LESSWRONG
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All of HA2's Comments + Replies

Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
HA240

I suspect that efficiency is not necessarily the reason that many dislike PUA techniques. Personally, I don't particularly doubt that there are patterns for how women react to men (and vice versa), and that these can be used to have more sex. On the other hand, spiking people's drinks or getting them drunk can also be used for the same purpose, and that's commonly known as rape.

Sure, there are ways to hack into people's minds to get them to do what you want. The fact that they exist doesn't make them ethically acceptable.

Now, I don't know whether PUA met... (read more)

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9Sirducer
Right. But now we have an ontological problem: "hack into someone's mind" and "not hack into someone's mind" are not natural kinds. In any social, romantic interaction, there is some degree of mind-hacking going on. When a person spends all their time and energy chasing a member of the opposite gender who is not interested, what has happened is mindhacking. The pain of unrequited love is a result of asymmetric mindhacking. Love itself is symmetric mindhacking: you have hacked her mind, and s/he has hacked yours, and both of your implicit utility functions have been shifted to highly value the other person. What the Seduction community seeks is to allow men to create an asymmetric situation to cause a woman to have sex with them (and this is a place where some members of the community really do behave like assholes and not let the woman down gently afterwards, a practise know as "expectation management", though the community has built up a tradition of karma: we ostracise men who break the rule of always managing expectations and leaving the woman in a happier state than when we met her). The other major goal of the community is to allow the man to create a symmetric situation - which is usually achieved by first creating an asymmetric situation (male strong), and then gradually evening it out by allowing yourself to fall in love with the woman. Women who have been "screwed and left" by pickup artists feel good about themselves more often than one would naively expect - and this surprised me until I realized that if the PUA has demonstrated enough alpha quality, the woman's emotional mind has classified him as "good to have sex with even without commitment" because alpha-male sperm is so evolutionarily advantageous - if you are impregnated by an alpha male then your male descendants will have whatever alpha qualities he has - and will impregnate other women, spreading your genes.
5Sirducer
No! NO! NO! Your long-term partner should be your soulmate, with a high degree of mutual trust and respect. But a woman who you have not yet had sex with is simply not going to respond well to you "respecting" her.
Without models
HA200

"Exercise 7. How can you discover someone's goals? Assume you either cannot ask them, or would not trust their answers."

I'd guess that the best way is to observe what they actually do and figure out what goal they might be working towards from that.

That has the unfortunate consequence of automatically assuming that they're effective at reaching their goal, though. So you can't really use a goal that you've figured out in this way to estimate how good an agent is at getting to its goals.

And it has the unfortunate side effect of ascribing 'goals'... (read more)

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Without models
HA210

"Now, I am not explaining control systems merely to explain control systems. The relevance to rationality is that they funnel reality into a narrow path in configuration space by entirely arational means, and thus constitute a proof by example that this is possible."

I don't think you needed control systems to show this. Gravity itself is as much of a 'control system' - it minimizes the potential energy of the system! Heck, if you're doing that, lots of laws of physics fit that definition - they narrow down the set of possible realities...

" ... (read more)

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Return of the Survey
HA200

The aliens question was interesting to think about.

I realized that if I put anything other than zero for 'probability of aliens existing within our galaxy', then it seems like it would make little sense to put anything other than 100 for 'observable universe', given how many galaxies there are! Unless our galaxy is somehow special...

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1steven0461
The probabilities for life in different galaxies aren't independent if you're uncertain about the fraction of stars/galaxies that spawn life. You could think that with p=.5 life is super-rare and with p=.5 life is super-common; then you'd put .5 on both questions.
0gwern
Yeah. Checking back over questions can be interesting. At first, I had a greater probability for cryonics working than anti-agathics, but then I realized - hold on, if cryonics worked, wouldn't aging have more or less been solved? Isn't cryonics a subset of anti-agathics?
The Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture
HA230

And if you're interested in what groups do rather than how they do it, you're in a vast minority. Good for you - you don't have to join a church, even a rationalist one! Nobody's making you!

But people have emotions. It's not 'rational' to ignore this. As Eliezer says, and clarifies in the next post, rationalism [is/is correlated with/causes] winning. If the religious get to have a nice community and we have to do without, then we lose.

Yes, I would like to join a community of people very much like a church, but without all the religious nonsense. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

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Where are we?
HA220

Champaign, IL

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3 Levels of Rationality Verification
HA230

I don't think that it's reasonable to expect that secret criteria would stay secret once such a test would actually be used for anything. Sure, it could be kept a secret if there were a dozen people taking the test, of which the four who passed would get admitted to an exclusive club.

If there were ten thousand people taking the test, a thousand of which passed, I'd bet there'd be at least one who accidentally leaks it on the internet, from where it would immediately become public knowledge. (And at least a dozen who would willingly give up the answer if o... (read more)

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1Mario
True, but I think that would be a problem with any test. I'm just trying to find a way around it since I think that as you add ways to avoid gaming, you both complicate and weaken the test. Perhaps a solution would be to test people without their knowledge, and reveal whether they succeeded or not at a later date.