I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so "libertarian" (US-style, ie, pro-free market).

It seems at odds to me with LW views on other topics. Free market is akin to evolution : it's at optimisation process which, given enough time and space, will end up finding local maxima, but it's a blind, uncaring force that doesn't care about the sufferings it produces, that has no long-term vision. It's Azathoth. The same way that good engineering is more efficient than evolution (show me a bird flying as fast as a plane), wouldn't a good partially planned economy be better than free market ?

Or if you look at it from a CS view, especially with the SIAI view on AI (which is not shared by all Less Wrongers, but by most) : we use Azathoth-like solutions (neural network, genetic algorithms, ...) when we don't have a classical engineering solution. Shouldn't we do the same in economy ? Try to have more "engineered" solution when we can do so, and resort to the "free market" as a suboptimal but working default when we don't have an engineered solution ? If you look at EDF or SNCF (french electricity and railroads), it seems there are domains in which the "engineered solution" works well.

It would seem more coherent with the rest of the LW view to support things like Cybersyn rather than Azathoth.

Also (but my comment is already too long so I won't elaborate that one), a rational view on human psychology and cognitive biases should tell us that Homo Economicus just doesn't exist, and things like "consent" and "free will" are always a bit fuzzy, humans are prone to error and manipulation, so we should have safeguards to ensure the errors done by individual don't completely ruin their (or others) life, which argue for a strong social safety net.

Given the chart is for those who aren't mathematically inclined, I'd suggest this might not be a great idea.

You can shorten the table by about half if you eliminate the negative logarithms by using the laws of logarithms.

For example, -20 decibles in terms of probability is just 100% - (The probability corresponding to +20 decibles), and the odds ratios simply occur in reverse order. That is 20 db = 100:1 and -20 db = 1:100

With the sex ratio around here we might have to take what we can get.

"Did you just generalize from fictional evidence?"

"You're a one-boxer, right?" (Said with no context.)

"You'd choose specks, right?" (Said with no context.)

"Mysteriousness is not a property of a thing."

"You're running on corrupted hardware."

"Replace the symbol with the substance."

"Could you regenerate that knowledge?"

"Consider a group you feel prejudiced against, frequentists for example."

"But what's the best textbook on that subject?"

"Is that a compartmentalized belief?

"I notice I am confused."

"Of course I have super-powers. Everyone does."

"Beliefs are properly probabilistic."

"Is that your confidence level inside or outside the argument?"

"Did you credibly pre-commit to that rule?"

"That's just what it feels like from the inside."

"Conceptspace is bigger than you imagine."

"No you don't believe you believe that."

"No, money is the unit of caring."

"If that doesn't work out for you, you can still make six figures as a programmer."

"Purpose is not an inherent property."

"You think introspection is reliable?"

"Why didn't you use log-odds?"

Bullshit Rationalists Say:

"My priors are different than yours, and under them my posterior belief is justified. There is no belief that can be said to be irrational regardless of priors, and my belief is rational under mine."

"I pattern matched what you said rather than either apply the principle of charity or estimate the chances of your not having an opinion marking you as ignorant, unreasoning, and/or innately evil."

"Rational..." (used in the title of a post on any topic.)

Shit and Bullshit Rationalists Don't Say:

"You're entitled to your opinion."

"You can't be too skeptical"

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

"Did you read what Kurzweil wrote about the Singularity?

"100%."

"But was it statistically significant at the p<.05 level?"

"Yeah, I read all the papers cited in lukeprog's latest article."

I don't think self-awareness and sentience are the only dimensions along which minds can differ. The kinds of goals a mind tries to attain are much more relevant. I wouldn't want to ensure the survival of a mind that would make it more difficult for me to carry out my own goals. For example, let's say a self-aware and sentient paperclip maximizer were to be built. Can killing it be said to be unethical?

I think the minds of most non-human animals (with maybe the exception of some species of hominids) and human sociopaths are so different from ours that treating them unequally is justified in many situations.

Makes me take the warnings not to be seduced by my imagination far more seriously. Excellent work.

I experience numbers as being on a line that runs left to right, swerves to the left at some number, continues upwards, and then returns to running from left to right. My experience of temperatures, people's ages, and the days of months is similar, but with different patterns of where the turns are. However, I think it may actually go right to left somewhere in the millions, though I'm not sure. Negative numbers run to the left forever, as far as I can tell. Calendar years are slightly different, in that they take more rounded turns and seem to be capable of going in any direction. The months of the year are very different. They make a letter "D" curve with January at the top and December at the bottom, but the link between January and December seems to be "pinched" rather than connected by a straight line. Also, the days of the week have different shades, Monday-Friday are all slightly grayish, while Saturday and Sunday are bright.

I also experience the letters of the alphabet, numerals, punctuation marks, months, days of the week, and various mathematical symbols as having genders and personalities.

I seem to be unable to think without internal monologue and visualization both being active. Whenever I imagine something, my internal monologue is describing it, and whenever I think verbally I visualize what I'm "talking" about.

I have an exceptional memory for auditory information.

I am usually almost completely indifferent to adult suffering.

I can get lost in deep thought such that I may forget where I am or the time of day or what I'm doing, etc. In these episodes, it may be quite difficult to get my attention.

I can hardly look at an object or person without them having a strong influence on my line of thought.

I conceptualize manipulations of mathematical expressions as movements consisting of slides and "flips".

Someone recommended HPMOR on another forum. Then I found LessWrong by googling the author's name.

Why don't we start treating the sum of log_2 of the probability — conditional on every available piece of information — you assign to every true sentence, as the best measure of your epistemic success?

Wait. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here, but how are we going to decide what a true sentence is independently of all of our available information?