All of Bindbreaker's Comments + Replies

I would rather have examples that better conform to reality than examples that are better characterizations of the principles in question.

Explicitly nonfictional stories would be better, though of course certain concerns apply to posting such information and it might be harder to find good examples.

I'm not sure what the relevance is here.

Yes, no, yes, yes. This is a very well-written post, incidentally. Good work.

Fifthed.

Karma doesn't mean "rationality points," and Aumann rationality has additional prerequisites anyway. My judgement stands, though I of course would revise that opinion if confronted with additional evidence. For reference, I put far more credence to the proposition "Kevin runs Clippy" than to the proposition "Clippy is a real (limited) paperclip-maximizer."

To clarify, Eliezer Yudkowsky is working both on a book and on the Harry Potter fanfiction in question. Both pertain to rationality.

Are you joking? Clippy is a gimmick poster on the Internet based on a common (if extreme) example.

"He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless dead." --anonymous

The last time I really checked (which was back in the early days), you had a far higher than normal proportion of posts with negative karma, which is the main thing that I use to evaluate a poster's status. In general I find total karma to be unreliable because karma seems generally linked to post count (in the old days, this link was quite direct).

However, looking back now I see that your recent comments appear to have been much more generally appreciated. I am not as active as I would like and therefore haven't seen many of these comments. This was quite an interesting discovery, as it made me aware of a greater need to evaluate status in the present state and account for shifts over time, so thanks, I guess.

Who is "Eliezer Yudowsky?"

/snark

"If I can't easily answer the question or refine my self-model relative to the provided suggestion, I assume that the description is accurate."

To be frank, I'm skeptical of that heuristic. For "love language," I literally could not orient myself correctly to answer any of the questions, nor could I honestly describe myself as really matching any of those categories. But I'm quite confident that that doesn't mean that they're all true, it just means that none of them apply to me!

Seconded.

Adding the "akrasia" tag would be helpful here.

Yes in all cases, but absolutely only if reversible.

I am asexual and thus have not experienced any of the romantic/sexual emotions. I feel as if doing so would almost certainly help my understanding of others, as well as broaden my emotional range. However, I seem to do quite fine without these emotions, and they seem to cause more problems than they are worth in many of the people around me. Therefore I would only take such pills if they were reversible, as my present state is quite happy and the alternative could certainly be worse.

Would it be reversible?

"Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is your victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men."

--Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"

Ali can be short for several female names, but it can also be a male name.

Yup-- didn't know "alicorn" was a word.

The user name "Alicorn" seems gender-indeterminate to me.

Report: No discernible response for anything except the creepy old man (minor positive emotional response). Note that I don't really have a conception of "cute" or "sexy," so disregard my responses for cute boy, cute girl, and sexiest person.

Which forums are these?

Does anyone here have experience with piracetam?

What's an easy way to explain the paperclip thing?

I've found this to be true as well. Calling someone a fool in casual conversation is bizarrely more insulting than calling them a damn fool, as everyone will understand that the latter is a joke but the former might be taken seriously.

This is an incredibly good joke.

I'm pretty sure this would indicate that the AI is definitely not friendly.

Fake difficulty applies to multiplayer too. Anything that adds barriers to entry or needless clicks is fake difficulty. Games like Starcraft, where you sometimes end up fighting the interface instead of your opponent, have a lot of fake difficulty. If you're going by That Other Site's definition of fake difficulty, the #1 thing on the list is "Bad technical aspects make it difficult," which certainly seems to apply!

For example, in Starcraft you have to micro all your workers to different mineral patches at the start of the game in order to get th... (read more)

Starcraft is a bad game, though; it's only popular because the ridiculously primitive 1998-era interface means that actual physical speed is required to control your units correctly, which adds barriers to entry to competitive play and makes it more challenging to play and therefore more impressive for someone to be good at. It's pretty much the embodiment of fake difficulty in game design.

What does that mean in practical terms?

I suspect that short, concise posts and long, thought-out ones both get higher karma than ones that fall in between.

I don't find that that's necessarily correct. For example, this post of mine expressing skepticism about cryonics or this one questioning a highly rated post were both fairly highly rated. I think needless contrarianism gets downvoted, but reasonable arguments generally don't, even if they advance unpopular cases.

This seems unusual. You are much more likely to be injured against a knife than you are against a gun. I am moderately confident that I can take a handgun away from someone before they shoot me, given sufficiently close conditions; I am much less confident in my ability to deal with a knife.

I don't worry about this for the same reason that Eliezer doesn't worry about waking up with a blue tentacle for his arm.

I'm pretty sure most people are concerned more with the scenario where revival comes before FAI.

I take it you read "Transmetropolitan?" I don't think that particular reference case is very likely.

No-- thanks for the tip! I will adjust my calculations accordingly.

This post was obviously a joke, but "we should kill this guy so as to avoid social awkwardness" is probably a bad sentiment, revival or no revival.

That seems like a fairly extreme outlier to me. I'm an extrovert, and for me that appears to mean simply that I prefer activities in which I interact with people to activities where I don't interact with people.

I plan to donate once I have X dollars of nonessential income, and yes, I have a specific value for X.

I'm in the "amassing resources" phase at present. Part of the reason I'm on this site is to try and find out what organizations are worth donating to.

I am in no way a hero. I'm just a guy who did the math, and at least part of my motivation is selfish anyway.

I don't believe in excuses, I believe that signing up for cryonics is less rational than donating to prevent existential risks. For somewhat related reasons, I do not intend to have children.

Suppose your child dies. Afterward, everyone alive at the time of an unFriendly intelligence explosion plus the tiny handful signed up for cryonics (including your child), also dies. Would you say in retrospect that you'd been a bad parent, or would you plead that, in retrospect, you made the best possible decision given the information that you had?

I, personally, will allocate any resources that I would otherwise use for cryonics to the prevention of existential risks.

This might get me blasted off the face of the Internet, but by my (admittedly primitive) calculations, there is a >95% chance that I will live to see the end of the world as we know it, whether that be a positive or negative end. I do not see any reason to sign up for cryonics, as it will merely constitute a drain on my currently available resources with no tangible benefit. I am further unconvinced that cryonics is a legitimate industry. I am, of course, open to argument, but I really can't see cryonics as something that would rationally inspire this sort of reaction.

It's my impression that, regardless of whether or not you actually have status, acting like you do is probably undesirable, as it gets you thinking in the wrong patterns.

I understand the joke, but the title nonetheless reminded me of the statements that political candidates make at the end of their commercials.

I like this post, but I don't like the title. I don't see what it has to do with the content, and it seems to assert high status.

This seems like one of the most irrational posts I've seen here. It starts off wrong (sunlight is actually bad for your skin) and goes downhill from there.