Oxygen != heat, or even fire. Fluorine can set things on fire, for example. And of course the wonderful thing about energy is that it can change forms. So phlogiston theory is thoroughly useless, though I agree it's not a really mysterious answer.

"Emergence" or "quantum effects" to explain how the brain works might fall into this category.

On the second thought, this is turning to be a dialog, which is more appropriate for a chat room, than for a public forum, so I will stop here.

If this string of comments is much upvoted, then it would certainly be appropriate for here, despite there being only two people in the discussion.

P.S. SithMasterSean, Nietzsche's writing has been praised by Nazis. You wouldn't want to be a Nazi, would you?!

I'm struggling to figure out what this was meant to communicate.

ADDED: Please go meta, folks. I am not trying to argue about this specific Wiki article. I am not asking for redress. Specifics about this wiki article are irrelevant. I am asking whether this is still a benevolent dictatorship.

I cannot fathom how you could possibly think this was a practical direction to move your attack. I honestly expected you to quickly backpedal from the ownership challenge and into a more productive method of bringing attention to the group selection issue and making Eliezer look silly. But now you seem to be escalating in a direction that can only end badly.

You had the potential for having a minor moral victory while influencing people about the contentious issue that has your interest. But you're throwing it all away!

• Who owns the domain?
• Who created the Wiki?
• Who owns the code?
• Who pays for the servers?

You left off "Who cares?" Eliezer's practical power over the website itself is not in question. If there was (another) shift of power and control at the SIAI and people there really cared then it could in theory be wrested from him. It is also conceivable that lax legal precautions could allow technical folks like, say, Tricycle to pull a defection. But this is all meaningless. What you should be interested in is the lesswrong community, which is ephemeral, social and not subject to absolute control by legal powers.

And actively seeking "challenge, danger, conflict and conquest" - well, two of those (challenge and conquest) are good things to seek, but the other two (danger and conflict) are stupid and destructive.

Not to play apologist, but I'd say that people's intuitions for danger and conflict are far too broken to justify blanket acceptance or rejection of actions carrying those emotional tags. Playing chicken with a 300-pound Sumatran tiger is a dangerous act tagged correctly, granted, but ancestral instincts don't often do that a good job of carrying over: people's intuitions for social, technological, or habitual dangers are often completely out of whack relative to their actual importance, and habituation might well be indicated in many cases. Conflict being more of a social construction, I can't make blanket statements about it as easily, but I strongly suspect similar considerations would apply.

I agree with the rest of your comment.

Yes Nietzsche is the Western world's Dark Side philosopher par excellence. People here seem to have an irrational fear of these ideas, probably because they are the shadow of Eliezer Yudkowsky's absurd universe-saving religion of rationality. Fear is indeed the mind-killer, but as Ra's al Ghul advised Bruce Wayne: "To conquer fear, you must become fear." Or as Darth Vader said to Luke: "if you only knew the power of the Dark Side!"

The point being, if you think you can only acquire knowledge or power by rational, utilitarian calculations and Light Side thinking, then to quote Emperor Palpatine: "Oh, no, my young Jedi. You will find that it is you who are mistaken...about a great many things."

I'm working on coming up with my own advice for you, chimera. First, I would like to ask some questions.

What prompted this post? Have these concerns always been with you, but have recently found a voice? Alternatively, did you realize that you had these problems as a result of something you read on Less Wrong or some other recent event?

I get the impression that you posted this after realizing that you were in a funk and had no idea how to get out. How long have you felt the way that you felt when you posted this, or if you feel that way still, the way you feel now?

What about the time leading up to this funk? Did you feel that were accomplished, progressing in your life, accomplishing your goals? Do you feel that you recently lost an important part of yourself, as if a bit of your self image was dissolved?

In the last year or so, has anything changed in your physical surroundings or routine? These will be keys to discovering why you feel the way you do.

I'm a fan of moving forward, just like everyone on Less Wrong, but it's likely the proximate cause of your situation will give us a hint at it's ultimate cause, and may point us in the direction of a solution.

All the information you need is already out there, and I have this suspicion you have probably read a good deal of it. You probably know more about being happy than everybody else you know and yet you're not happy. You realize that if you're a smart rational agent you should just be able to figure out what you want to do and then just do it, right?

1. figure out what makes you happy
2. do more of those things
3. ???
4. happiness manifests itself

There is no step (3). So why does it feel more complex than it really is?

What is the kind of response you're really looking for when you start this topic? Do you (subconsciously) want people to just tell you to buck up and deal with it? Do you (subconsciously) want people to tell you not to worry and that it's all going to be alright? Or are you just in some kind of quarter-life crisis because you don't really see clearly where you're going with your life and the problems you have are just side-effects of that?

• Maybe you need to be held accountable for your actions?

• Maybe you need additional responsibility?

• Maybe you need a vacation?

• Maybe you need to grow as a person in another manner?

We can't answer these questions for you and you know we can't answer these questions for you. Yet you ask us anyway. It doesn't make sense.

Now, I can make a complete shot-in-the-dark guess about your situation and make the following assumptions:

1. you're in social isolation
2. you spend much time on intellectual issues
3. you're not producing, you're almost exclusively consuming intellectual stuff
4. you're not eating as well as you should
5. you're letting lazy habits chip away at your life on the edges
6. you tell yourself that there's nothing wrong with you and that you should just man up
7. you hate the fact that you procrastinate and yet you keep procrastinating
8. every time when you feel you're making progress it doesn't last and you regress every time to square one.
9. you have trouble making lasting changes in every single aspect of your life

Psychological help doesn't work because you don't need people to explain this stuff to you, you've done your homework already and you know all this.

I'd be happy to talk to you over skype if you want, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. For some people talking about their problems really helps, especially if they otherwise bottle it all up.

What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is - here's the clincher - boredom...

The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'

Remember - boredom is the enemy, not some abstract 'failure.' (T. Ferris)

My guess is that your Will to Power has no outlet so you are redirecting it into other activities. Forget saving the world; save yourself. Watch the movie Fight Club if you want to see one possible way to do this. What you need is challenge, danger, conflict and conquest -- things which modern society does all it can to suppress and vilify. The result is an epidemic of impotent young men who have neither Will to Power nor willpower. Intelligence isn't enough dude; nerds tend to have little power and be evolutionary failures, so much of what you will read at sites like this probably isn't helpful. Your rational mind is a small component of your psychological makeup, which, if you let it totally dominate you, is unlikely to produce a satisfying existence. Practice exercising your will, over yourself at first, then over your pets, your friends, family, co-workers and so on into the larger world, and I guarantee that you will start to feel much better about yourself!

Do you mind going into detail about why you think video games devour life's potential?

Sure. The main thing is that, empirically, they tend to hijack peoples' motivational systems by providing fake utility functions and a constant stream of well-tuned rewards, to make them play for many hours. Those are usually hours that could've been spent on something much better. Some formerly-well-adjusted people end up spending a large fraction of their waking hours this way, particularly people who got suckered into setting up social reinforcement for their gaming habits (MMORPG players who meet friends they can only interact with through the game, and Facebook/Zynga game players who constantly receive and generate notifications to and from their friends about the games.) Even if you're only losing a small number of hours, though, video games are dangerous as a procrastination activity because they're immediately available and more tempting than most other procrastination activities, and they're hard to transition back from.