Comment author: kodos96 03 January 2013 01:38:49AM 0 points [-]

calling upon various fictional deities for whom I have great respect.

Just curious... can you clarify this statement? It sounds a lot like Chaos Magick to me, and that surprises me, coming from you (not necessarily in a bad way).

Comment author: OrphanWilde 02 January 2013 02:43:57PM 12 points [-]

People who don't want a regularly-occurring exception.

The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest, and overall I'd consider them to have been productive thus far. It is of course possible that the tone or nature of these debates will change over time, but it seems on current evidence to be that a lot of people are mindkilled about whether or not politics is in fact a mindkiller. Granted, the voting system here generally encourages controversy - fifty votes yay and forty nine votes nay is better than an uninteresting post with one vote nay, after all.

Comment author: kodos96 02 January 2013 06:20:42PM 2 points [-]

The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest

Yes, I've noticed that too, which was part of why I was confused that people objected to it.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 02 January 2013 01:39:37PM *  14 points [-]

but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?

What do you mean by that? Supposed on what grounds, accepted by whom and in what sense? (There's also a distinction between following a rule and agreeing with it, and there is no rule in this case.)

Comment author: kodos96 02 January 2013 06:20:04PM 4 points [-]

I was under the impression that this was an "official" thing, but it sounds like I was wrong.

Comment author: kodos96 02 January 2013 08:10:27AM *  3 points [-]

Just curious... who is downvoting this post, and why? Politics is the mind killer, I know... but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 26 March 2012 06:31:56PM 1 point [-]

It's just that the same goes for "Include everyone except fundamentalist Christians."

There is no clear bright line determining who is or is not a fundamentalist Christian. Right now, there pretty much is a clear bright line determining who is or is not human. And that clear bright line encompasses everyone we would possibly want to cooperate with.

Your advisory board suggestion ignores the fact that we have to be able to cooperate prior to the invention of CEV deducers.

And you're not describing a process for how the advisory board is decided either. Different advisory boards may produce different groups of enfranchised minds. So your suggestion doesn't resolve the problem.

In fact, I don't see how putting a group of minds on the advisory board is any different than just making them the input to the CEV. If a person's CEV is that someone's mind should contribute to the optimizer's target, that will be their CEV regardless of whether it's measured in an advisory board context or not.

Comment author: kodos96 01 January 2013 12:32:35AM 1 point [-]

There is no clear bright line determining who is or is not a fundamentalist Christian. Right now, there pretty much is a clear bright line determining who is or is not human.

Is there? What about unborn babies? What about IVF fetuses? People in comas? Cryo-presevered bodies? Sufficiently-detailed brain scans?

Comment author: gensym 13 October 2010 03:54:45AM *  3 points [-]

Seconding methylphenidate for #2, and (specifically) delta-wave-inducing binaural beats for #3.

I've heard good things about weed + Adderall for creative production, but never tried it.

Comment author: kodos96 31 December 2012 03:56:56AM 0 points [-]

delta-wave-inducing binaural beats

Do you have any recommendations for a currently commercially available (or freely available) source of binaural beats? I experimented with a binaural beat "mind machine" years ago, and saw no significant results, but still find the idea fascinating.

Censorship: A case study

2 kodos96 27 December 2012 03:09AM

Background:

A curious aspect of censorship, in all its forms, is that it is rarely, in practice, about what it purports to be about in theory. Some examples:

  • A government whistleblower leaks classified information to the media that makes the sitting government look bad. They get prosecuted, under "state secrets" or some such legislation. Yet a member or supporter of the government who leaks classified information which makes the sitting government look good does not get prosecuted. [Meta: this should not be read as a mind-killing reference to American current events. Examples of this dynamic can be found universally, in all countries, no matter which party is in office.]

An alien watching this interaction from space might well conclude that "state secrets" meant "criticising the sitting government." Yet the legislation is never phrased that way explicitly. If the law were to come right out and include language specifying that it only applied to those politically out of power, it would be obviously totalitarian, and no one would accept it as just.

  • Blasphemy: blasphemy laws rarely specify that they apply only to a single religion. They are usually phrased in neutral terms of "upsetting religious sensibilities." Yet they are never enforced that way. In a very valuable public service, 1st Amendment lawblog popehat.com recently compiled A Year of Blasphemy, documenting one twelve-month period worth of blasphemy prosecutions/protests, from across the globe. Perusing the list, one thing jumps out at the reader: in essentially all cases, the "blasphemer" is a member of a religious minority, and the "blasphemed" is a member of the religious majority in the relevant jurisdiction. The single exception to that rule I see is the case in which an Indian man was charged, under pressure from the Catholic Church, for debunking a weeping-Jesus-statue miracle. But in that case, the blasphemer in question was a "skeptic" (read: "atheist"), a group even lower-status locally than the Christian minority.

An alien watching this interaction from space might well conclude that "blasphemy" meant "a member of a religious minority criticising a member of the religious majority", or in some cases simply "being a member of a religious minority". But the laws (or public calls to enact such laws) are rarely phrased that way explicitly.

 



Case study:

As many of you may be aware, there is something of a kerfluffle regarding censorship currently ongoing here at LessWrong. Though the instigating event was something certainly worthy of scorn, the response was to propose an absurdly broadly worded new censorship policy. Much of the debate has focused on the "violence" aspect, but even more troubling is the second clause, referring to discussion of anything "illegal" - a term which, if it had an unambiguous definition, wouldn't require the existence of the entire legal profession to disambiguate. The language then adds an exception for "the types of laws not commonly enforced against middle class people" (paraphrasing). Although apparently intended to narrow the scope of the clause, this caveat actually makes it even more ambiguous than it would have been without it.

Censorship laws/policies which are worded in an unnecessarily broad and ambiguous manner should set off alarm bells for those familiar with free speech issues: they are the hallmark of an attempt to allow those in power maximum ability to enforce those laws/policies against those out of power, while imposing minimum requirements on them to enforce those same laws/policies against those in power.

In the initial discussion thread regarding the proposed policy, dozens of commenters tried in vain to pin down a more narrow definition of what exactly was forbidden, and what was allowed, by the new policy. Despite overwhelming karma balance favoring those of us questioning the meaning (and the wisdom) of the new policy, no responses were forthcoming - not to clarify the policy, not even to counter-argue against any of the dozens of well-reasoned objections.

I was curious... what exactly was the new policy proposing to forbid? What was it not proposing to forbid? Was the dynamic described in the "background" section at play here? Just because you have a hammer doesn't make everything a nail. So I decided, like a good empiricist, to attempt to experimentally determine where exactly the new lines were being drawn. I created a discussion post which intentionally violated the new policy against discussion of violence against identifiable individuals, yet did so only indirectly, requiring some non-trivial inferential distance to get from my text to "discussing violence". The post was carefully crafted to violate as many LW social norms as possible (politics-is-the-mindkiller, Godwin's Law, the new anti-violence policy), while still retaining an erudite and non-explicitly trollish tone. Would my post get censored?

Nope. The mods didn't bite. So I escalated. In response to a comment pointing out that my post might be read as an indirect endorsement of violence, I replied "one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens", thereby bridging the inferential gap (at least for those fluent in LW-ese) from implicit to explicit endorsement of violence. Surely that would get the post censored, right?

Nope, still no bites. So I escalated again, this time violating one of the few remaining LW social norms not yet violated: that against explicitly trollish behavior ("trolling" defined for our purposes as posts primarily intended to to elicit negative emotional reactions). I put on my troll hat and and began making mischief in the comments on the post. Problem?

This went on for a few hours, but still no bites... in fact a couple of my troll comments were even getting net-positive upvotes - obviously my trolling skills need polishing! The next day, with the post still not censored, I was just about ready to give up on obtaining a positive experimental result.

But then something happened: someone commented accusing my post of being "a form of dishonesty", by purporting to be about one topic, while actually intending to be about the censorship issue. I replied:

It's also a form of dishonesty to request public feedback on a policy issue, then systematically ignore all feedback that disagrees with your predetermined decision.

Boom! Within roughly 60 seconds, the thread had been sent down the memory hole. You have been banned from /r/pyongyang!

Let's summarize these results in tabular form:

My Action Moderator Response

 Implicitly violating no-violence-discussion policy

 None

 Violating politics-is-the-mindkiller

 None

 Invoking Godwin's Law

 None

 Explicitly violating no-violence-discussion policy

 None

 Trolling my ass off

 None

 Describing Eliezer's actions as "dishonest"

 Instant thread deletion

 

If you were an alien watching this interaction from space, what would you conclude was the reason for the post's deletion?


 

Next up in this series: my proposal for a constructive solution.

 

Comment author: DanArmak 26 December 2012 08:13:56PM 0 points [-]

What about conflicts between state/federal/constitutional law?

What about gasp whole other countries outside the US?

Comment author: kodos96 26 December 2012 08:50:20PM 1 point [-]

Yes, that was covered by the previous question: "Under what jurisdiction?"

On the ethicality of retributive justice

-15 kodos96 25 December 2012 05:06AM

Adolf Eichmann (19 March 1906 – 31 May 1962) was a high-ranking Nazi SS officer, and one of the primary architects of the Holocaust. He survived the conclusion of WWII, fled to Argentina using forged papers, and lived under a false identity for roughly a decade and a half. In 1960, Mossad tracked him down, kidnapped him, and brought him back to Israel for trial for crimes against humanity. He was convicted, and executed by hanging in 1962.

This action was a blatant violation of the sovereignty of the nation of Argentina. Yet I hold that it was entirely ethically correct and proper.

In 1975, noted American Nobel Peace Prize laureate and War Criminal Henry Kissinger, explicitly green-lit the genocidal invasion and occupation of East Timor by Indonesia. Over the course of this invasion, mass extrajudicial killings, torture, and strategic starvation were routinely employed. An estimated 100,000-200,000 deaths were directly attributable to this action. Today, East Timor is an independent and sovereign nation.

Suppose, hypothetically, that the government of East Timor were today to send a team of intelligence operatives to Washington D.C., kidnap Kissinger, and return him to East Timor for trial.

This action would be a blatant violation of the sovereignty of the United Stated of America. But would it be ethically justified? Is "sovereignty" even an ethically meaningful concept? How would the American public react? How would you react?

Comment author: [deleted] 25 December 2012 12:43:55AM *  5 points [-]

BTW, I know it's not terribly rare for anti-marijuana laws to be enforced against middle-class people where I am; so he should have either specified “against middle-class people in Northern California” (but how is someone from (say) rural Poland supposed to know?) or use a different example such as copyright infringement for personal use (hoping that no country actually enforces that non-negligibly often).

EDIT: A better criterion that would include laws against kidnapping but not laws against marijuana or laws against copyright infringement (though by far not a perfect one) in the context of ‘suggesting breaking those publicly on the internet would look bad’ would be ‘laws that a supermajority of internet users aged between 18 and 35 and with IQ above 115 would likely find ridiculous’. (Though I might be excessively Generalizing From One Example when thinking about what other people would think of anti-marijuana laws or copyright laws.)

Comment author: kodos96 25 December 2012 01:08:00AM 5 points [-]

BTW, I know it's not terribly rare for anti-marijuana laws to be enforced against middle-class people where I am; so he should have either specified “against middle-class people in Northern California”

Also, even in California, and even for people of middle class, you'll get marijuana laws enforced against you if you manage to piss off the wrong cop/prosecutor.

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