I've banned all of eridu's recent comments (except a few voted above 0) as an interim workaround, since hiding-from-Recent-Comments and charge-fee-to-all-descendants is still in progress for preventing future threads like these.

I respectfully request that you all stop doing this, both eridu and those replying to him.

What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the "nasty" "exclusionary" mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.

Most real-life social groups have mechanisms to exclude low-status people - from informal shunning to formal membership criteria. Since people as well as groups seek to maximize status, this evolves into a complex equilibrium. (Groucho: "I wouldn't want to join a club that would have [a status exclusion mechanism weak enough to have] me as a member.")

But since we at LW must have a rational explanation for things, these arbitrary criteria (of which my proposal is a pastiche) won't do. Half of the folks here are OK with outsourcing the power and responsibility for excluding low-status folks onto the women of LW. The other half doesn't even want that. Both sides want to consciously come up with convoluted arguments about why "creepy" [low-status male] behavior is objectively bad. That dog won't hunt.

Me too - my father thought it was a trap to detect dishonest answers, but from what I've read, giving the more absolute answers (for example, saying that procedures should always be followed) tends to get you a "better" score. If you want to game the test, pretend you're a naive robot who never, ever does anything even remotely bad, even if nobody actually acts like that.

See also.

Tried it, didn't work for me. :(

Amazon removed one edition of 1984 due to it being sold by a company that did not have the copyright. Given how much backlash there was just over that, it is extremely unlikely that Amazon or any other major e-book provider will engage in any form of substantial censorship or removal of material. The risk does exist but it is so small as to not really need much attention paid to it.

A more substantial problem seems to be the great difficulty which one has in lending e-books. There have been some steps taken to handle this but they are still very suboptimal.

The comments on Reddit are worth reading:

Cognitive science is an oxymoron and who ever said the humanity is rational?

Also:

you know, not everything has to be reduced to effieciency and end results. humans and human society is still special even if some shut in bean counter thinks otherwise.

With apologies for not commenting more on your other points until I've read the thread more closely:

I suggest avoiding changing your estimate of a person's character, or assuming bad faith, just because "someone compared X to Y".

I don't know if there's a formal name for this fallacy, but it never fails that when someone compares A to B regarding characteristic Y, someone else interprets them as implying A is also comparable to B regarding characteristic Z.

I can't think of a real example at this hour of the night, but I did read a post a while ago where a mathematician tried to model the memetic spread of popular religions like Mormonism using equations from epidemiology. If you treat the religion as a disease which gets spread from a "case zero" to their close contacts and so on to their close contacts, then maybe you can use epidemiology to predict how quickly the religion spreads. I don't remember if it worked or not but it was a clever idea.

But imagine some Mormon reading that and saying "Atheist mathematicians at liberal universities are writing papers explicitly comparing Mormons to bacteria now. I guess the next step is to recommend we get eradicated to 'cure' the 'disease'".

(sorry to pick on the Mormons, it was the first example that popped into my head)

Yeah, they're comparing Mormonism to a disease, but only along one limited axis, not in general, and not in a way that implies what the objector thinks it implies.

I don't trust anyone including myself to avoid this, so I try to avoid accusatory "he's comparing X to Y!" statements. If someone is really digging themselves into a hole - if they say something like "Jews should be eliminated like vermin" - then you should just say "he said Jews should be eliminated like vermin!" and not the weaker "he compared Jews to vermin". Yeah, occasionally you make a type ii error - if Hitler says "Jews are as common here as cockroaches" then he's trying to imply something beyond just numbers - but usually you have more evidence against those sorts of people than just one comparative statement.

I don't think that a good analogy. i've never heard of a carnivore who thought meat eating was morally better. Their argument is that meat eating is not so much worse that it becomes an ethical no-no, rather than a ethically neutral lifestyle choice. (Morally level ground).

People can even carry on doing something they think is morally wrong on the excuse of akrasia.

And gay marriage is becoming slowly accepted.

The strongest counterargument offered was that a scope-limited AI doesn't stop rogue unfriendly AIs from arising and destroying the world.

I don't quite understand that argument, maybe someone could elaborate.

If there is a rule that says 'optimize X for X seconds' why would an AGI make a difference between 'optimize X' and 'for X seconds'? In other words, why is it assumed that we can succeed to create a paperclip maximizer that cares strongly enough about the design parameters of paperclips to consume the universe (why would it do that as long as it isn't told to do so) but somehow ignores all design parameters that have to do with spatio-temporal scope boundaries or resource limitations?

I see that there is a subset of unfriendly AGI designs that would never halt, or destroy humanity while pursuing their goals. But how large is that subset, how many do actually halt or proceed very slowly?