All of FourFire's Comments + Replies

I have benefited from linking your post to others as a reference point for non-constructive alignment approaches, so don't feel any guilt I expect that if we live for another few years this post will pay for the damage it's caused ;) 

I believe you have psychologically harmed me.

Well done!


I appreciate what appears to be your very best effort.
We certainly need to keep working on this category of problem until: 

20 years pass and somehow we're still alive and everything is great!

3JenniferRM
I apologize! Is there anything (1) I can afford that (2) might make up for my share of the causality in the harm you experienced (less my net causal share of benefits)?

I must admit confusion, and a quick googling does not alleviate it;
For those of us outside of academia, what exactly do you mean by "AF style publication"?

2Seth Herd
Sorry for the obscure reference. Alignment Forum is the professional variant of Less Wrong. It has membership by invitation only, which means you can trust the votes and comments to be better informed, and from real people and not fake accounts.
1Simon Möller
AF: Alignment Forum

My first comment on the new forum, please give feedback on which community norms I inevitably end up violating.

I'll attack the first section of your post, and I'll be disregarding the controversial intelligence-autism correlation.

a person who is both unusually smart

You are an outlier, the rules aren't made with you in mind.

Most people are forced break some rules in order to win, but from the perspective of most people, you can do moves which are impossible.

You can Win without breaking any rules.

Why would you throw away utility by taking u... (read more)

My steelmanning of Ialdaboath's claim isn't that it is impossible to succeed without being a psychopath. (Though I would definitely agree that his perspective is rather dreary and pessimistic) It is that the paths to success in society have been distorted by psychopaths into requiring one to express psychopathic traits in order to succeed a lot more of the time than would be the case in absence of psychopaths within the ruling elite.

0ialdabaoth
Yes, although I'd say it slightly more strongly: the paths to success have been distorted by psychopaths - and by our outright worship of them - into requiring one to express psychopathic traits in order to succeed, so much so that society's various commons are - in general - being drained more quickly than they're being replenished. Moreso, most of these so-called "successful" traits aren't even seen as psychopathic anymore; they're seen as "alluringly confident" or whatever.

I think ialdabaoth's claim is valid if, when measured, the most politically and culturally powerful quintile of the world population proves to be more than 1-4% clinical psychopaths.

I am assuming the top quintile of world population is what is meant by winners: people who control a disproportionate amount of the world's resources, and by proxy, people.

The USA has the world's largest prison population, of ~2.2MIllion and a total population of ~316 Million (both 2013)

If we were to expect an even distribution of Psychopathy across the bellcurve of intelligenc... (read more)

0Viliam
I believe that clinical psychopaths will be overrepresented among: the ruling elite, prison population, and probably also victims of drug abuse. But given their relatively low base rate, there is a chance to win at life (or get to prison) without being one of them.

Enjoy your stay!

I think most of the people who were around ten, or even six years ago now consider this place a mostly static repository of articles which are useful to refer to, rather than a dynamic community forum capable of generating more of said articles.

While I agree with your sentiment, I also care substantially more about the continued success and growth of solstices than about one or two participants of such events being deeply offended.

Elo is taking a stand here, which I believe needs to be taken, and few others are due to following the social norms of pre-emptively not offending people.

I admit I am confused; is sidestepping around the issue part of Ask or Guess culture?

1shev
I'm not asking for people not to talk about problems they have. I'm just criticizing the specifically extra-insensitive way of doing it in the comment I replied to. There are nicer, less intentionally hurtful ways to say the exact same thing.
0gjm
I think it's a separate issue: in principle, you could have pretty much any norms about calling out other people's bad behaviour along with pretty much any norms about how one person gets to find out what another wants. But I'd guess that willingness to make public objections like this correlates with Ask+Tell as opposed to Guess, and probably also with Tell as opposed to Ask.
  1. I agree completely.

  2. Politics has most certainly damaged the potential of SSC. Notably, far fewer useful insights have resulted from the site and readership than was the case with LessWrong at it's peak, but that is how Yvain wanted it I suppose. The comment section has, according to my understanding become a haven for NRx and other types considered unsavoury by much of the rationalist community, and the quality of the discussion is substantially lower in general than it could have been.

  3. Sure.

  4. Codebase, just start over, but carry over the useful ideas i

... (read more)
5John_Maxwell
I think Hacker News has a better solution to that problem (if you reply to someone who replied to you, your reply gets delayed--the deeper the thread, the longer the delay).

I'm responding to congratulate you on your correct prediction.

I see this account hasn't been active in over four years.

Archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the heavy pillars from local quarries and move them

I wouldn't take this claim for granted, perhaps I can contact one of these archaeologists, to check how they reached their estimate?

There's not many pixels in this source but it explains a concept for low manpower block moving using simple tools probably available to pre-farming civilizations.

That might be true, but the fact remains that one person is still completely dependent on and consequently bound to one neural substrate, and the support system for said neural substrate, which permits us (for now) to tie a person's personality to their distinct 'body'.

This remains true even in the spectrum of cases when multiple personalities or possibility even people (appear to) inhabit or share the same neural substrate.

If the substrate is disrupted, the indivdual(s) are destroyed.

This will not always be the case, once technology progresses to such ... (read more)

Found my favourite version:

Hi, just letting you know that though I wish I could be there, I will not be able to attend this meetup.
I will certainly attend a Stockholm meetup in the future though.

How is availability right now?

I'm looking to attend at least one Community event this year.

1nino
There are about 20 spots left and we seem to be getting 5–15 sign-ups per month. So if you want to attend, don't wait too long :)
3Houshalter
What's more surprising is that a lot of people put "male" in the "gender:other" write in. Often with a message protesting that they don't believe in other genders. Very strange, and possibly messes up the data a bit.

Same, unfortunately, I consider this site to be a mostly sunk ship, as previously stated, I've been mostly inactive since 2011, and I never really posted here anyway.

I wonder who downvoted you.

I'd argue for more strict dealing of downvote moderation, a higher waterline, if you like; noninsightful posts get downvoted (and otherwise ignored, or if specifically wrong, corrected) and impolite posts also get down-voted and responded to with an explanation. Explanatory responses might need to be encouraged more, in order to permit the author to know why exactly their post is being downvoted, but I'm wary of encouraging the lesswrong community to become more of a politeness before reason community than it already has, and so many other communities out there have.

0Lumifer
I treat up/downvoting not as a carrot or a stick, but as a message. Accordingly, I either downvote or reply, not both (with rare exceptions). Basically, if I bother to reply, there is no need for an up/downvote since I've sent a better message. As an aside, I don't think that tinkering with voting will solve any of LW's problems.

In retrospect, reading this thread is hilarious to me since I have been so inactive a user as to not have built up a model of any of the users who have been active since late 2011. You could argue that I have a poor or no theory of mind, but it is still fun attempting to construct temporary models for everyone based solely on the contents of this thread (I have no time to read the previous five years backlog).

Personally I think that there should be a lower limit of lesswrong culture/rationality in each post regardless of it's niceness content, and have a p... (read more)

0Viliam
It doesn't have to be a trade-off between rationality and politeness. Maybe we could downvote both comments that are stupid and comments that are rude. (Polite but not smart comments could be ignored, and only insightful non-rude comments upvoted.)

You seem to have suddenly lost some karma due to your other posts in this thread, I am discouraged from commenting on those posts, so I shall do so here instead.

At first I was surprised that 100% of the downvoted beyond default visible threshold comments in this thread belonged to the same person, and considered that you might be the victim of a downvote brigade, but after reading the comments themselves I realize that I too would downvote these ones, and so do not consider it a conspiracy beyond the stated purpose of the site.

Tangentially, I notice that d... (read more)

Alright, I'll bite:

Do you have a list of Labs/Hospitals which will sell storage of frozen tissues (and possibly the future service of thawing and growing them for implantable cloned organs) at competitive prices?

If not, where do you recommend I start, when looking for reputable sellers of such a service?

I'll have to attend one of the future meetups in this location.

I'm suffering from the same opportunity cost bias that lead to FeepingCreature attending my own meetup last week.

It's awefully tempting to just get a plane ride to the meetup, indeed the cost of the entire trip would be less than a day's wages!

Well, there went another evening filled with interesting discussion, though there were fewer attendees than I anticipated, those of us who did attend covered the aforementioned topics and more.

There was also some very above average pizza.

Anyhow I look forward to future meetups, though none are currently planned, I'll see about getting the next one posted at least six weeks in advance.

Anyone interested in participating in the organization of future meetups, or maybe just dropping a comment is welcome to join the mailing list.

Oslo, Norway.

Are any of these open/free to take, because I have use for such a test.

1Tem42
I don't know of any that are free, but What Color Is Your Parachute? is generally recognized as a good one, and is likely to be available at most used book stores -- though would probably have to settle for an older edition. Edit: and any library will have a copy.

I am of the opinion that much better tests can exist, not sure if they do, which can divide people into further categories.

I would also like to see these resources. A cursory search yields this, however I don't think it is sufficiently indepth.

5Vaniver
I responded. Incidentally, Less Wrong has a neat feature where if you click the envelope icon at the bottom right of a comment, you'll get replies to that comment in your inbox as if you had written the comment yourself.

Hello again, The first meetup was what I consider a success and future meetups are being organized here.

I have high hopes of there being a healthy northern Europe rationality community with time.

Thanks to everyone who turned up, and for those who couldn't make it, I look forward to seeing you next time, I certainly had a fun time, and I believe i was not alone :)

Here is the google group (mailing list) for LessWrong Oslo.

My apologies, you are correct, I'll simplify my posts in the future in order to avoid potential confusion.

I had a pleasant and intellectually enticing time tonight.

I look forward to further meetups and invite anyone who couldn't make it tonight to join us in the future.

I myself consider that a large degree of why I find myself to be bad at math is because I have spent very little time really trying to do math as a result of it being actually mentally painful to do due to this effect.

This makes me sad, because even without accomplishment, I feel as if my reasoning ability is "merely above average" and I have no apparent way of leveraging that besides hacking that into making me seem more verbally intelligent (a lame result in my opinion).

However I'm not a programmer either, yet.

I didn't see that until right now, made me chuckle.

That method of attack would only work for a tiny fraction of possible gatekeepers. The question, of replicating the feats of Elezier and Tuxedage, can only be answered by a multitude of such fractionally effective methods of attack, or a much smaller number, broader methods. My suspicions are that Tuxedage's attacks in particular involve leveraging psychological control mechanisms into forcing the gate keeper to be irrational, and then leverage that.

Otherwise, I claim that your proposition is entirely too incomplete without further dimensions of attack methods to cover some of the other probabilty space of gatekeeper minds.

Your comment is enlightening, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

The video appears to be private, which is unfortunat since I was interested in watching how the event progressed.

2maxikov
We decided that keeping the whole video including personal stories public all the time wouldn't be a very good idea. All the songs, however, are publicly available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhH76Ztpl1UIHsSvxSsHhoPLc95n_s_6N

I've said the same myself...

And yet I have not found this post until this very day, how unfortunate...

FourFire500

I answered every question except the last one (I don't have a scanner set up).

Indeed I consider that the winning move would be to blackmail the person starting the auction for a small percentage of his winnings, (else you expain to everyone present why he'll get those winnings).

I am still interested in some good examples of Yvain's posts which invoked this reaction from you, I have been reading somewhat more of his writing recently and though I often agree with his points, I don't recall feeling such explicit urges.

0Leonhart
PMed you because of reasons

I just came to note that I'm reading through my relatively few posts here, and the above is still true.

I don't want to mention it directly here, out of embarrassment, if nothing else, but it was a long piece, the ending of which features the immortal An-/Pro-tagonist giving up on the universe, and committing suicide.

I'm sure a lot of people will feel that way if free will is determined to be an illusion, and enhanced humans or nonapocalyptic but still vaguely (apparently) unfriendly AI are loose on the world, manipulating people.

I myself held this position until I, quite recently as a matter of fact, read some fiction which tipped off an existential crisis, putting me on the verge of a panic attack. Since then, I am more wary of dangerous ideas.

Ignorance might be bliss, but wisdom is gathered by those who survive their youth.

1[anonymous]
I am very interested in what fiction that was. I have experienced the same thing myself once, when I was 13 and read 1984 for the first time. It took me hours to recover and days to recover fully. I know you didn´t want to tell before, but if you have changed your mind, please do. I don´t judge anyone and I don´t think many others will either.
1Richard_Kennaway
I have to ask: what was the fiction?
2AndyWood
I have had many attacks. I survived them all.

So, do you maintain your decision, or was it just a spur of the moment lapse of judgement?

4SoundLogic
After a fair bit of thought, I don't. I don't think one can really categorize it as purely spur of the moment though-it lasted quite a while. Perhaps inducing a 'let the AI out of the box phase' would be a more accurate description.

I agree that it's depressing, I disagree that we should give up now. No vote either way.

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