If anything, I'd be tempted to say that autism is a more pronounced degree of asperger's
That seems to me to be basically equivalent to saying that aspergers is a lesser form of autism. Again, sorry I can't find the links at the moment, but I recall reading several articles suggesting that the two might actually not be related at all, neurologically.
The whole idea of neurodiversity is kind of exciting, actually. If there can be more than one way to appropriately interact with society, everyone gets richer.
I agree. Unfortunately, modern culture and in...
I have a form of autism called Asperger Syndrome
This is not at all unusual here at LessWrong... I can't seem to find a link, but I seem to recall that a fairly large portion of LessWrong-ers (at least relative to the general population) have Aspergers (or at least are somewhat Asperger-ish), myself included.
I'm not entirely sure though that I agree with the statement that Aspergers is "a form of autism"... I realize that that has been the general consensus for a while now, but I've read some articles (again, can't find a link at the moment, s...
By "the first one" do you mean "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!"? If so, please cite examples.
probably in one episode of The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show
I've been abstaining from LessWrong for awhile now, so I've missed a lot. Can you link me to some examples of what you mean by "The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show"? It sounds highly entertaining.
Yes, I suppose so. Good point.
Edit: Seriously? Downvotes? For conceding that my political opponent made a good point? Seriously?
Although I disagree with FiftyTwo's conclusions, I am nevertheless disappointed that it has received net downvotes.... it's a perfectly valid question after all, and we're not supposed to be doing downvote==disagree, right?
For fairness' and balance's sake, I'll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.
Funny, from my point of view this evidence suggests that pro-lifers are actually more concerned with controlling women's sex lives, than with saving unborn babies.
Upvoted, beacause I agree in principle, but I don't actually see any examples of this in this thread.
If you put a big banner over a discussion saying "HEY THIS IS A POLITICAL DISCUSSION", and you have people adding "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!" at the end of their posts, or reply with "OH, THAT'S A SOCIALIST ARGUMENT YOU'RE MAKING THERE"
I don't see any examples of people actually doing that, though.
If they laugh, that proves I'm right; if they boo, that proves I'm right.
This seems like heresy to me from a Bayesian perspective.
calling upon various fictional deities for whom I have great respect.
Just curious... can you clarify this statement? It sounds a lot like Chaos Magick to me, and that surprises me, coming from you (not necessarily in a bad way).
The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest
Yes, I've noticed that too, which was part of why I was confused that people objected to it.
I was under the impression that this was an "official" thing, but it sounds like I was wrong.
Just curious... who is downvoting this post, and why? Politics is the mind killer, I know... but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
People who don't want a regularly-occurring exception.
The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest, and overall I'd consider them to have been productive thus far. It is of course possible that the tone or nature of these debates will change over time, but it seems on current evidence to be that a lot of people are mindkilled about whether or not politics is in fact a mindkiller. Granted, the voting system here generally encourages controversy - fifty votes yay and forty nine votes nay is better than an uninteresting post with one vote nay, after all.
but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
What do you mean by that? Supposed on what grounds, accepted by whom and in what sense? (There's also a distinction between following a rule and agreeing with it, and there is no rule in this case.)
I downvoted this post because I don't want to see more attention to politics here. I don't see it as an "accepted exception" but as a recent push for more political discussions.
It can be interesting to talk about social issues, but doing this under the explicit heading "politics" header is likely to prime people into paying more attention to the political implications of the topic.
There is no clear bright line determining who is or is not a fundamentalist Christian. Right now, there pretty much is a clear bright line determining who is or is not human.
Is there? What about unborn babies? What about IVF fetuses? People in comas? Cryo-presevered bodies? Sufficiently-detailed brain scans?
delta-wave-inducing binaural beats
Do you have any recommendations for a currently commercially available (or freely available) source of binaural beats? I experimented with a binaural beat "mind machine" years ago, and saw no significant results, but still find the idea fascinating.
Eliezer found your comment, read it, decided he wanted to get rid of it
Circumstantial evidence suggests that it was not Eliezer himself who personally modded the thread. But I'm not sure.
This does not sound much more plausible than him noticing that your thread broke the rules, and censoring it for that reason, at about the same time your accused him of dishonesty in it.
Sure, that's a possability. It seems to me much less likely than my proposed hypothesis, but only the mods can say for sure. Mods? Comment?
...Given that evidence, it would be absolute
Yes, but I can only see my side of them, not the comments they were responding to, and they don't make any sense that way.
A better way to present the data would be to have a column for your actions, and then a second column giving the amount of time between that action and the deletion.
Agreed. That was my original intention, but I didn't realize that deletion of the thread would eliminate the entire record of the sequence of events. I'm sure such a highly-granular log could be produced by the mods though. Mods? You reading this? (rhetorical question... we all know you are).
...You obviously think it is much more likely that the mods will act immediately than that they will a
Downvoted for bragging about trolling here - that's not something I want to see encouraged.
I was quite concerned about this myself, which is why I very intentionally created a separate troll thread (or "experimental thread") within which to segregate my trolling from the main discussion thread, in order to avoid lowering the signal-to-noise ratio in the forum where substantive matters were being discussed.
By the time I entered phase 3 of the experiment (explicit trolling), the post had already been downvoted sufficiently that it was no longer appearing on "recent comments".
Trust me, I put a LOT of thought into this.
even though this particular experiment was not helpful
Not helpful? How do you figure? From where I stand, we won't be able to draw any conclusions about that until several days from now, after seeing how things play out.
your method may have caused collateral damage,
Elaborate, please.
and your conclusion was poorly supported. On the other hand, you had a chart that presented a poorly-supported hypothesis as fact.
How do you mean? Obviously it wasn't a rigorously controlled experiment, up to acedemic standards - it wasn't supposed to be. But I'm no...
Your argument would seem to recommend a hands-off policy to moderation - in fact this is very the basis on which websites with full-time legal staff recommend such policies.
If you censor (i.e. "exercise editorial control over") posts which you disapprove of, the inescapable implication is that you DO approve of all OTHER posts. Whereas if you instead institute a policy of not exercising editorial control of your comments (except as mandated by law), then you escape that implication, by saying "we don't exercise editorial control over our comments, therefore lack of censorship cannot logically be read to imply endorsement".
That's pretty quick reactions if it's really about the accusation of dishonesty.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the "troll thread" had been pretty much dead for about 12 hours or so when the "dishonesty" comment got posted... and 60 seconds later resulted in deletion. I'm a bit too intoxicated at the moment to do the math, but the unlikelihood of that being coincidental seems astronomical.
Furthermore, the accusation is much more noticeable in this thread than it was in your previous
Yes, but in this thread, unlike the oth...
The only problem I can think of with this experiment is that your post could have been deleted for one of your more overt offenses, but it took until the time it was actually deleted for someone to actually get around to deleting it, especially with all the controversy. You have evidence that it was attacking Eliezer that broke the camel's back, but maybe not strong evidence.
Good point, but the timing of how exactly things went down argues pretty strongly for my interpretation: all of the explicit violations happened on christmas eve, within a period of...
Yes, that was covered by the previous question: "Under what jurisdiction?"
It's also a form of dishonesty to request public feedback on a policy issue, then systematically ignore all feedback that disagrees with your predetermined decision.
Well, you are correct that the post isn't actually about retributive justice........ but it's not about sovereignty either ;)
Yes, that would seem to be the obvious answer. But the obvious answer isn't necessarily the correct answer, so it seems like something at least worth discussing openly, doesn't it?
Fundamental civil liberties is also a fundamentally diseased concept.
Please explain. (I've heard this argued before, but I'm curious what your particular angle on it is)
I don't think this censorship decision has a very meaningful impact either way on FAI.
I disagree. One of the most common objections to the idea of FAI/CEV is "so will this new god-like AI restrict fundamental civil liberties after it takes over?"
you have to realize the risks are far more on Eliezer than they are on any poster
This, I think, is the fundamental point of diagreement here. The emotional valence is far greater on Eliezer than on us, but if we're taking seriously the proposition that the singularity is coming in our lifetimes (and I do), then the risks are the same for all of us.
His low tolerance responses and angry swearing are exactly what you should expect
Angry swearing? Did I miss some posts? Link please.
...This is also why trying to point out his Okcupid profile as a PR snaf
OK. This is a question about what you would do if you were a transhuman FAI (or designing one).
Probably not have retributive justice
This is a question about Ethics. Ethics are off topic for LW?
Off the top of my head, my response would be that for private prosecution to be ethically legitimate, it should require a victim in the jurisdiction in question. Was there a Canadian victim in that case? (Not a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know).
Eliezer, do you consider this a valid question to be discussed on LW?
This is certainly a valid question, worthy of further debate.
Eliezer, do you disagree?
Good question. I don't know.
Anybody?
BTW, I know it's not terribly rare for anti-marijuana laws to be enforced against middle-class people where I am; so he should have either specified “against middle-class people in Northern California”
Also, even in California, and even for people of middle class, you'll get marijuana laws enforced against you if you manage to piss off the wrong cop/prosecutor.
Before I spend any more time replying to this, can you clarify for me... do you and I actually disagree about something of substance here? I.e. how an organization should, in the real world, deal with PR concerns? Or are we just arguing about the most technically correct way to go about stating our position?
You seem to be using a very narrow definition of "crypto".. I'm not sure whether you're just being pedantic about definitions, in which case you may be correct, or if you're actually disputing the substance of what I'm saying. To answer your question, I'm not a cryptographer, but I have a CS degree and am quite capable of reading and understanding crypto papers (though not of retaining the knowledge for long)... it's been several years since I read the relevant papers, so I might be getting some of the details wrong in how I'm explaining it, but ...
As much as people who don't like this policy, might wish that it were impossible for anyone to tell the difference so that they could thereby argue against the policy, it's not actually very hard to tell the difference.
I didn't interpret CronoDAS's post as intending to actually advocate violence. I viewed it as really silly and kind of dickish, and a good thing that he ultimately removed it, but an actual call to violence? No. It was a thought experiment. His thought experiment was set in the present day, while yours was set in the far future, but other...
I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out
Eliezer, at this point I think it's fair to ask: has anything anyone has said so far caused you to update? If not, why not?
I realize som...
Well, point 3 can be eliminated by proper use of crypto. See OTR
The response to point 2 is that by having it be publicly known to everyone that messages' contents are formally mathematically provably deniable (as can be guaranteed by proper crypto implementation), that disincentivizes people from even bothering to re-post content in the first place.
Point 1, however, I agree with completely, and that's why I'm not actually advocating this solution.
One the one hand, you're deciding policy based on non-PR related factors, then thinking about the most PR friendly way to proceed from there. On the other hand, you're letting PR actually determine policy.
Re-reading the grand-grand-grand-grand-parent post, yes, I now see that you're correct that that was what he was trying to get at - although he certainly wasn't being particularly clear.
But regardless, downvoting someone for conceding a point to someone they're engaged in debate with is pretty lame.