All of Mulciber's Comments + Replies

Why does it sound more like 1 than .5? If I believed the probability of my home getting struck by a meteorite was as high as .5, I would definitely make preparations.

Mulciber-20

That sounds like someone who rationalizes, which is something we should be avoiding.

It's weird that trying to rationalize something can go against rationality, but that's English for you.

Edit: I assume this was downvoted so heavily because I failed do the constructive thing by providing a suggestion of my own. Sorry about that.

How about something based on the name of the site? LWite, LWer, LWan? Or maybe a more pronounceable version like Lewite, etc.

I also think the farther into the future you get the less interested future people will be in reviving (by comparison) the mentally inferior.

This sounds possible but not at all obvious. It seems to me that so far, interest in historical people and compassion for the mentally inferior have if anything increased over time. This certainly doesn't mean they'll continue to do so out into the far future, but it does mean I'd need some really good reasons to support expecting them to.

0Jack
So I can envision future persons wanting to meet some people from the past for historical reasons as you say. But I'm not sure we'd bring back thousands of Homo Habilis if we had the chance. One or two might be interesting- but what would we do with thousands?

Cost of facilities per person should go down significantly as the number of people gets large, right?

It's counterintuitive to say that being dead is basically null value. If I'm choosing between two courses of action, and one difference is that one of them will involve me dying, that's a strong factor in making me prefer the other option.

I can think of possible explanations for this that preserve the claim that being dead has value zero, but I'm not seeing a way that would do so only in non-cryonics cases.

-1jhuffman
Notice the subtle difference in language though. You are talking about dying. Dying is pretty obviously a bad thing. Its only once you are dead that you are in a null state. Cryo-preservation does not prevent you from dying. You still go through the dying process, and I doubt you are very much comforted by the small chance that you could be revived at some point.

Right. The whole point is that what karma really controls for is appearing useful to the community, not being useful to the community.

I agree that it has a purpose, and that we're better off with it. I don't think it's sufficient on its own, and we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that obsessing over it is the same as focusing on improving the community. At best, it improves only a small aspect of the community; at worst, the subgoal "think about karma and get points" takes over at the expense of all else.

But you wouldn't choose to die rather than walk through the city, would you?

It's hard for me to take the nightmare science fiction scenarios too seriously when the default actions comes with a well established, nonfictional nightmare: you don't sign up for cryonics, you die, and that's the end.

That's starting to sound like a general argument for shorter lifetimes over longer ones. Is there a reason this wouldn't apply just as well to living for five more years versus fifty? There's more room for extreme positive or negative experiences in the extra 45 years.

0Alicorn
Not at all - I'd take straight up immortality, if somebody offered, although I'd rather have a suicide option loophole for cases where I'm the only person to survive the heat death of the universe or something. Perhaps I unduly value the (illusion of?) control over my situation. But my reasoning is about the choice as a gamble: my risk aversion makes me prefer not to take the gamble that cryonics unambiguously is, which could go well or badly and has a cost to play.

We are all attempting to make ourselves appear more useful to the community

That gets to the heart of why I don't think the karma system is worth too much emphasis. Shouldn't we instead be attempting to make ourselves more useful to the community?

Like so many things, it feels like it trivializes but it is there for a purpose.

That's true. I do think we're better off with it than we would be without it, but it shouldn't get attention disproportionate to its purpose. It's a means to an end, nothing more.

0[anonymous]
That's the thing. Controlling things with 'shoulds' is unstable without the presence of real consequences, social or otherwise. Anonymous internet forums do not have these real consequences naturually, which is what gives Karma a purpose. It is a way to allow social control and influence with the minimum of overhead and perceived oppression.

Describing this as being averse to risks doesn't make much sense to me. Couldn't a pro-cryonics person equally well justify her decision as being motivated by risk aversion? By choosing not to be preserved in the event of death, you risk missing out on futures that are worth living in. If you want to take this into bizarre and unlikely science fiction ideas, as with your dystopian cannon fodder speculation, you could easily construct nightmare scenarios where cryonics is the better choice. Simply declaring yourself to have "high risk aversion" do... (read more)

0Alicorn
I call it risk aversion because if cryonics works at all, it ups the stakes. The money dropped on signing up for it is a sure thing, so it doesn't factor into risk, and if I get frozen and just stay dead indefinitely (for whatever reason) then all I've lost compared to not signing up is that money and possibly some psychological closure for my loved ones. But the scenarios in which cryonics results in me being around for longer - possibly indefinitely - are ones which could be very extreme, in either direction. I'm not comfortable with such extreme stakes: I prefer everything I have to deal with to be within my finite lifespan, in the absence of having a near-certainty about a longer lifespan being awesome. I don't doubt that there are some "nightmare" situations in which I'd prefer cryonics - I'd rather be frozen than spend the next seventy years being tortured, for example - but I don't live in one of those situations.

Does it have to be a dolphin, or would successful revival of a mouse count?

Try not to look up if that's been done before you answer. If you do know, try to imagine whether you'd count it as evidence, if you didn't already know.

Don't worry. I'd guess that posting this comment resulted in other people downvoting the article to compensate.

Which makes me think the karma limit on downvotes doesn't prevent downvotes (among high-karma members) so much as make them something that's done indirectly by posting a comment, rather than clicking "vote down."

Mulciber-10

That comment could equally well have gone in "The ideas you're not ready to post," come to think of it.

I like that motto a lot. Another one that bears on this is Postel's Law: "Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others."

In the case of wanting to deemphasize politeness, this would suggest being more lenient in the amount of rudeness you allow from others, but not increasing it in your output. Sort of the principle behind Crocker's Rules.

-1Mulciber
That comment could equally well have gone in "The ideas you're not ready to post," come to think of it.

"Folks from the outside often see 'philosophy' as something without internal divisions (like people from the outside of any culture)."

Aren't those people just straightforwardly wrong? If anything, philosophy has too many internal divisions.

It may be that we'll hear more about that other project after the end of April.

Is there a way for us to see on our own how many downvotes and upvotes we've given?

I mean, I guess there is a way to check your total downvotes now, but I'd have to downvote a lot of posts to get the information that way.

3wmoore
No there isn't a way to check vote counts at the moment.

I'm concerned that this makes the ability to downvote a limited resource. That's good in some ways, but as long as we're talking about "what if someone created a whole bunch of accounts to mess things up" scenarios, it raises an unpleasant possibility.

If someone mass-created accounts to post flame bait and complete garbage, we'd respond by voting them down severely, which restricts the ability to use downvotes productively in actual discourse.

I don't know much about the way this site is set up. Was that scenario already considered, but viewed as unlikely for reasons I'm not seeing?

Those of you excited about this: aside from the presumed difficulty of implementing it, would it be even better if there were an option to actually vote -0.3 on a post, instead of voting -1 with 30% probability? And would it be even more of an improvement if you could choose to vote anywhere in the [-1, 1] range, so that you could mark something -0.7 or +0.25?

Those suggestions probably seem like an exaggeration, but I really do think we're all getting too worked up over the minutia of the karma system. This isn't a game. These numbers aren't our high scores. It feels like there's too much temptation to regard them that way, and further complexity to the system will only increase that.

1AndySimpson
Agreed, but: We must admit that to a great extent, it is. We are all attempting to make ourselves appear more useful to the community, and karma is the only quantitative way to tell if we're making progress. Like so many things, it feels like it trivializes but it is there for a purpose.

Marathons do involve a significant amount of pain/discomfort, but I wouldn't consider that to be the main motivation to them.

That does indeed help. Thank you.

So really, a meta strategy would be something like choosing your deck for a Magic tournament based on what types of decks you expect your opponents to use. While the non-meta strategy would be your efforts to win within a game once it's started.

0MrHen
Ah, crap. Was that my comment? Sorry. I keep deleting comments when it looks like no one has responded. But, yeah, Magic has a rather intense meta-game. The reason I deleted my comment was because I realized I had no idea where the meta-strategy was in the dice example so I assumed I missed something. I could be chasing down the wrong definition.

I didn't vote the post in question up or down, but I would speculate that it was received negatively simply because the tone came across as rude.

There's sometimes a tendency in rationalists to observe (accurately) that our society overemphasizes politeness over frankness, and then to take it upon ourselves to correct this. Unfortunately, being human, we tend to do this selectively: by being ruder to others, sometimes to an overcompensating extent, while still reacting poorly to the rudeness of others. At least, that's an issue I've had in the past. Your mi... (read more)

2Paul Crowley
Great comment, agreed on all points. One of my mottos is "As polite as possible; as rude as necessary". I can't see anything in Annoyance's writings that could not be conveyed with less rudeness except their urge to ensure we all understand the contempt they hold us all in.
2gjm
And, then again, some people just enjoy being obnoxious.

Both those courses of action with dice sound like strategies to me, not meta strategies. Could you give another example of something you'd consider a meta strategy?

I think there's a larger point lurking here, which is that a good strategy should, in general, provide for gathering information so it can adapt. Do you agree?

1[anonymous]
I might be able to clarify the example. The strategy for one roll is the die with 3 green sides. The strategy for multiple rolls is not the same as repeating the strategy for one roll multiple times. That being said, I do not know if that qualifies as a meta-strategy. A more typical example could be a Rock-Paper-Scissors game. Against a random player, the game-theory optimal is to pick randomly amongst the three choices. Against your cousin Bob who is known to always picks Rock, picking Paper is the better option. Using knowledge from outside the game lets you win against Bob because you are using a meta-strategy. See also, Wikipedia's article on Metagaming.

Oddly enough, yes. "0 points" is also the standard. The singular only applies for 1.

That seems contradictory. If you actually thought that always using one strategy would have this obvious disadvantage over another course of action, then doing so would by definition not be "the strategy you currently think is best."

4JamesAndrix
Experiments can always be framed as a waste of resources. There is always something you're using up that you could put to direct productive use, even if it's just your time.
1jimmy
You're confusing meta strategies and strategies. The best meta strategy might be implementing strategies that do not have the highest chance of succeeding, simply because you can use the information you gain to choose the actual best strategy when it matters. Consider the case where you're trying to roll a die many times and get the most green sides coming up, and you can choose between a die that has 3 green sides, and one that probably (p = 0.9) has 2 green sides, but might (p = 0.1) have 4 green sides. If the game lasts 1 roll, you chose the first die. If the game lasts many many rolls, you chose the other die until you're convinced that it only has 2 green sides- even though this is expected to lose in the short term.
Mulciber140

It sounds as though you're viewing the debate as a chance to test your own abilities at improvisational performance. That's the wrong goal. Your goal should be to win.

"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than a... (read more)

1Peter_de_Blanc
This isn't about choosing to lose. It's more about exploration vs. exploitation. If you always use the strategy you currently think is the best, then you won't get the information you need to improve.

I'm curious about why you asked the second question. It seems obvious that "the word" you're talking about is human rationality, that being the whole focus of this community. So why ask people what the word you're asking about is? Is there something more subtle going on here?

In that case, would it be a good goal to make this site more fun, independent of the focus on rationality? That way people would recommend it to each other more so the rationality information would be more effective.

1Dojan
I don't think it works that way. Do you know any example of an existing webpage/event/thing where the people behind it said "it needs to be the same but more fun!", and it actually worked? I find lesswrong to be fun as it is, and I want it to attract people who are attracted to the actual content, rather than some fun-nes sprinkled on top. (I'm not saying lesswrong cant improve, and that I'd necessarily want to conserve it exactly the way it is though.) The reason wikipedia for example is so wildly successful is that it does what it does really well, and that thing is something people want and need. So no, I don't think that would be a good goal :) (Aware of/sorry for necroposting)

I think works of fiction are the most effective way of spreading the word (logic and rationality). Personally, if it hadn't been for being exposed to rationalism from science fiction at an early age, I doubt I'd have ever come to this site.

0SoullessAutomaton
Anyone who reads science fiction is probably already going to be reasonably receptive to our ideas; what would really make a difference would be promoting rationality in other genres of fiction.

"To understand the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matures, is an object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind."

-George Boole

"It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want."

-Spock

"Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth."

-Aristotle

Mulciber-10

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting."

-Spock