Am I the only one who thinks that there's some kernel of truth in this? that many people's perception of 'quality' is very strongly influenced by the perceived social status of the creator?

Yeah, I get the whole weirdtopia thing. But like Mark says, its probably not the best weird thing to be chosen.

And if people can't understand that and read any kind of far-off weirdness through the lens of this decade's petty tribal politics, then basically, fuck 'em.

In one way, I think this attitude is commendable - interlectual and artistic integrity and not having to kowtow to people who are offended. But at the same time, 'anyone who disagrees can just fuck off' ... its not the best PR. And I don't think 'not being scared of rape' is an important criteria for rationalists.

I've read a similar idea to legalised rape before, in the context of a future where it was considered extremely bad manners to refuse sex. I can kinda imagine this could work. But legalised violent rape...

What I imagine would happen is that one person would try to rape another, they would fight back, their friends would intervene, a full-blown bar fight would ensue, someone would smash a bottle, and people would end up in the hospital, or the mental asylum, or the morgue.

Or are they not allowed to fight back? Is it maybe just date rape which is legal, or can you for instance, kidnap and rape someone who is on their way to an important business meeting? Do people say "First on the agenda, Mrs Brown and Mr Black give their apologies that they are unable to attend the emergency meeting on disaster relief for Proxima centuri - alpha, as Mrs Brown has contracted space measles and Mr Black is otherwise engaged in being anally gang raped"?

I mean, even if everyone in the future are the sort of ultra-kinky people who enjoy being raped, and everyone is bisexual to avoid the problem of being raped by the wrong gender, it still doesn't make sense.

Counterexamples: Bill Gates nor Arnold Schwarzenegger seem respectively 100% geek and 100% jock, and are among the most successful people on earth. Which seem to show you can be extremely successful without "striking a balance".

Going 100% geek seems like a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you mostly care about success at geeky things (which amazingly a lot of geeks do).

Which isn't to say there aren't any "geek failure modes" to avoid, but "try to strike a balance between geek and jock" doesn't seem like a very useful rule of thumb.

Well, it is true that I think that I think to post effectively on LW is to translate my rather diverse life experience to Americanese and it is leaky. But it is nowhere this leaky.

There are mind people and body people. Where it comes from is a good question, but this phenomenon goes back to tribal chieftains vs. shamans, warriors vs clergy and who knows where.

Ultimately it comes from the fact that man is a smart animal and these two aspects are in a constant tension. Satoshi Kanazawa have put it so that as IQ is a general problem-solver, it tends to suppress earlier adapted problem-solver instincts, making intelligent people not too good at things like common sense, read signs of romantic attraction, pick up social cues and so on.

So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain - shaman - warrior dynamic. The warriors were the perfectly primates, who represented what is in humans like in every animal, who respected physical health and strength, liked such challenges, liked tackling problems head-on preferably clubbing them over the head, liked direct and impulsive action and raised the fiercest of them as chieftains. And the shaman was the intellectual who represented what is specifically human in man, the intelligence, which was back then probably interpreted as suggestions from spirits and gods perhaps through a bicameral mind setup.

If Kanazawa is right that the tension is inherent, because not only stupid people are not smart but also smart people are not good at being instinctive and sensible, then I think that explains it. But even when not I think the basic tension can also be seen empirically.

Liberal-arts intelligentsia and hackers are of the same mind-people, ex-clergy, ex-shaman stock. The whole point is that with some influence from body people they are more likely to become hackers than postmodernists :-) (Intelligentsia is much more a French than Russian concept.)

And the get-shit-done comes from the same body-orientation as machismo or sports come from, as our heads can be in any kinds of clouds but our body is always in the here in now, it is through the body how minds have contact with reality. People who care about their ass sitting on an uncomfortable chair will be practical and fix the chair. People who are not interested in their ass being uncomfortable because the body is a mere lowly vessel of their minds won't.

Thinking aloud here:

Say I'm an agent that wants to increase u, but not "too strongly" (this whole thing is about how to formalize "too strongly"). Couldn't I have a way of estimating how much other agents who don't care about u might still care about what I do, and minimize that? i.e. avoid anything that would make other agents want to model my working as something more than "wants to increase u".

(back in agent-designer shoes) So we could create a "moderate increaser" agent, give it a utility function u and inform it of other agents trying to increase v, w, x, y, and somehow have it avoid any strategies that would involve "decision theory interaction" with those other agents; i.e. threats, retaliation, trade ... maybe something like "those agents should behave as if you didn't exist".

I'm not saying he should remove the anime references, although they do go straight over my head. I'm saying that getting rid of the legalised rape would involve cutting one or two sentences - a tiny amount of the story which probably generates a hugely disproportionate amount of criticism.

For what its worth, when I write fiction, I just write whatever inspire me, and then go back over it later and remove the bits which no-one else will get.

I'm toying with the idea of programming a game based on The Murder Hobo Investment Bubble. The short version is that Old Men buy land infested with monsters, hire Murder Hobos to kill the monsters, and resell the land at a profit. I want to make something that models the whole economy, with individual agents for each Old Man, Murder Hobo, and anything else I might add. Rather than explicitly program the bubble in, it would be cool to use some kind of machine learning algorithm to figure everything out. I figure they'll make the sorts of mistakes that lead to investment bubbles automatically.

There are two problems. First, I have neither experience nor training with any machine learning except for Bayesian statistics. Second, it's often not clear what to optimize for. I could make some kind of scoring system where every month everyone who is still alive has their score increase by the log of their money or something, but that would still only work well if I just use scores from the previous generation, which is slower-paced than I'd like.

Old Men could learn whether or not Murder Hobos will work for a certain price, and whether or not they'll find more within a certain time frame, but if they buy a bad piece of land it's not clear how bad this is. They still have the land, but it's of an uncertain value. I suppose I could make it so they just buy options, and if they don't sell the land within a certain time period they lose it.

Murder Hobos risk dying, which has an unknown opportunity cost. I'm thinking of just having them base the expected opportunity cost of death on the previous generation, but then it would take them a generation to respond to the fact that demand is way down and they need to start taking risky jobs for low pay.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I consider "give up and do something else instead" to be a valid suggestion, so say that if you think it's what I should do.

Edit: I could have Murder Hobos workout expected opportunity cost of death by checking what portion of Murder Hobos of each level died the previous year and how long it's taking them to level up.

The impression I get when reading posts like these is that people should read up on the morality of self-care. If I'm not "allowed" to care for my friends/family/-self, not only would my quality if life decrease, it would decrease in such a way that would it harder and less efficient to actively care (e.g. donate) about people I don't know.

Why do people think children have greater moral value than adults, and it's worse to kill a child than a similarly defenseless, innocent adult?

However I have seen little discussion of the earlier part of the spectrum (friends and family vs. strangers), and it seems to be the one on which our intuitions agree the most reliably - which is why I think it deserves more of our attention (and having clear ideas about it might help about the rest).

I think, like you point out, this gets into near / far issues. How I behave around my family is tied into a lot of near mode things, and how I direct my charitable dollars is tied into a lot of far mode things. It's easy to talk far mode in an abstract way (Is it better to donate to ease German suffering or Somali suffering?) than it is to talk near mode in an abstract way (What is the optimal period for calling your mother?).

This was a big debate in ancient China, between the Confucians who considered it normal to have “care with distinctions” (愛有差等), whereas Mozi preached “universal love” (兼愛) in opposition to that, claiming that care with distinctions was a source of conflict and injustice.

The Spring and Autumn period definitely seems relevant, and I think someone could get a lot of interesting posts out of it.