I was asked by several people to comment on this post/proposal. Clearly, Maxikov put a lot of time and effort into this post and, at least in part, there's the pity. When you find you have an idea which seems at once compelling and obvious (in tems of the science) in an already well explored field, the odds are very good that you weren't the first to reach that conjecture. And that almost always means that there is someting wrong with your premises. Very smart and capable people have been trying to achieve cryopreservation of cells, tissues, organs and organisms for over 50 years now and the physical chemistry of water under very high pressures and very low temperatures has been understood for far longer. This should be a hint that some careful searching of the literature is in order before going public with a proposal to "fix cryonics," and especially before spending a lot of time/energy on proposal like this.

Attempts to use extreme hydrostatic pressure to mitigate or eliminate freezing injury go back at least 60 years, and probably longer. As your phase diagram above shows, when the pressure is sufficiently high during cooling the expansiuon of water is prevented, but ice formation is not. What happens is that other allotropes of ice form which do not require expansion. However, this turns out to be a bad thing, since, as opposed to any of these ices being formed first in the interstitial spaces, as happens with Ice I, freezing occurs both intracellularly and extracellularly at the same time in the presence of other ice allotropes. Crystal formation inside cells results in devastating ultrastructural disruption - far worse than would occur if ice formed outside cells first, grew slowly and dehydrated the cells, and finally resulted in a vitrified cellular interior (providing that cryoprotectant is present).

However, the problem with this approach doesn't stop there. Extreme hyperbaria itself is directly damaging by at least two mechanisms: denaturation of cellular proteins (including critical enzymes and membrane proteins) and damage to cell membrane lipid leaflets resulting in permeabilization of the membrane to ions (Onuchic LF, Lacaz-Vieira F., Glycerol-induced baroprotection in erythrocyte membranes. Cryobiology. 1985 Oct;22(5):438-45.) Irreversible membrane damage occurs in mammalian red cells exposed to a pressure of 8000 atm (~117,600 psi) applied for ~10 minutes. Exposure of more comnplex mammamalian cells to far lower pressures~20,000 psi, results in loss of viability due to protein denaturation, and perhaphs due to alterations in the molecular structure of membrane lipids,as well. Interestingly, the same compounds that provide protection cellular (molecular) protection against freezing damage also confer substantial protection against baroinjury. Fahy, et al., have extensively explored the use of hyperbaria to augment vitrification in the rabbit kidney (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4559298.pdf) and have further extended work from the 1980s demonstrating that cryoprotectives are also substatntially baroprotective.

The first work that I'm aware of to attempt to achieve organ cryopreservation using hyperbaria was that of the late Armand Karow, in the late 1960s - early 1970s (Karow AM Jr, Liu WP, Humphries AL Jr. Survival of dog kidneys subjected to high pressures: necrosis of kidneys after freezing.Cryobiology. 1970 Sep-Oct;7(2):122-8. PMID: 5498348). Karow was able to demonstrate the brief tolerance of dog kidneys to pressures of about ~18,000 psi, however, kidneys subjected to isothermal hyperbaric freezing, even in the presence of of moderate cryoprotection, did not survive.

When I started research and experimentation in cryobiology nearly 40 years ago, there was no Internet, no (affordable) photocopiers and the only way to do a "literature search" was with something called the Index Medicus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Medicus) which was a veritable wall of bound volumes. I used 3" x 5" index cards to write down possible cites to look up - which then required a trip(s) to the "stacks" to look for the journals. Today, I have the Internet, Pubmed, the international patent database and on line library for 30 million books available. I currently have a digitial library of 12,000 mostly scientific and technical books which, at its current rate of growth, should double in size within a few months. My computer is almost constantly reading a book to me with software that cost me just under $5.00. One of the books I "read" recently was The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Carr argues that the Internet is fundamentally altering the way most people today process information - and not for the better. I don't use the Internet the way most people seem to, today. I rely heavily on books, especially textbooks, to educate me about areas with which I have little or no familiarity, and my approach is pretty much what it has been since I started my intellectual life; namely to study intensively and deeply until I achieve basic mastery of an area, and only then use skimming and browsing over large amounts of material to advance my knowledge. The tools of the information-digitial age have thus been a nearly unblemished advantage to me. If you want to reads Carr's book, click on this link:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/5s4wdr554ia4axn/Nicholas_Carr-The_Shallows__What_the_Internet_Is_Doing_to_Our_Brains_(2010).epub and then click on the green Download button.

I'm also posting links to a number of full text books on cryobioolgy which you can download, as per above:

ADVANCES IN BIOPRESERVATION: https://www.mediafire.com/?raccqhv0rrqfhmh

ADVANCES IN LOW TEMPERATURE BIOLOGY: https://www.mediafire.com/?4i6v9qublf3l8q2

FUNDAMENTALS OF CRYOBIOLOGY: https://www.mediafire.com/?pxq6mxbxvfib41j

CURRENT TRENDS IN CRYOBIOLOGY: https://www.mediafire.com/?pxq6mxbxvfib41j

CRYOPRESERVATION... https://www.mediafire.com/?pxq6mxbxvfib41j

LIFE IN THE FROZEN STATE: https://www.mediafire.com/?ydx3a89m2f47r7y

THE FROZEN CELL: https://www.mediafire.com/?ydx3a89m2f47r7y

Cheers, Mike Darwin

I can't believe Hermione Granger has been framed for murder by Tom Riddle....again.

There is no territory, it's maps all the way down.

Three shall be Peverell's sons and three their devices by which Death shall be defeated. - chapter 96

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches, born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month - - chapter 86

There has previously been some speculation that the dark lord in Harry's birth prophesy is death rather than Voldemort. I think this interpretation just got a lot stronger.

James and Lilly had defied Voldemort but not death. The new lines back an interpretation that the Peverells thrice defied death with the three deathly hollows and Harry is born to the Peverell line.

This is, in some ways, a more natural interpretation of that clause since James and Lilly were in the Order and were defying Voldemort on a daily basis not just 3 times. The line of the Peverells makes the number three make sense rather than being arbitrary.

Per a discussion on IRC, I am auctioning off my immortal soul to the highest bidder over the next week. (As an atheist I have no use for it, but it has a market value and so holding onto it is a foolish endowment effect.)

The current top bid is 1btc ($120) by John Wittle.

Details:

1. I will provide a cryptograpically-signed receipt in explicit terms agreeing to transfer my soul to the highest bidder, signed with my standard public key. (Note that, as far as I know, this is superior to signing in blood since DNA degrades quickly at room temperature, and a matching blood type would both be hard to verify without another sample of my blood and also only weak evidence since many people would share my blood type.)
2. Payment is preferably in bitcoins, but I will accept Paypal if really needed. (Equivalence will be via the daily MtGox average.) Address: 17twxmShN3p6rsAyYC6UsERfhT5XFs9fUG (existing activity)
3. The auction will close at 4:40 PM EST, 13 June 2013
4. My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern (over which I continue to claim copyright); transfer does not cover any souls of gwerns in alternate branches of the multiverses inasmuch as they have not consented.
5. There is no reserve price. This is a normal English auction with time limit.
6. I certify that my soul is intact and has not been employed in any dark rituals such as manufacturing horcruxes; I am also a member in good standing of the Catholic Church, having received confirmation etc. Note that my soul is almost certainly damned inasmuch as I am an apostate and/or an atheist, which I understand to be mortal sins.
7. I further certify that the transferred soul is mine, has never been anyone else's, has not been involved in any past transactions, sales, purchases, etc. However, note that, despite rich documentation that this is doable, I cannot certify that any supernatural or earthly authorities will respect my attempt to sell my soul or even that I have a soul. It may be better for you to think of this as purchasing a quitclaim to my soul.
8. Bids can be communicated as replies to this comments, emails to gwern@gwern.net, comments on IRC, or replies on Google+. I will update this comment with the current top bid if/when a new top bid is received.

Suggested uses for my soul include:

• novelty value

• pickup lines & icebreakers; eg. Wittle to another person considering selling their soul:

  JohnWittle> ______: "You know, I own gwern's soul.
  You know, gwern of LessWrong and gwern.net" is a
  great ice breaker at rationalist meetups and I anticipate
  it increasing my chances of getting laid by a nonzero amount.
  Can your soul give me similar results?
  

• supererogatory ethics: purchasing a soul to redeem it
• making extra horcruxes

• as a speculative play on my future earnings or labor in case I reconvert to any religion with the concept of souls and wish to repurchase my soul at any cost. This would constitute a long position with almost unlimited upside and is a unique investment opportunity.

  (Please note that I hold an informational advantage over most/all would-be investors and so souls likely constitute a lemon market.)

• hedging against Pascal's Wager:

  presumably Satan will accept my soul instead of yours since damnation does not seem to confer property rights inasmuch as the offspring of dictators continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains and are not evicted by his agents; similarly, one can expect him to honor his bargain with you since, as an immortal he has an infinite horizon of deals he jeopardizes if he welshes on your deal.

  Note that if he won't agree to a full 1:1 swap, you still benefit infinitely by bargaining him down to an agreement like torturing you every day via a process that converges on an indefinitely large but finite total sum of torture while still daily torturing you & fulfilling the requirements of being in Hell.

EDIT: Congratulations to Mr. Wittle.

I think what Harry's says here is, or at least ought to be, a kind of shorthand for a closely related and much stronger argument.

It isn't just that brain damage can take away your mental abilities. It's that particular kinds of brain damage can take away particular mental abilities, and there's a consistent correlation between the damage to the brain and the damage to the mind.

Suppose I show you a box, and you talk to it and it talks back. You might indeed hypothesize that what's in the box is a radio, and there's a person somewhere else with whom you're communicating. But now suppose that you open up the box and remove one electronic component, and the person "at the other end" still talks to you but can no longer remember the names of any vegetables. Then you remove another component, and now they t-t-talk w-with a t-t-t-terrible st-st-st-stutter and keep pausing oddly in the middle of sentences. Another, and they punctuate all their sentences with pointless outbursts of profanity.

And I have some more of these boxes, and it turns out that they all respond in similar ways to similar kinds of damage.

How much of this does it take before you regard this as very, very powerful evidence that the mind you're talking with is implemented by the electronics in the box?

Source?

Here's some nice controversial things for you:

• Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.

• Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad (which it is not). Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).

• Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

• Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow, and should not be treated differently from those issues.

• Self identity is a problem.

• EDIT: most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps.

Less controversial in LW, but still bad to say outside:

• Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.

I run out of ideas.

EDIT: in case it's not clear, I take all these ideas seriously. I would actually appreciate a discussion on these topics with LW.

EDIT: this was productive! I've seriously updated one way or the other on many of these ideas. Thanks for pointing out truths and holes everyone! :)

Geoff,

Of course you and I are pursuing many of the same goals and we have come to many shared conclusions, though our methodologies seem quite different to me, and our models of the human mind are quite different. I take myself to be an epistemic Bayesian and (last I heard) you take yourself to be an epistemic Cartesian. You say things like "Philosophically, there is no known connection between simplicity... and truth," while I take Occam's razor (aka Solomonoff's lightsaber) very seriously. My model of the human mind ignores philosophy almost completely and is instead grounded in the hundreds of messy details from current neuroscience and psychology, while your work on Connection Theory cites almost no cognitive science and instead appears to be motivated by folk psychology, philosophical considerations, and personal anecdote. I place a pretty high probability on physicalism being true (taking "physicalism" to include radical platonism), but you say here that "it follows [from physicalism] that Connection Theory, as stated, is false," but that some variations of CT may still be correct.

Why bring this up? I suspect many LWers are excited (like me) to see another organization working on (among other things) x-risk reduction and rationality training, especially one packed with LW members. But I also suspect many LWers (like me) have many concerns about your research methodology and about connection theory. I think this would be a good place for you to not just introduce yourself (and Leverage Research) but also to address some likely concerns your potential supporters may have (like I did for SI here and here).

For example:

• Is my first paragraph above accurate? Which corrections, qualifications, and additions would you like to make?
• How important is Connection Theory to what Leverage does?
• How similar are your own research assumptions and methodology to those of other Leverage researchers?

I suspect it will be more beneficial to your organization to address such concerns directly and not let them lurk unanswered for long periods of time. That is one lesson I take from my recent experiences with the Singularity Institute.

BTW, I appreciate how many public-facing documents Leverage produces to explain its ideas to others. Please keep that up.

Random, low-confidence but possibly amusing prediction: in MoR the final obstacle of the third-floor corridor is called the Mirror of Vec, because it's inscribed Noiti lovde talopart xet nere hocru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.

It's much more thematic, at least.

Consider an "ask culture" where employees consider themselves totally allowed to say "no" without repercussions. The boss would prefer people work unpaid overtime so ey gets more work done without having to pay anything, so ey asks everyone. Most people say no, because they hate unpaid overtime. The only people who agree will be those who really love the company or their job - they end up looking really good. More and more workers realize the value of lying and agreeing to work unpaid overtime so the boss thinks they really love the company. Eventually, the few workers who continue refusing look really bad, like they're the only ones who aren't team players, and they grudgingly accept.

Only now the boss notices that the employees hate their jobs and hate the boss. The boss decides to only ask employees if they will work unpaid overtime when it's absolutely necessary. The ask culture has become a guess culture.

"Hard mode" sounds too metal. The proper response to "X is hard mode" is "Bring it on!"

Therefore I object to "politics is hard mode" for the same reason I object to "driving a car with your eyes closed is hard mode". Both statements are true, but phrased to produce maximum damage.

There's also a way that "politics is hard mode" is worse than playing a video game on hard mode, or driving a car on hard mode. If you play the video game and fail, you know and you can switch back to an easier setting. If you drive a car in "hard mode" and crash into a tree, you know you should keep your eyes open the next time.

If you discuss politics in "hard mode", you can go your entire life being totally mind-killed (yes! I said it!) and just think everyone else is wrong, doing more and more damage each time you open your mouth and destroying every community you come in contact with.

Can you imagine a human being saying "I'm sorry, I'm too low-level to participate in this discussion"? There may be a tiny handful of people wise enough to try it - and ironically, those are probably the same handful who have a tiny chance of navigating the minefield. Everyone else is just going to say "No, I'm high-enough level, YOU'RE the one who needs to bow out!"

Both "hard mode" and "mind-killer" are intended to convey a sense of danger, but the first conveys a fun, exciting danger that cool people should engage with as much as possible in order to prove their worth, and the latter conveys an extreme danger that can ruin everything and which not only clouds your faculties but clouds the faculty to realize that your faculties are clouded. As such, I think "mind-killer" is the better phrase.

EDIT: More succintly: both phrases mean the same thing, but with different connotations. "Hard mode" sounds like we should accord more status to politics, "mind-killer" sounds like we should accord less. I feel like incentivizing more politics is a bad idea and will justify this if anyone disagrees.

Upvoted because moderation is hard and I get the impression it's more responsibility than you thought you were signing up for.

I finished my thesis!

7 comments and no answers...? Regardless, you could have answered this question pretty easily and I don't think this was Discussion-post-worthy (certainly a reasonable Open Thread question). But I'll answer your question anyway.

The second line of the linked talk says:

For more information on this topic, read Dr. Baumeister's book Is There Anything Good About Men? available in bookstores everywhere, including here.

A search of 'Is There Anything Good About Men' in the usual place turns up a copy. Download. What are we looking for? A reminder, the key lines in the linked speech are:

...It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes,every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children. Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. I think this difference is the single most under-appreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

We could search for various words or phrase from this passages which seem to be relatively unique; as it happens, I chose the rhetorical "50%" (but "80%", "40%", "underappreciated", etc all would've worked with varying levels of efficiency since the speech is heavily based on the book), and thus jumped straight to chapter 4, "The Most Underappreciated Fact About Men". A glance tells us that Baumeister is discussing exactly this topic of reproductive differentials, so we read on and a few pages later, on page 63, we hit the jackpot:

The correct answer has recently begun to emerge from DNA studies, notably those by Jason Wilder and his colleagues. They concluded that among the ancestors of today’s human population, women outnumbered men about two to one. Two to one! In percentage terms, then, humanity’s ancestors were about 67% female and 33% male.

A C-f for "Wilder" takes us to pg286, where we immediately read:

...The DNA studies on how today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men have been the most requested sources from my earlier talks on this. The work is by Jason Wilder and his colleagues. I list here some sources in the mass media, which may be more accessible to laypersons than the highly technical journal articles, but for the specialists I list those also.

For a highly readable introduction, you can Google the article "Ancient Man Spread the Love Around," which was published September, 20, 2004 and is still available (last I checked) online. There were plenty of other stories in the media at about this time, when the research findings first came out. In "Medical News Today," (www.medicalnewstoday. com), on the same date in 2004, a story under "Genes expose secrets of sex on the side" covered much the same material.

If you want the original sources, read Wilder, J. A., Mobasher, Z., & Hammer, M. F. (2004). "Genetic evidence for unequal effective population sizes of human females and males". Molecular Biology and Evolution, 21, 2047-2057. If that went down well, you might try Wilder, J. A., Kingan, S. B., Mobasher, Z., Pilkington, M. M., & Hammer, M. F. (2004). "Global patterns of human mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome structure are not influenced by higher migration rates of females versus males". Nature Genetics, 36, 1122-1125. That one was over my head, I admit. A more readable source on these is Shriver, M. D. (2005), "Female migration rate might not be greater than male rate". European Journal of Human Genetics, 13, 131-132. Shriver raises another intriguing hypothesis that could have contributed to the greater preponderance of females in our ancestors: Because couples mate such that the man is older, the generational intervals are smaller for females (i.e., baby's age is closer to mother's than to father's). As for the 90% to 20% differential in other species, that I believe is standard information in biology, which I first heard in one of the lectures on testosterone by the late James Dabbs, whose book Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers remains an authoritative source on the topic.

(I jailbroke Shriver 2005 for you. Wilder et al 2004, incidentally, fits well with Baumeister remarking in 2007 that the research was done 2 or so years ago.)

And of course you could've done the exact same thing using Google Books: search "baumeister anything good about men" to get to the book, then search-within-the-book for "50%", jump to page 53, read to page 63, do a second search-within-the-book for "Wilder" and the second hit of page 287 even gives you the exact snippet you need:

Sources and References 287

...If you want the original sources, read Wilder, J. A., Mobasher, Z., & Hammer, M. F. (2004). "Genetic evidence for unequal effective population sizes of human females and males". Molecular Biology and Evolution...

But I didn't bite any of the counterarguments to the extent that it would be necessary to counter the 10^100.

I don't think this is very hard if you actually look at examples of long-term investment. Background: http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle#ancestors and especially http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle#islamic-waqfs

First things:

Businesses and organizations suffer extremely high mortality rates; one estimate puts it at 99% chance of mortality per century. (This ignores existential risks and lucky aversions like nuclear warfare, and so is an underestimate of the true risks.) So to survive, any perpetuity has a risk of 0.01^120 = 1.000000000000001e-240. That's a good chunk of the reason to not bother with long-term trusts right there! We can confirm this empirically by observing that there were what must have been many scores of thousands of waqfs in the Islamic world - perpetual charities - and very few survive or saw their endowments grow. (I have pointed Hanson at waqfs repeatedly, but he has yet to blog on that topic.) Similarly, we can observe that despite the countless temples, hospitals, homes, and institutions with endowments in the Greco-Roman world just 1900 years ago or so - less than a sixth of the time period in question - we know of zero surviving institutions, all of them having fallen into decay/disuse/Christian-Muslim expropriation/vicissitudes of time. The many Buddhist institutions of India suffered a similar fate, between a resurgent Hinduism and Muslim encroachment. We can also point out that many estimates ignore a meaningful failure mode: endowments or nonprofits going off-course and doing things the founder did not mean them to do - the American university case comes to mind, as does the British university case I cite in my essay, and there is a long vein (some of it summarized in Cowen's Good and Plenty) of conservative criticism of American nonprofits like the Ford Foundation pointing out the 'liberal capture' of originally conservative institutions, which obviously defeats the original point.

(BTW, if you read the waqf link you'd see that excessive iron-clad rigidity in an organization's goal can be almost as bad, as the goals become outdated or irrelevant or harmful. So if the charter is loose, the organization is easily and quickly hijacked by changing ideologies or principal-agent problems like the iron law of oligarchy; but if the charter is rigid, the organization may remain on-target while becoming useless. It's hard to design a utility function for a potentially powerful optimization process. Hm.... why does that sentence sound so familiar... It's almost as if we needed a theory of Friendly Artificial General Organizations...)

Survivorship bias as a major factor in overestimating risk-free return overtime is well-known, and a new result came out recently, actually. We can observe many reasons for survivorship bias in estimates of nonprofit and corporate survival in the 20th century (see previously) and also in financial returns: Czarist Russia, the Weimar and Nazi Germanies, Imperial Japan, all countries in the Warsaw Pact or otherwise communist such as Cuba/North Korea/Vietnam, Zimbabwe... While I have seen very few invocations recently of the old chestnut that 'stock markets deliver 7% return on a long-term basis' (perhaps that conventional wisdom has been killed), the survivorship work suggests that for just the 20th century we might expect more like 2%.

The risk per year is related to the size of the endowment/investment; as has already been point out, there is fierce legal opposition to any sort of perpetuity, and at least two cases of perpetuities being wasted or stolen legally. Historically, fortunes which grow too big attract predators, become institutionally dysfunctional and corrupt, and fall prey to rare risks. Example: the non-profit known as the Catholic Church owned something like a quarter of all of England before it was expropriated precisely because it had so effectively gained wealth and invested it (property rights in England otherwise having been remarkably secure over the past millennium). The Buddhist monasteries in China and Japan had issues with growing so large and powerful that they became major political and military players, leading to extirpation by other actors such as Oda Nobunaga. Any perpetuity which becomes equivalent to a large or small country will suffer the same mortality rates.

And then there's opportunity cost. We have good reason to expect the upcoming centuries to be unusually risky compared to the past: even if you completely ignore new technological issues like nanotech or AI or global warming or biowarfare, we still suffer under a novel existential threat of thermonuclear warfare. This threat did not exist at any point before 1945, and systematically makes the future riskier than the past. Investing in a perpetuity, itself investing in ordinary commercial transactions, does little to help except possibly some generic economic externalities of increased growth (and no doubt there are economists who, pointing to current ultra-low interest rates and sluggish growth and 'too much cash chasing safe investments', would deprecate even this).

Compounding-wise, there are other forms of investment: investment into scientific knowledge, into more effective charity (surely saving peoples' lives can have compounding effects into the distant future?), and so on.

So to recap:

1. organizational mortality is extremely high
2. financial mortality is likewise extremely high; and both organizational & financial mortality are relevant
3. all estimates of risk are systematically biased downwards, estimates indicating that one of these biases is very large
4. risks for organizations or finances increases with size
5. opportunity cost is completely ignored

Any of these except perhaps #3 could be sufficient to defeat perpetuities, and I think that combined, the case for perpetuities is completely non-existent.

Contracts never have merely two parties. They are never "private" in the sense implied above. A contract requires a third party to enforce the contract against either party at the other's appeal. The existence of the enforcing party is a suppressed premise in almost all contracts, and the consent of that third party is rarely explicitly discussed.

Asking for unbounded "freedom of contract" means asking for the existence of a third party who consents to enforce any contract, and has the power to enforce any contract; in other words, a third party that is amoral and omnipotent; one with no objections to any contract terms, and sufficient power to enforce against any party.

The state, in a democratic republic, cannot be such a third party, because it is not amoral — it has moral (or moral-like) objections to some contract terms. For instance, today's republics do not countenance chattel slavery; even if a person signs a contract to be another's slave, the state will not consent to enforce that contract.

I suggest that, given what we know about humans, the creation of an actual amoral and omnipotent third party would constitute UFAI ....

The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying "Hey, I don't do it that often" and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.

It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren't just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences. They're examples of the sort of language that has been consistently used to justify and motivate oppression and violence against trans people. Since you recognize that your feelings have no objective justification, your casual transphobia is inexcusable. If you can't get over those feelings, keep them to yourself please.

DO NOT USE YOUR REGULAR IDENTITY TO SAY ANYTHING TRULY INTERESTING ON THIS THREAD, OR ON THIS TOPIC, UNLESS YOU HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT IT FOR FIVE MINUTES.

Given our known problems with actively expressing approval for things, I'd like to mention that I approve of the more frequent open threads.

And thus, Hermione Jean Granger was permenantly sacrificed in a ritual which manifested Harry Potter.

A major mental change that allowed me to own less things was someone mentioning "treat craigslist as free storage." The idea being that if you ever really need X you can get it fairly easily. But this extends to retail goods as well. I now keep in mind that everything that costs<(.1)(paycheck) is already mine and I only go pick it up if I really, actually, need it.

Spend more money/time on optimizing boring things you use a lot:
Shoes
socks/underwear
Mattress
Tailored clothes
Hygiene products that work well for you
Kitchen accessories (part of the reason you don't cook healthy meals for yourself might be because your kitchen work flow sucks)
Ergonomic setup at computer

Hey guys, you may know me as pizzarules1000, but I want to formally introduce myself to the community. My name is Kim Suozzi. Here's a link to my Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/kimsuozzi), a video I made today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW3peOK1X9E), and Twitter, which you might enjoy (https://twitter.com/dblchb). I'd be happy to upload some documents confirming my identity/that I have cancer. I'll be at Duke tomorrow and can have my medical records sent to whomever. I also could upload a pathology report today, or have one of my doctors email you guys a document confirming my condition/treatment. I always have my driver license to show you as well. I just made a payment to CI (http://imgur.com/VVdoU) and asked them if they could help with handling the fund. I don't blame you for wanting to be careful.

Anyway, now that I have all of that out of the way (sort of), I want to express how deeply I appreciate everyone's support so far in donating, spreading my story, and otherwise advocating for me. I'm so glad that there's this robust community of intelligent and compassionate people that have come to my aid. As much as it sucks to die now, I'm goddamned lucky to live in the place and time that I do. You guys are giving me hope that I can achieve my goal. Again, it's hard to describe how much that means to me; people like you are offering me the most peace that can feasibly be found with knowledge that I'm going to die.

No, no, "The first rule of the Bayesian Conspiracy is that you talk about the Bayesian Conspiracy just as much as a typical member of the general population does."

As a start, I copied all Alicorn's lines into a Markov text synthesizer . Some of the best results were:

"Whoa, there's an improvement, but it's subjectively objective."

"Okay, but every change is turning into bottom-line thinking like a collective action problem."

"If keeping my current job has higher expected utility than founding a brownie."

"I think he's just the unit of you shouldn't implement Really Extreme Altruism. Unless the teacher's password."

"If I wish to optimize for Rare Diseases in paperclips."

"My elephant wants a term for infanticide."

Actual paper title from scientific journal: Why Aren't We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements

Corresponding article headline: Human Brains Unlikely to Evolve Into a 'Supermind' as Price to Pay Would Be Too High

Actual paper title from scientific journal: Influence of Incubation Temperature on Morphology, Locomotor Performance, and Early Growth of Hatchling Wall Lizards (Podarcis muralis)

Projected future article headline: Killer 'Godzilla' Lizard Race Larger than Skyscrapers Unlikely to Arise because Global Warming Heats Eggs. All Forms of Genetic Engineering Therefore Impossible

The phrase "how are you" is no different from a TCP Handshake. In order to establish communication, the first initiating computer will send out a synchronize, the responder sends a synchronize-acknowledge, then the initiator will give back a single acknowledge. This is just how human language does it, with a slight order change.

"How are you?" - Synchronize request

"Good, how are you?" - Acknowledge synchronize request, send sync request of your own

"I'm good too" - Acknowledge

Just like in computers, the purpose is not to convey information in itself. It is to establish communication including the rules of communication each side will be using. If you want to change the transfer protocol over to UDP, that is also acceptable (eg, "how are you?" "ugh terrible! <beginning asynchronous information dump>). You can also throw up halt flags before conversation begins (eg, "how are you?" "sod off"). The initial synack is also good for pinging (eg, "how are you?" ... <couple seconds pass by> "sorry I was busy thinking").

However, the one thing that neither humans nor computers use synack for is transmitting information. Doing so is simply a breach of information transfer protocol and may result in you defecting by accident.

[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]

The replication initiative (the push to replicate the majority of scientific studies) is reasonably likely to do more harm than good. Most of the points raised by Jason Mitchell in The Emptiness of Failed Replications are correct.

The amusing thing is that Mitchel's argument proves much more than he wants it to prove.

Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way. Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.

Notice that the above argument applies just as well to the original experiment being replicated.

It has to - otherwise you wouldn't be able to see what YOU upvoted/downvoted.

Also, otherwise you would be able to upvote or downvote something multiple times.

So clearly, it has to track somewhere.

If you guys need a SQL guy to help do some development work to make meta-moderation easier, let me know; I'll happily volunteer a few hours a week.

EDIT: AAAUUUGH REDDIT'S DB USES KEY-VALUE PAIRS AIIEEEE IT ONLY HAS TWO TABLES OH GOD WHY WHY SAVE ME YOG-SOTHOTH I HAVE GAZED INTO THE ABYSS AAAAAAAIIIIGH okay. I'll still do it. whimper

Given that there is a popular tendency for people to accuse even totally different things of being "eugenics" to discredit them, if you tried to rebrand eugenics as something else people would notice very quickly, they would "accuse" you of being eugenicist, and the debate about whether Plan Y is or is not a good idea would immediately shift to a debate about whether Plan Y is or is not eugenics - which you would lose, because it is.

This reminds me of an interesting analysis I heard about why Heartiste manages to hang on when many people who are much less horrible than he is get laughed off the Internet. If you write some very reasonable liberal enlightened essay about how maybe there's some reason to believe some women are such-and-such but we must not jump to conclusions, people will call you a sexist, you'll have to argue that you're not a sexist, and your opponents have spent their entire lives accusing people of sexism and are better at this argument than you are and will win (or at least reduce your entire output to defending yourself). If you're Heartiste, and people call you sexist, you can just raise an eyebrow, say "Well, yeah", and watch people whose only master-level argumentative gambit is accusing people of sexism have no idea what to do

Heartiste happens to be awful, but I'm pretty sure the same strategy could be applied to reasonable positions. If I wanted to start a site that promoted sexist positions, I would call it www.sexism.com.

If the human biodiversity people had called their movement neo-racism, they would have avoided having every mention of them devolve into painful non-debates like this one. Compare the neo-reactionaries, who are much more politically astute and who were entirely correct to call their movement neo-reaction.

My 5 year old came to the dinner table, and calmly announced, "There is no Santa." I was puzzled because just couple of days ago he had taken his Christmas gift from Santa (though now that I think about it, he was not totally thrilled). So I asked why he thought so. He said, "Well, for Christmas I only got the gifts I told you about; I had gone to bed and told Santa himself what I wanted without telling you to see if he is real, and none of those came through - and I was a good boy all year!"

To be sure, I asked him, "But you saw Santa at the mall?" He laughed as hard as could be, then pointed out to me, "They are people in costumes!"

-- Wen Gong

It's funny time now in Slovakia; as if someone declared a call: "Irrational people of all beliefs, unite!"

It started two years ago with the so-called "Gorilla scandal". (TL;DR: Not a real gorilla, just a nickname of some criminal who was investigated by the secret service. By wiretapping his house the investigation revealed that almost all of our political parties, both left and right, participated in economical crime, cooperating with the same small group of people. The transcripts of the investigation were leaked to internet.) It was followed by a few demonstrations, after which pretty much nothing happened. Realizing that most media in our country actually belong to people involved in the scandal, so they don't have an incentive to investigate and report on the scandal, an internet radio called "the free broadcast" was created. From that point, it gradually went downhill.

By deciding to focus on 'news that don't have place in the official media', the radio was gradually selecting for hoaxes, conspiracy theories, etc. Which probably led to saner people leaving the radio, concentrating the irrationality of the remaining ones. One year later, it was mostly about how vaccination causes autism and how pharmaceutical companies want to prevent you from using MMS. Two years later, it seems to be mostly about how freemasonic and homosexual conspiracies are ruling the world, which is why we need to make a revolution and create a direct democracy.

Meanwhile, a new religious cult called Magnificat was created by a few excommunicated Catholic priests; or perhaps they joined an already existing cult and brought it here, I am not sure. A few years ago there were some documents about social service in some other countries (mostly Britain) abusing their powers and taking children away from non-abusive families to offer them for adoption to other people, for money. This Magnificat cult is spreading news that this is all a part of world-wide conspiracy against the traditional family, led by atheists, homosexuals and people hating the Virgin Mary. Recently this cult has registered as a political party, and participated in the recent municipal elections (although I am not aware of any significant victories). They also organized a large protest "for life and traditional family". When our Catholic church saw them stealing its main agenda, it doubled its efforts and last week it published a new pastoral letter criticizing the "culture of death", "gender ideology" and "the sins of Sodom".

Meanwhile, a local neo-nazi movement become strong enough to win the municipal election in one of our counties (luckily not the one I live in). Their main agenda is fighting against the corrupted democratic politicians and parasitic Roma minority. They are very popular on "the free broadcast" internet radio, together with Magnificat; at this moment they seem to support each other, at least memetically. This combination of signalling contrarianism and yet appealing to common prejudice, seems very attractive to a lot of people. These days you can't have an online discussion without someone explaining what a brainwashed sheep you are for not believing in them.

A month ago I burned some of my social capital by publishing a blog about how the Catholic church should stop giving tacit approval to the neo-nazis. (And by "tacit approval" I mean things like the former arch-bishop organizing a private mass for the local neo-nazis and blessing their leader. Which was later described by the church speakers as simply his private affair, which is not anyone else's business.) So far it doesn't seem like there was any benefit from it, except for me feeling better for having spoken my mind openly.

I feel like surrounded by complete idiots. To be honest, I always had this feeling, but recently it became very intensive.

Seems to me that irrational people have the advantage that they can relatively easily join their powers. An irrational person mostly cares about one thing; a rational person cares about many things. Suppose that you have a person A believing that people are manipulated by space aliens; a person B believing that vaccination causes autism; and a person C believing that it's all about homosexuals trying to destroy the traditional family. Technically, none of them contradicts the others. And if you succeed to create a complex theory containing all the necessary components (the space aliens are controlling the humankind by giving more political power to homosexuals, which use their power to destroy the traditional family by using vaccination to cause more autism), you already have three strong believers. And more people mean more political power! Meanwhile the rational person will disagree with A and B and C, and remain without any allies. The ability of an irrational person to accept a compatible irrational belief is popularly called "having an open mind".

A few years back, I had an incredibly vivid dream that seemed to be real. One of the characters in the dream informed me that my whole life had been a dream, and I didn't believe her. We got in an argument, where I pointed out how vivid and detailed my surroundings were, how vivid and detailed my memories of growing up in California were, and how unlikely it was that a character in my own dream would disagree with me. The character challenged me to try to open my eyes, and I did, confident that they were already open. I opened my eyes, and it was 3:00 in the morning in my little apartment in Texas. I have never even been to California. My entire life had been a dream, and a small fragment of my subconscious had known it was a dream when I had not. I was a solipsist for the rest of the week.

Did some research. The claim that the proposals are poorly written leaps out at me as immediately true. Here's a website with successful grant applications, to be used as models to write them:

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/samples_index.htm

This is the first grant I pulled up (it's not the first, but it -was- the first I felt competent to evaluate, concerning primarily technology):

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/grantkay.pdf

First, the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation leap out at me immediately. Second, the claim in the post that grant proposals are written to describe what they're doing, rather than what they're intending to achieve, holds up, for this grant at least.

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/MH%20grant.pdf

This proposal is the best-written I encountered. It describes the specific problems it intends to resolve and the specific solutions it intends to use. Unfortunately, the only evidence it introduces is the evidence that there is a problem. It doesn't provide any evidence that its solutions work. Its stated "Method of Evaluation", moreover, exactly mirrors the claims made in this post - it evaluates whether or not its solutions are implemented, NOT whether or not the problem is solved. (Goal #5 seems like an exception, but remember the stated problem is mental health issues.

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/TARGET.pdf

This proposal is the best I've encountered. It is horribly written, however. (You can skip past the pages and pages of documentation about how exactly the money will be spent to read the goals.) The accountability section has this (this is a proposal, essentially, to buy more modern computers for students and teachers, and to hire support staff):

We will begin by taking benchmarks of our current situation with regard to number of computers per student (including the capability of that equipment), number of teachers and students currently using the PLATO or other learning systems, number of teachers using the Web as a training and communication tool, and student scores on the TABE and PLATO assessment tests. On a quarterly basis, we will review computer ratios and teachers/students using PLATO. Every semester we will use questionnaires and surveys, as well as observation, of staff to get feedback on the impact of professional development activities. Student scores will be reviewed after every semester. Results will be tabulated and communicated to school staff, superintendents, Advisory Boards and Texans Can! staff annually. Where indicated, adjustments in curriculum and instruction will be made to ensure that student performance continues to improve

Note that the accountability, as it pertains to this grant, is - wait for it - to make sure the grant money is spent as expected. You can change curriculum and instruction -without- the computers, remember. (I think this is a pretty sensible grant request, but the accountability measures it proposes provide no actual accountability. "Did we say what we were going to do? Yes? Then our grant was a success!")

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/FLAP%20Narrative.pdf

Setting aside the fact that I've seen better writing from middle school students, this is actually a decently written grant. It has specific goals, implementations, and even has accountability. (Although it does seem confused about who or what is accountable to who or what; the accountability section reads rather like the author's understanding of accountability meant the ability of students to measure their own improvements in performance. Notably omitted is a suggestion that the program's success/improvement rate be compared to non-program success/improvement rates.)

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/2003_Library&Literacy.pdf

A well-written grant I can't find fault with. (Except maybe its questionable notion of scientific evidence.)

So - some of the grants here definitely show symptoms of the problems indicated in the post. Some don't. A couple of these had no business being granted. ALL of these grants were successful applications - that is, the grants were granted.

After this exercise, my position shifted from "This post is credible" to "This post exaggerates the extent of the problem to some degree, but remains a valid criticism of the grant system as it exists."

And I tried to find a grant similar to the iPod/Makeover grant, and found this:

http://www.msmagiera.com/ipad-grant

Okay, not exactly analogous, as it at least pertains to education. However, given the grant's self-evaluation criteria, student scores could plummet and the project could still call itself an overall success. (Actual improvement in student abilities only accounts for a fourth of their apparently unweighted criteria.)

Less Wrong requires no politics / minimal humor / definitely unambiguously rationality-relevant / careful referencing / airtight reasoning (as opposed to a sketch of something which isn't exactly true but points to the truth.) This makes writing for Less Wrong a chore as opposed to an enjoyable pastime.

the next step will be to make it impossible for users less than three months old (or with less than 1000 karma or something) to see comments under -3 at all.

I am vehemently opposed to this. If the problem is out-of-control threads, make the newbies unable to reply to downvoted comments - don't make them unable to look at them! Don't they need negative examples too?

I think the politics taboo is one of the best things about Less Wrong.

Yes, it's also a frustrating thing, because politics is important and full of relevant examples about rationality. But if you think you have an insightful, rational point to say about politics that will not degenerate into a sprawling discussion with negative utility... you are probably wrong.

I've been watching with interest the debates around how good minicamp was. I think we need to distinguish between two hypotheses:

A) Minicamp was well-run, the participants enjoyed it and subjectively estimated it was helpful, and it made everyone involved much more enthusiastic about rationality and motivated to pursue positive self-change.

B) Minicamp had objective effects on measurable rationality parameters like calibration, and objective long-term effects on things like lifetime success, tendency to help rationality-related causes, and ability of participants to enjoy their life.

Everyone who's talking about how obvious it is that minicamp was a stupendous success is talking about A, and everyone who's saying they're not convinced is talking about B.

Most self-help doesn't work - so with zero background information about a camp, our prior probability of B is low. That this is a rationalist camp is extra information: P(B|Rationality_Camp) is greater than P(B) alone if we believe rationality is a more effective self-help strategy than average. But this just brings us to where we were before the camp started; to say the evidence in the post above increases that estimate we've got to investigate P (B|A) - the probability that, given a camp gets glowing reviews and everyone loved it and thinks it changed their life, the it really is effective.

But A is a common feature of almost all self-help camps - googling "Christian retreat testimonial" can be very enlightening (add the phrase 'changed my life' to the query for best results). I think most rationalists would be very skeptical of most of the camps that manage to get such glowing reviews from their participants. So P(B|A) - the probability that data shows a real long-term effect given that everyone loved it and is wildly enthusiastic - may not be much higher than P(B).

So if you're trying to prove A - that the camp was successful and everyone loved it and felt very motivated - you've more than succeeded by now. If you're trying to prove B, keeping on giving more and more evidence for A isn't really the way to go.

A better suggestion might be to tell people "We have strong evidence you'll love the camp and feel transformed and enlightened, and we have some evidence that it will help because rationality is teachable and we're trying to gather more specific evidence as the program continues."

Hear that sound beneath your feet? It's the high-ground falling out from under you.

I'm offended by the censorship as well and was voting a number of your comments up previously. But as long as discussions of the censorship itself aren't being censored peaceful advocacy for a policy change and skirting the censors are the best strategies. And when the discussions of censorship start being censored the best strategy is for everyone to leave the site. This increasing risk nonsense is insanely disproportional. Traditionally, the way to get back at censors is to spread the censored material not blow up 2 1/2 World Trade Centers.

This post would have been a lot better had it contained at least a thumbnail sketch of what Connection Theory is, or what its principle claims are. I reached the end of the post still rather mystified as to what you are talking about.

For those, like me, who needed more background before reading the post, I found quite a good critique of Connection Theory here.

Moral Philosopher: How would you characterize irrational behavior?

Economist: When someone acts counter to their preferences.

Moral Philosopher: Oh, that’s what we call virtue.

Most people go through life using cultural memes that they soak up from their environment. These cultural memes have had lots of selective pressure acting on them, so most of the time they won't be obviously harmful: for example, most cultures don't have memes advocating that you stick your hand in fires. Following these cultural memes is a low-variance strategy: you might not become overwhelmingly successful this way, but you'll also avoid many failure modes.

A basic aspect of LW-style rationality involves questioning and rethinking everything, including these cultural memes. As such, it's a high-variance strategy: you might end up with new memes that are much better or much worse than standard memes. This might be okay if you're quite good at questioning and rethinking things, but if you aren't (and even if you are!), you might afflict yourself with a memetic immune disorder and head towards all sorts of failure modes as a result (joining a cult being the sort of stereotypical thing).

I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird, and I think this is probably overall a reasonable aversion for most people to have, as it helps them avoid many failure modes.

What happened to holding off proposing solutions?

Main is useless to me as is. As I mentioned a few times before, it should be replaced/supplemented by a "highly rated"/"greatest hits"/"best of LW" section, whether generated automatically based on post's karma or updated manually once a day or so.

Also, instead of/in addition to subreddits, you can create a list of approved tags/keywords a poster is forced to select one or more from, which trigger notifications to these busy people, or to anyone else who subscribes to notifications.

I seem to remember a study demonstrating that my political opponents are particularly vulnerable to this bias.

And I now see that contrary to the feature request, it's only asking for 5 karma for immediate descendants, not anywhere in the chain, so I shall go now and ask that to be updated.

Please clarify this for me. If I am reading correctly it indicates that currently only the immediate descendent is punished but that your orders are that all descendents of that comment shall be punished too. If so that strikes me as ridiculously shortsighted. This makes us obliged to go through the entire ancestor history of a comment every time we wish to make a reply if we wish to avoid being arbitrarily punished.

If this particular effort proves insufficient, the next step will be to make it impossible for users less than three months old (or with less than 1000 karma or something) to see comments under -3 at all.

Eliezer, you should stop personally exercising your power over the forum. Your interventions are reactionary, short sighted, tend to do more harm than good and don't adequately incorporate feedback received. Consider telling someone else at SingInst what your desired outcome is and ask them to come up with a temperate, strategically sane solution that doesn't make you look silly.

This is probably not the solution Harry's going to use in Chapter 81 (I'm writing this before it was posted), but a friend and I were discussing it and came up with a possible solution. I decided it would be much more fun as a piece of fanfanfiction rather than an abstract description, so here it is. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing.

Chapter 81b: Alternate Solution

Beyond all panic and despair his mind began to search through every fact in its possession, recall everything it knew about Lucius Malfoy, about the Wizengamot, about the laws of magical Britain; his eyes looked at the rows of chairs, at every person and every thing within range of his vision, searching for any opportunity it could grasp -

And the start of an idea formed - not a plan, but a tiny fragment of one. He spelled out N-O-T-E on his fingers, and, as discretely as he could, drew a piece of paper out from his bag that he did not remember putting there. It read:

"Mess with time if you want!"

And then he heard a loud bang, and another while he was stuffing the note back in his bag, and he looked up to see that a circular piece had pushed out from the wall, (that wall that could've withstood a nuclear explosion), far in the back where no one had been looking. Heads turned in unison to look as four glowing, silver human shapes emerged from the three-foot diameter hole, and began walking down the aisle towards Hermione. No one in the room but Harry and Dumbledore suspected they were Patronuses.

Prime Minister Fudge should have been angry, that magical creatures would dare barge in; but for some reason he couldn't quite place, he was calm. Auror Gawain was too busy casting shield spells to acknowledge how scared he was. Harry had a pretty good idea where this was going, but decided that "confused" was the best expression to wear. Professor McGonagall nearly had a stroke. Lucius Malfoy's angry expression had vanished, leaving his face perfectly blank. His entire row had stood up, and drawn their wands. To his left, five wizards Harry didn't recognize were pointing at the human Patronuses; to his right, seven wizards pointed their wands at Dumbledore.

Lucius himself had his wand, and his gaze, fixed firmly on Harry. For a brief and accidental moment, the boy who thought he was a rock looked back.

Wands too numerous to count followed those glowing figures, as they walked down the aisle towards Hermione. Harry noticed that Fawkes had perched silently on her shoulder, and she was taking slow, deep breaths.

Behind each wand, a wizard thought that someone else ought to do something. A rare upside to the bystander effect, Harry would later note. For the time being, his mind was busy choreographing the movements of four invisible figures, who were definitely not bumping into each other. When the Patronuses had reached the bottom-most platform, where Hermione sat, they stopped, and looked up at Dumbledore's platform.

"Who dares interrupt these proceedings?" Dumbledore's voice boomed out. In fact, he was glad that they had been interrupted, and knew exactly who he was talking to; but as Chief Warlock, he had to express indignance, or else someone else would have gone and done it for him.

This better be good, Harry thought, because I won't be able to think of anything else once I've been anchored.

"We are the Guardians of Merlin", said the first Patronus, in Harry's best impression of a Scottish accent.

"In that case, I yield the floor to the Guardians of Merlin", said Dumbledore. "May I ask why you are here?"

"We were a safeguard created by Merlin, to protect the purity of the Wizengamot. In his wisdom, Merlin set down a list of especially vile deeds; should this assembly should decide to perform one, we awaken. And so we are here."

Lucius turned away from Harry, and towards the front. "Ridiculous. This is no different than the many other times we have punished murderers, and no ghosts or apparitions appeared then." He put a slight emphasis on "ghosts or apparitions". He had no idea what they really were, but there was ample precedent saying ghosts and apparitions weren't allowed to do things.

Harry wondered what lie his future self would tell. Then the second patronus spoke, in exactly the same voice as the first. "It is different, because sending this girl to Azkaban would satisfy the first requirement for a ritual!"

The murmurs stopped. Several members of the audience suddenly noticed the dementor in the room, on a level where they had not noticed it before. Professor McGonagall actually did have a stroke, but it was a small one, of a kind that could be fully repaired by magic later. For a moment, Dumbledore lost himself in his role and forgot that he was speaking to four copies of Harry Potter.

Five seconds passed before Dumbledore broke the silence. "Are you saying that this trial is part of a dark ritual?"

"Yes", said all four patronuses simultaneously, convincing several members of the assembly to abandon the idea that they were all controlled by one person. The figures were new, important, and mysterious. Hermione was no longer salient.

"Do you know who could be behind this?" Dumbledore asked.

Heads turned towards Lucius, who looked around and noted exactly whose heads they were, handling the sudden deluge of important information by recording only the ways in which it differed from what he would have expected. Lucius knew then, that he had to lose; not only was he facing four new and completely unknown pieces, pieces which had been powerful enough to carve a hole in the indestructible wall of the Wizengamot, his own role was looking altogether too suspicious. He looked left, met the eyes of his servant, August Stoessel, and sent a thought.

Two seats left, August stood up and shouted, "It must be Lord Voldemort!" The audience's attention shifted slightly. Lucius decided that four days later, Stoessel - Imperiused and falsely rumored to be a perfect occlumens - would confess to the whole thing, claiming (though no one would believe the last part) to have been Imperiused by Lord Voldemort himself.

Dumbledore looked very disturbed. Onlookers did not find this surprising, but they would have been surprised by the reason, if they knew. Dumbledore had just put the pieces together - Harry had performed an advanced plot, and time turned in spite of his time turner's locked shell, just as he must have done on the day Bellatrix Black broke out of Azkaban.

"Talk of dark rituals is unfit for discussion here", Dumbledore said, a little shakily. "If there are no objections, I believe we can suspend the previous vote and reconvene tomorrow morning, after the Ministry has had a chance to speak with these Guardians. We will vote whether to release or punish Hermione then, with fuller information."

Lucius did not object. He would have a whole day to plan his next move. Harry did not object. He would have a whole day to plan his next move.

The Guardians of Merlins left first, through the strange hole from which they had come. Then the Aurors left, taking Hermione, their patronuses, and the dementor, slightly smaller but still intact. Then the audience left, Harry among them, and he excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he anchored his time turner inside its shell like Quirrell had shown him, and spun the shell twice. Finally Dumbledore left; but he was only two steps out the door when he disillusioned himself, spun his time turner twice, and reentered.

Two hours earlier, an invisible Harry Potter was wandering around the Wizengamot building, first looking for his earlier self so he could place the "Mess with time if you want" note, then looking for the other side of the wall he had seen cut open. He found it in a secluded storeroom, with ten minutes to spare, set down a piece of paper and marked it with a single tally. Soon he was joined by another Harry, who had used his time turner only once, and another, and another. Rather than take off their invisibility cloaks, they announced their arrival by marking the paper with a second, third, and fourth tally.

Dumbledore watched invisibly from inside the Wizengamot chamber as four invisible Harry Potters used partial transfiguration to cut a hole in the wall. He watched invisibly as four Human Patronuses entered the room. And then an invisible Harry Potter bumped into the invisible Dumbledore, changing events from how they were meant to go; and the entire twisted tangle of time loops collapsed into a paradox and never was. Reality would take a different path, one in which Harry chose a simpler solution, one that did not require three things to all happen.

Some points:

• This is classic costless analysis. A quarantine would have prevented some transmissions of the disease, but would have severely limited the life quality of those quarantined. It would also have made it more difficult to detect HIV (if having HIV means compulsory quarantine, then if I suspect I have the disease I am less likely to get tested). Any proposal looks good under a benefit analysis; you are supposed to weigh those against the costs.
• This kind of costless analysis is especially beloved by medicine and health professionals, whose only measure of value is health (e.g. their "quality of life" measure is essentially just health integrated over lifespan). I would have hoped rationalists would better recognise the complexity of human value.
• The fact that the quarantine is compulsory ought to give the game away that it's not in the interests of the HIV sufferers. Let's call indefinite compulsory quarantine what it is - prison. It might well be in the interest of the rest of the population for HIV sufferers to be indefinitely imprisoned to stop the spread of the disease, but depending on your ethical theory, it is not obvious that the majority should have their way here.
• "What gives the government the moral right to imprison people on grounds of public health?" and "Why should we trust the government to make wise decisions on this matter?" seem like the default questions to ask, and the post doesn't even begin to address them. See (2) above regarding the deformation professionelle.
• How about instead of quarantine, we had instead tattooed all HIV sufferers across the forehead? This would be a less coercive method of achieving substantially the same result. Yet I'm guessing Cochran wouldn't sign up for that. Can phrases like "rights" and "human dignity" now begin to wend their way into the conversation?

Cochran is fond of calling people dimwits and pinheads, but I have rarely read such a tone-deaf post.

[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]

Human value is not complex, wireheading is the optimal state, and Fun Theory is mostly wrong.

Especially since I never actually even signed up for it - I was just told one day that "hey, you're a mod now". :-)

I think that people may be confused as to what's happening with this announcement.

The early phase details of the agreement were negotiated first between Harry and Lucius. Harry represented house Potter here because he's the entirety of house Potter. Lucius negotiated with Harry because Harry (as the boy who lived) has a lot of clout and credibility and he offered to throw that behind Draco. On an emotional level, HP also offers revenge against whoever attacked Draco and the possibility of revenge against Dumbledore.

Step two, the adults negotiate amongst themselves. In this second phase Lucius goes to the board of Governors with the agreement he and Harry made as a starting point.

The Knott and Greengrass votes are naturally inclined to go with Malfoy by faction alliance. Knott is also incentivized to go with the plan for other reasons. His son is a friend and chief lieutenant of Harry Potter. That's a potentially very valuable connection, but its a connection that can't be used when the votes are split death eater v Dumbledore. Realignment effectively "monetized" that asset. Greengrass doesn't have that and so asks for a few sweeteners on its deal. Also, the plan reduces their children's risk of death which is a non trivial inducement.

Bones runs the aurors. That's a strong base, but the aurors are generally kept out of Hogwarts, which was previously described as an invincible fortress. This puts her people inside Hogwarts which expands her domain of influence. While she probably wouldn't be willing to do that at the expense of being kicked from the order faction to the death eater faction, its worth it if she gets to keep most of the same allies (which she does via Harry) while isolating Juergen and other of her more extreme opponents. Also, the plan reduces the childrens' risk of death which is a non trivial inducement.

Neville inherits the Longbottom vote when he turns 18, so Longbottom is in Harry's camp in the long run and so his aunt has reason to at least reap the benefits of being on Harry's side since they pay the costs regardless. Like Bones she benefits from isolating extremists like Juergen. Based on her comments in prior chapters both at the war game and about QQs speech she favors a higher level of military readiness and is getting that from this deal.

So once the adults agree on the deal. Why announce it this way vs some other way?

An announcement through official channels goes through Dumbledore. Bypassing that contributes to sidelining / undermining Dumbledore, so Malfoy has a clear interest in the announcement through non official channels.

For Bones and Longbottom an announcement from the board has the two of them seen as going along with house Malfoy. Given their current alliances this would be damaging and bad for their images. By having the children give the boards's announcement right on the heel of an announcement by Harry and Draco the optics are that Draco is bringing the Greengrass / Knott votes and Harry is bringing the Bones / Longbottom votes. This allows them to maintain the optics of their factional alliance. They are seen as Harry's votes rather than as Malfoys votes.

Greengrass and Knott are in similar situations. As parts of Malfoys faction they also benefit from sidelining Dumbledore. They are lesser houses than Malfoy and are voting with Malfoy and are seen to be voting with Malfoy. Their houses get much more visibility and 'airtime' with this plan than if the board announced a vote. The chapter notes that it had all been negotiated and rehearsed and that the prominent role Daphne got was one of the carrots thrown to Greengrass.

Basically it happens this way because it is in the parents interests for it to happen this way.

IRRATIONALITY GAME

Eliezer Yudovsky has access to a basilisk kill agent that allows him to with a few clicks untraceably assassinate any person he can get to read a short email or equivalent, with comparable efficiency to what is shown in Deathnote.

Probability: improbable ( 2% )

best track record of any top pundit in the US

The study linked to meant next to nothing in my eyes. It studied political predictions in an election year by political hacks on tv. 2007-2008. Guess what? IN an election cycle that liberals beat conservatives, the liberal predictions more often came true than conservative predictions.

Reminds me of the reported models of mortgage securities, created using data from boom times only.

Krugman was competing with a bunch of other political hacks and columnists. I doubt that accuracy is the highest motivation for any of them. The political hacks want to curry support, and the columnists want to be invited on tv and have their articles read. I'd put at least 3 motivations above accuracy for that crowd: manipulate attitudes, throw red meat to their natural markets, and entertain. It's Dark Arts, all the way, all the time.

Imagine a substantive Less Wrong comment. It's insightful, polite, easy to understand, and otherwise good. Ideally, you upvote this comment. Now imagine the same comment, only with "obviously" in front. This shouldn't change much, but it does. This word seems to change the comment in multifarious bad ways that I'd rather not try to list.

Uncharitably, I might reduce this whole phenomenon to an example of a mind projection fallacy.

I have a different explanation: this is a status defense mechanism. If you say something that other people find obvious, in a way that suggests that you didn't find it obvious, you lose status-points for not being as smart as them. By adding the word "obviously", you in effect say "please do not infer that I think this remark is a great discovery of mine (and thus that I am ignorant relative to you) from the mere fact that I think it needs to be stated explicitly".

As an added benefit, if the remark turns out not to be obvious to your audience, yet demonstrably true, you gain status for having been smarter than them.

You might think, then, that there is no downside to simply prefacing every statement you think is true with "obviously". Obviously, however ( :-) ), you have to avoid making it transparent what you're doing, and thus restrict your usage of "obvious" to particularly plausible cases. Calibrating this sense of plausibility with your own epistemic powers is one of many mysterious (in the sense of not being spoken about or taught explicitly) techniques of human status negotiation. (And heaven help you if you label "obvious" something that is false...)

This is too much fuuuuuuuun

"She's just signaling virtue."

"Money is the unit of caring."

"One-box!"

"Beliefs should constrain anticipations."

"Existential risk..."

"I'll cooperate if and only if the other person will cooperate if and only if I cooperate."

"I'm going to update on that."

"Tsuyoku naritai!"

"My utility function includes a term for the fulfillment of your utility function."

"Yeah, it's objective, but it's subjectively objective."

"I am a thousand shards of desire."

"Whoa, there's an inferential gap here that one of us is failing to bridge."

"My coherent extrapolated volition says..."

"Humans aren't agents." ("I'm trying to be more agenty." "Humans don't really have goals.")

"Wait, wait, this is turning into an argument about definitions."

"Look, just rejecting religion and astrology doesn't make someone rational."

"No, no, you shouldn't implement Really Extreme Altruism. Unless the alternative is doing it without, anyway..."

"I'll be the Gatekeeper, you be the AI."

"That's Near, this is Far."

"Don't fall into bottom-line thinking like that."

My #1 suggestion, by a big margin, is to generate more new formal math results.

My #2 suggestion is to communicate more carefully, like Holden Karnofsky or Carl Shulman. Eliezer's tone is sometimes too preachy.

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/5459/demponies.png I apologise in advance.

I've read all of HPMOR and some of the sequences, attended a couple of meetups, am signed up for cryonics, and post here occasionally. But, that's as far as I go.

That's further than I go. Heck, what else is there, and why worry about whether you're going there or not?

This is a bit of a tangential ramble on why diversity might be kind of a good idea.

Different evidence accrues to people with different experiences.

A Bayesian agent who goes through an upbringing as a boy and one who goes through an upbringing as a girl will probably not possess identical beliefs about society, the world, humanity, and so on. This is not because one has been held back or misled, nor because one is less rational than the other ... but because two different partial explorations of the same territory do not yield the same map.

This does not mean that "men's truth" and "women's truth" (or "European truth" and "African truth") are different truths. Nor does it mean that any map is just as good as any other. Some people really do sit down and scribble all over their map until it is useless.

But since nobody's map is equivalent to the territory, overall we can expect that we will navigate the territory better if we can get help from people whose maps are different from our own.

That means that if we spend our time hanging out only with people whose experiences are a lot like our own, and going all Robber's Cave on anyone whose map doesn't look like ours, we are probably going to end up kinda ignorant. At the very least we will not have as complete a picture of the landscape as a group who has shared maps from lots of different paths.

This matters if we care about possessing accurate maps; and it also matters a great deal if what we are trying to map includes things like "the good of humanity" or "coherent extrapolated volition of humankind" or things like that.

Congratulations, but I still don't want to hear about your baby.

EDIT: It occurs to me that the correct way to perpetrate baby-photos is to create an "Early Childhood advice repository," or a "Social Open Thread" :P Or, and I like this one best, a satirical "welcome to LW" comment.

Please do mental benchmarking: Mnemosyne/Anki/spaced-repetition, dual n-back, http://www.quantified-mind.com/ , http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/ - something objective.

I really want to reply to this but I'm also really conflicted about how to do that. I think it is smart to acknowledge that women often associate being alone with an unfamiliar man as a serious risk. As a result it is totally reasonable to make judgments about how a man would behave in that setting. And it is good for men to be aware of this and to calibrate their behavior to take it into account.

But my sense is that using the kind of rhetoric in this post with young, well meaning men with poor social skills causes problems. And since the audience here is mostly young, well meaning men with poor social skills I'm kind of concerned. Nyan's reply is illustrative of this effect. Let's suppose there are two kinds of creepy: people who are creepy because you actually can't trust them to be alone with you and people who just come off that way. With the first group learning about what behaviors seem creepy is not going to actually make the trustworthy. With the second group, well they're by definition really bad at calibrating how to act in social situations. And it seems like it is pretty routine for men in that group to drastically overcompensate to avoid seeming creepy to the point where they come off as trying to be sexless. A) This is a good way for any possible sexual relationship to immediately fail (penalizing all parties). B) It appears to be really stress-inducing. C) An unexpressed smoldering libido tends to come out indirectly and a man who appears to be hiding his sexual attraction from a woman is it's own kind of creepy.

I don't mean any offense to the contributor. But I think it is unfortunate there were not multiple entries on this topic. As with anything, the people who express a concern tend to be more concerned with it than the people who don't. The vast majority of women would not find a request for their phone number to be creepy so long as it followed an pleasant exchange of 5-10+ minutes. Maybe you get a fake number or a decline-- but it isn't out of line.

And lo, people began tweeting:

Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences" are mostly not original

Which is false. This pushes as far in the opposite wrong direction as the viewpoint it means to criticize.

Evolutionary biology, the non-epistemological part of the exposition of quantum mechanics, and of course heuristics and biases, are all not original. They don't look deceptively original either; they cite or attributed-quote the sources from which they're taken. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.

When it comes to the part that isn't reporting on standard science, the parts that are mostly dealt with by modern "philosophers" rather than experimental scientists of one kind or another, the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there. There is such a vast variety of philosophy that you can often find a conclusion similar to anything, to around the same degree that Leibniz's monadology anticipated timeless quantum mechanics, i.e., not very much. The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions, and what is done with those conclusions, is most of the substance - finding a conclusion that happens to look vaguely similar does not mean that I was reporting someone else's academic work and failing to cite it, or reinventing work that had already been done. It is not understating any sort of "close agreement" with even those particular concluders, let alone the field as a whole within which those are small isolated voices. Hofstadter's superrationality is an acknowledged informal forerunner of TDT. But finding other people who think you ought to cooperate in the PD, but can't quite formalize why, is not the same as TDT being preinvented. (Also TDT doesn't artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream. This is "similar" to some attempts to rescue evidential decision theory by e.g. Eels, but not quite the same thing when it comes to important details like not two-boxing on Newcomb's Problem.) And claiming that in principle philosophical intuitions arise within the brain is not the same as performing any particular dissolution of a confused question, or even the general methodology of dissolution as practiced and described by Yudkowsky or Drescher (who actually does agree and demonstrate the method in detail within "Good and Real").

I'm also still not sure that Luke quite understands what the metaethics sequence is trying to say, but then I consider that sequence to have basically failed at exposition anyway. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can point Luke or anyone else at which says the same thing in more academic language.

Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?

I don't understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be - what positive consequence it was supposed to have. Lots of the Sequences are better exposition of existing ideas about evolutionary biology or cognitive biases or probability theory or whatever, which are appropriately quoted or cited within them? Yes, they are. People introducing Less Wrong should try to refer to those sources as much as possible when it comes to things like heuristics and biases, rather than talking like Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow invented the idea of scope insensitivity, so that they don't sound like phyg victims? Double yes. But writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet,

Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences" are mostly not original

...I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone. It is also a grave sin to make it sound like you're speaking for a standard academic position when you're not!

And I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what's "already" been done in academia. If some future anti-Luke is this charitable in construing how much of future work in epistemology and decision theory was "really" all done within the Sequences back in 2008, they will claim that everything was just invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky way back then - and they will be wrong - and I hope somebody argues with that anti-Luke too, and doesn't let any good feeling for ol E. Y. stand in their way, just like we shouldn't be prejudiced here by wanting to affiliate with academia or something.

I get what this is trying to do. There's a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it. (Interesting side note: John Tooby is apparently an SF fan who grew up reading van Vogt and Null-A, so he got some of his spirit from the same sources I did! There really is an ancient and honorable tradition out there.) If someone encounters that spirit in LW for the first time, they'll think I invented it. Which I most certainly did not. If LW is your first introduction to these things, then you really aren't going to know how much of the spirit I learned from the anncient masters... because just reading a citation, or even a paragraph-long quote, isn't going to convey that at all. The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Doing this, I would guess, gave Luke an epiphany he's trying to share - there's a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought. But the OP doesn't do that. It doesn't get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it's already been presented to them on LW, after all. So they won't actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it's not what they've already read.

There's literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that's an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.

Unbreakable Vows are ridiculously broken, as Harry briefly observes in Ch. 74. They're even more ridiculous in fanfictions where people can just grab a wand and swear something on their life and magic and thereby create a magically binding vow. I had to nerf the hell out of their activation costs just to make the MoR-verse keep running. I can't depict a society with zero agency problems, a perfect public commitment process and an infinite trust engine unless the whole story is about that.

Have you ever convinced a religious person to become atheistic?

Yes, a few dozen, exclusively through my writing.

My impression is that the arguments have almost no effect. What has an effect is being smart, likable, and altruistic, while occasionally mocking religion and sending signals that being religious is socially uncool.

Colonialism was a good system with significant beneficial impact for colonized countries, which are now failing mostly due to native incompetence rather than colonial trauma. It would be a win-win position to reinstitute it competently.

As a kid, I was sometimes suicidal. I thought I didn't like being alive.

It turned out I just didn't like being a kid. I simply had nothing else to compare it to until I attained and got to try out being an adult. (Which is awesome.)

This wasn't so much about failing to have hope as it was failing to realize that there was a thing to be hoped for. I didn't have anyone telling me that being an adult was really really cool and would make me happy, so I didn't expect it as a kid. So, I guess my statement is that there should be black-swan hope for things no one has bothered to put forth as happiness-inducers.

As a general note to whom it may concern: I consider it (deontologically) wrong to bring mental health professionals into the life of a non-dangerous-to-others person whose sanest available preferences indicate that they don't want such professionals. I am not a professional of any stripe myself, but I am willing to converse with (a non-overwhelming number of) sad people if they want someone to talk to.

My vote was for disabling, but I think this should also change your username to something suitably anonymous (like "Account deleted").

VOTE: Delete = Disable account
The account deletion process removes your ability to log in and your user page. Your posts and comments remain. (You get warned that you're about to lose the ability to change anything you've previously posted and that your username will continue to be associated with your previous account activity.) Actually deleting everything requires you to do it manually, one by one. Your username would continue to be unavailable to others. Your user account page would be replaced with a "User account deleted" page. Your old account activity would remain and link back to the "Account deleted" page.

This morning my daughter told me that she did well on a spelling test, but she got the easiest words wrong. Of course that’s not exactly true. The words that are hardest for her to spell are the ones she in fact did not spell correctly. She probably meant that she missed the words she felt should have been easy. Maybe they were short words. Children can be intimidated by long words, even though long words tend to be more regular and thus easier to spell.

Our perceptions of what is easy are often upside-down. We feel that some things should be easy even though our experience tells us otherwise.

Sometimes the trickiest parts of a subject come first, but we think that because they come first they should be easy. For example, force-body diagrams come at the beginning of an introductory physics class, but they can be hard to get right. Newton didn’t always get them right. More advanced physics, say celestial mechanics, is in some ways easier, or at least less error-prone.

“Elementary” and “easy” are not the same. Sometimes they’re opposites. Getting off the ground, so to speak, may be a lot harder than flying.

-John D. Cook

A full half (20/40) of the posts currently under discussion are meetup threads.

Can we please segregate these threads to another forum tab (in the vein of the Main/Discussion split)?

Edit: And only 5 or so of them actually have any comments in them.

My admittedly very cynical point of view is to assume that, to a first-order approximation, most people don't have beliefs in the sense that LW uses the word. People just say words, mostly words that they've heard people they like say. You should be careful not to ascribe too much meaning to the words most people say.

In general, I think it's a mistake to view other people through an epistemic filter. View them through an instrumental filter instead: don't ask "what do these people believe?" but "what do these people do?" The first question might lead you to conclude that religious people are dumb. The second question might lead you to explore the various instrumental ways in which religious communities are winning relative to atheist communities, e.g. strong communal support networks, a large cached database of convenient heuristics for dealing with life situations, etc.

Why should the term "the sequences" even be in the title? What does it tell an uninformed reader? Does it have any useful meaning for anyone who hasn't already read them? (Why are they even called that, anyway? I mean... I guess it's just that it was a sequence of blog posts?) In what way is "The Sequences" or "[Some title]: the Sequences" better than "The Blog Posts" or "The Diary Entries"?

An older woman is abusing her position of authority to violently take out her frustrations on a young male she has authority over - and that's patriarchy? Really? Reverse the situation, and that might be "patriarchy." Or it could just be a messed up person. The position the author takes in that post trivializes women; they can't help it, they're not responsible for their actions, because Patriarchy. Well, "misogyny" is right. It just applies to the person writing that post.

And the porn comment, as well. Men need to be fixed, because their sexuality isn't desirable or acceptable.

And I'm sure I'm "mansplaining," a sexist term which boils down to trivializing male perspective. Regardless of whatever bad things it has been used to describe, I've seen it far more often used to attack reasonable discourse. When you're discussing things rationally you can say exactly what is wrong with a statement; you don't need terms like "mansplaining."

Also, a minor comment in regards to Author A - please don't trivialize women who do prefer the contributing, doting role. They aren't doing it wrong, they're doing it different, and they experience no small amount of hostility from other women who have replaced one kind of misogyny with another. Your comments about doting women are extremely similar to PUA comments about "beta" males, not a little because both are fulfilling similar roles in relationships, and because your comments, like theirs, essentially add up to the suggestion that any relationship entered into in a supportive role is necessarily doomed because nobody will ever respect them. Indeed, swap the genders and it wouldn't be out of place in a PUA blog.

Or, to put it another way - read this post with the genders reversed and few would hesitate to call the result misogynistic. This is my personal yardstick for discussing gender issues; swap the genders and see how it reads. I doubt the LW Women series of posts would be anywhere near as well-received if the genders involved were editorially swapped.

The site was seriously going to hell due to long troll-started threads and troll-feeding.

I really don't see this. It looks like the main clause of decline is that spontaneous top-level postings are not enough to make up for the loss of the enormous subsidy of a good writer posting as a full-time job. 3 examples of hellish troll-feeding would be nice.

Who else is reading this page because they visited LessWrong to procrastinate?

And the first thing i see when i get here is a discussion post on internet procrastination. I feel so ridiculous now that i have no choice but to get back to work!

LWers are largely too confident in the conclusiveness of the research they cite for some of their beliefs.

Well, where should I start? A few examples:

• The Roman Empire reached its maximum extent under Trajan circa 100AD. (And even that was a fairly small increase relative to a century earlier under Augustus.) Signs of crisis started appearing only towards the end of the 2nd century, and Christianity started being officially tolerated only in the early 4th century. How these centuries of non-expansion before Christianity entered the political stage can be reconciled with the theory from the article is beyond me.

• There is clear evidence that the fall of the Roman empire occasioned a huge fall in living standards throughout the former Empire, including its provinces that it supposedly only pillaged and exploited. (See The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins for a good recent overview.)

• Ascribing the decline in masculinity to some mysterious "reprogramming" that is narrated in passive voice strikes as me as bizarrely incoherent.

• Large cities are not a modern invention. In the largest cities of the ancient world, enormous numbers of men (certainly on the order of hundreds of thousands) lived packed together much more tightly than in modern cities. How did the states ruling these cities handle that situation, if the mysterious "reprogramming" occurred only in the last few centuries?

• In the antebellum U.S., the South was not fighting to implement federal tariffs, but opposing them bitterly.

• Cotton picking wasn't widely automated until the mid-20th century. How long slavery would have remained profitable without abolition is a difficult question, but in 1861, "mechanical reapers.. mak[ing] slavery uneconomical" were still firmly in the realm of science fiction.

• If the reason for the lack of interest in slaves in the North was their short growing season, then the ongoing industrialization should have changed that. Factories can utilize labor profitably 365 days a year. So clearly other factors were more important.

Guys, these are students in an intro philosophy class who looked at a few introductory and recently promoted articles. Expecting them to genuinely struggle with the weird views expressed here would require them to a) encounter the weird views which they likely didn't do and b) feel that they in any way have the expertise to challenge those views. What is noteworthy about this is that the comments were mandatory. If you make everyone who read a few introductory articles write comments these are about the results you're going to get. The people who write comments on the internet are the small minority who feel strongly about something said here and competent enough to add or criticize. But that is a small fraction of the possible audience. So seeing comments that don't pattern match to the comments one normally reads on the Internet is not a good reason to conclude the students did not have genuinely positive reaction to what they read.

Most intro to philosophy classes are not made up of kids with any significant CS, cog sci, mathematical or physics background. Yes, they're taking Less Wrong to be authoritative. But they read a bunch of good, non-controversial articles and have little prior expertise to fall back on. Yeah, the comments are written in bullshitty language and tone because that's how one writes for authority figures you can't trust yet. That does not mean the sentiments expressed are bullshit- it is very common for undergrads to criticize assigned reading.

Many of the negative comments in this thread strike me as spouting cached thoughts about higher education, in many cases from people who may not have a lot of experience with higher ed.