This does indeed seem like something that's covered by the new policy. It's illegal. In the alternative where it's a bad idea, talking about it has net negative expected utility. If it were for some reason a good idea, it would still be incredibly stupid to talk about it on the &^%$ing Internet. I shall mark it for deletion if the policy passes.

there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say "you figure out how not to piss me off"-- abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.

I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers - abuse in self-defense is still abuse.

I think LessWrong as a whole would find you less frustrating if you assumed most comments from established users on domain-specific concepts or facts were more likely to be correct

Agreed. That's easier. However, sometimes the easier way is not the correct way.

In a world where the authoritative "facts" can be wrong more often than they're right, scientists often take a roughly superstitious approach to science and the educational system isn't even optimized for the purpose of educating what reason do I have to believe that any authority figure or expert or established user is more likely to be correct?

I wish I could trust other's information. I have wished that my entire life. It is frequently exhausting and damn hard to question this much of what people say. But I want to be correct, not merely pleasant, and that's life.

Eliezer intended for us to question authority. I'd have done it anyway because I started doing that ages ago. But he said in no uncertain terms that this is what he wants:

In Two More Things to Unlearn from School he warns his readers that "It may be dangerous to present people with a giant mass of authoritative knowledge, especially if it is actually true. It may damage their skepticism."

In Cached Thoughts he tells you to question what HE says. "Now that you've read this blog post, the next time you hear someone unhesitatingly repeating a meme you think is silly or false, you'll think, "Cached thoughts." My belief is now there in your mind, waiting to complete the pattern. But is it true? Don't let your mind complete the pattern! Think!"

Perhaps there is a way to be more pleasant while still questioning everything. If you can think of something, I will consider it.

I think there are a couple ways to go about answering this question. If you go about it by seeing whether people who are related and people with a few life experiences that you want to track score high on a conscientiousness test, you're not really answering the question "what training would work?"

I don't have a direct answer to that, but I do have several bits of information that would be very useful for a person who would like to try and solve this:

Dabrowski did research on morality also. His theory is that there are certain traits called "super sensitivities" that predict moral behavior. There may be a way to increase these - perhaps with drugs or life experiences designed to make your nervous system more excitable.

See also Jane Elliot's brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. I don't know whether they did these formally, but they observed that when the situation was reversed (the situation was that kids with a certain eye color were told they were better and became abusive) the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the "better than" role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior.

I researched violent crime one day and discovered that the main thing that was connected with violent crime was high testosterone. In theory, treatment using existing drugs could make a very big difference. That would probably require some kind of training intended to explain to the violent criminals that their problem was chemical, and convince them to take the drugs. This would be difficult because if they're chemically imbalanced it may not be easy to get that through to them. To an ordinary person, it's a no-brainer, but to them, it's probably not. Some type of educational program designed to get them to wake up and realize they need testosterone reduction treatment may go a long way.

This doesn't exactly qualify as training, as I've gone up to a meta level, but this kind of thinking could potentially make a very big difference:

We need to consider the role of perverse incentives. There are a lot of perverse incentives in life, and a lot of them are improperly checked and balanced. For instance, diagnosing a person with a mental disorder can be devastating to that person and to come up with an accurate diagnosis can take some time. However, psychologists are pressured to diagnose on the first visit because they can't get paid by the insurance company without it. Take a good person and put them into a bad situation, and they may react as if they were a bad person because they need to in order to survive. Identifying and changing perverse incentives might really change not only the way that a large number of people behave, but would also redirect the selection pressure on humans such that the good ones are more likely to survive and reproduce, helping to "train" our genes in the right direction, rather than just our behavior.

One final point about this response is worth nothing.

Is this a typo?

Would an EMP effectively disable any implanted nanotechnology? If so, how can nanotechnology be made EMP-proof?

Scenario meant to discover whether the experience of life is valued

Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it. At the time of pressing the button, I'm indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction... they are all me.

Okay, so I guess what you're saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.

How do you feel about this scenario:

You and your husband are planning to go to a really awesome event soon. Maybe it's the Singularity summit, maybe your favorite rock star is having a concert, maybe it's the birth of a new baby you guys have been wanting for a long time. Imagine whatever sort of event you'd enjoy most.

You're really looking forward to it!

Then work calls and says "Dave, two days from now, we need you to do this really important job 3,000 miles away from your ordinary work site. We couldn't get you a plane ticket on such short notice, but fortunately we have a transporter."

You agree, as it is your job.

Now you hang up the phone and your husband comes over, saying "I can't believe we're actually going to have this event soon! Isn't it exciting!"

"Yeah, of course!" You say. But something feels wrong.

You realize that you are going to be disassembled by the transporter BEFORE the event happens.

YOU won't experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead.

Is this acceptable?

I certainly don't want to live a lifestyle where we use transporters to go everywhere and each instance of me only experiences until the next transport. My life would never be long enough to experience any satisfaction. That's reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland's absurd circumstance: "Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today."

A new instance of me can experience a future event I've been planning for tomorrow, and a past me may have experienced a continuous life before transporters, but most instances of me would just be slaving away during the few hours or days in which they experience, doing things like working or buying groceries, so that other temporary instances of myself can reap the rewards. The instances that do get a reward still wouldn't get to experience the fulfillment of planning out a goal and following through - this is really important to me for satisfaction.

Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience

While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship's captain has the option of using the ship's transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.

Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I'll assume it's intact) I assume you're saying the option is to reassemble those people out of their original particles. (Because if not, it isn't any different from the transporter with technical failure argument, and I'd say that their experiencing ceased when they were disassembled, which is unacceptable, so they're dead.).

First, I'd like to say that re-assembling the people, no matter what with, may be better than letting them die because that still saves them from four out of the five elements of death above.

So what we're arguing about is not whether this rescues their genes, their influence in the world, their selves, or their bodies (that's inconsequential in this case), but whether it saved their ability to experience.

I'm seeing several ways for this to go. The transporter could re-assemble them by putting the exact same particles into the exact same relative locations, or by putting the mass of particles from the accident into whatever locations (mostly not the same locations).

Putting the same particles into the same relative locations:

This, I think, would be the same as turning a computer on and off. I don't have any reason to think I have a "soul" that would "escape" in this case, and I see no reason to differentiate a me made of the exact same particles as me from a me made from the exact same particles as me. In other words, a copy was never made. The re-assembled me is not a new instance - it is the original. I theorize that me1's experience would continue.

Putting the mass of particles into different locations:

This is sticky. If I have some of the same particles, but not all of them, is it me1? What if I have all of the same particles but they're in different locations? That's really, really sticky. This calls into question: What is experience? To answer this question, I have to ask "What is consciousness?"

I have an idea. If we had enough technology to send a person's entire pattern to a new location, surely it would require less bandwidth to send only their thoughts or commands to the remote location. Also there would be no risk of being damaged due to copying errors. A brainless body could be constructed there (either in the exact likeness of the person, or in a form designed to make optimal use of resources), and the original person could control it using a mind reading interface such that they experience what the remote avatar is experiencing.

This would be more efficient and less risky, don't you think?

It still doesn't answer the sticky question of "Would my experience be continuous if my particles were disassembled and re-arranged?" but I think it addresses the practical transportation problem behind this (also, you'd likely get to inhabit a variety of avatars, which would be cool) but back to the original question:

If all of my particles were disassembled and re-arranged, would I have a continuous experience or not? I had been basing this on whether there would be a new instance or not. But this confuses me as to whether there's a new instance, and makes me ask whether being disassembled and re-assembled exactly the same way might mean I lose continuous experience even if I am the same instance.

Maybe continuous instance != continuous experience.

So I have to answer the question of "What is continuous experience?" and "How does it work?"

Unfortunately, I see no way of testing for whether a consciousness is having a continuous experience, since it follows that new instances will pick up where previous instances left off, causing them to have the illusion of continuous experience, and disassembled instances will be dead and therefore incapable of responding about whether they're having an experience. Not that I could test it anyway without a transporter, but this means I can't imagine a scenario and reason out whether a disassembled instance of me would experience or not after being put back together exactly the same way.

Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?

Virtualization. I think if you are virtualized (uploaded to a computer, or copied into a new brain), you still die. I keep running into people on here who seem to think that if you copy someone, this prevents them from dying. It seems that I am in the minority on this one. Am I? Has this been thoroughly debated before? I would like to start a discussion on this. Good idea / bad idea tips on presentation?

Are you such a Platonically ideal female that we can generalize from you to other females, who may have expressed no interest in cryonics?

Of course not, that's an assumed "no". I guess what you're really asking is "What is the point of seeing whether we can convince you to sign up for cryo?" Sometimes case studies are helpful for figuring out what's going on. Study results are more practically useful but let's not forget how we develop the questions for a study - by observing life. If you've ever felt uncomfortable about the idea of persuading someone of something or probing into their motivations, you can see why being invited to do so would be an opportunity to try things you normally wouldn't and explore my objections in ways that you may normally keep off-limits.

Even if most of my objections are different from the ones other people have, discovering even a few new objections and coming up with even a few new arguments that work on others would be worthwhile if you intend to convince other people in the future, no?

If you see it that way, it sounds like you're already very nearly convinced.

Alicorn is right. It's not that I am convinced or not convinced, it's that I'm capable of interpreting it the way that you might have meant it. For the record, where I'm at right now is that I'm not convinced it's a good way to save my life, (being the only way does not make it a good way) and I'm not 100% convinced that it's better than donating to a life-saving charity.