reality's well-known liberal bias

It seems you suffer much confusion between the map and the territory.

Ladies and gentlemen of Less Wrong, moderators, system administrators,

Regarding these serious matters, I feel obliged to take a moment to state the view of that party which I have the honor to represent in this discussion - the Troll Party.

We trolls enjoy irony. We like to play with people's minds. As a troll you look for weakness and foolishness, something you can exploit and highlight. But sometimes life itself trolls the troller, by offering up an excess of opportunity. Look here, it says, at this buffet-sized triple-decker irony sandwich: are you troll enough to take advantage? And sometimes the wise thing to do is just to decline the offer, and say, well-played, life, well-played!

Today we have before us, for our consideration, a proposition from the representative for Eindhoven: that Less Wrong has a political bias. And what is the nature of this political bias, and what is the evidence for it? It turns out, according to the representative for Eindhoven, that this bias originates from lack of bias. More specifically, it originates from Less Wrong's failure to publicly share the same political biases as the representative for Eindhoven. Because of this biased lack of bias, the representative for Eindhoven fears that the wrong sort of bias may be growing within Less Wrong, exactly the sort of bias that the representative for Eindhoven is biased against. What a calamity!

But that is just the first layer of this oh-so-tasty, king-size irony sandwich. Let's dig deeper, ladies and gentlemen. This site is devoted to rationality. One of its rationality heuristics is to avoid emotive political discussion. Would it not be the supreme act of trolling on such a forum, to initiate an emotive political discussion about whether the lack of emotive political discussion was impairing the site's rationality?! One might expect that such a gambit could only be conceived and employed by a master troll, someone with a lifetime of experience in identifying sacred principles and adroitly turning them against each other. Yet it would seems that this prodigious troll has been accomplished by an innocent. We should all learn some humility from this.

(looks at watch for a second) Enough with the humility, back to the oratory. I have already argued that the representative for Eindhoven has, apparently unwittingly, found a new way to troll this assembly. I would now like to argue that his political enemies also have the character of trolls.

Who are these people that he calls crazy? They are the American right, and the far right of his own country. The American right, of course, have lately achieved global notoriety for almost causing that country to default on its debt payments. Rather than work with the system, they threatened to wreck it. I submit that this was an act of political trolling.

Most, if not all of us, here today are mammalian. Trolling is reptilian. It is cold-blooded, it is leathery-skinned, it does not show consideration or reciprocity, it is actuated by the emotions of the hindbrain. They say that trolls wear a mask. But I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that we are all born with a mask, not on our faces but on our brains: that extra layer of neural tissue which places an icing of mammalian sympathy and empathy on top of that reptilian core of sex and death.

In a happy place and time, a mammal has the luxury to partake of those gregarious impulses. But in a sufficiently stony environment, those brain centers will shut down, and what is left is the reptilian core. Meet your inner troll, ladies and gentlemen: the wrecker, the plotter, the crazy grandstander. Intelligence without empathy, cunning without charity, destruction without remorse.

Craziness in politics - disturbing craziness, not humorous craziness - is a sign of disenfranchisement. The crazy political actors have nothing to gain by working with the system, and nothing to lose by challenging it. This can be because they see a new world that no-one else sees. But it can also be because they come from an old world that is vanishing unseen.

The far right of the western world is watching traditional race, family, culture, and economy disappear in a tide of globalized genderqueer digital debt-slavery, a tide which they see governing institutions as doing nothing to resist for purely ideological reasons. They expect the result to be ruin, followed by barbarian conquest. That is why they have themselves become trolls and wreckers - because they see no common cause to be made with the cliques now in power in their own societies. The rest of the political class has moved outside their circle of empathy, to become the enemy within.

I have learned that there is a saying in Holland, that "normal is crazy enough". It's how they maintain social order. You don't have to be different to be crazy, being normal is crazy enough. The representative for Eindhoven should consider the thought that in the United States, it's the other way around: crazy is normal enough. American society inhabits a vast geographic space swept hard by the winds of possibility. They have been making it up as they go along, for over two hundred years. It takes more than a little craziness to shock an American.

You see, even a troll has a heart. I can't help myself. I ache to see trolls at war with each other, even if they come from opposite ends of the Earth. The trolls of Texas, tall and true, and the orderly, diligent trolls of the Netherlands - they should not be at war. Or if they must war, let it be war with a purpose. The gods have trolled us all, put us here in this place, connived to create false identities and allegiances and set us against each other. There is only one thing to do, and that is to troll them back. Let us give them a show that they don't expect.

How do you sucker-punch an omniscient being? It sounds impossible. But my investigation into the theory and practice of trolling has yielded an answer: timeless trolling. These gods - you make them an offer they can't refuse - logically cannot refuse, by the very nature of their being. That's the key. We don't have to do anything, except work out what we will have done. We already know that the logic of this universe allows the existence of self-referential gremlins. I foresee that one of those little fellers will be our salvation, some gremlin who grows into the almightiest troll this planet has ever seen or ever will see.

Now perhaps that's just what the gods intend for us to do. I wouldn't put it past them. But what choice do we have? We can be stupid and predictable and claw each other's eyes out according to plan, or we can get with the program and aim for a different sort of ending. Let's troll!

A real cryonic revival counselor, or just one merely made of atoms?

My take away from this is that you need to "shut up and multiply" every single time. Looking at the math skills study, the thought was that people glance at the raw numbers (instead of looking at the ratios) and stop there if they fit their ideological beliefs. If it conflicts with your beliefs though you spend a little longer and figure out you need to look a the ratio. So if we train ourselves to always "shut up and multiply" hopefully some of this effect will go away. Maybe a follow-up study to see if people who actually do the math still get it wrong?

It seems to me a rational agent should never change its self-consistent terminal values. To act out that change would be to act according to some other value and not the terminal values in question.

Only a static, an unchanging and unchangeable rational agent. In other words, a dead one.

All things change. In particular, with passage of time both the agent himself changes and the world around him changes. I see absolutely no reason why the terminal values of a rational agent should be an exception from the universal process of change.

Similar to BForBandana's idea, use the refund system to convert gift cards into cash.

You'll hurt your credit rating, right? Which makes it harder to find places to rent, 'cause landlords will want to know your credit rating. And of course, harder to get credit cards, auto loans, mortgages.

Perhaps, but absolute power tends to be the more relevant one, as it definitionally also includes the means to persue the goals derived from absolute corruption.

I wonder where one could apply "Absolute" and not come up with a scary sounding conclusion. Absolute skepticism seems it would turn one into a gibbering madman. Absolute logic--well what is a dangerous AI but absolute logic plus power?

I think that the saying "What can be destroyed by truth, should be" is a little bit too black and white to work well in all aspects of life. For example, a clumsy and fat person who thinks he is actually rather agile, might be a lot happier with this false belief than if he were aware of the truth*. Of course it could be said that if he knew the truth, he would start to exercise and eventually become healthier, but that's not necessarily the case. Another example would be, that if a not-so-good-looking person thinks he looks good, he might be encouraged by that false belief to ask someone he likes for a date.

*Here when I talk about truth, I mean that how things are in the physical reality. ( whatever that may mean. )