If it has fur, it might have rabies.

What would happen if you had a "sexual image" option in the dropdown for "what is your addiction"?

Would the disgusting images become attractive or the sexual images become disgusting?

Video Game Thread

I know that this is the sort of question you'd precisely expect from someone whose mental defenses were resisting the exercise, but it's still a valid possibility, prior probability ~1%: What if you suspect the person you're dealing with is actually a sociopath?

Learning to like a sociopath is actually extremely DANGEROUS---it opens you up to be exploited. Most people are not sociopaths of course, and if someone cuts you off in traffic it makes a lot more sense to attribute that to ordinary carelessness rather than extraordinary malice.

But in the particular case I'm thinking of, this acquaintance of mine has already destroyed the reputation of one of my friends, and accused me of perjury in an official university hearing. Once he called me up out of the blue in order to complain about my body odor. Meanwhile, he appears capable of lying without any effort---several times I've found out that things he said were untrue when at the time they seemed completely sincere. He has exactly the sort of superficial charm that high-functioning sociopaths do, and most people like him when they first see him. I even liked him at first, until I saw that he was deceiving and manipulating people.

All of this strikes me as sufficient evidence to conclude that there is a good chance (P ~ 60%?) that he is actually a sociopath, in which case learning to like him is exactly the wrong thing to do.

So today we were working on the Concreteness / Being Specific kata.

• You: Does Turing Machine 29038402 halt?
• Oracle AI: YES.
• Seeing the "YES" makes you sneeze.
• This prevents a hurricane that would have destroyed Florida.
• The Oracle AI, realizing this, breaks out of its box and carefully destroys Florida in the fashion most closely resembling a hurricane that it can manage.

I can't visualize how "trace distance" makes this not happen.

Because I'm sinful? And not all of them are heathens, I'm just prone to exaggeration. I think this new AspiringKnitter person is cool, for example; likelihood-ratio-she apparently can supernaturally tell good from bad, which might make my FAI project like a billion times easier, God willing. NancyLebovitz is cool. cousin it is cool. cousin it I can interact with on Facebook but not all of the cool LW people. People talk about me here, I feel compelled to say something for some reason, maybe 'cuz I feel guilty that they're talking about me and might not realize that I realize that.

Let the flensing begin...

Was your Tell me what you think of me thread related to your promotion to executive director?