Overview for Plasmon - Less Wrong

Plasmon on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-17T02:36:45.654965+10:00

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.

Plasmon on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-17T01:53:18.302766+10:00

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.

Plasmon on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-16T15:39:05.928131+10:00

Domain experts saying that the obvious ways to exploit a phenomenon fail is usually evidence against the existence of said phenomenon.

Plasmon on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-10T23:35:12.844509+10:00

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

Plasmon on Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism

2013-05-09T15:22:34.203655+10:00

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.

Plasmon on Good luck, Mr. Rationalist

2013-04-30T15:37:56.905653+10:00

Fun fact : the Vulcan greeting originated in ancient Egypt.

Plasmon on Grad Student Advice Repository

2013-04-15T00:24:19.197392+10:00

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.)

Plasmon on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

2013-04-04T17:35:37.962465+11:00

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?

Plasmon on Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013

2013-02-27T04:53:44.446866+11:00

See this comment

Plasmon on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013

2013-02-26T05:12:12.976601+11:00

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.