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Everyone, vote Isaac enough points at least to move this there :-)
And my nefarious plot to gain cheap karma comes to fruition, muahaha...
Just kidding ;-) Moved to the front page.
Hong Kong LW meetup
Any LW readers in Asia's world city interested in a meetup? I have a hunch that there might be more of us that the statistics suggest, possibly due to some of us showing up in the analytics as being based in Kowloon, not Hong Kong. At any rate, I'd be surprised if we couldn't find enough people for a decent gathering, HK being such a wired and technophilic place.
Date: Saturday 12th March, 6:00 pm.
Place: 168 Future Bar, Mong Kok
Reading Starting a LW Meetup is Easy inspired me to try and get this moving. Remember, you don't need to be an active contributor to the site to come along and meet like-minded people (I personally don't post or comment very often, though I do lurk a lot). Don't be shy, if you're at all interested please reply so we can get the ball rolling!
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Hong Kong LW meetup
Main page for visibility?
I don't have sufficient karma to post to the main page.
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Rationality Quotes: February 2010
Organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological.
-- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
I'm interested to find that you read ribbonfarm.com, since along with lesswrong it's one of my two most-visited blogs.
I sometimes think Venkatash's way of thinking might be on a level above that of many of the posts here. As an engineer he seems to have internalized the scientific/rationalist way of thinking, but he's combined that with a metaphorical/narrative/artistic way of looking at the world. When it works well, it works really well. What do other people think?
Interestingly, he has PhD in an AI-related field (specifically, control theory), but thinks the Singularity is unlikely to happen: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/28/the-misanthropes-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world/
Another article that might contradict a common belief of this community: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/09/28/learning-from-one-data-point/
Anyway, certainly a blog I'd recommend to lesswrongers.
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Spoiled Discussion of Permutation City, A Fire Upon The Deep, and Eliezer's Mega Crossover
At the risk of being shunned as something of a heretic here, I have to admit to not having cared too much for Permutation City. It had some lovely ideas, but its characters seemed too constrained by the exigencies of plot and setting, and never quite came alive for me.
I loved Fire Upon the Deep, though.
Also Deepness in the Sky, though it's not particularly about uploading, although it is a good visceral introduction to just how much benefit even a marginal increase in intelligence can provide. It is also helpful to read if you're going to get some of the crossover references in FUtD.
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Spoiled Discussion of Permutation City, A Fire Upon The Deep, and Eliezer's Mega Crossover
I felt the same way. I feel the same way about a lot of science fiction - interesting ideas, often worth reading for the ideas alone, but falls flat on plot, or characters, or writing, or all of the above.
With Permutation City I got the sense that he was trying hard to make his characters 3-dimensional, but it didn't work for me. [SPOILER WARNING] For example, one supporting character spent most of the novel trying to overcome the guilt of murdering a prostitute. The idea is promising, but the execution was irritating.
(In fact, I have a theory that some popular works of genre fiction - I would include thrillers and romances as well as sci-fi - are popular because of their flaws. For example, when reading The Da Vinci Code, you don't have to worry about any interesting characters or beautiful prose distracting you from the puzzles and conspiracies.)
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Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence
Small error at "It's difficult to conceive of an intelligence that experiences around 30,000 years in just one second"
One billion * one second = ~30 years, not ~30,000 years.
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Confidence levels inside and outside an argument
Note that someone just gave a confidence level of 10^4478296 to one and was wrong. This is the sort of thing that should never ever happen. This is possibly the most wrong anyone has ever been.
I was in some discussion at SIAI once and made an estimate that ended up being off by something like three hundred trillion orders of magnitude. (Something about giant look-up tables, but still.) Anyone outdo me?
Surely declaring "x is impossible", before witnessing x, would be the most wrong you could be?
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Winston Churchill
This interestingly seems to parallel a comment by the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, when he first entered office.
"We're all going to have things thrown back at us. We're looking at the bigger picture. ... And if it means swallowing some humble pie, and if it means eating some of your words, I cannot think of a more excellent diet."
This was in response to a reporter who asked him why he was working with Nick Clegg, a man he had once described as a "joke". At the time I thought it was a spontaneous remark, but after seeing the above, it looks like he may have been quoting.