From these comments i'm getting the impression that:

• Being vulnerable here means some mix of being emotional, being compassionate, and being connected.

• The idea is to be lightly vulnerable, or vulnerable within limits.

• The name 'vulnerability' has the effect of emphasizing the paradox of desiring instability.

Emotions usually have a use. Being emotionally "secure" means to choose your mental actions so to avoid possibility of negative emotions. If you allow yourself to be emotionally vulnerable you do not sensor your emotions and their usefullness away from you. That is you allow the state of the world to influence you and do not let your self identity to hijack your mental state.

One possible reason is that it facilitates trust-building. Say you are stuck in a cell with another prisoner, and every day you have the chance to cooperate or defect on a small task (for example, sharing food equally vs trying to steal an unequal share). Later, you are asked to testify against each other and get a slightly reduced sentence in exchange for the other person having a drastically increased sentence. A history of the other person cooperating gives some evidence that they will cooperate in this new situation as well.

Another analogy to this would be the process of building credit. If you take out lots of loans and pay them back scrupulously, you build a history of credit worthiness. The banks are more willing to be vulnerable based on past behavior of not defaulting.

The LW community is in rapid decline and people have been leaving in large numbers for years. LW is probably in the terminal stage of decline now, not in the initial or even middle stage. If you think this isn't true you are in denial - all the poll data and post/comment data shows this to be true.

I used to be an active member of this group. This is my first comment in months. I don't know why other people left; I can only speculate and offer the reasons why I left. The reason I left was because I perceived (maybe incorrectly, I don't know) that discourse was being dominated by a handful of individuals who had very little interest in actual rational unbiased discussion and were more interested in forcing their views on everyone under the pretense of rationality.

I guess it's a lesson and a set of things to learn for the next LW-like site. It's a lesson in how quickly good intentions (rational discussion and questioning authority) can lead to the evaporative cooling effect and the adoption of extreme sociological/political views while pretending that this is not taking place.

Court can order computers dismantled. And I think there are methods for state to aquire property if it can be shown to be a "vechicle of crime". It is afterall the state that controls the monopoly on violence needed to enforce private property in the first place.

In the specific case of the project known as 'TheDAO', the terms of service does indeed waive all legal rights and says that whatever the computer program says supersedes all human-world stuff.

I may have missed it, but that is not at all what the link you posted says. It has a waiver of liability against 3rd parties (basically the DAO operation). It does not say that you cannot have liability between to parties subject to a contract, or even seem to mention anything about dispute resolution.

Also, I would like to point out that you CANNOT have a contract that requires an illegal act. For instance, you cannot create a contract that says "Person A waives all legal recourse against Person B if Person B murders them." The act of murder is still illegal even if both parties agree to it.

Finally, the TOS for DAO is not the contract, it is merely the TOS for using the service. So the individual contracts between two people are going to override that.

But that isnt even true. If two people enter into a contract they are governed by law, regardless of whether it is a paper contract or computer code. I highly doubt there is any legal language in the computer code saying that the agreeing parties waive any US legal rights.

The code is not the contract, but rather a vehicle to effect the contract. You can have the exact same setup without the code.

On top of that, there is some legal questions as to what the DAO stuff actually is as a legal matter.

Is it possible to self-consistently believe you're poorly calibrated? If you believe you're overconfident then you would start making less confident predictions right?

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.