All of 911truther's Comments + Replies

Make sure to wear your rationalist sneakers when you go!

I hope you'll treat me fairly as a person and actually read and try to understand my comments instead of jumping to conclusions based on my "score".

Emile210

Your best way to be taken seriously would be just to create a new account without making any reference to this one, and, well, not act like a troll.

Your work is wrong. To apply diagonal lemma the definition of phi must be a formula, since you write |- (which is not a formula in PA) I assume you meant it as shorthand for Godels Bew (which is), but you can't existentially quantify Bew like you did in line 3 of the definition.

"Your work is wrong" is an unfair characterization of presence of a minor technical inaccuracy.

Nisan130

Yes, I really mean phi to be a formula based on the provability predicate. The third line is really shorthand for

))

where Sub is a function that replaces the first two free variables in the Gödelized formula with a and b. So we can quantify over a and b.

I suppose I should mention this in the post.

To save you some time: the standard response is "I'm being censored! You're an Eliezer-cult! All these downvotes are just because you're scared of the Truth!".

I never said anything like this and I never invoked Eleizer. I don't understand why you're telling me off for something I didn't do. Look at my post history if you don't trust me.

What you are doing is not fitting into the community norms of discussion, like research and linking/referring to specific sources

It only makes sense to do so when making a claim. Yet people on this site have... (read more)

9pedanterrific
I found this claim difficult to believe, so I looked it up. For the record:
-1dbaupp
I know you didn't invoke Eliezer, but that is a common statement by people who find themselves downvoted a lot, so I was pre-empting it (if you were not going to do that, I apologise and that sentence should be considered removed from my quote, however the rest still stands). The only reason I said that, was because I looked at your post history and saw this one: For the rest: * People have been providing links and citations to back up their claims. (Several of the replies in this thread) * I wasn't implying that you flamed anyone, just that dissent is part of this website, and it is treated with respect. * Dismissing accusation of "troll" with uncheckable and irrelevant claims of rationality is not the right way to do it.

One of the problems is that you say things like "I've been rational for years". Sorry. No, you haven't. EY hasn't been rational for years. You may have been an aspiring rationalist, but that's a far cry from actually being rational. When you say things like that it is extremely off-putting because it sounds self-congratulatory. That's something that this community struggles with a lot, and we typically heavily downvote things that are that way because they send very bad signals about what this website is. Beyond that, when it's said by someone wi... (read more)

MixedNuts100

Maybe some people dislike you and are downvoting all your comments because if was you who wrote them ("karmassassination"). But all of your comments are low-quality enough for downvotes, taken individually. People are not disproving you because you sound like a troll.

If you're not actually a troll, please lurk more, try to understand the norms around here, read up on the standard answers to everything you think of posting (e.g. look for other posts on cryonics here and Alcor's FAQ before you say cryo sucks), and find the most on-topic posts to co... (read more)

Dallas110

If you posted something not obnoxious, I'm inclined to believe the community would, in fact, upvote it.

15 comments and -120 karma? Okay, at this point I may begin immune response against trolling (delete further comments, possibly past comments, as and when I get around to seeing that they were made).

I also remind everyone: Please do not respond at length to trolls, attention stimulates their reward centers.

1dbaupp
Are you enjoying wasting your time on this website? You have 15 comments and a grand total of -120 karma. That is a strong indication that you are doing something wrong. To save you some time: the standard response is "I'm being censored! You're an Eliezer-cult! All these downvotes are just because you're scared of the Truth!". Please don't use it, because it is not true: e.g. two links you've already seen, people call Eliezer out on mistakes, naunced responses to "Yay for Eliezer/rationality/SI!"-type posts. Part of the reason I like LW is precisely because people do disagree, but there are almost never flame wars: the disagreement means that people actually think about what they believe and even change their minds! What you are doing is not fitting into the community norms of discussion, like research and linking/referring to specific sources (anyone can say "I've done research!", but that doesn't mean that you have). (I'll pre-empt another common whinge: yes, in most cases, Wikipedia is an acceptible reference to use on LW). The parent comment might not be particularly bad; but your history (and your username) puts you very close to "troll", and that makes the parent comment look like a pattern-matched response (rather than a genuine question) which is the reason I downvoted.
1faul_sname
Rational compared to who?
5[anonymous]
.
9faul_sname
I downvoted you not because I disagree with your stance on cryonics (in fact I share it), but because you didn't link to or provide the material that convinced you of the unfeasibility of cryonics, or what could make you change your mind (i.e. successful revival of a primate).
gwern100

You didn't say anything explicitly wrong except vitrification can't work 100% yet, ice crystals are still formed. information-theoretic "death" may not have happened but the claim that recovery may be possible in the far future is a seriously dubious

What exactly is your argument here? Why do you think vitrification doesn't work, especially given you hadn't heard of it until a few minutes ago?

Are you now shifting your argument to 'yes, vitrification works to preserve everything, but we won't be clever enough to make any use of the preservation'?

It's a terrible idea to try to learn theorems by memorization, if all you want to do is pass math tests fine.. but if you want to understand mathematics it's definitely going to do more harm than good.

billswift150

You don't learn things from flash cards, you fix things you have already learned into your memory. And memorizing the formulas encoding theorems is definitely helpful.

Yes, you can get up votes here if you don't think cryonics will work. You got down voted for rejecting it out of hand without doing any research.

7Grognor
Please, never post on Less Wrong again.
5gwern
You're pointing to a grad student - not even a cryobiologist. Try googling "kidney cryobiology". Isolated indeed.

if you don't want your beleifs questioned you're doing the right thing [by downvoting]

That is true; however the converse ("if you do want your beliefs questioned, you're doing the wrong thing") isn't.

7gwern
Because spending the time to look up references solid enough that they cannot be glibly rejected indicates that I think someone is worth educating, that I can educate them, or it's a sign of respect. None of those three are true. So if you think you are right, you are free to bring your own references to the table.
9Metus
Seems correct, since the karma system is used to signal what is interesting to the community and you apparently produce content that is uninteresting in this community.
1advancedatheist
This shows the difference between the purely "skeptic" mentality versus the mentality of an inventive problem solver. "There is practically no chance cyonics [sic] can work" really means "There is practically no chance cryonics can work" given the way cryonics organizations currently perform their suspensions, a way of framing the problem which I find worth discussing, because I think it comes closer to the truth and doesn't discourage exploring new approaches to the problem. While I consider this an unrealistic fantasy so far, I'd like to think that a couple of bright & energetic college students somewhere with aspirations of becoming the next Steve Wozniak, Sergey Brin or Bill Gates will discover cryonics, notice that the field has stayed relatively neglected and underdeveloped so far, and decide to go into it to revolutionize the technology. In the meantime that leaves us cryonicists with the burden of trying to nudge the kludge into something closer to feasibility.

I was going to say "Come on LW! Obvious troll is obvious." but then I remembered this recent post...

This person appears to take pleasure in being downvoted consdering how much it is happening. Moreover, they aren't curious as to what norms they're violating to receive so much downvoting indicating some awareness. Their username is automatically controversial, but it can't even be a plausibly effective advocacy account for 9/11 conspiracy beliefs because then they would be polite the other rhetorical dimensions, so as to appear likable and be mo... (read more)

5Dallas
You are self-identifying as a 9/11 "truther", which is signalling to us that you are a crank with a persecution complex. The fact that you subsequently verified delusions of persecution is just digging yourself into a deeper hole.
3[anonymous]
Cells are routinely frozen and thawed in labs doing cell culture. Tissue is a lot harder, but if you use a different medium (routine during cryopreservation) you can probably preserve even microscopic structures such as synapses.
[anonymous]100

there is no evidence of it ever being done successfully.

There is evidence that cryonics preserves brain structure to some extent, which, coupled with the fact that people are brains, constitutes Bayesian evidence that cryonics suspensions performed up to this point were successful (that is, information-theoretic death didn't happen). What you require as evidence in this case might be a clear-cut demonstration of a cryonics patient getting revived. However, if we already knew how to revive people we wouldn't bother with cryosuspension in the first place.... (read more)

2APMason
There are a bunch of papers debunking that here. Scroll down past the names (although you may be tempted to pay attention to some of them).
9siodine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oocyte_cryopreservation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_frog http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html
gwern180

Freezing things makes water expand and burst the fragile parts of your brain.

Freezing canard: proof you have not read the cryonics literature. Instant downvote.

5Metus
I have read the arguments against cryonics on RationalWiki and I know that it is not accepted in mainstream. I am thus not interested in arguments that do not go further than "It won't work, no way!"
7Viliam_Bur
The distinction between data and code is mostly useful, but in some situations we intentionally cross the boundary. If you have a text editor, then the separation is valid -- the program is code, and the text documents are data. But if you have a compiler, you have a compiler program, which is code, and the compiled program, which is data, but on a different level it is also code. If you have a dynamically loaded library, while you load it, it is data, but then you start treating it as code by running it. If you have an interpreter, which is a code, you emulate the program, which on one level is data and simultaneously on another level is code. If you have a decompiler or debugger, which is code, it takes another code and treats it like data. A bootloader loads data and then starts them as a code. Etc. This means that treating data as code, or code as data, is not necessarily a mistake or confusion of levels, and sometimes it is unavoidable. How else could you for example start a program, which originally exists only as a sequence of bytes in a file on a disk? You treat it as data when loading the file to a memory, and then you treat it as a code. Some maths here: let X be a problem we want to solve, and let's suppose that the problem is algorithmically solvable. Further, let P be a set of all programs, PX a set of programs that correctly solve problem X, U is a unit test and PU is a set of programs that passes the unit test. We will call U a correct unit test for problem X if each program from PX belongs to PU (a correct program always passes the unit test) and some programs in P-PX don't belong to PU (some incorrect programs don't pass the unit test). In other words, PX is a subset of PU, which is a strict subset of P. A random code generator will provide a random distribution R of programs. Now the question is whether R ∩ PX is non-empty, in other words whether the generator is capable of generating a correct solution assuming it is incredibly lucky. This dep
3jmmcd
Degeneracy is an important feature of DNA-based evolution (biological evolution as-it-is) but it's not fundamental to evolution as-it-could-be.
5A1987dM
And a single mutation in DNA in the wrong place can be disastrous, too.
4Viliam_Bur
A well-written program does not have it, but many real-life programs do. In my programming environments I have usually warnings turned very sensitive, for example they complain about declared but never used variables/functions, and when I read other people's code, I see this often. Could we see a program with syntax error as a fatal mutation? Fortunately, these fatal mutations are easy to detect. (Alternatively, we could mutate the parse trees.) Still I have seen humans do this and take their paychecks. Yes, I would expect such evolved program be full of bugs; but real-life applications also contain bugs and it does not prevent them from being useful. I admit I would hate to read the machine-generated code, or even worse fix the bugs or add new functionality. But this is like saying that reading DNA is, ahem, not very user-friendly. Sure, it is not; but it works. Two more things to consider. First, unit tests -- the better unit tests you make, the higher chance is that a random program that passes them is correct. If test-driven development can reduce random human errors, it can also reduce computer-generated error, though of course the computer will make much more errors. Second, we are OK with randomized algorithms having some chance of error, as long at the chance is very very small. So the prior probability of computer generating a correct algorithm is small, but non-zero. By making unit tests we increase the probability that the result will be correct. If we can increase this probability from epsilon to 1 - epsilon, we win.
8satt
This is as good an opportunity as any to link this presentation and these cool papers about evolving patches for real-world C programs in minutes. In light of an actual working example of a computer program that fixes other programs' bugs, broad brush claims about how programs can't have algorithmic insight, won't lead to correct programs, and lack "the redundancy or flexibility of genetics" won't really wash.
2JoshuaZ
Genetic algorithms are used in practical contexts. See for example this use of genetic algorithms to make a more efficient radio antennas(pdf).
7Costanza
Kind of merciless, just like natural selection. Only the rabbit that gets to the hole slightly sooner than the wolf lives on.
1Raemon
I did just learn this today (oddly enough, in the very first page of Origin of Species). [edit: I knew that there was at least one other person developing the theory concurrently, but I didn't know that Darwin was just a few incremental steps beyond the general consensus] Over the past few hours I've been discussing some ideas with others and mostly come to this conclusion. It would definitely be a hard problem, although I'd enjoy the problem enough to work at it for a while.
Cthulhoo120

What you need to think about is what consequence any of this has to your life. The reality is, like the moon landing, it means absolutely nothing to the decisions you'll be making whether it's real or not. Like holocaust denial, the only reason people make one claim rather than another is to be seen as a certain type of person.

To me honestly it appears that the consequences of such beliefs are relevant. If the WTC went through a controlled demolition, this affects the standard view of what happened next, and should influence your beliefs on politics and... (read more)

8prase
There are indirect consequences. Believing nonsense forces one to compartmentalise at best and contaminates one's whole epistemology at worst. Many facts I am/was interested in have practically zero direct consequences to my life. Consider the consequences of knowing about * evolution / origin of life * quantum mechanics * Big Bang * simulation hypothesis * history of the Roman empire * almost all philosophy * ...
Emile190

Like holocaust denial, the only reason people make one claim rather than another is to be seen as a certain type of person.

That's true in the same sense that I don't stab people who cut in line because I don't want to be seen as a psychopath, and I don't say that 2+2=5 because I don't want to be seen as an idiot.

0Anubhav
Upvoted for the first two sentences, not sure what to make of the last one.