I like going to see movies with my friends.  This doesn't require much elaboration.  What might is that I continue to go see movies with my friends despite the radically different ways in which my friends happen to enjoy watching movies.  I'll separate these movie-watching philosophies into a few broad and not necessarily all-encompassing categories (you probably fall into more than one of them, as you'll see!):

(a): Movie watching for what was done right.  The mantra here is "There are no bad movies." or "That was so bad it was good."  Every movie has something redeeming about it, or it's at least interesting to try and figure out what that interesting and/or good thing might be.  This is the way that I watch movies, most of the time (say 70%).

(b): Movie watching for entertainment.  Mantra: "That was fun!".  Critical analysis of the movie does not provide any enjoyment.  The movie either succeeds in 'entertaining' or it fails.  This is the way that I watch movies probably 15% of the time.

(c): Movie watching for what was done wrong.  Mantra: "That movie was terrible."  The only enjoyment that is derived from the movie-watching comes from tearing the film apart at its roots--common conversation pieces include discussion of plot inconsistencies, identification of poor directing/cinematography/etc., and even alternative options for what could have 'fixed' the film to the extent that the film could even said to be 'fixed'.  I do this about ~12% of the time.

(d): Sneer. Mantra: "Have you played the drinking game?".  Vocal, public, moderately-drunken dog-piling of a film's flaws are the only way a movie can be enjoyed.  There's not really any thought put into the critical analysis.  The movie-watching is more an excuse to be rambunctious with a group of friends than it is to actually watch a movie.  I do this, conservatively, 3% of the time.

What's worth stressing here is that these are avenues of enjoyment.  Even when a (c) person watches a 'bad' movie, they enjoy it to the extent that they can talk at length about what was wrong with the movie. With the exception of the Sneer category, none of these sorts of critical analysis are done out of any sort of vindictiveness, particularly and especially (c).

So, like I said, I'm mostly an (a) person.  I have friends that are (a) people, (b) people, (c) people, and even (d) people (where being a (_) person means watching movies with that philosophy more than 70% of the time).

This can generate a certain amount of friction.  Especially when you really enjoy a movie, and your friend starts shitting all over it.

Or at least, that's what it feels like from the inside!  Because you might have really enjoyed a movie because you thought it was particularly well-shot, or it evoked a certain tone really well, but here comes your friend who thought the dialogue was dumb, boring, and poorly written.  Fundamentally, you and your friend are watching the movie for different reasons.  So when you go to a movie with 6 people who are exclusively (c), category (c) can start looking a whole lot like category (d) when you're an (a) or (b) person.

And that's no fun, because (d) people aren't really charitable at all.  It can be easy to translate in one's mind the criticism "That movie was dumb" into "You are dumb for thinking that movie wasn't dumb".  Sometimes the translation is even true!  Sneer Culture is a thing that exists, and while its connection to my 'Sneer' category above is tenuous, my word choice is intentional.  There isn't anything wrong with enjoying movies via (d), but because humans are, well, human, a sneer culture can bloom around this sort of philosophy.

Being able to identify sneer cultures for what they are is valuable.  Let's make up a fancy name for misidentifying sneer culture, because the rationalist community seems to really like snazzy names for things:

Typical Sneer Fallacy: When you ignore or are offended by criticism because you've mistakenly identified it as coming purely from sneer.  In reality, the criticism was genuine and actually true, to the extent that it represents someone's sincere beliefs, and is not simply from a place of malice.

This is the point in the article where I make a really strained analogy between the different ways in which people enjoy movies, and how Eliezer has pretty extravagantly committed the Typical Sneer Fallacy in this reddit thread.

Some background for everyone that doesn't follow the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent tumblr-sphere:  su3su2u1, a former physicist, now data scientist, has a pretty infamous series of reviews of HPMOR.  These reviews are not exactly kind.  Charitably, I suspect this is because su3su2u1 is a (c) kind of person, or at least, that's the level at which he chose to interact with HPMOR.  For disclosure, I definitely (a)-ed by way through HPMOR.

su3su2u1 makes quite a few science criticisms of Eliezer.  Eliezer doesn't really take these criticisms seriously, and explicitly calls them "fake".  Then, multiple physicists come out of the woodwork to tell Eliezer he is wrong concerning a particular one involving energy conservation and quantum mechanics (I am also a physicist, and su3su2u1's criticism is, in fact, correct.  If you actually care about the content of the physics issue, I'd be glad to get into it in the comments.  It doesn't really matter, except insofar as this is not the first time Eliezer's discussions of quantum mechanics have gotten him into trouble) (Note to Eliezer: you probably shouldn't pick physics fights with the guy whose name is the symmetry of the standard model Lagrangian unless you really know what you're talking about (yeah yeah, appeal to authority, I know)).

I don't really want to make this post about stupid reddit and tumblr drama.  I promise.  But I think the issue was rather succinctly summarized, if uncharitably, in a tumblr post by nostalgebraist.

The Typical Sneer Fallacy is scary because it means your own ideological immune system isn't functioning correctly.  It means that, at least a little bit, you've lost the ability to determine what sincere criticism actually looks like.  Worse, not only will you not recognize it, you'll also misinterpret the criticism as a personal attack.  And this isn't singular to dumb internet fights.

Further, dealing with criticism is hard.  It's so easy to write off criticism as insincere if it means getting to avoid actually grappling with the content of that criticism:  You're red tribe, and the blue tribe doesn't know what it's talking about.  Why would you listen to anything they have to say?  All the blues ever do is sneer at you.  They're a sneer culture.  They just want to put you down.  They want to put all the reds down.

But the world isn't always that simple.  We can do better than that.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220).  I've seen a similar sentiment expressed before about the MWI sequences.  And I say that still believing it to be the most seemingly correct of the available interpretations. 

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

I recently read Scott Aaronson's "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" (http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1791), which has a wealth of interesting thought-food.  Having chewed on it for a while, I've been thinking through some of the implications and commitments of a computationalist worldview, which I don't think is terribly controversial around here (there's a brief discussion in the paper about the Waterfall Argument, and its worth reading if you're unfamiliar with either it or the Chinese room thought experiment).

That said, suppose we ascribe to a computationalist worldview.  Further suppose that we have a simulation of a human running on some machine.  Even further suppose that this simulation is torturing the human through some grisly means.

By our supposed worldview, our torture simulation is reducible to some finite state machine, say a one tape turing machine.  This one tape turing machine representation, then, must have some initial state.

My first question: Is more 'harm' done in actually carrying out the computation of the torture simulation on our one tape turing machine than simply writing out the initial state of the torture simulation on the turing machine's tape?

The computation, and thus the simulation itself, are uniquely specified by that initial encoding.  My gut feeling here is that no, no more harm is done in actually carrying out the computation, because the 'torture' that occurs is a structural property of the encoding.  This might lead to perhaps ill-formed questions like "But when does the 'torture' actually 'occur'?" for some definition of those words.  But, like I said, I don't think that question makes sense, and is more indicative of the difficulty in thinking about something like our subjective experience as something reducible to deterministic processes than it is a criticism of my answer.

If one thinks more harm is done in carrying out the simulation, then is twice as much harm done by carrying out the simulation twice?  Does the representation of the simulation matter?  If I go out to the beach and arrange sea shells in a way that mimics the computation of the torture, has the torture 'occurred'?

My second question:  If the 'harm' occurring in the simulation is uniquely specified by the initial state of the Turing machine, how are we to assign moral weight (or positive/negative utility, if you prefer) to actually carrying out this computation, or even the existence of the initial state?

As computationalists, we agree that the human being represented by the one tape turing machine is feeling just as real pain as we are.  But (correct me if I'm wrong), it seems like we're committed to the idea that the 'harm' occurring in the torture simulation is a property of the initial state, and this initial state exists independent of us actually enumerating that state.  That is, there is some space of all possible simulations of a human as represented by encodings on a one tape turing machine. 

Is the act of specifying one of those states 'wrong'?  Does the act of recognizing such a possible space of encodings realize all of them, and thus cause an uncountable number of tortures and pleasures?

I don't think so.  That just seems silly.  But this also seems to rob a simulated human of any moral worth.  Which is kinda contradictory--we recognize that the pain a simulated human feels is real, yet we don't assign any utility to it.  Again, I don't think my answers are *right*, they were just my initial reactions.  Regardless of how we answer either of my questions, we seem committed to strange positions.

Initially, the whole exercise was looking for a way to dodge the threats of some superintelligent malevolent AI simulating the torture of copies of me.  I don't think I've actually successfully dodged that threat, but it was interesting to think about.