I think using randomized trials to search for successful policies is more likely to happen in China than in the United States. Large chunks of Chinese policy are not up for discussion, let alone experimentation, but their authoritarian leaders are mostly engineers and can just mandate policy.

I put the randomized-trials-for-policy thing on facebook earlier today. I love that idea. It is one of those obvious-to-me ideas that I once I had it, I couldn't believe that we weren't doing it routinely. As if people weren't thinking or something. You want to know whether something works? Try it and find out.

I had a similar feeling when I found out about homosexuality in ancient greece. When I was a kid: Many cultures are weird about homosexuality? Oh, it must be a new thing. What? It has been a well-known, standard minority fraction of human sexuality for thousands of years?

What you've said makes sense to me, that the flipbooks do not constitute a calculation. However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.

If the flipbooks contain enough information to continue the calculation then they are the same as a backup. Ok, so a flipbook is a series of closely spaced backups. What constitutes a calculation? I've read about these things, but I've never tried to work it out for myself before.

A backup is a static result of a calculation. Static results are static. They don't count as alive, they don't count as a calculation.

What counts as a calculation? I'm getting stuck. Let's say we do the calculation as a state machine. You have static states that are updated according certain rules. State 1 determines/causes state 2. The calculation is implemented somewhere. So there are patterns of matter/energy that represent the states and represent the arithmetic needed to change states. I guess the calculation is here?

Consider a slightly different thought experiment. Suppose some government, as it tortured a prisoner, took a brain scanner and took a series of, say, 200 pictures of that person's brain, spaced, one second apart. Those pictures are then printed out, and they can be "flipped through" in the manner you describe. But suppose instead that you simply took the pictures, stacked them, and then put them in a box off in a warehouse somewhere. Does that count as simulated torture? Even better, what if you took the entire box in an airplane, and scattered the pictures out the window so that the wind blew them all over the world. What's the difference here?

While flipping through the printouts creates the illusion of seeing something happen, it is not a simulation. When you watch a movie on DVD, you are not watching some alternate universe where the movie's subject is actually occurring, and the photons are being transmitted into your own universe to be projected out of your TV. It's an optical illusion. Nothing about "flipping" the printouts does anything special, other than create an illusion within your own brain. You are not going to be able to absorb all the data on the sheet anyway (at least not at regular flipping speeds) so there is no chance of your own brain being used as the computing substrate.

Rather, the actual simulated torture in this scenario would be the actual calculations to generate the printouts. That does count as torture, and I would pay to stop it. But once the calculations have been done, it doesn't matter how many pieces of paper come out of the printer.

I'm starting to sympathize with PlaidX's complaint. If what you really want to ask is, "Could a flipbook be conscious?" then why not just say that? The torture is completely irrelevant.

I'd say the torture happened once. Even if you make more flipbooks and it changes the measure of the subjective experience, there is only one unique experience. The experience doesn't know if it happened before.

Once the system is closed, I'd think it is morally same for the experience to be simulated once or many times.

You're no more torturing them again than you are killing them again and again when the flipbook finishes its calculation.

For every non-duplicate comment replying to this one praising me for my right action, I will donate $10 to SIAI, up to a cap of $1010, with the count ending on 1 June 2011. Also accepting private messages.

Edit: The cap was met on 30 May. Donation of $1010 made.

Are you recommending this book as someone independently knowledgeable about the relevant history? Or do you just assume that since its thesis, if accepted, would further some contemporary political goals that you favor, its historical claims must be more accurate than the historical claims of the other side? I lack the expertise to evaluate this book, but I do know that history written with the goal of providing propaganda ammunition for modern ideological controversies almost inevitably ends up heavily biased, no matter whose case it serves.

In any case, the idea that the modern U.S. First Amendment constitutional law doctrines and the controversies arising from them have any relation with its original meaning and purpose is fantastically ahistorical. Taking quotes from that period, to whatever effect, and trying to present them as having some bearing on the present-day issues is sheer propaganda.

From the Wikipedia article:

Love-bombing is characteristic of most cults, especially the Jehovah's Witnesses. New recruits are drowned in a sea of fake "love" and "caring." Cults will pretend to love you to death as long as you are a prospective convert to their group. As a member of a tight-knit community, love will surround you as you faithfully follow all of the strict rules of the cult. However, if you ever decide that you want to leave the group, if you ever disobey any of the rules of the cult, or if you express doubt about any of the cult's doctrine, then all "love" suddenly ceases. The member is then shunned and excommunicated (which Jehovah's Witnesses call "disfellowshipping"), and all remaining members are instructed to never have any contact with them in the future, not even to greet them. Then all effort is directed towards finding new recruits to replace the shunned members who have "gone astray."

That certainly is a bad thing. But dude, simply having some basic decency and being nice to people is not the thing that's being described in there.

I am afraid that if LessWrong recruits, it has to do it the hard way, through directly addressing the logical mind, not by pushing weird psychological switches.

Rationalists seem to have this weird bias that everything else than strictly logical reasoning and persuasion is dishonest and wrong somehow, and you should never appeal to emotions. This seems to me nonsensical and counterproductive. Like it or not, even rationalists are still very strongly driven by pure emotional affect. We're driven to visit those groups where we feel comfortable and welcome, and reluctant to visit groups where this isn't the case. The rider may exert some guiding pull, but ultimately the elephant is the one in charge.

If LessWrong ever wants to build a real community, by which I mean a group that really motivates its members to act rational, motivates them to stay in touch with each other, makes them feel safe enough that they can openly discuss their problems and failings, helps promote their mental health, to provide each other concrete help, etc., then "pushing weirding psychological switches" is what you must do. And personally I'd much rather have a real community that makes people in the world better off and helps spread rationality, than just a loose gathering of people who are only united by the fact that they write things on the same Internet message board. And that they attended the occasional meet-up, but eventually drifted away because they saw little benefit in attending those.

The organizational problems you have written about here are concrete and easily supported. When I read your organizational writing and I come to a place where I need to evaluate if what you're saying is true, the problem is transformed into a question of whether I believe that churches and missionary groups are successful at these things. So far you've been distilling and translating institutional knowledge.

I haven't seen you write about harder issues here. Issues that require weighing competing mental processes, avoiding self-deception, tracing several levels of implication, being careful about what constitutes evidence, etc.

Of your writing elsewhere, it feels like you are snorkeling with fins and a mask. You're staying on the surface in warm water and are checking out the beautiful tropical fish. You can see some of the terrain below you because your mask isn't that foggy, but you don't touch it because that just isn't the activity you're doing. You're not surface diving, or deep water diving, and you're having fun with your current activity.