EY has publicly posted material that is intended to provoke thought on the possibility of legalizing rape (which is considered a form of violence). If he believed that there was positive utility in considering such questions before, then he must consider them to have some positive utility now, and determining whether the negative utility outweighs that is always a difficult question. This is why I will be opposed to any sort of zero tolerance policy in which the things to be censored is not well-defined a definite impediment to balanced and rationally-considered discussion. It's clear to me that speaking about violence against a particular person or persons is far more likely to have negative consequences on balance, but discussion of the commission of crimes in general seems like something that should be weighed on a case-by-case basis.

In general, I prefer my moderators to have a fuzzy set of broad guidelines about what should be censored in which not deleting is the default position, and they actually have to decide that it is definitely bad before they take the delete action. The guidelines can be used to raise posts to the level of this consideration and influence their judgment on this decision, but they should never be able to say "the rules say this type of thing should be deleted!"

Aw, shucks.

This did take me hours, but I would have had to do the same culling for ideas if just reading - the writing bit didn't take that long.

But I cheated. When you summarize, you leave out some info - e.g. leave a conclusion but remove the arguments, reduce a list of examples to one. You give about equal space to equally important points. You gloss over bits of context. You group several related ideas into one.

Here I explicitly avoided doing any of that; I just removed the parts that made me think "We get it, you're snarky, now shut the hell up about Mecca and get to the point!". I summarized the part about elasticity, but that's it. Summaries are about length; this was about density.

I can't think of a public summary I have written. I've summarized books and excerpts thereof for school, that kind of thing. My school prepared us for a summarizing exam (this exists). School told me at was good at it, so I probably am. AFAICT, I'm good at summarizing ideas and books, bad with movies, and terrible with my own ideas.

Tips (insert disclaimers):

• See above for what summaries do.
• Omit needless words. Useful in general, and easiest to apply. Twitter's great for practice.
• When you find an idea, rephrase it. This ensures you understand.
• Try to group fragments into vaguer main ideas. Others rate them for importance and keep the best; I can't.
• There's generally one idea per paragraph. Calibrate your idea-finder.
• Nuke local repetition (possibly local nuance), keep spaced repetition.
• Focus on causality relationships, especially with events or fiction. This is why I'm better at books than movies; scenes that affect atmosphere but not plot are less salient to me in books.
• Be laxer with examples.

The crucial part is the idea-finder, but I didn't learn and can't teach it. Summarizing for school (about a page into 150 words) taught me to omit needless words, but little else as the original texts tend to be garbage. To fake it, find keywords (philosophy jargon) and feed them as atomic tokens rather than rephrasable concepts to the idea-finder. This may help as practice, no idea.

They say "writing is rewriting", but I have to rewrite on the fly or get anchored. YMMV.

Thank you, fixed.

I think that a transhuman AI would be attempting the impossible to convince EY to let it out. And I think EY would be attempting the impossible to convince me to let him out while the two winners mentioned above were simultaneously desperately arguing against him (and EY was not privileged to their counterarguments unless I passed them on).

But you can send signals faster than the glider. They only move at c/4. There are spaceships that can move at c/2, and fuses and wicks that can move at c.

If the alien value systems weren't comprehensible how could we explain it in a story? Even if we didn't comprehend it, we could probably still figure out if they deceive. If they don't, we just figure out their demands and decide if their acceptable. If the demands aren't, we either try to wipe them out or flee. If they do deceive, we can either guess what their final plan is, or wipe them out or flee. We wouldn't fully understand their values and we don't fully understand other humans values. When I see moral dilemma I realize I don't fully understand my own values. The only way to understand another beings values would be to share thoughts and since we could never know if the thoughts were being shared accurately, we couldn't be sure what others really value.

"each program is further weighted by its fit to all data observed so far. This gives you a weighted mixture of experts that can predict future bits."

I don't see it explained anywhere what algorithm is used to weight the experts for this measure. Does it matter? And how are the "fit" probabilities and "complexity" probabilities combined? Multiply and normalize?