The arguments laid out on the linked page are orthogonal to any questions of value or goodness.
The page's arguments conclude that "life is trying to occupy all space, and to become master of the universe." However, nothing is said as to what "life" will do with its mastery, and thus these arguments are unrelated to the question of why the future might be good, except insofar as most people would rank futures in which life is wiped out as not good.
I believe that it is fairly trivial to show that while evolution is in fact an optimizati...
The mechanics definitely need to be such that the dominant strategy is to give accurate predictions. I am reminded of Yvain's post on Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points, in which the optimal strategy is to attack/defend each of the cities in proportion to the values of the cities in question. One of the keys is that it is a repeated trial, which the idea of assassination at 8 does not have.
Although, it does sound as if the computer will be tracking the likelihoods by itself, and you only have to decide what to do with the information produced by the ful...
there are also men who'd like a friendlier version.
I cannot agree with this enough.
I also want to be clear that I do not think that this requires putting niceness padding on every statement and interaction. Just enough padding on enough interactions that a new person can believe that they will get a padded response instead of seeing no alternative but that they will receive an unpadded response.
Also, it's much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn't want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
I strongly suspect that tone and body language are a key component in whether the statement "that's not right" is interpreted as "I disagree, let's talk about it" or "shut up and think what I think".
I further suspect that a tendency to interpret ambiguous or missing subtext in a negative or overly critical way correlates strongly with being "thin-skinned". This is partly based on having both of these characteristics myself. A potential counter-argument here is that it is not "rational" or useful to always ...
I have seen other forums that use this mechanism. They list which users "liked" the post right underneath the post itself. Those forums did not have a karma system, though, and it might seem that the systems are somewhat redundant, but I, for one, would process the two types of feedback differently in my meat-brain.
In short, I sign the above comment without reservation.
I actually started thinking about how to create something that would work for this as soon as I started reading the comments about the Pomodoro feature. I'm not sure if I'd be the best person to actually make something like this, but I'll share the design requirements that I've come up with so far.
The framework that I'm basing this off of is something like TeamSpeak or Mumble, where there are a hierarchical tree of rooms with people in them. There should probably be an accessible tree view that shows all rooms along with all current occupants.
Inside of e... (read more)