It would feel completely awkward, and I would catch myself making all the mistakes that first-timers to that move make, since I hadn't already trained it into muscle memory.

This is an awesome strategy!

One of the things I do to figure out how people can do stuff wrong (i.e. in swimming, which isn't something you can try doing in your non-dominant direction) is to break down the motion into tiny parts and do that tiny part while watching them, to figure out if that tiny part is the one they're getting wrong.

I also do a lot of trial and error, because sometimes someone's stroke will look intuitively wrong to me in a way I can't really explain to myself, so I make a guess, teach them how to correct that, and then watch again and see if my intuition is any happier with it.

Agreed... I think the Halo effect is a sub-component of an affective death spiral, and "affective death spiral" is a term unique to LW [correct me if I'm wrong!], while 'Halo effect' isn't.

physicsforums, gamedev.net, stackexchange, arstechnica observatory, and so on, those are all more rational than LW.

Can you list some specific examples of irrational thinking patterns that occur on LessWrong but not on those communities? The one guess I can make is that they're all technical-sounding, in which case they might exist in the context of a discipline that has lots of well-defined rules and methods for testing success, and so less "bullshit" gets through because it obviously violates the rules of X-technical-discipline. Is this what you mean, or is it something else entirely?

As a side issue, I'm dismayed upon finding that ideas I had thought original to Yudkowsky were secondhand.

Having to have original ideas is a very high standard. I doubt a single one of my posts contains a truly original idea, and I don't try–I try to figure out which ideas are useful to me, and then present why, in a format that I hope will be useful to others. Eliezer creates a lot of new catchy terms for pre-existing ideas, like "affective death spiral" for "halo effect." I like that.

His posts are also quite short, often witty, and generally presented in an easier-to-digest format than the journal articles I might otherwise have to read to encounter the not-new ideas. You apparently don't find his writing easy to digest or amusing in the same way I do.

The quotes aren't all about AI.

I didn't say they were. I said that just because the speaker for a particular idea comes across as crazy doesn't mean the idea itself is crazy. That applies whether all of Eliezer's "crazy statements" are about AI, or whether none of them are.

Whoever knowingly chooses to save one life, when they could have saved two – to say nothing of a thousand lives, or a world – they have damned themselves as thoroughly as any murderer.

The most extreme presumptuousness about morality; insufferable moralism.

Funny, I actually agree with the top phrase. It's written in an unfortunately preachy, minister-scaring-the-congregation-by-saying-they'll-go-to-Hell style, which is guaranteed to make just about anyone get defensive and/or go "ick!" But if you accept the (very common) moral standard that if you can save a life, it's better to do it than not to do it, then the logic is inevitable that if you have the choice of saving one lives or two lives, by your own metric it's morally preferable to save two lives. If you don't accept the moral standard that it's better to save one life than zero lives, then that phrase should be just as insufferable.

Science is built around the assumption that you’re too stupid and self-deceiving to just use Solomonoff induction. After all, if it was that simple, we wouldn’t need a social process of science right?

I decided to be charitable, and went and looked up the post that this was in: it's here. As far as I can tell, Eliezer doesn't say anything that could be interpreted as "science exists because people are stupid, and I'm not stupid, therefore I don't need science". He claims that scientific procedures compensates for people being unwilling to let go of their pet theories and change their minds, and although I have no idea if this goal was in the minds of the people who came up with the scientific method, it doesn't seem to be false that it accomplishes this goal.

How would one explain Yudkowsky's paranoia, lack of perspective, and scapegoating--other than by positing a narcissistic personality structure?

I had in fact read a lot of those quotes before–although some of them come as a surprise, so thank you for the link. They do show paranoia and lack of perspective, and yeah, some signs of narcissism, and I would be certainly mortified if I personally ever made comments like that in public...

The Sequences as a whole do come across as having been written by an arrogant person, and that's kind of irritating, and I have to consciously override my irritation in order to enjoy the parts that I find useful, which is quite a lot. It's a simplification to say that the Sequences are just clutter, and it's extreme to call them 'craziness', too.

(Since meeting Eliezer in person, it's actually hard for me to believe that those comments were written by the same person, who was being serious about them... My chief interaction with him was playing a game in which I tried to make a list of my values, and he hit me with a banana every time I got writer's block because I was trying to be too specific, and made the Super Mario Brothers' theme song when I succeeded. It's hard making the connection that "this is the same person who seems to take himself way too seriously in his blog comments." But that's unrelated and doesn't prove anything in either direction.)

My main point is that criticizing someone who believes in a particular concept doesn't irrefutably damn that concept. You can use it as weak evidence, but not proof. Eliezer, as far as I know, isn't the only person who has thought extensively about Friendly AI and found it a useful concept to keep.

And that the lesswrong.com sequences are not original or important but merely succeed at drowning out all the craziness they include by a huge amount of unrelated clutter and an appeal to the rationality of the author.

Name three examples? (Of 'craziness' specifically... I agree that there are frequent, and probably unecessary, "appeals to the rationality of the author".)

Even most science fiction books avoid that because it sounds too implausible.

Not saying I particularly disagree with your other premises, but saying something can't be true because it sounds implausible is not a valid argument.

I strongly prefer wheat to rice, and rice to corn (also, white wheat to whole wheat). I enjoy the bread I bake enough to eat until I physically can't store more food in my stomach. When I bake bread with 75% wheat and 25% amaranth, it tastes noticeably worse (which I can tell because I eat what I cut and don't try to eat it all).

From personal experience, I can say that wheat is a) very addictive for me (I am much more likely to pig out on large quantities, to get cravings for the texture and flavour of wheat-based products, etc), and b) is definitely bad for me. I lack the willpower to cut it out entirely; it's quite inconvenient trying to get enough calories to sustain my very active lifestyle without wheat, especially while trying to save money by not eating much meat, and it's nearly impossible to eat out cheaply 'on the fly' wheat-free. I spend most of my life being a bit bloated and having intermittent diarrhea.

Based on anecdotal evidence from family members and friends, a lot of people feel better when they cut wheat out of their diet, even if they didn't realize it was causing problems beforehand. This may not be everyone, though...if you really feel fine, then you're most likely fine with it.

The main thing that worries me about your stated diet is protein intake. Unless you supplement with a lot of eggs and dairy, grains contain incomplete protein, i.e. not enough of certain essential amino acids, which means that your body can't use the amino acids to build tissue proteins at all and just breaks them down for energy. Do you eat any beans, nuts, etc? Legumes combined with grain create complete protein, not quite as high-quality as meat sources, but almost. And beans are cheap, and come with the added benefit of high fibre.

Fair enough. I can see why a specific example of a drug known to be harmful (i.e. cocaine) would be clearer than the example given, where the harm is only long-term and not directly related to that particular occasion of eating ice cream.

Other people might also find the example "offensive" because there are likely more LW-ers who are overweight and still eat ice cream (and consider this a perfectly legitimate personal choice) than who take [harmful] drugs recreationally.