It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

-Czeslaw Milosz, "The Captive Mind" (first sentence)

It seems to me that on lesswrong there is an overemphasis on status as a human motivator. For example, I think it's possible for a scientist to want to make an important discovery not to gain status in the scientific community but for the beauty of knowledge.

It seems it's a similar situation to the 'if you're a hammer you see all problems as nails' kind of situation, where 'doing it for status' is such a readily thought of thing that it gets over applied.

thoughts?

So how many others got three paragraphs in, and stopped and went to do whatever they were supposed to be doing before coming back?

is your post missing some of what you intended it to say?

if you wanted someone on lesswrong to know and be able to confirm that this game has rubberband AI then it's obviously very off-topic here

I'm curious what peoples opinions are of Jeff Hawkins' book 'on intelligence', and specifically the idea that 'intelligence is about prediction'. I'm about halfway through and I'm not convinced, so I was wondering if anybody could point me to further proofs of this or something, cheers

I'd like to hear what people think about calibrating how many ideas you voice versus how confident you are in their accuracy.

For lack of a better example, i recall eliezer saying that new open threads should be made quadanually, once per season, but this doesn't appear to be the optimum amount. Perhaps eliezer misjudged how much activity they would receive and how fast they would fill up or he has a different opinion on how full a thread has to be to make it time for a new thread, but for sake of the example lets assume that eliezer was wrong and that the current one or two threads per month is better than quadanually. Should eliezer have recalibrated his confidence on this and never said it because its chance of being right was too low or would lowering his confidence on ideas be counter productive and is it optimal for people to have confidence in the ideas that they voice even it causes them to say some things which aren't right.

I suppose this is of importance to me because I think I might be better off if i lowered how judgemental i am of people who say things which are wrong and also lowered how judgemental i am of the ideas i have because i might be putting too much weight on people voicing ideas which are wrong.

Don't forget to consider the negative utility of an angry cat attacking the catpenny player, which will surely happen after x catpennies.

Anyone going to go looking for x? It would of course have to be statistical distribution, varying with cat age, breed, and so on.

Starcraft is a bad game, though; it's only popular because the ridiculously primitive 1998-era interface means that actual physical speed is required to control your units correctly, which adds barriers to entry to competitive play and makes it more challenging to play and therefore more impressive for someone to be good at. It's pretty much the embodiment of fake difficulty in game design.