So the responsible thing to do is to refrain, right? Cause if everybody did nobody would have the ability to destroy the site, and what would you do with such an ability anyway except not use it?

The problem is it feels like a game/exercise, and a game/exercise is something I want to opt in to, even if just to challenge myself.

That said, I think twice before pressing any big red button, and as of yet I haven't pressed this one.

Edit: Following Dagon's comment (published 8 hours after this post), which confirmed it's framed as a game, I decided to press the button and opt in.

If someone commits an immoral act, and then gets cloned to the atom, are both versions of him guilty? (morally, not legally)

If so, then - assuming what he did deserves a 10 year sentence, should both versions get it, or should each get half a sentence?

'The grass is green' and 'The sky is blue' are pretty bad examples of obviously true statements (they're actually often false - the sky is dark at night and the grass is yellow-brown when dry).

'The sun is bright' and 'Water is wet' are better statements in the same style.

I tried to think of different names for the Moloch Dynamic^[1] and came up with

• Mutual Sacrifice Trap
• Mutual Sacrifice Equilibrium
• Mutual Sacrifice Equilibrium Trap
• Sacrifice Race
• Sacrifice Competition

"Collective" can also replace or be added before "Mutual", to signify that it tends to refer to dynamics of many actors, where coordinating to get out of the equilibrium trap is difficult.

What do you think of these options?

1. ^{^}

   A reminder of what the Moloch Dynamic is:

   "In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the

I love how user tooltip now shows a three of their posts (and generally all the new features. You're doing a great Job, LW team!). 

Currently the tooltip shows the 3 most recent posts. It would be nice if it was possible to pin posts on the user page, and then if you did it would prioritise the pinned posts on the tooltip before new posts.

@habryka 

(Only read the abstract)

Stagnation and Scientific Incentives

New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did. A popular explanation for stagnation is that good ideas are harder to find, rendering slowdown inevitable. We present a simple model of the lifecycle of scientific ideas that points to changes in scientist incentives as the cause of scientific stagnation. Over the last five decades, citations have become the dominant way to evaluate scientific contributions and scientists. This emphasis on citations in the measurement of scientific pr

I'm looking for a dialogue partner with whom to discuss my normative philosophy of political/social change which I call Experimentalism or Experimentationism. 

It is an attempt to give a name and structure to a position I believe many people already implicitly and intuitively tend towards, and to go beyond Progressivism and Conservatism, or to "synthesise" them, if you want, though I don't particularly like the term.

I found it a bit hard to flesh out an explanation on my own, so I hope doing so in a dialogue would be helpful. This doesn't require any s... (read more)

“One can do logic without empiricism, but one must never do empiricism without logic.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I think this neatly explains why, though we cherish Empiricism, we call ourselves Rationalists. 

Reason must come before observation, for without reason observation cannot be processed and made sense of.

Idea: Github + Voting 

The way Github works is geared towards how projects usually work - someone or some group owns them, or is responsible for them, and they have the ability to make decisions about it, then there are various level of permissions. If you can make a pull request, someone from the project's team has to accept it. 

This works well for almost all projects, so I have no problem with it. What I'm going to suggest is more niche and solves a different problem. What if there's a project that you want to be completely public, that no one p... (read more)

(This is an exercise, be careful not to spoil the answer to yourself)

All world maps are wrong due to the fact that it's impossible to flatten a sphere without distortions.

there is a simple idea anyone can think of that greatly improves the accuracy of flat maps and that no has tried in the last 2000 years - Until last week, when three Princeton researchers thought about it.

Take a moment to try to think what you might do to improve the accuracy of flat maps.

I'm making this an exercise since this seems like incredibly low hanging fruit that hasn't been picke... (read more)

Punishing non-punishers taken to the limit (punishing non-punisher non-punishers, punishing non-punisher non-punisher non-punishers, etc...) is simply "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy".

Correlation suggests Association suggests Causation.

Me and a friend want to start journaling daily, and we're looking for a good app to use for that.

Desired features:

• Can be used from a phone (bonus if it's multiplatform)
• Easy to add a new entry
• Easy to see entries in chronological order
• Has an option to tag entries so it's easy to later come back and read them using the tag
• Can remind of you entries (say, remind of you entries on the date they were entered, or after some set amount of time).
• Bonus: Reminds you daily to write with a notification

I thought of roam and obsidian, but I'm not very familiar with either... (read more)