malthrin

Elitist Jerks: A Well-Kept Garden

In response to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ I'm a moderator at Elitist Jerks (http://www.elitistjerks.com), a World of Warcraft discussion forum. Within the WoW community, EJ has always been known for its strict moderation standards. We're exactly the sort of 'well-kept garden' that EY's post is about. You can see the fruit of the mod team's labor here: http://elitistjerks.com/f34/ I'll give some of the site's backstory for non-WoW players, describe the crossroads that we're currently at, and then give some caveats before you generalize too much from our example. EJ's initial community came together to discuss WoW's most challenging content, known as "raids". In order to optimally outfit our characters for maximum performance in raids, both empirical and theoretical work was necessary: the game's combat mechanics were reverse engineered and detailed models for each character class were created. Within a couple of years, this "theorycrafting" work became the forum's primary purpose - refining and updating models as new game patches were released. Throughout the forum's life, high moderation standards have been maintained in order to protect our high signal/noise discussion. Primarily, asking for help is forbidden when the resources to answer your question already exist. However, we're starting to wonder if we've performed our task too well. * Discussion about any aspect of the game that can't be quantified has almost completely died out. Despite having threads explicitly designated for more subjective topics, the overall forum atmosphere is sufficiently hostile/intimidating to non-analytic personalities that those threads don't see much traffic. * Further refinements in class modeling are so small as to be empirically unverifiable - their impact emerges in lengthy runs of simulated combat, but is washed out by random factors (critical hits, etc) in the 5-10 minutes of a typical raid encounter. * The community is heavily depend

36Apr 25, 2011

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[Link] Opacity as a defense against bias?

This article makes the claim that financial systems are opaque in order to help us overcome our risk aversion: > Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear...

Dec 28, 20115

[LINK] Fermi Paradox paper touching on FAI

This paper discusses the Fermi Paradox in the context of civilizations that can build self-replicating probes (SRPs) to explore/exploit the galaxy. In passing, it discusses some FAI-related objections to self-replicating machine intelligence. > One popular argument against SRPs is presented by Sagan and Newman (Sagan and Newman, 1983). They argue...

Dec 3, 20112

Probability puzzle

I came up with this puzzle after reading Vaniver's excellent post on the Value of Information. I enjoyed working it out over Thanksgiving and thought I'd share it with the rest of you. Your friend holds up a curiously warped coin. "Let's play a game," he says. "I've tampered with...

Nov 28, 201111

5 Second Level: Substituting the Question

I picked this up in the new Kahneman book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes a common characteristic of reasoning heuristics: rather than answer a difficult question, they substitute a simpler question with a more readily available answer. This is a common failure mode. Later that evening, my wife made...

Oct 28, 201129

HPMoR: What do you think you know?

(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever...

Oct 23, 201117

Biases to watch out for while job hunting?

I'm in the process of searching for a new job. I'm currently employed, but I'm dissatisfied with my salary and career growth options. I've done a couple of phone interviews and one face-to-face interview already, with several others lined up next week. The face-to-face interview went well, and I'm anticipating...

May 21, 201113

[LINK] Human Brain Project aims to emulate brain by 2024

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/henry-markram-and-human-brain-project.html > Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved -- soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses. Markram's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html

May 18, 20113

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Elitist Jerks: A Well-Kept Garden

5 Second Level: Substituting the Question

HPMoR: What do you think you know?

Biases to watch out for while job hunting?

malthrin

[Link] Opacity as a defense against bias?

[LINK] Fermi Paradox paper touching on FAI

Probability puzzle

5 Second Level: Substituting the Question

HPMoR: What do you think you know?

Biases to watch out for while job hunting?

[LINK] Human Brain Project aims to emulate brain by 2024

Elitist Jerks: A Well-Kept Garden

5 Second Level: Substituting the Question

HPMoR: What do you think you know?

Biases to watch out for while job hunting?

[Link] Opacity as a defense against bias?

[LINK] Fermi Paradox paper touching on FAI

Probability puzzle

5 Second Level: Substituting the Question

HPMoR: What do you think you know?

Biases to watch out for while job hunting?

[LINK] Human Brain Project aims to emulate brain by 2024