each pair contains two elements, so that if a graph G has i edges and j equals the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G, then the sum of the degrees of all nodes in a graph G' with i+1 edges will equal j+2. Because this is true for an arbitrary, non-empty graph G, it is true for every non-empty graph G. j is even by assumption, and the sum of two even numbers is even, so j+2 is even. Because this is true for an arbitrary, non-empty graph G', it is true for every non-empty graph G.
For every non-empty graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even. The sum of the degrees of all nodes in the empty graph is even. Therefore, for every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.
Your operation for turning G into G' doesn't let you construct all graphs, e.g. K3 (the triangle graph) can't be formed like that. The rest of that paragraph is probably more dense than it needs to be. You're on the right track, but I can't quite tell if you actually rely on that construction.
Thanks for the feedback. I think you can construct all graphs and use it to prove the theorem if you prove that you can add an arbitrary number of additional edges and nodes to an arbitrary graph and keep the sum of the degrees of all nodes even, instead of just one additional node and one additional edge. I also see what you mean about this:
I think the inductive hypothesis in the rest of that paragraph might be enough, and I just wrote down how I intuitively visualized the proof before that without realizing that it wasn't necessary (nor sufficient, I now know) for the argument to carry through.
If you have an idea of how you would write the proof, I'd be interested in seeing it. I looked at the book and the proof is actually even less formal there.
If I were doing it inductively, I'd go in the other direction, removing edges instead of adding them. Take a graph G with n>0 edges, and remove an edge to get G'. The degree sum of G' is two less than the degree sum of G (two vertices lose one degree, or one vertex loses two degree). Then induction shows that the degree sum is twice the edge count. There are probably simpler proofs, but having been primed by yours, this is the one that comes to mind.
I feel like being completely formal is the sort of thing that you learn to do at the beginning of your math education, and then gradually move away from it. But you move to a higher class of non-rigor than you started from, where you're just eliding bookwork rather than saying things that don't necessarily work. E.g. here I've omitted the inductive base case, because I consider it obvious that the base case works, and the word "induction" tells me the shape of the argument without needing to write it explicitly.
Lemma: sum of the degrees of the nodes is twice the number of edges.
Proof: We proceed by induction on the number of edges. If a graph has 0 edges, the the sum of degrees of edges is 0=2(0). Now, by way of induction, assume, for all graphs with n edges, the sum of the degrees of the nodes 2n; we wish to show that, for all graphs with n+1 edges, the sum of the degrees of the nodes is 2(n+1). But the sum of the degrees of the nodes is (2n)+2 = 2(n+1). ∎
The theorem follows as a corollary.
If you want practice proving things and haven't had much experience so far, I'd recommend Mathematics for Computer Science, a textbook from MIT and distributed under a free license, along with the associated video lectures *. To use Terry Tao's words, Sipser is writing at both level 1 and 3: he's giving arguments an experienced mathematician is capable of filling in the details to form a rigorous argument, but also doing so in such a way that a level 1 mathematician can follow along. Critically, however, from what I understand from reading Sipser's preface, he's definitely not writing a book to move level 1 mathematicians to level 2, which is a primary goal of the MIT book. If you're looking to prove things because you haven't done it much before, I infer you're essentially looking to transition from level 1 to 2, hence the recommendation.
A particular technique I picked up from the MIT book, which I used here, was that, for inductive proofs, it's often easier to prove a stronger theorem, since it gives you stronger assumptions in the inductive step.
PM me if you want someone to look over your solutions (either for Sipser or the MIT book). In the general case, I'm a fan learning from textbooks and believe that working things out for yourself without being helped by an instructor makes you stronger, but I'm also convinced that you need feedback from a human when you're first getting learning how to prove things.
* The lectures follow an old version of the book, which ~350 pages shorter and, crucially, lacks exercises.
I think it's actually cleaner to prove the theorem non-inductively (though I appreciate that what GS asked for was specifically a cleaned-up inductive proof). E.g.: "Count pairs (vertex,edge) where the edge is incident on the vertex. The number of such pairs for a given vertex equals its degree, so the sum equals the sum of the degrees. The number of such pairs for a given edge equals 2, so the sum equals twice the number of edges."
(More visually: draw the graph. Now erase all of each edge apart from a little bit at each end. The resulting picture is a collection of stars, one per vertex. How many points have the stars in total?)
I really appreciate this comment, thank you.
I've actually never studied automata, computability, or complexity before either, so that's really why I picked up Sipser. But I'm downloading your other recommendation now (just moved, mobile Internet only); I can certainly imagine that some books are more useful than others for learning proof, I just saw an opportunity to practice and see how my natural ability is. I'll try to include things more specifically for learning proof in my diet. I sure will PM you if I need some feedback (I expect to), thanks.
FYI, this is called the sum of degrees theorem. In fact, the sum of degrees is not only an even number, but twice the number of edges in the graph. This is due to Euler, I think. He used the famous Koenigsberg bridges problem as a motivation for thinking about graphs.
Good work on thinking about proofs, +1 to you.
I love that I can come to this website and have one of Judea Pearl's former students check my elementary graph-theoretic proofs.
But really, thanks for the encouragement. I had also been wondering if it had a name.
I don't seem to be able to reply to a Gunnar Zarncke reply to my comment on another thread because of my low comment score.
How can I explain my comment and myself [to the extent that I can] to this resident of Germany?
BTW, my view of the world seems to be different than most of you.
Possibly it's because the mortality tables say that half the men born on the same day as me will dead in 14 years and so my priorities may be different. Also, most of my life has been lived so I'm not so much worried about the uncertainties that most of you seem to be. In fact, what else can they [they, in a general sense] do to me? :)
The books [don't ask which, I don't remember them all] tell me that I should come to terms with the life I have lived. This is not easy. I have failed to bring down almost all bad guys and failed to protect good guys.
I do thank this site for making me aware of things I've never heard of but I don't know that I can teach anyone here anything.
Thanks for reading.
Man, I want to try playing a game of Rationality Cardinality online, but the place is a wasteland. Anyone want to coordinate for some upcoming evening or something?
Heh. Andrew Gelman of the Bayesian Data Analysis textbook discovers Yvain.
My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years' donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don't donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I've been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it's worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I'd ask.