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Comment author: Plasmon 16 May 2013 04:36:45PM 0 points [-]

I was taking a statement from this great-grandparent post and surrounding posts at face value

If domain experts say that the obvious ways to exploit having a tulpa fail, they are probably right.

By "do something munchkiny", I meant these "obvious ways to exploit having a tulpa", presumably including remembering things you don't and other cognitive enhancements.

Why do I think they can't? Because the (hypothetical?) domain experts say so.

Comment author: Plasmon 16 May 2013 03:53:18PM *  1 point [-]

Only in a very specific sense of "exist". Do hallucinations exist? That-which-is-being-hallucinated does not, but the mental phenomenon does exist.

One might in a similar vein interpret the question "do tulpas exist?" as "are there people who can deliberately run additional minds on their wetware and interact with these minds by means of a hallucinatory avatar?". I would argue that the tulpa's inability to do anything munchkiny is evidence against their existence even in this far weaker sense.

Comment author: Plasmon 16 May 2013 05:39:05AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Plasmon 10 May 2013 01:35:12PM 3 points [-]

This reminds me of the Abramelin operation, a ritual that supposedly summons guardian angels.

Comment author: Plasmon 09 May 2013 05:22:34AM 4 points [-]

He estimated the sun was no more than 20 million years old, and presumably did not expect it to last for more than a few tens of millions of years more.

Comment author: Plasmon 30 April 2013 05:37:56AM 2 points [-]

Fun fact : the Vulcan greeting originated in ancient Egypt.

Comment author: Plasmon 14 April 2013 02:24:19PM *  -2 points [-]

This is good advice. Strive for real understanding rather than rote memorisation.

(is this too obvious to be worth mentioning? Probably. Unfortunately I have seen several doctoral students fail and in hindsight it appears to me that this was part of the cause of that failure.)

Comment author: Plasmon 04 April 2013 06:35:37AM *  4 points [-]

as it (MWI) requires uncountable worlds created in any finite instance of time

How is that any more problematic than doing physics with real or complex numbers in the first place?

Comment author: Plasmon 26 February 2013 05:53:44PM 0 points [-]
Comment author: Plasmon 25 February 2013 06:12:12PM 9 points [-]

can you conceive of a reason (not necessarily the officially stated one) that the actual basilisk discussion ought to be suppressed, even at the cost of the damage done to LW credibility (such as it is) by an offsite discussion of such suppression?

The basilisk is harmless. Eliezer knows this. The streisand effect was the intended consequence of the censor. The hope is that people who become aware of the basilisk will increase their priors for the existence of real information hazards, and will in the future be less likely to read anything marked as such. It's all a clever memetic inoculation program!

disclaimer : I don't actually believe this.

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