I like the writeup and the idea very much. I can think of times when I've used something similar in the past, but the bit about recruiting people to do get milk didn't occur to me at the time.

I'm kinda torn, I see it as a very useful technique to defuse a situation and get people reminded about why they talk to each other in the first place. And of course the actual consequences of having a blazing row, which isn't as apparent when we're separated by keyboards. On the other hand as already pointed out a bunch of other social conventions then come into play. ('Home turf', shyness, social dominance, etc.)

At the very least, it's an important option to have in our toolkit.

Yeah, the original post was banned. I've unbanned it. There seems to be no good (i.e. standard/accepted) reason for banning the post, so whoever did it should comment/private-message before escalating further. (Will got on a list of ban-able users a few years back for not responding to heavy downvoting of many of his comments, but for the last two years there were no problems with the comments, so they should no longer be easily banned. I've looked through the comment history, and there appears to be no other recently banned content, except that one post.)

(Will: Maybe remove the copy of the text from this post, so that it's only in the original, while this post is focused on discussing the mysterious banning of the original post?)

This doesn't really seem useful here. I didn't come to LW isn't to read drunk fanfic (or fanfic-fic), and I doubt most people do either.

If you think I'm being unfair, note that HPMOR isn't posted here, just referenced to it. If you actually want to work on writing as you've claimed, rather than trolling, maybe fanfic.net is the better place.

Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke? (c)

According to the base rate there is an evidence that this is a joke about Russia national team or Suarez bite

Vote for a third party that cares about Z.

Provided that one exists. And provided that it isn't completely screwed up about issues A to Y. And provided you are willing to sacrifice the rest of your political signaling power to a signal about Z.

Perhaps Nigerian scammers? Nowadays everyone knows that Nigerian scammers are likely going to take you for a ride, and what tactics they use. And how much it hurts to get stung by one.

You could use the idea of benevolent Nigerian Princes as the 'known false' idea that everyone can agree on, and segue into the features of it that ring alarm bells (high payoff for sending personal info, undeserved wealth triggering our 'greed' buttons, etc) and the idea that being primed on rationality helps you to not fall for whatever the next version of Nigerian scamming turns out to be.

When uncertain what to do, keep your options open.

Right, I recall having the same thought, if fleeting. "Measure twice and cut once" and all that.

My main gripe with the story was actually the universal (across species) desire to impose one's morality on alien intelligences. This premise challenged my suspension of disbelief more than anything else in the story.

From the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0126v1.pdf "In particular, memory functions must be vastly non-lossy, otherwise retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay. " I wonder if they've ever met a human being? That's pretty much how we work. Memories don't so much decay as get influenced slightly every time we remember them. That's one reason why they get witnesses to crimes to write stuff down straight away, rather than waiting till a trial, etc.

Sigh. To go from 'brains are pretty good at storing information' to 'therefore brains must never leak lose data in an information theoretic sense' is so misleading that it makes me wonder if it's deliberate.

They seem to be doing this to build up the argument that a non-lossy consciousness isn't computable. (And therefore, humans are special. ) The irony is that they're trying to make human consciousness special by making it more stereotypically robot-like, by implying it can't lose information.

Last meetup there seemed to be a bit of interest in locks and locksport. I'll bring along some simple locks and tools and run a short introduction after the main discussion for anyone that's interested.

Cheers, Gav

Heyya,

Just want to confirm it's a 5:30pm start. The text says 5:30, but the 'Where/When' says 6:30.

Cheers, Gavin