All of Viliam_Bur's Comments + Replies

For curious readers: Most of the vast "comment graveyard" are dozens of copies of the same two or three comments.

FYI, I just banned an account "kings11me" who didn't participate in the forum, but was sending the following private message to multiple users:

God bless you and thanks, how are you? Happy to meet you. I got your contact via this site, I seriously have interest to invest on a profitable business in your country, the money I want to invest was acquired from my church member, and then I was his financial adviser. The amount to invest is ($14.5 million US dollars) presently, but I’m the present Catholic Church leader in my parish, if you will like

And my impression is that people are only really weirded out by these songs on behalf of other people who are only weirded out by them on behalf of other people.

Coincidentally, I was thinking today about whether people upvote some LW articles because they felt really useful for them, or just because they believe they could be useful for other people. Another instance of a similar problem.

(Specifically, I was considering writing an article explaining some more or less high-school math. Because... well, people have random blind spots, so maybe this could ... (read more)

Hi, welcome back!

If we look at this issue from an angle "ethics is memetic system evolved by cultural group selection", then I guess it makes sense that (1) systems promoting helping your cultural group would have an advantage over systems promoting helping everyone to the same degree, and (2) systems that allow to achieve the "ethical enough" state reasonably fast would have an advantage over systems where no one can realistically become "ethical enough".

The problem appears when someone tries to do an extrapolation of that concept.

I am not su... (read more)

None that I'm aware of.

I suspect that no one actually fell for the scam... or if they did, they are too ashamed to admit it... so there is nothing specific to investigate.

Banned.

Congratulation! By the way, were those subjects mathematicians/programmers? Because I was told (by someone who uses hypnosis professionally) that those are the most difficult ones to hypnotize.

Maybe at the front page the "Recent Promoted Articles" and "Featured Articles" should move on the top, and the "Less Wrong is…" description should be below them.

Or maybe even articles first, map of meetups second, and the website description on the bottom. And the bullet points in the description are unnecessarily large.

Things at the top of the page are more likely to be noticed.

Removed (both the comment and the user).

I am not an American, and the American ways of transferring money are mysterious to me. When I want to send money from point A to point B, I log into a web page, fill in the required data, confirm the data, and in a day or two the money is there. If I understand it correctly, the American way to do this is to personally go to the bank, take a paper form, write the data on the paper, deliver the paper to the target, and the target must take the paper to their bank.

It was a huge surprise to learn this, because I automatically assumed that the American ways o... (read more)

How I see it, deleting of Eugine's new accounts is a continuous enforcement of the permanent ban from 2014 (explained here). Whether he continues in his previous behavior should in theory be irrelevant; I would delete his new accounts anyway because that's what "permanent" means. But in practice, he continues with his old behavior, which makes him easier to detect, and motivates me to overcome my laziness.

moderator action: Torchlight_Crimson is banned

Another account of Eugine_Nier / Azathoth123 / Voiceofra / The_Lion / The_Lion2 / Old_Gold is banned, effective now. This is an enforcement of the already existing ban, therefore only this message in Open Thread.

EDIT: Also Crownless_Prince.

This seems like a correct answer. The company (1) wants to be seen as the sort of company that helps charities, (2) doesn't care deeply about the charities, and (3) wants to motivate employees.

The first part explains why they have a budget for charities, and the second and third part together explain why they let employees allocate that budget instead of the company doing it itself. The charitable explanation of the second part is that the company trusts their employees to have good knowledge about charities, and thus kinda outsources the research of good ... (read more)

I think it can be taken for granted that people on this site have an elevated sense of skepticism

They also have an elevated sense of contrarianism. I suspect it's not enough to make them literally send money to a scammer, but enough to argue publicly about giving the benefit of doubt.

My long comment was written for the audience. To make people potentially swayed by clever arguments remember the context -- that this is a website where we publicly talk about donating to MIRI, publicly talk about money in general, already have a lot of quality financial advice, and no one is preventing our mysterious benefactor from posting an article.

So, Vaniver, are you personally going to cooperate with this guy in the "donating to MIRI through you" project? Could you please promise in advance to write an article about it when the financial transaction is over?

I apologize if I wronged you, but if you are honest, please act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.

Money is no taboo here. MIRI asks for money publicly by posting an article (December 2015, August 2015, ...). Members post articles with financial advice (Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management, Financial Effectiveness Repository, A Guide to Rational Investing, and many debates in the regular Open Threads). According to our recent survey, 71 members work in "Finance/Economics" a... (read more)

There is a chance that you are right. I feel like it's about 10% though. I apologize in advance if I am wrong. But I acted on the chance that I'm right and that I may save some naive altruistic student's money.

It is promoted now, so it will stay on the main page for a longer time. (I don't know how long the scammers will stay here.)

I reposted it in the facebook group.

I also am not sure they're scams in the traditional sense.

If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?

Typically the reason for contacting people individually, when the public announcement would be the natural way, is to prevent the contacted people from seeing each other's reactions.

moderator action: Old_Gold is banned

Another account of Eugine_Nier / Azathoth123 / Voiceofra / The_Lion / The_Lion2 is banned, effective now. I am posting this as a comment in Open Thread to avoid writing articles about banning the same person again and again, thus reducing the administrative cost of enforcing the already existing ban.

This specific change of policy does not apply to other potentially banned users (unless they are obvious spammers or scammers) who still deserve a separate post.

Thank you for the explanation! I posted a warning in a separate article. (Ironically, the second private message mentioned in the article was sent to my account.)

Here are some existing Python scripts for LW.

If you can look at them, and then write a script that takes a number (or a list of numbers) as an input, and displays total number of LW users, and number of LW users with karma smaller than given number... well, that would be the first step. Otherwise, we need to wait until someone does it.

Sounds like this could work.

Well, depends on how large fraction of votes currently comes from users with karma under 250. It would be bad to reduce the total number of votes drastically. They do have a positive role, in general; most people use them correctly.

Did he start out this way or did this develop over time as he got more frustrated?

I don't remember.

Traditionally he posted quotes in Rationality Quotes threads to farm karma he could use for the downvotes. Maybe he got tired of doing that.

Eugine's beliefs are "politically incorrect", but that's not completely unusual at LW. The main reason why we don't see them here often is that we don't debate politics often. And ironically, Eugine's downvoting crusades have contributed significantly to reducing the political debates on LW. There were times when we used to have a political debate in a separate thread or in an Open Thread once in a while. And at some moment, such debates started predictably ending with someone saying "I have disagreed with Eugine yesterday, and today I see I... (read more)

NancyLebovitz is currently the main moderator, with the right to ban accounts, so you can send her a private message.

We don't even have a good specification yet. Even if you add a specific number, "casting too many votes" isn't really what we need.

Ironically, I believe the problem could actually be not enough voting by the regular users. That gives a rabid voter such large fraction of the total votes on the website.

For the record, I would support a software solution, but it would be one that would do data analysis in order to find various kinds of voting abuse (retributive downvoting, sockpuppetry, etc.) and would provide reports to moderators. Clicking the &qu... (read more)

I am sorry, this is an announcement post; I will not handle the requests posted here. This was a one-time action for me, and I will soon return to hibernation as a moderator.

The currently active moderator is NancyLebovitz. If you have a strong suspicion that something wrong is going on, please send a private message to her.

In theory, yes. However, LW is based on Reddit code, and the code and the database structure are quite difficult. (See some example database scripts here.)

Exactly. Eugine/Azathoth/Ra/Lion was already sufficiently transparently banned in 2014.

He either didn't get the memo, or he pretends to be dumb for the sake of scaremongering, or maybe he actually is delusional. I don't care which one; the outcome is the same.

There are about 30 accounts banned during the whole history of LW.

Most of them are spammers, who created their accounts, posted one or ten spam comments, subsequently had their accounts banned and comments removed. (The comments of the banned users have to be removed separately; banning the user merely disallows them to log in again.)

For curious people, the spam does not seem related to LW context. There were spam accounts promoting:

• iPhones,
• wedding rings,
• silver earrings,
• silver necklaces,
• a Korean casino,
• astrological service,
• a computer ga

Reminds me of a joke:

(at a job interview)
Q: "What is your biggest fault?"
A: "Sincerity."
Q: "Well, I don't think that sincerity is a fault."
A: "Well, I don't give a fuck about what you think."

Uhm, countersignalling? "I am so powerful that I do not need this ability."

Specifically: "I am so powerful that I do not need the abilities that make cooperation easier; others obey me anyway."

Depending on the day. But most of the time, yes. As a chatting club, we were rather okay. As a rationalist group... not so much.

I didn't have any specific article in mind. It is just a topic that I am aware of in my life. For example, I love learning new things, but instead of using them I often just jump to learning another thing. Which seemed like widening my options, until a few years later I realized that I keep forgetting the old things and that I actually never used most of them. Thus learning is an enjoyable hobby for me, but to make it useful, I have to go beyond mere learning.

There is such thing as "learning too much", or more precisely, being so obsessed by lear... (read more)

The eternal conflict between exploration and exploitation. Keeping your options is what keeps the good options within your reach, and prevents you from going too far in the blind alleys. But at the end, if you have walked through the whole shop and didn't buy anything, you leave empty-handed. At some point you gotta have a job (or other source of income) and people are going to pay you for something specific.

I think this is even more complicated when people are not explicitly aware of the skills they really have. They may feel like they don't specialize in... (read more)

Almost the same for me (just replace Python with Android or Unity, and "playing videogames I don't really enjoy" with "reading websites I don't really enjoy").

I don't really expect a huge change, because rationality is all about aiming the arrow better, but it does not change how strong you pull the bow or how many arrows you have in the quiver.

To continue in your metaphor, a small improvement in aiming can in some situations significantly increase the ratio of arrows that hits the target. Of course assuming that precision was the problem, instead of e.g. distance or lack of arrows. Returning from the metaphor, the benefits of (LW-style) rationality probably also depend on what kind of problems you solve, and... (read more)

it seems to me that most people are willing to settle for a certain status depending on how good the benefits are and the difficulties involved in getting there.

It is also my impression that people who "prefer being low status" are actually just afraid of possible punishment for claiming too much status.

Suggested experiment: Select a group of people who "prefer being low status" and let them interact with each other for a long period of time. Prediction: Some members of the group will gradually become more comfortable with acting high-status within the group.

What do you suppose are the dominant positive outcomes of your meetups?

Meeting interesting people.

Unfortunately, at the meetups I've organized we didn't get further.

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment

Really?

Or perhaps to make it easy to read: "1 point" with "+2 -1" in the tooltip.

At the moment I am reading this, there seem to be no votes (no upvotes, no downvotes) on two of those three comments:

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1s4/open_thread_february_2010_part_2/1myj
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ir/you_be_the_jury_survey_on_a_current_event/1bnt

At least this is how I interpret "0 points, 0% positive". If someone would downvote it, it would not be 0% positive.

Not anymore, but yeah, this is where my frustration is coming from. Also, for every obvious example of voting manipulation, there are more examples of "something seems fishy, but there is no clear definition of 'voting manipulation' and if I go down this slippery slope, I might end up punishing people for genuine votes that I just don't agree with, so I am letting it go". But most of these voting games seem to come from one faction of LW users, which according to the surveys is just a tiny minority.

(When the "progressives" try to push t... (read more)

In recent months there were a few comments with flame-war potential which were quickly "downvoted into oblivion", but the next day their karma was above zero.

Either it means we have a group of people who prevent their "side" from being downvoted below zero (although they don't bother to upvote it highly when it already is above zero), or we have a group of people who believe in something like "no comment should be downvoted just because it has a flame-war potential" who prevent downvoting below zero in principle regardless of ... (read more)

SSC is one-person dictatorship with a benevolent dictator. It would be much worse there if people could play voting games in comments: upvoting everyone on their "side" and downvoting everyone on the opposing "side".

Also, on SSC people are banned more often than on LW, although most of the bans are temporary.

An alternative without programming changes would be biweekly "incisive open threads", similar to Ozy's race-and-gender open threads

Feel free to start a "political thread". Worst case: the thread gets downvoted.

However, there were already such threads in the past. Maybe you should google them, look at the debate and see what happened back then -- because it is likely to happen again.

and downvoting customarily tabood in them.

Not downvoting brings also has its own problems: genuinely stupid arguments remain visible (or can even get ... (read more)

I like your example and "learning environment" vs "testing environment".

However, I am afraid that LW is attractive also for people who instead of improving their rationality want to do other things; such as e.g. winning yet another website for their political faction. Some people use the word "rationality" simply as a slogan to mean "my tribe is better than your tribe".

There were a few situations when people wrote (on their blogs) something like: "first I liked LW because they are so rational, but then I was dis... (read more)