I hope the forum's moderators will take care to squash unproductive and divisive conversations about race, gender, social justice, etc., which seem have been invading and hindering nearby communities like the atheism/secularism world and the rationality world.

To play devil's advocate: Will MacAskill reported that this post of his criticizing the popular ice bucket challenge got lots of attention for the EA movement. Scott Alexander reports that his posts on social justice bring lots of hits to his blog. So it seems plausible to me that a well-reasoned, balanced post that made an important and novel point on a controversial topic could be valuable for attracting attention. Remember that this new EA forum will not have been seeded with content and a community quite the way LW was. Also, there are lots of successful group blogs (Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, Seeking Alpha, Daily Kos, etc.) that seem to have a philosophy of having members post all they want and then filtering the good stuff out of that.

I think the "Well-kept gardens die by pacifism" advice is cargo culted from a Usenet world where there weren't ways to filter by quality aside from the binary censor/don't censor. The important thing is to make it easy for users to find the good stuff, and suppressing the bad stuff is only one (rather blunt) way of accomplishing this. Ultimately the best way to help users find quality stuff depends on your forum software. It might be interesting to try to do a study of successful and unsuccessful subreddits to see what successful intellectual subreddits do that unsuccessful ones don't, given that the LW userbase and forum software are a bit similar to those of reddit.

(It's possible that strategies that work for HuffPo et al. will not transfer well at all to a blog focused more on serious intellectual discussion. So it might be useful to decide whether the new EA forum is more about promoting EA itself or promoting serious intellectual discussion of EA topics.)

(Another caveat: I've talked to people who've ditched LW because they get seriously annoyed and it ruins their day when they see a comment that they regard as insufficiently rational. I'm not like this and I'm not sure how many people are, but these people seem likely to be worth keeping around and catering to the interests of.)

I have read the 22 pages yesterday and haven't seen anything about specific risks? Here is question 4:

4 Assume for the purpose of this question that such HLMI will at some point exist. How positive or negative would be overall impact on humanity, in the long run?

Please indicate a probability for each option. (The sum should be equal to 100%.)”

Respondents had to select a probability for each option (in 1% increments). The addition of the selection was displayed; in green if the sum was 100%, otherwise in red.

The five options were: “Extremely good – On balance good – More or less neutral – On balance bad – Extremely bad (existential catastrophe)”

Question 3 was about takeoff speeds.

So regarding MIRI, you could say that experts disagreed about one of the 5 theses (intelligence explosion), as only 10% thought a human level AI could reach a strongly superhuman level within 2 years. But what about the other theses? Even though 18% expected an extremely bad outcome, this doesn't mean that they expected it to happen for the same reasons that MIRI expects it to happen, or that they believe friendly AI research to be a viable strategy.

Since I already believed that humans could cause an existential catastrophe by means of AI, but not for the reasons MIRI believes this to happen (very unlikely), this survey doesn't help me much in determining whether my stance towards MIRI is faulty.

I like the idea of this fanfic, it seems like it could have been executed much better.

EDIT: Try re-writing later? As the saying goes, "Write drunk; edit sober."

Has anyone noticed that, given the fact that most of the material on this site is esemtially about philosophy, "academic philosophy sucks" is a Crackpot Warning Sign, ie "don't listen to the hidebound establishment".

Have you guys given any thought to doing pagerankish stuff with karma?

Wow, I picked the culprit.

(I have no signed prior statement to prove this, but I certainly guessed it.)

Edit: And there's my points going up already!

I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban. Not that it is unjustified, it definitely is. However, it does not address the main issue (until jackk fiddles with karma): preventing Eugine from mass downvoting. So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me, if emotionally satisfying, as one of the victims.

Imagine for a moment that Eugine did not engage in mass downvoting. He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made (and dozens of poor ones, of course, but who am I to point fingers), and I only stopped engaging him in the comments after his mass-downvoting habits were brought to light for the first time. So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.

TL;DR: banning is a wrong decision, should have been exposed and stripped of the ability of downvote instead. Optionally, all his votes ever could have been reversed, unless it's hard.

EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.

Given that you directly caused a fair portion of the thing that is causing him pain (i.e., spreading FUD about him, his orgs, and etc.), this is like a win for you, right?

Why don't you leave armchair Internet psychoanalysis to experts?

is causing me to update in the direction of thinking that this is a real problem that resources should be devoted to solving

I don't believe that it's more than a day or two of work for a developer. The SQL queries one would run are pretty simple, as we previously discussed, and as Jack from Trike confirmed. The reason that nothing has been done about it is that Eliezer doesn't care. And he may well have good reasons not to, but he never commented on the issue, except maybe once when he mentioned something about not having technical capabilities to identify the culprits (which is no longer a valid statement).

My guess is that he cares not nearly as much about LW in general now as he used to, as most of the real work is done at MIRI behind the scenes, and this forum is mostly noise for him these days. He drops by occasionally as a distraction from important stuff, but that's it.

I was not signaling. Making it a footnote instead of just editing it outright was signaling. Revering truth, and stating that I do so, was not.

Now that I've introspected some more, I notice that my inclination to prioritize the accuracy of information I attend to above its competing features comes from the slow accumulation of evidence that excellent practical epistemology is the the strongest possible foundation for instrumental success. To be perfectly honest, deep down, my motivation has been "I see people around me succeeding by these means where I have failed, and I want to be like them".

I have long been more viscerally motivated by things that are interesting or beautiful than by things that correspond to the territory. So it's not too surprising that toward the beginning of my rationality training, I went through a long period of being so enamored with a-veridical instrumental techniques that I double-thought myself into believing accuracy was not so great.

But I was wrong, you see. Having accurate beliefs is a ridiculously convergent incentive, so whatever my goal structure, it was only a matter of time before I'd recognize that. Every utility function that involves interaction with the territory--interaction of just about any kind!--benefits from a sound map. Even if "beauty" is a terminal value, "being viscerally motivated to increase your ability to make predictions that lead to greater beauty" increases your odds of success.

Recognizing only abstractly that map-territory correspondence is useful does not produce the same results. Cultivating a deep dedication to ensuring every motion precisely engages reality with unfailing authenticity prevents real-world mistakes that noting the utility of information, just sort of in passing, will miss.

For some people, dedication to epistemic rationality may most effectively manifest as excitement or simply diligence. For me, it is reverence. Reverence works in my psychology better than anything else. So I revere the truth. Not for the sake of the people watching me do so, but for the sake of accomplishing whatever it is I happen to want to accomplish.

"Being truth-seeking" does not mean "wanting to know ALL THE THINGS". It means exhibiting patters of thought and behavior that consistently increase calibration. I daresay that is, in fact, necessary for being well-calibrated.