All of pleeppleep's Comments + Replies

I'm not so sure I followed that. Do you still get tickets as long as you pledge $25 or higher? Or if you want the poster and a ticket do you have to make 2 pledges totaling $65?

1Raemon
Anyone who pledges at least $25 gets a ticket, and one other reward. Anyone who pledges at least $75 gets a reception pass, a ticket, and one other reward. (I realize this is confusing. Kickstarter is unfortunately not set up to make for a really comprehensible marketplace). That said, I actually just realized that the poster reward wasn't cost effective enough (it was almost exactly charging print value, so while it covered supply costs, it didn't raise any additional funds for the kickstarter itself). So I'm currently marking that one as sold-out, and next week I'll be revealing the poster itself, and a new reward for $50 that is slightly less confusing, explaining that it includes the ticket)

Do you have a picture of the poster that comes with a $40 pledge? Also, do you still get the poster if you pledge more?

0Raemon
Apart from the tickets and reception rewards (which go to anyone who pledges $25 and $75, respectively), making the pledge only gets you one of the rewards. However, you can make multiple pledges, and for subsequent ones, reduce your pledge by $25 and note which additional reward you'd like. The poster is not finished yet, but will most likely be revealed sometime in the next week or two. It will be stylistically similar to (although better quality than) the art on humanistculture.com.

I'm the kid in the corner with the laptop

0[anonymous]
I think I arrived too late and missed you.

Probably what I'll end up doing. Just checking first is all.

Not sure if open thread is the best place to put this, but oh well.

I'm starting at Rutgers New Brunswick in a few weeks. There aren't any regular meetups in that area, but I figure there have to be at least a few people around there who read lesswrong. If any of you see this I'd be really interested in getting in touch.

1[anonymous]
Seems like Open Thread is a fine place to put this, because, I am an entering freshman at RU, too! I just sent you a PM. :-)
7Vaniver
I recommend being a hero and posting a meetup. Bring a book and a sign to a coffeeshop and see if people show up. Best case, you make new friends; worst reasonable case, you read a book in a coffeeshop for a few hours.

I suppose modafinil should be in the same boat as caffeine for the purposes of this experiment.

1Douglas_Knight
Many people find that modafinil does not interfere with sleep, so it might be compatible with polyphasic sleep, though the threshold of "not interfering" might be different. It is likely to be problematic for this protocol of sleep deprivation.

I cried twice reading this. That puts it just below Humanism part 3 on my list of most touching chapters.

atorm140

I cried for real for the first time in years, and it made me very confused/uncomfortable with my feelings.

Quirrel in Methods has pretty much stated that he's trying to mold Harry into a dark lord. That requires Harry to be alive and is significantly more likely if he doesn't have Hermione's moral influence.

You will not be thrown in an asylum for discussing this with a professional

My experience disagrees. I went to see a professional for antidepressants, was emotionally stable at that moment, and was thrown in a psych ward for a week. I had to lie about my condition to be released. The whole affair failed to help in any way.

7NancyLebovitz
PSA: when giving high-stakes advice, be especially careful to think about whether you know as much as you believe you do.

If my inhibitions regarding a certain course of action seem entirely internal, go through with it because I'm probably limiting my options for no good reason.

jefftk100

Ah; sorry!

I'm planning to donate 30% of my pre-tax income this year, which I expect to be about $55K.

(Douglas_Knight's link also includes Julia's planned donations, which are $43K.)

How much money do you have to donate, if you don't mind my asking?

3jefftk
Let's say a $50 minimum.

Kinda awkward to say aloud. I think Institute for the Research of Machine Intelligence would sound better. Minor nitpick.

1Kevin
IRMI? irm-y? Sounds like squirm. Or the name Erma.

Really? To me, the extra words in "Institute for the Research of Machine Intelligence" feel redundant, and MIRI is better for being concise and to the point.

This is a question about utilitarianism, not AI, but can anyone explain (or provide a link to an explanation) of why reducing the total suffering in the world is considered so important? I thought that we pretty much agreed that morality is based on moral intuitions and it seems pretty counterintuitive to value the states of mind of people too numerous to sympathize with as highly as people here do.

It seems to me that reducing suffering in a numbers game is the kind of thing you would say is your goal because it makes you sound like a good person, rather ... (read more)

1DanArmak
Cooperation for mutual benefit. Potential alliance building. Signalling of reliability, benevolence, and capability. It's often beneficial to adopt a general policy of helping strangers whenever the personal price is low enough. And (therefore) the human mind is such that people mostly enjoy helping others as long as it's not too strenuous.
2Jabberslythe
I am not sure that the hedonistic utilitarian agenda is high status. The most plausible cynical/psychological critique of the hedonistic utilitarian agenda, is that they are too worried about ethical consistency and about coherently extrapolating a simple principle from their values.
1aelephant
You could reduce human suffering to 0 by reducing the number of humans to 0, so there's got to be another value greater than reducing suffering. It seems plausible to me that suffering could serve some useful purpose & eliminating it (or seeking to eliminate it) might have horrific consequences.
1drethelin
I'm not strongly emotionally motivated to reduce suffering in general but I realize that my and other instances of suffering are examples of suffering in general so I think it's a good policy to try to reduce world-suck. This is reasonably approximated by saying I would like to reduce unhappiness or increase happiness or some such thing.
8Pablo
When I become directly acquainted with an episode of intense suffering, I come to see that this is a state of affairs that ought not to exist. My empathy may be limited, but I don't need to empathize with others to recognize that, when they suffer, their suffering ought to be relieved too. I don't pretend to speak on behalf of all other hedonistic utilitarians, however. Brian himself would probably disagree with my answer. He would instead reply that he "just cares" about other people's suffering, and that's that.

You don't have to be specific, but how would grossing out the gatekeeper bring you closer to escape?

3Qiaochu_Yuan
Psychological torture could help make the gatekeeper more compliant in general. I believe the keyword here is "traumatic bonding." But again, I'm working from general principles here, e.g. those embodied in the tragedy of group selectionism. I have no reason to expect that "strategies that will get you out of the box" and "strategies that are not morally repugnant" have a large intersection. It seems much more plausible to me that most effective strategies will look like the analogue of cannibalizing other people's daughters than the analogue of restrained breeding.

Like when you say "horrible, horrible things". What do you mean?

Driving a wedge between the gatekeeper and his or her loved ones? Threats? Exploiting any guilt or self-loathing the gatekeeper feels? Appealing to the gatekeeper's sense of obligation by twisting his or her interpretation of authority figures, objects of admiration, and internalized sense of honor? Asserting cynicism and general apathy towards the fate of mankind?

For all but the last one it seems like you'd need an in-depth knowledge of the gatekeeper's psyche and personal life.

3Qiaochu_Yuan
Of course. How else would you know which horrible, horrible things to say? (I also have in mind things designed to get a more visceral reaction from the gatekeeper, e.g. graphic descriptions of violence. Please don't ask me to be more specific about this because I really, really don't want to.)

But you wouldn't actually be posting it, you would be posting the fact that you conceive it possible for someone to post it, which you've clearly already done.

2Qiaochu_Yuan
I'm not sure what you mean by "a hypothetical," then. Is "psychological torture" not a hypothetical?

You really relish in the whole "scariest person the internet has ever introduced me to" thing, don't you?

Yes. Yes, I do.

Derren Brown is way better, btw. Completely out of my league.

Could you give me a hypothetical? I really can't imagine anything I could say that would be so terrible.

I'd prefer not to. If I successfully made my point, then I'd have posted exactly the kind of thing I said I wouldn't want to be known as being capable of posting.

Adult readers never seriously maintain that fictitious characters exist

A) "Never" is a strong word. I imagine there are all kinds of mental disorders that can lead certain adults to confuse fiction with reality

B) "Existence" here is a cached term used for simplifying a concept to the point of being inaccurate. When a person says that, for instance, Frodo Baggins doesn't exist, he or she would be entirely incorrect to say that there is nothing in existence that matches the concept of Frodo Baggins. What the person is actually saying, ... (read more)

I can't imagine anything I could say that would make people I know hate me without specifically referring to their personal lives. What kind of talk do you have in mind?

3Qiaochu_Yuan
Psychological torture.

Have there been any interesting AI box experiments with open logs? Everyone seems to insist on secrecy, which only serves to make me more curious. I get the feeling that, sooner or later, everyone on this site will be forced to try the experiment just to see what really happens.

5Tuxedage
This is one of them that have been published: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9ld/ai_box_log/
4Qiaochu_Yuan
Open logs is a pretty strong constraint on the AI. You'd have to restrict yourself to strategies that wouldn't make everyone you know hate you, prevent you from getting hired in the future, etc.

Only read "External" so far, but I propose god(s) be divided into "trusted and idealized authority figures", "internalized sense of commitment to integrity of respected and admirable reputation (honor)", and "external personification of inner conscience".

If people cite God as the source of spiritual value, it's because he represents a combination of these things and the belief that their values are ingrained in reality. God isn't the root cause, and taking Him out of the equation still leaves the relevant feelings an... (read more)

This post was from awhile ago and I don't think anyone with access to the note is still around to supply it. You could try asking everyone here for a copy and see if anything comes of it.

1Pablo
Thanks. If anyone has a copy of the letter, please send me a private message.

This seems interesting. Are you just doing the whole thing through email? Also, voluntary response isn't a great way to get accurate results, but I guess it's all you have to work with.

5Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
It's going to be a survey to fill out online once a week. And I know we won't get the best quality data, necessarily, but I think this is the first study that's ever been done on this, AND I don't have a research background, so if the results come back super interesting, Shannon Friedman might try to recruit some people who do have a research background and are interested in doing it more rigorously.
4FiftyTwo
Also, the subset of people who participate on lw is going to be an incredibly unrepresentative sample,

I squeed when I saw this post and you should have shown the .mov series, everyone finds those funny.

Also, I don't think I can say that the root cause of climate change denial and cartoon hatedom is the exact same bias. With cartoons, people mostly reject them for fear of falling out of line with a vague but undeniably present cultural standard that could cause them grief in the future. With climate change, the issue has become so muddled in politics that clear lines have been drawn and to cross them would be labeled betrayal. Also, there are various non-sc... (read more)

72% probability of welcoming you to the herd

3ygert
Care to record that on predictionbook?

That's.... an interesting analysis. Can I ask whether you're speaking from experience, or is that too personal? If not, do you have any links for where you got you're information? I myself feel self destructive from time to time, and I think that's a pretty good description of the emotions involved, so I'm a bit curious here.

MixedNuts140

First two are from experience, second two are from anecdotes whose sources I mostly forget plus a dash of experience.

I don't have nearly as much experience with suicidal thoughts that can be interpreted as "wanting to die", but I can report that the standard "too much suffering to cope with" explanation isn't universal.

Freedom to make any sort of arrangement as long as all parties are willing. A "contract" would be a formal agreement. If you bring force into the mixture you'll end up with more problems than if you don't. You can't have everyone and their grandmother making arbitrary agreements and then using state power to coerce others into following through, so let them make arbitrary agreements and sort it out amongst themselves. Otherwise you get as much injustice as if you'd just allowed the government to dictate your affairs on a whim.

That still means he wanted to die, but the nature of his desire provokes extreme sympathy.

MixedNuts210

The psychology of suicide can get a lot more complicated than that. Feeling you absolutely must do something, but you can't bring yourself to lie down and wait, or to go to the hospital, or to call a hotline, or to take a shower, so you do the only thing you can. Watching yourself plan your own suicide, thinking "Huh. That's probably a bad idea. I wonder if I'll actually go through with it?". Being desperate both to die and to live, and picking whichever you're drifting towards until it happens to be death. Letting the suicidal part of you run the show, not because you share its goal, but because it's the only one that can get you out of bed.

It seems to me the problem here is that the private contracts would be enforced in the hypothetical model. Libertarians seem to propose that the legal benefits of marriage as opposed to the arbitrary spiritual components are the aspect of marriage to be agreed upon. I disagree.

I think that people should be allowed to create private contracts for any issue, but only if those contracts are not enforced. Both parties must remain willing participants throughout the process. Also, if the state deems any contracts unacceptably offensive, or contrary to public in... (read more)

0ygert
You realize that you can't quite call something a contract if it is not enforceable? The point of contracts is precommitment. What good would the kind of "contract" you describe bring?

I'm really not sure if the fact that he wanted to die makes it better or worse...

Shmi110

He didn't want to die, he couldn't handle going on living.

1Spectral_Dragon
Here, we fight for as long and happy lives as possible for as many as possible, no? Just imagine how bad your life is if you ACTIVELY want to reduce your lifespan. An experienced negative QALY. So I say worse. It's one of the most horrible things you could ever experience. I've heard it said that a life barely worth living, is still worth living, here. So, a life not worth living...

Good post, but I can easily imagine awesome ways to starve hundreds of children.

"Awesome" to me means impressive and exciting in a pleasant manner. You seem to use it to mean desirable. If morality just means desirability, then there's no reasons to use the word morality. I think that for morality to have any use, it has to be a component of desirability, but not interchangeable with it.

0A1987dM
They would be awesome to you but awful to the children. Back to the problem of inter-personal utility comparisons...
5[anonymous]
You are right that it shouldn't directly be that which is desirable. I guess there is a bug in the OP explanation in that "awesome" does not automatically feel like it should be outside yourself. The excitingness connotation is a bug.

You posted this here just for an excuse to ask the poll, didn't you?

9gwern
I'm sure I don't know what you mean.
3mwengler
First, I think this is a very useful and interesting question. It actually impacts decisions. Second, I think the question itself is biased, in a sense. It asks which is more optimal for ensuring prosperity implicitly leading some to think this is the only possible criterion for choosing. However, the party that leads to more prosperity by many definition might also be the party that produces a poor underclass and a society which is, overall, significantly less happy or healthy on average. Might do, I'm saying, the point being that prosperity alone is not necessarily even the most intuitive figure of merit. Indeed another very important figure of merit is societal survival. What profiteth it a political system if it raise the happiness but succumb to an external enemy? Nature is "red in tooth and claw," this is not a value judgement, just a description of the survivors. There is no seriously large (i.e. successful) political system that isn't pretty amazingly cynical about basic rights when protecting itself. It can be codified and above board (such as passing laws about which "coercive interrogation" is allowed and what the rules for "extraordinary rendition" are) or it can be hidden and lied about, but even seeming peacey countries have militaries and intelligence services and are not anxious to repeat any subjugation they might have experienced in world war I or II or some other conflict they did not do well in. Having said all that, my considered opinion (sort of like a conclusion I guess) is that the policies of either major party in the US can be made to work for prosperity. That the more fundamental difference is values, primarily a belief in different amounts of government redistribution (both parties support redistributive policies). If you can accept a repressed underclass, you can get an efficient economy carried out by the overclass. If you want to mitigate the bottom, you can get an efficient economy carried out. The provable results of economics are
-6ArisKatsaris
7FiftyTwo
How do you define 'prosperity?' Do you mean it in a narrow economic sense of a wider sense (e.g. ensuring general utility).
Alsadius210

I think that this thread will go better, by the established norms of LW, if we stick to single, small topics that can actually be taken apart. The question you ask has far too many nested unknowns - definition of party platforms is hard, and economic outcomes of various policies is even harder - and too many places for discussion to go off the rails. Even with this group, that debate will devolve into talking points within three layers of replies. I'd rather have that sort of discussion in an ordinary group, and use LW for political debate of the sort LW actually has an advantage at.

Emile140

I believe that this is the most relevant question we can ask if we're talking politics

Why ???

One of ways politics messes up people's reasoning is that they tend to pay excessive implication to the political alignment of issues. When considering policy X, they first ask themselves, "is X a left-wing or a right-wing policy"? (I know I used to, though I try to do so less and less), which in turn is likely to subconsciously influence how skeptical they are of pieces of evidence, etc.

This isn't a very big problem for elections, where one's vote has... (read more)

9eB1170

This question strikes me as both too mindkill-y, and as unimportant in light of the fact that you don't get to vote for political parties, only for individual candidates in individual races. What do you think would be the important change in your behavior if you were convinced, in general, that Republicans were "better" than Democrats or vice versa, and how do you think that would impact the political process?

A prerequisite to the above question:

Do the political parties, when elected, implement the policies that they advocate when campaigning?

Are there other affiliations besides party which more accurately predict a politician's actions?

I intend to live forever or die trying

-- Groucho Marx

8DanielLC
I'm not sure that's great advice. It will result in you trying to try to live forever. The only way to live forever or die trying is to intend to live forever.

I felt an extreme Deja Vu when I saw the title for this.

I'm pretty sure I saw a post with the same name a couple of months ago. I don't remember what the post was actually about, so I can't really compare substance, but I have to ask. Did you post this before?

Again, sorry if this is me being crazy.

1timtyler
Certainly I wrote about this idea long ago - in Self improving systems are here already - from 2009. The abstract from the associated video:
drethelin110

No, there was a very very similar post, about how governments are already super intelligences and seem to show no evidence of fooming.

This made me laugh. Also, I knew someone would do this the second Eliezer proposed new boundaries for Lesswrongers.

The only problem I can think of with this experiment is that your post could have been deleted for one of your more overt offenses, but it took until the time it was actually deleted for someone to actually get around to deleting it, especially with all the controversy. You have evidence that it was attacking Eliezer that broke the camel's back, but maybe not strong evidence. I don't think you can get anything conclusive from this.

What you sh... (read more)

-1kodos96
Good point, but the timing of how exactly things went down argues pretty strongly for my interpretation: all of the explicit violations happened on christmas eve, within a period of a few hours. Then I was gone most of the next day for christmas with the family, during which time there was pretty much no action on the thread. When I posted the final comment, it was basically the only thing posted to the thread that day, and the banhammer came down literally within 60 seconds. Yeah, probably... but I had last minute christmas shopping to do!

I think you mean the Litany of Gendlin, and I believe some of these rules are being newly implemented, but I could be wrong about that.

He can run his site anyway he wants, and most of the ideas here are reasonable precautions given his values. That doesn't change the fact that I intuitively don't like them when I read them, and that gut reaction (or possibly it's opposite) is probably shared with others here who probably allow it to color their arguments one way or the other. Just something to keep in mind, is all.

-2Epiphany
Oh thank you. I kept wondering what that quote was. Oh, that is a good point. I was trying to make you feel better.

Intuitive gut reaction. If I had an argument to make I would have said so. Any case I make would have been formed from backtracking from my initial feeling, and I'm probably not the only commenter here arguing based on an "ick" or "yay" gut reaction to the idea of censorship. I thought it was worth pointing out.

2[anonymous]
Status quo bias: I'm reasonably sure that if this policy had been in place from Day 1, very few people would have given it a second thought.
3Epiphany
As I see it, this is sort of like that quote on truth that goes something like "You may as well acknowledge the truth - you're already dealing with it." Censorship was already happening on LessWrong. Now that Eliezer is making an effort to share some of his decision-making process, there is less to fear in a way since you get to have that additional info for guessing what he's likely to do. Fear of the unknown can feel a lot worse than fear of the known.

Well...

I'm upset by this.

Not sure why, exactly, but yeah, definitely upset by this. Just felt like sharing.

3Luke_A_Somers
If you could figure that out, that would be helpful.

In other words, I don't think there's a fact of the matter about "if people should die after 100 years, a thousand years, or longer or at all". The question assumes that there's some single answer that works for everyone. That seems unlikely.

Not necessarily true. The question posits the existence of an optimal outcome. It just neglects to mention what, exactly, said outcome would be optimal to. It would probably be necessary to determine the criteria a system that accounts for immortality has to meet to satisfy us before we start coming up wi... (read more)

Superhappy aliens, FAI, United Nations... There are multiple possibilities. One is that you stay healthy for, say, 100 years, then spawn once blissfully and stop existing (salmon analogy). Humans' terminal values are adjusted in a way that they don't strive for infinite individual lifespan.

Possible outcome; better than most; boring. I don't think that's really something to strive for, but my values are not yours, I guess. Also, I'm assuming we're just taking whether an outcome is desirable into account, not its probability of actually coming about.

I

... (read more)
1Shmi
Good question. Just looking at some possible worlds where individual eternal life is less optimal than finite life for the purposes of species survival. Yet where personal death is not a cause of individual anguish and suffering.

I've never actually posted more than a comment here, so I'm all for the idea.

I don't know what to make of this. It means everything I'd pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding - the pursuits of intelligence when you don't have the political trait.

"Truth" and "understanding" seem to work as applause lights in this sentence. "Status" is used to the opposite effect throughout the post.

I think you're premise is a little confused. It sounds like you previously viewed status-seeking as the emotional equivalent of immoral, but... (read more)

-3duckduckMOO
"That's not the way it feels" "it feels right" This is a horrible justification for anything. Doing something bad doesn't automatically make someone feel bad. It's an especially bad test of status-seeking's moral status because (normal) people rarely feel bad about doing something they perceive as normal even if it's bad. In any case it's not true that it always feels right, There are constitutional differences from person to person that change how normal everyday status seeking feels: not everyone seeks status for the warm fuzzies, some people seek it because it makes them feel powerful, or important, or to ease their insecurity, or because they think its useful in general, or in a specific case, or because it's normal and they do normal stuff (perhaps out of habit or an alief that normal=good, some do it to fit in, or because of explicit political calculation or etc etc obviously there are many different possible feelings I can't think of on the spot.) There are also some means of status seeking that should make most people feel pretty bad, E.g. picking on someone to avoid being picked on yourself, lying to make yourself look good, lying to transfer blame and punishment to someone else etc. "The term "status" feels kinda dirty when you analyze human interaction from afar.There's always the subtext that if you play for it, you're a bad person." No there isn't. Where would the subtext be coming from exactly? This stuff isn't all written by status haters (I wonder if any significant proportion is) What there is is explicit discussion of stuff that is usually left implicit. Sometimes if someone feels or thinks that it's bad that's going to leak through in what they write but this is hardly standard or ever present. If it feels dirty, maybe they mean something else by status than you do, or maybe that's just how you feel about it when looking from afar (or lots of other possible explanations). There's no subtext to blame it feeling dirty on. "It can feel like tryin
0shokwave
Not justify: instead, explain. I understood that previously, handoflixue felt that status was dirty, but in understanding it has come to feel that it's just part of human nature (for most people, as the post points out).

Note: Not trying to attack your position, just curious.

but I cannot decide for sure if fixed lifespan is such a bad idea.

Fixed by whom, might I ask?

It seems to me that associating natural death of an individual with evil is one of those side effects of evolution humans could do without.

You seem to be implying that designed death is worse. How do you figure?

1Shmi
Superhappy aliens, FAI, United Nations... There are multiple possibilities. One is that you stay healthy for, say, 100 years, then spawn once blissfully and stop existing (salmon analogy). Humans' terminal values are adjusted in a way that they don't strive for infinite individual lifespan. I don't. Suffering is bad, finite individual existence is not necessarily so.
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