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The role of fun in maintaining mental health should also be noted. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Nonsuperintelligent AI threat
Something that I don't think I've seen discussed here is the threat posed by an AI which is smarter than we are when it comes to computer security without being generally intelligent.
Suppose there were a computer virus that could read code, to the extent of looking at the programs on a computer, seeing how they process input from the internet, and how they could be exploited to run arbitrary code. Historically, viruses have been annoyances. How much smarter would a virus have to be in order to be a threat on the scale of say, a planetary EMP burst?
In response to
Offense versus harm minimization
For me, the important distinction between the salmon thing and the Mohammad thing is that getting zapped when you see a picture of a salmon is a reaction that doesn't go away through exposure. It can't be desensitized. Drawing Mohammad, or really any form of trolling, eventually gets savvy people to change the way they react.
That's not to say that trolling is necessarily good, but it is functionally different than what's happening with the salmon. See this article by Clay Shirky.
In response to
We are not living in a simulation
If my qualia were actually those of a computer chip, then rather than feeling hot I would feel purple (or rather, some quale that no human language can describe), and if you asked me why I went back indoors even though I don't have any particular objection to purple and the weather is not nearly severe enough to pose any serious threat to my health, I wouldn't be able to answer you or in any way connect my qualia to my actions.
But in the simulation, you WOULD have an objection to purple, and you would call purple "hot", right? Or is this some haywire simulation where the simulated people act normally except they're completely baffled as to why they're doing any of it? Either what you're saying is incredibly stupid, or I don't understand it. Wait, does that mean I'm in a simulation?
In response to
Only submit Meetups when you've declared a place and time
I'm half-tempted to schedule a meetup in the ruins of downtown San Francisco at noon on April 9, 2036. I'll be in what used to be the Ferry Building, wearing a hazmat suit with "Less Wrong" written on the front.
I will go to this as long as that libertarian guy won't be there.
Nope, indescribable of the "bazilions of small and big things done towards it all the time with no pattern or connection other than they goal they're supposed to help accomplish" variety.
If the memetic hazard you're referring to is the same one as mine, I recommend benzodiazepines in the short term and vipassana meditation in the long term. And just thinking about it, though clearly you're already doing that.
I think to a large extent, the percieved threat of the thing is due to a generally neurotic perspective, common to many people here, which can twist abstract thinking into knots when given a sufficiently long and nonintuitive chain of reasoning. The trauma illuminates a serious problem with the mind rather than a serious threat from the idea.
Also, it is extraordinarily impolite to post a comment containing a link, then, after a reply has been posted, edit the link to point somewhere different. I don't currently have enough karma to downvote, but if I did I would definitely downvote such a flagrant breach of basic etiquette.
For the record, PlaidX's original link was to http://www.rangevoting.org/IRVcs.html . The link now points to http://www.rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html . And the argument there is a specious one, in that the situation described only works if the "best" voters know how everyone else is going to vote. Which they don't.
Sorry, I couldn't see your reply when I did my edit. I should've reloaded.
In response to
The AV referendum and rationality
Alternative Voting, also known as instant runoff voting, produces results very similar to first past the post, while introducing massive headaches. You want range voting or approval voting instead.
IRV leads to 2-party domination
There are three IRV countries: Ireland (mandated in their 1937 constitution), Australia (adopted STV in the early 1900s, but in 1949 added "reweighting" to STV in their multi-winner elections, a change which does not matter for us since we are only considering single-winner elections - Australia and Ireland have both kinds of elections), and Malta. (Later note: a recent addition is Fiji, but it unfortunately then got subtracted due to a 2006 coup.)
All three became 2-party dominated in their IRV seats. And this is despite the fact that in addition to IRV single-winner elections, they all also have multi-winner STV "proportional representation" (PR) elections, and they are parliamentary rather than presidential. Both of these two factors mitigate toward having more than 2 parties (the parliamentary countries with PR essentially all have many more than 2 vibrant political parties). But despite those multiparty-genic factors, the effect of IRV in these countries has been enough to drag them back down to 2-party domination status! So given that, you can bet your bottom dollar that the USA, were it to adopt IRV but still to remain presidential and without multiwinner PR elections (i.e. wholy with single-winner elections), will definitely stay 2-party dominated.
I strongly urge anyone who cares about voting systems to poke around this site for a while, it's very well-written.
In response to
The Good News of Situationist Psychology
Hmm. I wonder what situationism says about living alone and not interacting with anyone. Does it mean no influence, or feedback from your own traits, or what?
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[skims article]
Skim more. Got it.