“The world is just a word for the things you value around you, right? That’s something I’ve had since I was born. If you tell me to rule such a world, I already rule it.” – Tohsaka Rin (Fate: stay night) on not taking over the world.
I think it is having a small core of things and people you value that keeps you grounded and healthy. Our "Something to Protect" if you like. Without that investment and connection to things that matter it's easy to lose your way.
No, that's never how I've seen anyone define 'world'. Maybe that quote makes more sense in context.
Seems to me there are two important factors to distinguish:
To me it seems that the problem is the inherent difficulty of herding cats; and Eliezer is the most successful example I have ever seen. I have seen initially good web communities ruined after a year or two... and then I read an article describing how exactly that happened. From outside view, LW seems to survive for surprisingly long time as a decent website.
The problem with Roko seems to me a bit similar to what is happening now -- some people intentionally do things that annoy other people; moderator tries to supress that behavior; contrarians enjoy fighting him by making it more visible and rationalize their behavior as defending the freedom of speech or whatever. The Roko situation was much more insane; at least one person threatened to increase existential risk if Eliezer does not stop moderating the discussion. Today the most crazy reaction I found was upvoting an obvious troll so that others can comment on their nonsensical sequence of words without karma costs! Yay, that's exactly the behavior you would expect to find in a super-rational community, right? Unfortunately, it is exactly the kind of behavior you will find when you make a website for wannabe smart people.
Wikipedia is different: it is neither a blog nor a discussion forum. And it exists at cost of hundreds of people who have no life, so they can spend a lot of time in endless edit wars. This is yet another danger for LW. Not only new users can overrule the old users, but also the old users who have no life can overrule the old users whose instrumental goals are outside of LW. Users who want to reduce their procrastination on LW will not participate in endless discussions. If there is more content per day, they will simply read less, therefore they will vote less on an average comment, and they will have less word in "community" decisions. There is a risk that the procrastinators will simply optimize the website to fit their preferences -- preferences of people who don't mind spending a lot of time online, therefore e.g. reading comments by trolls and the subsequent discussions is not a problem for them. From their point of view, strict moderation will seem too harsh and fun-reducing.
As a reminder, if someone is convinced that they (as a person, or as a group) have better skills at maintaining a rationalist website, there is always a possibility of starting a new rationalist website. It could be even interlinked with LW, similarly like OB is now. Make an experiment, bet your own money and/or time!
I don't think any of that addresses the main point: what has Eliezer done that is evidence of good moderating skills? Who has Eliezer banned or not banned? etc.
The question isn't: "can Eliezer spend years cranking out high quality content on the excellent Reddit codebase with a small pre-existing community and see it grow?" It is: "can Eliezer effectively moderate this growing community?" And I gave several examples of how he had not done so effectively before LW, and has not done so effectively since LW.
(And I think you badly underestimate the similarities of Wikipedia during its good phase and LW. Both tackle tough problems and aspire to accumulate high quality content, with very nerdish users, and hence, solve or fail at very similar problems.)
Thanks for all the replies. Sorry for the delay in response.
Does this mean that in terms of empirically evaluating brain emulations, we will have to "walk blind" on the path of emulating higher and higher organisms until we reach a level of complexity, like rats where we can truly state that a personality is being emulated here and not just a generic instance of an animal?
Probably. I've seen proposals for testing uploads (or cryonics) by learning simple reactions or patterns, but while this is good for testing that the brain is working at all, it's still a very long way from testing preservation of personal identity.
No one wants to be in the control group.
Do you know that, or are you guessing?
To the best of my knowledge (and I've looked) there is not a single scientific long-term randomized study showing the effectiveness of any type of treatment for autism. This means that when deciding on the best way to help the kid you are going to have to rely on the judgment and intuition of family, friends and special needs specialists. Besides the normal biases the huge problem with doing this is that as an autistic child gets older you would expect him, in an absolute sense, to make improvements in many metrics (just as typical kids do) even if whatever special stuff was being done for him had absolutely no impact on his condition. Another problem is that, based on my observations at least, the women who devote their careers to the needs of "special children" tend to be of the very happy/uplifting/optimistic types which undoubtedly causes them to have a more positive assessment of treatment than should be justified and this bias outlook negatively impacts the research that makes use of the subjective judgments of autistic professionals.
Rather than spending time reading about autism you can probably better help this child by playing with him and doing stuff for his parents so they have more time to play with him, although ignore this advice if you enjoy reading about autism and so your doing so isn't a cost.
To the best of my knowledge (and I've looked) there is not a single scientific long-term randomized study showing the effectiveness of any type of treatment for autism.
Why isn't there? There would seem to have been more than enough time & funding for at least one. Is there some more subtle problem here?
(I'm thinking a scenario like "parents of autistic kids are constantly trying new approaches both quack and genuine, and would refuse to stop this, thereby making the results worthless; and this is foreseeable in advance by any would-be experimenters.")
(semi-OT but strikes me of interest) "You know the science-fiction concept of having your brain uploaded to a computer and then you live in a simulation of the real world? Going to work for Google is a bit like this." Openness in the wider culture outside open source.
An interesting analogy. If we were to apply it to uploads, one wonders whether the Googlers are more or less productive once inside the Google bubble...
Actually, I wanted to say that there is no proof that CBT works for autism; but because it was proved to work for other things, I would bet on it anyway. I don't believe it could cure the cause, but I believe it could teach some useful behaviors to somehow compensate for the missing skills.
Perhaps I'm missing a point here, but when I look in Google Scholar there seems to be enough existing research on CBT & autism to say whether it helped or not.
First: A LessWrong seed bank. If this forest grows diseased or burns to the ground, the means to replant. Already in the LessWrong seed bank: The Sequences, FAQ, User Guide and MediaWiki.
Second: Terms of surrender. When conditions X, Y and Z are met, LessWrong will fold or reboot.
Second: Terms of surrender. When conditions X, Y and Z are met, LessWrong will fold or reboot.
That's an excellent idea, but I can't think of any clear metric of success or failure, short of really unlikely ones like 'during the annual poll, LWers majority vote for astrology'.
A bunch of computer nerds who sit at their desk all day are going to beat up people who exercise for a living?
My dad is a computer nerd who sits at his desk all day. Also, he has a black belt in jiujitsu.
Be less free with generalizations.
Also, he has a black belt in jiujitsu.
As martial artists have pointed out for a long time, holding a black belt is a fairly weak predictor of success in a true fight.
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History of Wizards of the Coast as told by the founder, Dave Adkinson. One point that caught my eye is that even though he's an excellent administrator (he shepherded his company through a half a dozen or so major changes), he was eventually pushed out of the business because eventually the only thing which made sense was to sell it to Hasbro. After a while, he lost so much control that they'd squeezed out the only thing he could think of to do with the business.
I'm not worried about him-- he's going to film school, and I expect he's going to do something worth seeing and make money at it.
However, I think there's something massively wrong with a system that punishes success. What might need to be different to prevent that sort of outcome?
The video might be of general interest because it's a brilliant example of someone who's reliably concerned with something to protect.
Letting founders remain permanently in control under all forms of incorporation is very far from profit-maximizing, sorry! The system is working as designed.