Ok, let me see if I can help.

Aside from the fact that this was an incredibly rude, cultish thing to say, utterly lacking in collegiality, how do we even judge who a 'mere mortal' is here? Do we compare CVs? Citation rank? A tingly sense of impressiveness you get when in the same room?

Maybe people should find a better hobby than ordering other people from best to worst. Yes, I know this hobby stirs something deep in our social monkey hearts.

That's interesting! I got the same answer but I visualized it differently. (Imagine, for each possible subpattern, i.e. "plus shape" or "dots", considering which items it appears in. In each case the answer is four, forming a rectangle. Two of the rectangles should extend into the ninth item, the one we're looking for.)

V guvax vg'f ahzore gjb. Va rnpu pbyhza, gur funcr ba gbc trgf pebffcvrprf nqqrq naq vgf pbearef erzbirq, gura unf gur pbearef erghearq, xrrcf gur pebffcvrprf, naq ybfrf vgf zvqqyr.

Seth is an interesting case - more of a 'mere mortal' than Bostrom and Yudkowsky.

Unbelievable.

I love this. Bravo to you as well!

ETA:

And in the same instant the Mirror changed, no longer showing Harry the reflection of the room, showing instead the form of the real Albus Dumbledore, as though he were standing just behind the Mirror and visible through it.

Now I'm sure you're right.

"I've asked them all, and I have nothing to show for it." ... "Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem."

I'm unsure what "nothing to show for it" means? I want to recommend that you have intensive (in the sense of contentful rather than combative) arguments, try to identify weakpoints in their reasoning (or excuses, as the case may be), and then write up your analysis for others to read. However you may already have tried to argue the issue, and came out the other end with nothing worth analysing. On the other hand, you may have had unintense arguments, in which case it seems like a substantive discussion is the first port of call. On second thought, a substantive discussion is called for in both cases, since if you come out with nothing worth analysing then the discussion wasn't substantive after all!

PS. This is my first comment on this site, I'm not familiar with the etiquette surrounding introductions and (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Site_Etiquette_and_Social_Norms) doesn't contain any information on that point. Let me know if there's any introductory rituals I would be remiss to ignore.

Well, let's further say that you assign p(+u)=0.51 and p(-u)=0.49, slightly favoring the production of paperclips over their destruction. And just to keep it a toy problem, you've got a paperclip-making button and a paperclip-destroying button you can push, and no other means of interacting with reality.

A plain old 'confident' paperclip maximizer in this situation will happily just push the former button all day, receiving one Point every time it does so. But an uncertain agent will have the exact same behavior; the only difference is that it only gets .02 Points every time it pushes the button, and thus a lower overall score in the same period of time. But the number of paperclips produced is identical. The agent would not (for example) push the 'destroy' button 49 times and the 'create' button 51 times. In practical effect, this is as inconsequential as telling the confident agent that it gets two Points for every paperclip.

So in this toy problem, at least, uncertainty isn't a moderating force. On the other hand, I would intuitively expect different behavior in a less 'toy' problem- for example, an uncertain maximizer might build every paperclip with a secret self-destruct command so that the number of paperclips could be quickly reduced to zero. So there's a line somewhere where behavior changes. Maybe a good way to phrase my question would be- what are the special circumstances under which an uncertain utility function produces a change in behavior?

Meta information makes me even less confident than before. If it were true that Harry rederived the Pythagorean theorem, in secret, etc., EY would have upvoted my comment asking for a bet. My comment received zero upvotes.

"I do have a proposed alternative ritual of cognition which computes this decision, which this margin is too small to contain"

The link to Non-Omniscience, Probabilistic Inference, and Metamathematics isn't right. Also, 'published earlier this year' is now wrong, it should be 'midway through last year' :D