On rereading this I feel I should vote myself down if I knew how, it seems a little over the top.

Let me post about my emotional state since this is a rationality discussion and if we can't deconstruct our emotional impulses and understand them we are pretty doomed to remaining irrational.

I got quite emotional when I saw a post that seemed like intellectual bullying followed by self congratulation; I am very sensitive to this type of bullying, more so when directed at others than myself as due to freakish test scores and so on as a child I feel fairly secure about my intellectual abilities, but I know how bad people feel when others consider them stupid. I have a reaction to leap to the defense of the victim; however I put this down to local custom of a friendly ribbing type of culture or something and tried not to jump on it.

Then I saw that privatemessaging seemed pretending to be an authority on Monte Carlo methods while spreading false information about them, either out of ignorance (very likely) or malice. Normally ignorance would have elicited a sympathy reaction from me and a very gentle explanation of the mistake, but in the context of having just seen privatemessaging attack elisennesh for his supposed ignorance of Monte Carlo methods, I flew into a sort of berserker sardonic mode, i.e. "If privatemessaging thinks that people who post about Monte Carlo methods while not knowing what they are should be mocked in public, I am happy to play by their rules!" And that led to the result you see, a savage mocking.

I do not regret doing it because the comment with the attack on eli_sennesh and the calumnies against Monte Carlo still seems to be to have been in flagrant violation of rationalist ethics, in particular, presenting himself as if not an expert, at least someone with the moral authority to diss someone else for their ignorance on an important topic, and then followed false and misleading information about MC methods. This seemed like an action with a strongly negative utility to the community because it could potentially lead many readers to ignore the extremely useful Monte Carlo methodology.

If I posed as an authority and when around telling people Bayesian inference was a bad methodology that was basically just "a lot of random guesses" and that "even a very stupid evolutionary program" would do better t assessing probabilities, should I be allowed to get away scot free? I think not. If I do something like that I would actually hope for chastisement or correction from the community, to help me learn better.

Also it seemed like it might make readers think badly of those who rely heavily on Monte Carlo Methods. "Oh those idiots, using those stupid methods, why don't they switch to evolutionary algorithms". I'm not a big MC user but I have many friends who are, and all of them seem like nice, intelligent, rational individuals.

So I went off a little heavily on private_messaging, who I am sure is a good person at heart.

Now, I acted emotionally there, but my hope is that in the Big Searles Room that constitutes our room, I managed to pass a message that (through no virtue of my own) might ultimately improve the course of our discourse.

I apologize to anyone who got emotionally hurt by my tirade.

Private_messaging, can you explain why you open up with such a hostile question at eli? Why the implied insult? Is that the custom here? I am new, should I learn to do this?

For example, I could have opened with your same question, because Monte Carlo methods are very different from what you describe (I happened to be a mathematical physicist back in the day). Let me quote an actual definition:

Monte Carlo Method: A problem solving technique used to approximate the probability of certain outcomes by running multiple trial runs, called simulations, using random variables.

A classic very very simple example is a program that approximates the value of 'pi' thusly:

Estimate pi by dropping $total_hits random points into a square with corners at -1,-1 and 1,1

(then count how many are inside radius one circle centered on origin)

(loop here for as many runs as you like) { define variables $x,$y, $hitsinsideradius = 0, $radius =1.0, $totalhits=0, piapprox;

input $total_hits for this run;
seed random function 'rand';
for (0..total_hits-1) do {
$x = rand(-1,1);
$y = rand(-1,1);
$hits_inside_radius++ if ( $x*$x + $y * $y <= 1.0);
}
$pi_approx = 4 * $hits_inside_radius
add $pi_approx and $total_hits to a nice output data vector or whatever

} output data for this particular run } print nice report exit();

OK, this is a nice toy Monte Carlo program for a specific problem. Real world applications typically have thousands of variables and explore things like strange attractors in high dimensional spaces, or particle physics models, or financial programs, etc. etc. It's a very powerful methodology and very well known.

In what way is this little program an instance of throwing a lot of random programs at the problem of approximating 'pi'? What would your very stupid evolutionary program to solve this problem more efficiently be? I would bet you a million dollars to a thousand (if I had a million) that my program would win a race against a very stupid evolutionary program to estimate pi to six digits accurately, that you write. Eli and Eliezer can judge the race, how is that?

I am sorry if you feel hurt by my making fun of your ignorance of Monte Carlo methods, but I am trying to get in the swing of the culture here and reflect your cultural norms by copying your mode of interaction with Eli, that is, bullying on the basis of presumed superior knowledge.

If this is not pleasant for you I will desist, I assume it is some sort of ritual you enjoy and consensual on Eli's part and by inference, yours, that you are either enjoying this public humiliation masochistically or that you are hoping people will give you aversive condition when you publicly display stupidity, ignorance, discourtesy and so on. If I have violated your consent then I plead that I am from a future where this is considered acceptable when a person advertises that they do it to others. Also, I am a baby eater and human ways are strange to me.

OK. Now some serious advice:

If you find that you have just typed "Do you even know what X is?" then given a little condescending mini lecture about X, please check that you yourself actually know what X is before you post. I am about to check Wikipedia before I post in case I'm having a brain cloud, and i promise that I will annotate any corrections I need to make after I check; everything up to HERE was done before the check. (Off half recalled stuff from grad school a quarter century ago...)

OK, Wikipedia's article is much better than mine. But I don't need to change anything, so I won't.

P.S. It's ok to look like an idiot in public, it's a core skill of rationalists to be able to tolerate this sort of embarassment, but another core skill is actually learning something if you find out that you were wrong. Did you go to Wikipedia or other sources? Do you know anything about Monte Carlo Methods now? Would you like to say something nice about them here?

P.P.S. Would you like to say something nice about eli_sennesh, since he actually turns out to have had more accurate information than you did when you publicly insulted his state of knowledge? If you too are old pals with a joking relationship, no apology needed to him, but maybe an apology for lazily posting false information that could have misled naive readers with no knowledge of Monte Carlo methods?

P.P.P.S. I am curious, is the psychological pleasure of viciously putting someone else down as ignorant in front of their peers worth the presumed cost of misinforming your rationalist community about the nature of an important scientific and mathematical tool? I confess I feel a little pleasure in twisting the knife here, this is pretty new to me. Should I adopt your style of intellectual bullying as a matter of course? I could read all your posts and viciously hold up your mistakes to the community, would you enjoy that?

The only scenario where a financial argument makes sense is if you're shortening your life by spending more than you can afford, or if spending money on cryonics prevents you from buying some future tech that would save your life.

What if I am facing death and have an estate in the low six figures, and I can afford one cryonic journey to the future, or my grandchildren's education plus, say, charitable donations enough to save 100 young children who might otherwise live well into a lovely post-Singularity world that would include life extension, uploading, and so on? Would that be covered under "can't afford it"? If my personal survival is just not that high a priority to me (compared to what seem to me much better uses of my limited funds) does that mean I'm ipso facto irrational in your book, so my argument 'doesn't make sense'?

I do think cryonics is a very interesting technology for saving the data stored in biological human bodies that might otherwise be lost to history, but that investing in a micro-bank or The Heifer Project might have greater marginal utility in terms of getting more human minds and their contents "over the hump" into the post-singularity world many of us hope for. I just don't see why the fact that it's /me/ matters.

What if the choice is "use my legacy cash to cryopreserve a few humans chosen at random" versus "donate same money to help preserve a whole village worth of young people in danger who can reasonably be expected to live past the Singularity if they can get past the gauntlet of childhood diseases" (the Bill Gates approach) to "preserve a lovely sampling of as many endangered species as seems feasible". I would argue that any of these scenarios would make sense.

Also, I think that people relying on cryo would do well to lifeblog as much as possible, I think continuous video footage from inside the home and some vigorous diary type writing or recording might be a huge help in reconstructing a personality in addition to some inevitably fuzzy measurements of some exact values of positions of microtubules in frozen neurons and the like. It would at give future builders of human emulations a baseline to check how good their emulations were. Is this a well known strategy? I cannot recall seeing it discussed, but it seems obvious.

It seems very likely to me that tribal groups in prehistory observed that "eating some things leads to illness and sometimes death; eating other things seems to lead to health or happiness or greater utility" and some very clever group of people starting compiling a system of eating rules that seemed to work. It became traditional to hand over rules for eating, and other activities, to their children. Rules like "If a garment has a visible spot of mildew, either cut out the mildewed spot with a specified margin around it or discard it entirely, for god's sake don't store it with your other garments" or "don't eat insects that you don't specifically recognize as safe and nutritious" or 'don't eat with unclean hands, for a certain technical definition of 'unclean', for example, don't touch a rotting corpse then stuff your face or deliver a baby with those hands" etc. etc.

Then much much later, some of the descendants of some of those tribes thought to write a bunch of this stuff down before it could be forgotten. They ascribed the origin of the rules to a character representing "The best collective wisdom we have available to us" and used about ten different names for that character, who was seen as a collection of information much like any person is, but the oldest and wisest known collection of information around.

Then when different branches of humanity ran into each other and found out that other branches had different rule sets, different authority figures, and different names for the same thing as well as differing meanings for the same names in many cases, hilarity ensued.

Then a group of very very serious atheists came and said "We have the real truth, and our collective wisdom is much much better than that of the ancient people who actually fought through fire and blood, death and disease and a shitstorm of suffering to hand us a lot of their distilled wisdom on a platter, so we could then take the cream of what they offered, throw away the rest, and make fun of their stupid superstitions while not acknowledging that they actually did extremely well for the conditions they experienced"

Religious minds did most of the heavy lifting to get rationality at least as far as Leibniz and Newton, both of whom were notably religious. I'm not saying that the religious mindset is correct or superior, but the development of rational thought among humans has been like a relay race carrying a torch for a million years, and then when the torch is at the finish line (when it gets passed on to nonhumans) a subset of the people who carried the torch for the last little bit doesn't need to say "Hah we are so much better than the people who fought and died under the banner of beliefs at variance with our own". This is a promulgation of what is /bad/ about religion, and I see a lot of it in this group. I love the group but would really like it even better if people showed a tiny bit of respect for the minds that fought through the eras of slavery and religious war and other evils, instead of proclaiming very loudly about how wonderful they are compared to everyone else.

I mean, you ARE wonderful, you are doing amazing things, but... come on.

Not that I am any better, here I am bashing you lovely people because your customs are at variance with my own - but that's what reading this group has taught me to do!