Is anyone else distressed by the fact that, at the time of writing this comment, all of the "Recent Comments" displayed on the front page of the site are on a topic called "How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy"?
I'm not usually the kind of person who worries about "marketing" considerations, but....
Discussion section, ffs!
Ironically, Obama is exactly the kind of person to whom that term should refer, if it means anything at all. Descendants of African slaves taken to the Americas a long time ago should have another term, such as "American blacks".
Despite his lack of membership in it, Obama self-identifies with the latter group for obvious political reasons; after all, "children of foreign exchange students" is not an important constituency.
No, I didn't
Yes, you did. Here is what you said:
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I'd still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
This clearly implies that you didn't think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written "I'd still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape" or something similar.
I don't want to have a mind-killing argument
Then don't just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn't want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It's what we might call a "hot-button issue".
...While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I'd still call bl
I don't agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting "moral equivocation" of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex "rape".
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word "racism", which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would p...
If you don't know "what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about", this should make you less sure of your footing.
I'm pretty sure the question was rhetorical.
I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others,
Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.
...and I'm probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.
But you see, women don't find men who try to be nice to them attractive...Women are genetically programmed to only let alpha sperm in
Oversimplified to the extent that it is basically not true.
And yet I would bet that it is still closer to true than I approve of. In particular, closer to true than the mental model used by the naive "nice guy"/"beta".
Bad: There is no longer any visible difference between promoted and non-promoted posts (all circles are green).
Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only "retract" them (with usernames remaining displayed).
Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only "retract" them (with usernames remaining displayed).
Actually, I think I like this. You can still edit, so if there's something that you don't want even under a strikethrough, you can get rid of it; but the default is just to cross it out, and this encourages people to do that instead. Deleted comments with replies have been seriously disruptive in the past, so this is an improvement.
1) I think the increase in probability of suicides is non-tiny
What would be the mechanism linking this post to future suicides? (See also below.)
2) I don’t value “not having taboos” particularly highly
That would certainly help to explain your reaction. I, however, value it very highly indeed, and think that taboos are incompatible with rationality and "enlightenment" values (such as freedom of speech) more generally. (There could be exceptions, but they must always be considered, and never knee-jerk or uncritically inherited from general s...
But I suspect that you're depressed yourself
I am not, in fact, currently depressed, although I have been in the past. But I (in my non-depressed state) respect the feelings, wishes, and preferences of my depressed self, just like those of someone else like Chris.
Many commenters here have reacted to the suicide not with "how must he have felt" but with "how can we prevent more such things from happening?" It seems you think this reveals a lack of empathy or respect
I haven't said much of anything in response to most comments here; ...
I really don't understand your objection to this post specifically. I tried to craft it in the most sensitive way possible, it wasn't directly addressed to suicidal people themselves, and you agree that all subjects are fitting subjects for rationality. Furthermore, many commenters (including yourself) have in fact used it as an opportunity to reach out to those in the community suffering from depression.
What aspects of this post are so harmful that you think they outweigh the benefits, and how could it have been better written so as to allow the topic to be discussed while minimizing harm?
Has this been debunked in some way, or is this thread a really terrible idea?
Those are not the only two alternatives.
If minimizing the number of suicides were the only consideration, then you might have a (weak) argument that this post is a bad idea. (But note that gimpf's link specifically discussed television coverage; more generally, the "copycat effect" is generally considered to be a result of sensationalizing or glorifying suicide, not merely discussing it.) However, there are other, competing, values involved, such as:
from a utilitarian perspective, committing suicide generally makes everyone around you absolutely miserable, and will then always cause pain for them. In that regard, committing suicide is either misguided or selfish.
Not necessarily; it depends on whether the pain they will experience is enough to outweigh the pain that the suicidal person will experience by staying alive.
Thank goodness, because I was starting to wonder whether I should be worried about Ben Goetzel's AGI project. This puts my mind at ease, at least for a while.
It shouldn't (not as a general rule; Ben's case might have other valid reasons to come to the same conclusion). Being confused in one area doesn't necessarily make you confused in another (or prevents from being capable despite confusion). Not getting the problem of FAI doesn't prevent you from working towards AGI. Believing in God or Santa Claus or flying yogi doesn't prevent you from working towards AGI. Evolution didn't even have a mind.
I'll come out of the shadows (well not really, I'm too ashamed to post this under my normal LW username) and announce that I am, or anyway have been, in more or less the same situation as MixedNuts. Maybe not as severe (there are some important things I can do, at the moment, and I have in the past been much worse than I am now -- I would actually appear externally to be keeping up with my life at this exact moment, though that may come crashing down before too long), but generally speaking almost everything MixedNuts says rings true to me. I don't live wi...
I've got a weaker form of this, but I manage. The number one thing that seems to work is a tight feedback loop (as in daily) between action and reward, preferably reward by other people. That's how I was able to do OBLW. Right now I'm trying to get up to a reasonable speed on the book, and seem to be slowly ramping up.
It's worth pointing out that the original comment concerned living or dying, not torture.
Myself, I would avoid the torture button, but would give serious consideration to pressing one that delivered a delicious pie at the cost of painlessly puffing a random faraway person out of existence.
If the button delivered a sufficiently large amount of money, I would press it for sure. Would require much more money for torture than death, however. (Like $1 million versus a few bucks.)
Or actually: a "law" in the sense of "predictable regularity", not "rule that one will be punished for violating".
In which case the post exemplifies it, rather than violating it.