I failed to spark good discussion of that subject with this post on "semi-general" AIs.

Hello folks! I'm a student of computer science, found Less Wrong a few years ago, read some articles, found myself nodding along, but didn't really change my mind about anything significant. That is, until recently I came across something that completely shattered my worldview and, having trouble coping with that, I found myself coming back here, seeking either something that would invalidate this new insight or help me accept it if it is indeed true. Over the past few days, I have probably been thinking harder than ever before in my life, and I hope to contribute to discussions here in the future.

...and "Influence" goes onto my "to read" list.

Prices are the obvious mechanism that comes to mind - prices of things like food or top American universities.

The demand for offspring is sufficiently inelastic that a Westerner refusing to have offspring is replaced by a developing country kid (or multiple kids, inasmuch as a Westerner kid consumes so many resources).

I believe Caplan's reply is basically that choosing to have kids affects the margin very little because any abdication on your part will be picked up by developing countries, and that having a kid is a net benefit because the more people there are, the more innovations and whatnot are created (positive externalities).

Well when they made claims like "logic/math is only one way of knowing things, along with metaphor and [something else I forgot]" and some claims about culture being distinct from individuals, I readied myself for explaining how human intuition and culture ultimately reduces to deterministic firing of neurons. When I started on that, they jumped ahead and said that they already knew and accepted a soul-free, lawful universe. I was a bit stumped, until I realised that I'd just pattern-matched those claims onto a stereotype of the kind of people that would write in The Social Text.

Upon reflection, I had been talking more in the vein of "The Universe is lawful, even when we don't know the laws, so math ultimately drives everything", and they had been more along the lines of "We can't go around calculating probabilities all the time, so we might as well go by intuition most of the time". It was a failure to cross inferential gaps on my part.

What is bad about pain?

It short-circuits rationality. If you are in enough pain, it no longer matters what is the rational thing to do, only what will stop the pain.

It carries immediacy that forces action before proper consideration. Future be damned, you WILL do whatever needs to be done to end the pain NOW.

In its less excruciating forms, it is a drain on mental and physical energy. No matter what you can do with pain (and some people do truly amazing things), you would be able to do more without.

Finally, it is often unproductive. You have a headache, for example. Does the pain tell you why you have a headache? No. It could be tiredness, allergies, sinus infection, deadly brain tumor, or a million other things. In cases of chronic pain, it is even worse: the pain "migrates to the cortex." In other words, the injury can heal completely, but the brain "learns to feel the pain" and continues feeling it for years to come (often for the rest of person's life).

I would say that is plenty of bad about pain.

A more controllable damage signaling system would be great. People are working on it.

Hmmm. Well, not the tone I intended. It literally did not occur to me that people would consider taking a Scientology course as a result of my post, but then I updated as a result of David's comment, and that is why I added the disclaimer to the first paragraph. "Figured" in my comment is past tense on purpose.

Can you explain clearly why you have gone all crazy? Why do you have to drop these esoteric hints and do this stupid troll business?

My understanding is that you delved too deeply into simulation arguments and met Cthulu or something, had a religious experience and determined that there is a god or something and that the people who are in the know are all in the catholic church somewhere.

And then for some reason you can't just explain this clearly and lay out your reasons. Or maybe you've tried explaining it clearly, but that was before my time and now you assume that everyone either already knows what you are on about, or is interested enough to scour the internet for your posting.

???

If Will won't cooperate, can someone else explain the best model we have of his weirdness?