SilentCal

Background: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Oracle_AI Epistemic status: Likely wrong, but I don't know how. I'm not a 'real' FAI researcher, just an LW reader inspired by the Alignment Prize to try to start contributing. (At minimum I'm heavily indebted to Stuart Armstrong for inspiration, and there's a fair chance I'm rediscovering something he's...

The concept of "virtue signalling" has been a bit polarizing. Some people find it seems to explain a lot of the world; others find its lack of precision makes it almost an empty insult against others' behavior. The model I'm about to propose doesn't capture everything people mean by "virtue...

Inspired by the recent skepticism of the double crux technique, I thought I'd launch a thread to try using double crux, and productive disagreement in general, with other LessWrongers. I think this will work best with some structure, so I've laid out some rules. Thread Rules: * DISCUSSIONS ARE TO...

I floated the idea of a thread for practicing productive disagreement techniques on this Double Crux post and was modestly upvoted, so I'd like to try it. But first, I'm going to explain the format I have in mind and see if anyone has objections/improvements. Proposed Disagreement Thread Rules (Discuss...

(The following is armchair psychological speculation based on anecdotal evidence. If anyone can respond with relevant science, that'd be awesome, but otherwise responses in kind are quite welcome.) I'm puzzled regarding the motivational effects of negative emotion, particularly shame, guilt, and regret--I'll just say 'regret' going forward, though there could...

This post was originally a link post to http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/fcc-chairman-mocks-industry-claims-that-customers-dont-need-faster-internet/ together with an instruction to read the article before proceeding, and then the following text rot13'd: > I believe this article is a nice rationality test. Did you notice that you were reading a debate over a definition and try to...

In response to: Failure by Analogy, Surface Analogies and Deep Causes Analogy gets a bad rap around here, and not without reason. The kinds of argument from analogy condemned in the above links fully deserve the condemnation they get. Still, I think it's too easy to read them and walk...