All of AstroCJ's Comments + Replies

Do you mean something different from the "Parent" link beneath each post?

Remove DV links from a person's "past comment" page unless viewed in context.

(After the recent comment thread dfranke sparked, I lost a large number of upvotes from my past comments, which were previously almost uniformly weakly positively ranked. I assume my previous posts had not suddenly reduced in quality, and that someone had simply decided to go through and punish me. Making people view a comment in context - one more mouse click - would make this unconstructive action less convenient and less likely.)

Cycle comment thread background colours through at least three distinguishable colours; unobtrusive colours like pale blue, grey would be preferable.

(In the current system we alternate between two colours, and active sub-threads can have many branches; it's difficult to follow visually. Clicking "parent" links is something of a workaround, but breaks the flow.)

(Edit: cf Nancy's reply below)

I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy - one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they'd spoken properly; he's not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.

(I personally have not read it, though I've read Alicorn's fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)

You're quite right; by paraphrasing shokwave in my rebuttal, I picked up a male pronoun. I've now edited the relevant comment to remove this. Thank you, on two levels.

EDIT: I didn't actually consciously avoid it in my first post.

From reading the thread you linked, it seems like things have improved an awful lot; no-one has weighed in with suggestions that I nail my gender to my name to warn innocent posters that they might be about to interact with a woman. Thank you for the hug; I do need to learn to control my responses to that stimulus.

(Edit: Pft, today is a day of typos.)

(I appreciate that you are taking the time to engage with me politely, especially after I have previously been (rightly or wrongly) impolite due to anger.)

dfranke didn't make a "correct" assumption, they[1] made an "unnecessary" assumption. I find it really quite surprising and disheartening that the Less Wrong community doesn't have an interest in making a habit of avoiding these - yes, even to the point of thinking for a tenth of a second longer when using vernacular speech. Good habits, people.

There are numerous other problems here... (read more)

Ok, I'll give a longer response a go.

You seem to me to be fundamentally confused about the separation between the (at a minimum) two levels of reality being proposed. We have a simulation, and we have a real world. If you affect things in the simulation, such as replacing Venus with a planet twice the mass of Venus, then they are not the same; the gravitational field will be different and the simulation will follow a path different to the simulation with the original Venus. These two options are not "computationally the same".

If, on the other ... (read more)

If I have in front of me four apples that appear to me to be identical, but a specific two of them consistently are referred to as oranges by sources I normally trust, they are not computationally identical. If everyone perceived them as apples, I doubt I would be seen as ill.

they would not make sense

Proof?

DV for being unconstructive.

I hope you didn't take my initial comment as being aggressive or judgemental; it was a good post, well written and interesting. I hope, too, that there's no kind of fallout.

Socially penalise, nothing. Something as personal as this, it's deeply unusual not to make it clear that you have permission; my concern is for the privacy of person under discussion.

I am alarmed and dismayed that no-one has raised the issue of privacy in this thread. Swimmer963, just from glancing through your comments, you're [rot13'd description of Swimmer963 deleted].

I didn't whizz through those to be creepy (actually I was impressed at how you seem to be consistently sensible), but if you're going to share incredibly personal details about "a friend" who was raped, we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent. The above is very easily enough to personally identify you.

On whether or not this will... (read more)

Unless...?

Since we do not live in the ancestral environment now, I think the quotation could be just underlining how we should viscerally know our brain is going to output sub-optimal crud given certain inputs. Upvoted original.

Downvoted.

For games where there are multiple agents interacting, the optimal strategy will usually involve some degree of weighted randomness. If there are noncommunicating rational agents A, B, C each with (an unsplittable) $1, and charities 1 and 2 - both of which fulfil a vital function but 1 requires $2 to function and 2 requires $1 to function, I would expect the agents to donate to 1 with p = 2/3.

A rational agent is aware that other rational agents exist, and will take account of their actions.

Speaking from a physical perspective, assuming that "$\Delta x$ is small" is a meaningless statement. Whenever we state that something is large or small, unless it's a nondimensionalised number, there is something against which we are comparing it.

Simple example, which isn't the best example but is fast to construct. Comparing $1 to $(mean GDP from country to country)

*$1 is a small amount of money in the USA. Even homeless people can scrape together a dollar, and it's not even enough to buy a cup of coffee from Starbucks. It's almost worthles... (read more)

Hm, interested.

What? Are you from the mythical land where every partnering has the same intensity of sex drive?

Tch! And the transcript makes it plain that I have been fooled by video editing. I suggest then the following replacement:

"...I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious Universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." - RPF

My source was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cd36WJ79z4 is an autotuned piece which includes footage of Feynman speaking those words, but it looks like it's from interviews with BBC's Horizon.

See under "Doubt and uncertainty":

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/archive/feynman/index_textonly.shtml

[EDIT: Found to be erroneous! Sorry!]

I don't feel frightened, not knowing things; I think it's much more interesting.

-Richard P. Feynman

(On the theme of the post, I think that bluntness is most polite here - this conversation doesn't look like it's about to progress further without prodding.)

• TheOtherDave did claim to know person X's gender? Unlikely, given the point of the example.

• TheOtherDave did inform you of person X's gender? Then, to repeat the question: What is that gender?

I think that threats often do work. I have a landlord, who uses a letting agent that we pay for our utilities. The letting agent stinks, and our electricity bill just trebled from the spring quarter into the summer quarter. Summer is warmer and brighter than spring - I would expect my bill to decrease by at least 5%.

So far, so bad, except that I was away for six weeks of that quarter, and most of my housemates were travelling for at least 2 weeks - my bill should have halved on top of this 5% decrease. There's a disparity of an expected 47.5% of my pre... (read more)

Strong agree and upvote, with some caveats.

I very much agree that politiking is a way to be more effective in any situation involving another person, and I think this post is a pretty nice defence of "Why should I bother to be polite?". I've several suggestions, and I've decided to try to explicitly bear in mind your bulleted advice rather than rely on my - usually pretty good - sense of what is polite.

I think you could extend the class of people of who could use this advice to be not just those who aren't interested in politeness, but those who... (read more)

Proxy server and a clean browser? I recommend TOR.

Mm, good question. Will it be ice or water that falls from the sky? To put it another way, to what extend do thermodynamic changes whilst an object is Transfigured persist after the spell wears off? We know that the 2nd Law can be violated, for example, but we don't know if it is as a matter of course.

raises hand

Hey, I'm originally of British origin. I can indeed confirm that the language Harry uses has made me wince a little. This hasn't happened in the last few chapters, since we've been hearing from harry!Mort rather than Harry, and mind-dumps don't respect style, but

"I'm in Mary's Place, Professor, in Diagon Alley. Going to the restroom actually. What's wrong?"

-contains the word "restroom", which no speaker of British English would ever use in that context, and the question "What's wrong?" is a little aggressive. I w... (read more)

It's usually clear when one says something intended to interact with the mechanics of the game (e.g. saying "That's the badger" on the Two of Clubs).

End P of O.

grin

This is precisely what I was going to suggest; I had a very nice game of it just last night.

Indeed (says AstroCJ, going on to discuss strategy, but not rules of the game), I think... hmm. This might actually be worth a top-level post. Since I'm going to dispense with all pretence of obeying "the rules", I'll rot13 the rest of this post. We never played the no talking variant either.

Fb, yrg hf fcbvy gur zlfgrel nf dhvpxyl nf cbffvoyr:

Znb vf n tnzr va juvpu gurer vf na rnfl (vfu) zrpunavfz sbe rnpu crefba gb zbqvsl gur ehyrf bs gur tnzr. V'yy qr... (read more)

Except for those damned lazy biologists, of course.

Ah, medium to strong disagree. I'm not far into my scientific career in $_DISCIPLINE, but any paper introducing a new "standard code" (i.e. one that you intend to use more than once) has an extensive section explaining how their code has accurately reproduced analytic results or agreed with previous simulations in a simpler case (simpler than the one currently being analysed). Most codes seem also to be open-source, since it's good for your cred if people are writing papers saying "Using x's y code, we analyse..." which means they nee... (read more)

So his argument is that "a human is not an appropriate tool to do this deterministic thing". So what? Neither is a log flume - but the fact that log flumes can't be used to simulate consciousness doesn't tell us anything about consciousness.

Disagree. If we allow humans to be deterministic then a "human as we know them" is driven solely by the physical laws of our universe; there is no sense in talking about our emotional motivations until we have decided that we have free will.

I think your argument does assume we have free will.

I cannot agree at all; simSimone is plainly conscious if meatSimone is conscious; there are no magic pattern of electrical impulses in physical space which the universe will "notice" and imbue with consciousness.

I'm a student; I value education and intellectual freedom for all sentient entities. I was told I would enjoy the Sequences after asking someone "Do you think that any 'good' society is inherently hierarchical?" over drinks.

I've always identified as a rationalist since I remember being conscious; I became a stated atheist approximately age four when I literally rejected the notion of a loving God along with the idea of Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny.

Are you serious? You missed

g) Make an honest attempt at grasping the subject matter.

I'm not sure if this is what you intended e) to cover, but if I meet a topic I'm completely unfamiliar with, my first instinct isn't to destroy the conversation.