I'd saying telling an interviewer you have sufficient confidence in your product to not need a backup plan is rational, actually not having one isn't.

Immortal humans can go horribly wrong, unless "number of dying humans" is really what you want to minimize.

"Increase my utility as much as you can"?

I want my old model of Eliezer Yudkowsky back!

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the supreme being to whom it is up to all of us to become superior!

I think chaosmosis would prefer to perceive this as occurring through a change in chaosmosis than a change in chaosmosis's evidence about Eliezer.

And lo, people began tweeting:

Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences" are mostly not original

Which is false. This pushes as far in the opposite wrong direction as the viewpoint it means to criticize.

Evolutionary biology, the non-epistemological part of the exposition of quantum mechanics, and of course heuristics and biases, are all not original. They don't look deceptively original either; they cite or attributed-quote the sources from which they're taken. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.

When it comes to the part that isn't reporting on standard science, the parts that are mostly dealt with by modern "philosophers" rather than experimental scientists of one kind or another, the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there. There is such a vast variety of philosophy that you can often find a conclusion similar to anything, to around the same degree that Leibniz's monadology anticipated timeless quantum mechanics, i.e., not very much. The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions, and what is done with those conclusions, is most of the substance - finding a conclusion that happens to look vaguely similar does not mean that I was reporting someone else's academic work and failing to cite it, or reinventing work that had already been done. It is not understating any sort of "close agreement" with even those particular concluders, let alone the field as a whole within which those are small isolated voices. Hofstadter's superrationality is an acknowledged informal forerunner of TDT. But finding other people who think you ought to cooperate in the PD, but can't quite formalize why, is not the same as TDT being preinvented. (Also TDT doesn't artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream. This is "similar" to some attempts to rescue evidential decision theory by e.g. Eels, but not quite the same thing when it comes to important details like not two-boxing on Newcomb's Problem.) And claiming that in principle philosophical intuitions arise within the brain is not the same as performing any particular dissolution of a confused question, or even the general methodology of dissolution as practiced and described by Yudkowsky or Drescher (who actually does agree and demonstrate the method in detail within "Good and Real").

I'm also still not sure that Luke quite understands what the metaethics sequence is trying to say, but then I consider that sequence to have basically failed at exposition anyway. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can point Luke or anyone else at which says the same thing in more academic language.

Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?

I don't understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be - what positive consequence it was supposed to have. Lots of the Sequences are better exposition of existing ideas about evolutionary biology or cognitive biases or probability theory or whatever, which are appropriately quoted or cited within them? Yes, they are. People introducing Less Wrong should try to refer to those sources as much as possible when it comes to things like heuristics and biases, rather than talking like Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow invented the idea of scope insensitivity, so that they don't sound like phyg victims? Double yes. But writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet,

Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences" are mostly not original

...I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone. It is also a grave sin to make it sound like you're speaking for a standard academic position when you're not!

And I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what's "already" been done in academia. If some future anti-Luke is this charitable in construing how much of future work in epistemology and decision theory was "really" all done within the Sequences back in 2008, they will claim that everything was just invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky way back then - and they will be wrong - and I hope somebody argues with that anti-Luke too, and doesn't let any good feeling for ol E. Y. stand in their way, just like we shouldn't be prejudiced here by wanting to affiliate with academia or something.

I get what this is trying to do. There's a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it. (Interesting side note: John Tooby is apparently an SF fan who grew up reading van Vogt and Null-A, so he got some of his spirit from the same sources I did! There really is an ancient and honorable tradition out there.) If someone encounters that spirit in LW for the first time, they'll think I invented it. Which I most certainly did not. If LW is your first introduction to these things, then you really aren't going to know how much of the spirit I learned from the anncient masters... because just reading a citation, or even a paragraph-long quote, isn't going to convey that at all. The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Doing this, I would guess, gave Luke an epiphany he's trying to share - there's a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought. But the OP doesn't do that. It doesn't get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it's already been presented to them on LW, after all. So they won't actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it's not what they've already read.

There's literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that's an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.

For strength, you use Dugbogs that were crushed by a strong Re'em.

For heat, you use bronze that was forged in a hot forge.

For immortality, you use a corpse that was burned by an immortal phoenix.

There are no decision theory experts.

In practice, true.

This may sound a bit crazy right now, but hear me out: rationality is not the territory.

Amusing.

Replace humanity with paperclips.

Clippy.

Have you read My Little Horcrux: Friendship is Torture?

My second favorite one.

Timeless sex is highly correlated with Friendly Lukeprog.

I do not know Luke in any way, and that's not my orientation, but I lol'd.

how would a possibly insane person determine that insanity X is a possible kind of insanity?

Perhaps they couldn't. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

Also, this approach presumes that your understanding of the way probabilities work and of the existence of probability at all is accurate. Using the concept of probability to justify your position here is just a very sneaky sort of circular argument

Sure. If I'm wrong about how probability works, then I might be wrong about whether I can rule out having X-type insanity (and also might be wrong about whether I can rule out being a butterfly).

But, if someone doesn't want to admit that logic exists or you just disagree with someone as to what logic is, there's really nothing to be done but to walk away.

That's not necessarily true. If we disagree on what logic is, I can work out the rules of what you consider logic and decide whether, using those rules, I come to a different conclusion than you do (in which case I can try to convince you of that different conclusion using your rules), or I can attempt to convince you that you're wrong via illogical means (like telling you a convincing story, or using question-begging language, or etc.). I can also do the latter if you reject logic altogether.

I saw something for the first time today. I replied to a comment that had been down-voted, and the site asked me,

Replies to downvoted comments are discouraged. Pay 5 Karma points to proceed anyway?

So, if one person dislikes a comment, it shouldn't be responded to? I disagree strongly. This makes the site enforce a tyranny of the majority. It punishes resistance to groupthink.

I don't think Alice should be prohibited from responding to Bob, ever. If two users create drama with back-and-forth responses, they have both chosen to do so.