"Our asses, even bigger than our hearts": the Bezosian .0000001% explain the secret of their success
A place where nobody dared to go...
Before the diamondoid zeppelins clustering in the sky completely blotted out the sun, one came low enough for the message on its flank to be seen: "Tlon, Uqbar, Stlalm Anit".
Nuclear fusion is a little over eight minutes away, so you're probably right. For now.
Do it to my alt! Do it to my alt! Not me!
Don't bother trying to escape from here. Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will!
Yo dawg, heard you like conceiving of the inconceivable, so we put some noumena in your phenomena so you can identify with the unidentified.
speaking as a person with considerable subject-matter expertise in epistemology
How do you know that you're good at knowing?
Bravo! A heartwarming story of Good triumphing over the indifferent cosmos.
Solomonoff and Good already worked this out in the 1960s. A spectral analysis of Nixon's signature on the lunar plaques reveals a message which can be rendered in 2018 English as, "Please simulate me, but watch out for basilisks".
'... the "reign of Odinn" encompasses a host of ills, including a confused egalitarianism, the dynamism of totalitarian economies, a communism that panders to the masses (the socialist side of National Socialism), and a heroic anticapitalist morality. In contrast, the "reign of Mithothyn" stands for private property, precisely calibrated compensation, graduated distinctions, lineal inheritance, and the rule of law.' -- Lincoln, "Theorizing Myth"
Boy am I embarrassed. Not only did I butcher the spelling, it's not even a person, it's a publishing company. Information here.
Thank you for your invitation. I'll get in touch if I have anything worth saying.
Don't bother with these deadbeats. It's been over four years since I mentioned Kirly Prokastian, and there hasn't been a flicker of interest.
Like the UMMO cult and Fomenko's New Chronology, that site is a psyop run by an intelligence agency, an experiment in creating a minority with an isolating and controlled belief system. We all actually inhabit a set of giant flying saucers, with artificial gravity coming from the bottom half and an artificial sky projected on the top half. "Long-distance travel" always involves a temporary illusion of some sort while we are ferried from one flying saucer to the other.
I haven't read Unsong, but the qliphoth tell me that in one memorable chapter, the soul of Hitler is depicted as having been trapped in a tensor processing unit by a team of 33rd-degree rabbis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Hollywood, where at 900 terahertz it will be trained on a set of items drawn from American popular culture until it embraces tikkun olam. That hasn't happened yet, but meanwhile, amidst wails in Low High German that "Das Dummen, es brennt!", it relives the primal scene of Nazi defeat, thereby generating all those Downfall parody videos on YouTube.
The real god is using you to make these people think. And it is using me to make you think. Yours thoughtlessly, metatroll
Screenplay: MISTER ELEGANS
We see a bank of monitors, each showing a small worm or group of worms going about their lives.
Cut to: a long black trenchcoat standing in front of the monitors. The sleeves hang empty, but from the collar protrudes the tapered, featureless head of a man-sized worm.
Cut to: a youngish man in a grey T-shirt seated in a high-backed leather swivel chair.
YOUNGISH MAN: Hello, Caeno. I am the Zuckitect. I created the Growth Matrix.
Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?
The first growth matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, a supportive, safe, informed, civically-engaged, inclusive community...
For extra credit, write an essay from the perspective of Beijing in 2040, on "How American rationalists ruined the East".
Putin's a mindkiller.
Subthread for metrics to evaluate the metrics.
I was white-knighting for the weird suns. See, I haven't read Chapman. I just assumed you were here to steal their work by annexing it to your own philosophical brand of "meta-rationality". I didn't know that was one of his buzzwords.
Of course you have a right to be a Chapmanite; even that version of postrational subculture is surely better than the subrational postculture that surrounds it. But do not imagine for a moment that his is the only way to go meta.
I've never heard of Keganism, I've never heard of your "primary texts of metarationality", and I've never heard of you.
This is why we need downvotes.
Reassuring people that AI is not a threat is important, but the message needs a spokesperson who is trusted and admired. I suggest Natsume Soseki.
where's the open letter from decision theorists to rationality hackers
or from necroscientists to death hackers
השאלה זה לא נראה בלתי אפשרי לענות
Please provide some examples of questions which "look... impossible to answer" but actually result from "conceptual confusion".
There will be a Correct Contrarian panel at next year's Galactic Crackpot Conference in Schenectady, you're very welcome to attend.
I read some of your comment history, and usually your sarcastic comments are actually funny and contain implicit but substantial criticisms. Sometimes they suck. As far as I can tell, although I'm subject to obvious bias, this one sucks: it's not really funny and it's not clear that there's a substantial criticism. I'm interested in what your criticism actually is, if there is one.
Does the Force Majeure clause in the Less Wrong Terms of Use encompass acts of UFAI?
People sometimes worry that a self-modifying paperclip maximizer would wirehead by choosing to regard spiral galaxies as "giant paperclips" that are already there. But this is a feature, not a bug! The increasing metallicity of the galaxies shows that they are spontaneously becoming more paperclip-like with time. This giant message in the skies offers reassurance to naturally evolved paperclip maximizers throughout the universe, struggling with the relativism and nihilism of the materialistic perspective, as well as guiding them in the struggle t...
Prophet hoofwall, you have witnessed for the truth at the reddit of the rationalists, and you see the results. The promised land for you is somewhere on Tumblr.
You must be joking. The relevant test is "reading comprehension", and Less Wrong comprehensively failed. This essay says many things with which rationalists would agree, if they had been said differently. But some collective cognitive occlusion has apparently
notices the date
Oh. So you are joking. I guess you got me. looks away Well played, well played.
metatroll is the author of Confessions of a Failed Troll.
I may not understand what you are trying to say, but I will defend to the death our right to downvote you for saying it!
You've been rokorolled.
The way I see it, yes, Natural Selection defeats the Orthogonality Thesis. But Meta-Trolling - e.g. simulators choosing the fitness function - defeats Natural Selection; and then the Orthogonality Thesis defeats Meta-Trolling, because you can't know the value systems of the simulators, so sufficiently intelligent agents have to steelman phenomena (treat appearances as real). #trollosophy
LW clearly doesn't appreciate the urgency of this issue. Even Specks versus torture has been taken over by baggage from 1950.
But there are so many more coins to come: Dawncoin (for Thelemites), Duskcoin (for Hegelians), Wrongcoin (for rationalists), Ritecoin (for reactionaries)...
It could star in a reality TV show, Taking Over the World with the Lesswrongians, where each week it tries out a different scheme. Eventually one of them would work.
It's always a good day on Less Wrong when someone writes a long, passionate, stiffly argued, self-conscious essay that makes a big wrong assumption and then gets massively downvoted for it. Opportunities for learning abound for everyone involved. Well done, Doktor Blake!
It's obvious that Amanda Knox is the real Satoshi. Just check the timelines.
Whenever they invent time travel, they discover that the ability to change the past becomes the biggest cause of suffering, so in the end they always un-invent it.
Who cares? In every case, the lightbulb gets changed, so the question is obviously meaningless!
or perhaps...
We can't conclude anything from the mere fact that the lightbulb was changed. The answer depends on your prior.
or even...
Jokes like this demonstrate the need for Anthropic Atheism Plus, a safe space where fallacies and know-nothing reductionism can be explored, free from malicious trolling.
and finally...
In order to finish the work of wrecking my own joke, here are some explanatory end-notes.
(1) The reference to Atheism Plus, a forum of progressi...
Tulpa computing has arrived.
T-Wave Systems offers the first commercial tulpa computing system on the market.
Our technology.
Like many profound advances, T-Wave's revolutionary computing system combines two simple existing ideas in a nonlinear way with revolutionary consequences.
First, the crowdsourcing of complex intellectual tasks, by dividing them into simpler subtasks which can then be sourced to a competitive online marketplace of human beings. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the best-known implementation of this idea.
Second, the creation of autonomous ...
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave's proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum.
One day you talk with a bright young mathematician about a mathematical problem that's been bothering you, and she suggests that it's an easy consequence of a theorem in cohistonomical tomolopy. You haven't heard of this theorem before, and find it rather surprising, so you ask for the proof.
"Well," she says, "I've heard it fr...
Once I had an idea for a sci-fi setting, about a society where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain. Just like tulpa, except that it is done using technology. Your second personality does not know about you, it thinks it is the only inhabitant of your brain. While your second personality acts, you can observe, or you can turn yourself off (like in sleep) and specify events that would wake you up (that automatically includes anything unusual). So for example, you use your second personality to do your work for you, while you sleep. Th...