All of Document's Comments + Replies

Came across this thread recently. I agree that it's bad to abuse entities that can show distress like this, to an extent regardless of whether/to what degree they're "conscious" or "moral patients" or whatever. (There are quotations on that, but I don't want to spend too much time looking for one.) We only have one chance to show how we treat digital minds when they're helpless.

What really bakes my noodle is, if the dialogue had been generated in Lsusr's head instead, what would be different?

Did you?

Came to complain about a fundraising email with broken unsubscribe links. Saw the survey and filled it out. On reflection, I'm not sure that I was the target audience, but it's done.

Refraining from questioning the meaning of "to proposing", why is there a degree symbol in your link? Was that added by the site?

An assumption with no basis, I trust you realized on reflection.

both A and B used the word "body" in places where I would have expected "self" or "mind" or "person"

I don't know where it originates or whether it serves any deliberate purpose, but that's common in social justice writing.

Interesting to read this shortly after this. Does Ta-Nehisi Coates have "influence"?

Did you mean to post that somewhere else?

Initial reaction: "That's news?".

That said, your link seems to be dead, with no archive. Do you have it saved?

From the comments:

Let me demonstrate how the summary statistics you report are entirely consistent with models which totally contradict your inferences.
(...)
your statistical model is bad and the data cannot support any alarmist claims about society discriminating enormously against high IQ or the need for a 'clarion call'.

There's no response to this from the author despite the passage of more than a year. Any thoughts?

How did it go? It seems like it would create some unsettling ambiguity in the "happy" ending.

Why not here?

Crazy guy: Hey, June*! Do you know that my cabinets keep opening and closing by themselves?
June*: Well, do you believe in ghosts?
Crazy guy: Yes, I do!
June*: Maybe your place is haunted, and the ghosts just want to say hello.
Crazy guy, after thinking a while: No, I think it's just my schizophrenia.

Allegedly overheard.

They didn't anticipate what the Internet would become--because they weren't fucking insane...

Robert Evans, Cracked

Related: Stranger Than History.

They didn't anticipate what the Internet would become--because they weren't fucking insane...

Robert Evans, Cracked

"I just don't like to see you make a fool of yourself."

"Oh!" MacBride stopped, glared. "I just should be a strong, silent guy, huh? Well, listen to me, Harry. I've noticed that a strong, silent guy is usually that way because he don't know anything. I'm willing to beef around, talk my head off, make a fool of myself—if it'll get me anywhere."

Frederick Nebel, "Doors in the Dark"

"I just don't like to see you make a fool of yourself."

"Oh!" MacBride stopped, glared. "I just should be a strong, silent guy, huh? Well, listen to me, Harry. I've noticed that a strong, silent guy is usually that way because he don't know anything. I'm willing to beef around, talk my head off, make a fool of myself—if it'll get me anywhere."

Frederick Nebel, "Doors in the Dark"

Edit: Related: Say It Loud.

Bit late, but: IIRC the post-credits scene implies that Ultron was somehow really under Thanos' control, via the Infinity Stone Thanos originally gave to Loki (and/or its corruption/influence via Stark via Wanda Maximoff).

I suppose it might be giving the movie too much credit to argue that Ultron was at no point honestly explaining his plans, but instead saying whatever he expected would confuse and/or demoralize his enemies.

The question of liability is sort of alluded to in the latest movie, Civil War; though the short answer seems to be no.

In the end, the only real answer is always "it's all made up and what you see is what you get".

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., S03E18: "The Singularity". Aired April 26. The team wants to find a biologist whose work they need.

Simmons: He was asked to step down a month before for conducting irregular experiments.
Lincoln: "Irregular" meaning...?
Fitz: (grimly) He's a rumored transhumanist.
Coulson (who previously collected a set of trading cards commemorating, and later worked with, a man who was biologically augmented in the 1940s; worked with and against various members of an alien civilization whose advanced magic/technology al

Is there a deadline?

Double-dipping to add: Calibre recommends not using PDFs as your source format if at all avoidable.

I feel like I should emphasize that it's not just that the format is ill-suited to conversion, but that Calibre's conversion routine for it is particularly poor; I quit using it when I noticed that the output was frequently truncated early.

Better conversion options:

• The Amazon Send to Kindle application's built-in conversion function
• Opening in a PDF reader and copying and pasting into a word processor
• Searching online for key text and seeing if you can fi

I would put this in the Map and Territory field. Or maybe it's a belief paying rent? Maybe both.

Not sure what this means.

Eliezer has an account here and is a very prominent figure if you check out the sequences.

Hamish Sinclair has an account at Marathon's Story Forum and is a very prominent figure if you check out the main site, but that didn't stop him randomly switching to a new account as "Godot". Is EY really so much less eccentric, and furthermore universally known to be by everyone but me?

I made no claim that those are the only two possibilities.

On reflection, I see that you're right; I inferred too much from your comment. What you said was that you'd be interested in an explanation of your error, if and only if you committed one; followed by asking the separate, largely independent question of whether Eugine/Azathoth/Ra/Lion was punishing you for not being right-wing enough again. I erroneously read your comment as saying that you'd be interested in (1) an explanation of your error or (2) the absence of such an explanation, which would prove the Eugine hypothesis by elimination. Sorry for jumping the gun and forcing you into a bunch of unnecessary analysis.

I strongly disapprove, since it leads casual readers to believe that you're Yudkowsky and/or some official representative of the website. But I have no authority, and nobody else seems to mind, so that's as far as I can go.

I hesitate to ask this, because the fact that you've been posting for six months without it being asked suggests that I'm missing something obvious. But I'm feeling lazy.

Are you actually Less Wrong?

Thanks! Downloaded; I don't know whether I'll actually read it (it being apparently over 476,000 words), but it's great to have.

Did you use the method RicardoFonseca described?

Any chance of a combined ebook version?

Anecdote: I haven't received a PM reply from him since 2013.

I wonder if anyone suggested the Council for Understanding Logic and Technology.

Interesting. It sounds like "dodging" and "swallowing" are equally misused in Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, but in different ways.

I would seriously nominate this as the largest bullet ever bitten
Why would anyone bite a bullet that large?
No, the drive to bite this bullet

This has bugged me for a while: is there a definition of "biting" or "dodging" a "bullet"? It seems to be used here in a way exactly opposite how I've seen it used elsewhere.

I guess technically it's "too late" to give up on a dream if you've already accomplished it; but I'm not sure that's how most people would read the statement.

It's NEVER too late to give up on your dreams. :-)

Similar "problem"(?): Acausal trade with Azathoth

The last quote isn't from Yudkowsky.

RationalWiki explains this in the way that you should act as if it is you that is being simulated and who possibly faces punishment. This is very close to what the LessWrong Wiki says, phrased in a language that people with a larger inferential distance can understand.

I'm pretty sure that I understand what the quoted text says (apart from the random sentence fragment), and what you're subsequently claiming that it says. I just don't see how the two relate, beyond that both involve simulations.

This is like a robber walking up to you and explaining that

I just liked seeing the usually-untouchable hero called out on his completely empty boast of how tirelessly curious and inquiring he was.

"I hate being ignorant. For me, a question unanswered is like a thorn in my side that pains me every time I move until I can pluck it out."

"You have my sympathy."

"Why is that?"

"Because if that is so, you must spend every waking hour in mortal agony, for life is full of unanswerable questions."

-- Eragon and Angela, Brisingr, by the same author

The URL contains "commentisfree". Doesn't that mean that it's a user blog rather than an article?

Now that the series of posts has been continued and completed in a different thread, you might want to update your link to point here.

In addition to what others said, I find that turning the contrast to maximum helps somewhat.

I'd rather not worry about budget.

Not counting external storage, I'm using about 25 GB of the D620's 38 GB, plus 25 GB (not counting software) on the family desktop PC.

(After ordering the XPS, I realized that it doesn't have a removeable battery, which seems like a longevity issue; but it seems likely that that's standard for devices of its weight class.)

Update: I've provisionally ordered a Dell XPS 13.

Thanks for replying. I haven't looked at your link yet, but it seems like there'd be limits to how much shock protection could be fit in an ultrathin laptop, and it'd be hard to find out how good it is for specific models. (And the speed advantage seems like enough reason to want an SSD in any case.)

Source on SSDs failing sooner? I thought (or assumed) it was the opposite. A quick Google search turns up the headline "SSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5%".

Looking further, though, I also see: "An SSD failure typically goes like this: One minute it's working, the next second it's bricked.". The page goes on to say that there's a service that can reliably recover the data from a dead drive, but that seems like a privacy concern (if everything on the drive weren't logged by the NSA to begin with).

On the pro-SSD side, thou... (read more)

I think I want to buy a new laptop computer. Can anyone here provide advice, or suggestions on where to look?

The laptop I want to replace is a Dell Latitude D620. Its main issues are weight, heat production, slowness (though probably in part from software issues), inability to sleep or hibernate (buying and installing a new copy of XP might fix this), lack of an HDMI port, and deteriorated battery life. I briefly tried an Inspiron i14z-4000sLV, but it was still kind of slow, and trying to use Windows 8 without a touchscreen was annoying.

I remember reading ... (read more)