Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 04 July 2014 10:46:02AM *  1 point [-]

General case:

When someone posts links from webpage X, which can be refuted from webpage Y (or vice versa), and so on, without adding anything themselves to the discussion.

Motivating example:

I've often seen things posted on climate change, lifted directly from http://wattsupwiththat.com/ , that can be refuted from http://www.skepticalscience.com/ , which can often be re-refuted from the original website, and so on. Since we're just letting the websites talk to each other, and neither poster has any relevant expertise, this seems a pointless waste.

Comment author: Discredited 05 July 2014 05:00:26AM 3 points [-]

An argument that halts in disagreement (or fails to halt in agreement) because the interlocutors are each waiting for another to provide a skillful assessment of their own inexpertly-referenced media sounds a lot like a software process deadlock condition in computer science. Maybe there's a more specific type of deadlock, livelock, resource starvation, ..., in the semantic neighborhood of your identified pattern.

Dropping references, while failing to disclaim your ability to evaluate the quality and relevance of topical media, could be called a violation of pragmatic expectations of rational discourse, like Grice's prescriptive maxims.

Maybe a telecommunications analogy would work, making reference to amplifiers \ repeaters \ broadcast stations that degrade a received signal if they fail to filter \ shape it to the characteristics of the retransmission channel.

"Rhetorical reenactment" sounds like "historical reenactment" and hints at the unproductive, not-directly-participatory role in the debate of the people sharing links.

Comment author: Discredited 26 June 2014 02:42:23AM 2 points [-]

DeepMind isn't doing safety engineering; they're doing standard AI. It doesn't matter if Elon Musk is interested in AI safety, if, after his deliberations, he invests in efforts to develop unsafe AI. Good intentions don't leak value into the consequences of your acts.

Comment author: Discredited 17 February 2014 05:14:17AM *  1 point [-]

You are never going to catch up, and neither is anyone else.

-- Gian-Carlo Rota

Comment author: Discredited 29 January 2014 06:02:20PM 3 points [-]

Bob will accept that some phrase X is meaningful if there is a test that can be performed whose outcome value depends on truth value of X. If there is such a test, then we can construct a further test of asking someone who has performed the original test what the outcome of the test was. Since the people who set up tests are usually honest, this test would also be a test of X (provided the original test exists).

If I ask an honest peasant how long the emperor's nose is, but I also suspect no one has ever seen the emperor, how much do I learn from her statement? What if she says, "I have never seen the emperor, but other people tell me his nose is 5cm"? How many people has she talked to? Has any of them seen the emperor?

I don't know how to answer those questions, and yet your example is even less clear. You think no one has seen the emperor and you're not sure if he can be seen. 5cm? Well she is honest.

In response to comment by ciphergoth on Why CFAR?
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 December 2013 12:50:39AM 11 points [-]

I would phrase this more along the lines of "If nothing MIRI does works, or for that matter if everything works but it's still not enough, CFAR tries to get a fully generic bonus on paths unseen in advance."

Comment author: Discredited 01 January 2014 03:26:52AM 2 points [-]

Do you choose that rephrasing because you don't see how MIRI's work could be harmful or because there is nothing CFAR can do in that case?

Comment author: Discredited 24 December 2013 06:51:31AM 1 point [-]

Mirror of the Bonobo Conspiracy webcomic: #569: Easy once you know

Comment author: lukeprog 05 November 2013 04:21:49AM 1 point [-]

Nope!

Comment author: Discredited 05 November 2013 05:09:10AM 0 points [-]

Richard Jeffrey!

Comment author: lukeprog 04 November 2013 04:31:36PM *  0 points [-]

Karma points to whoever identifies them correctly!

The guy on the right is more accurately represented than the guy on the left, but the guy on the left may still be guessable based on the subject matter. Hint: the guy on the left is a philosopher known, among other things, for his post-1950 contributions to theory of causality.

(The guy in the middle is Judea Pearl, Ilya's advisor at UCLA.)

Update: dougclow correctly identified the man on the right, and vallinder correctly identified the man on the left.

Comment author: Discredited 05 November 2013 03:15:32AM *  0 points [-]

The man on the left is Hans Reichenbach.

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