That seems like a failure of noticing confusion; some clear things are actually false.
This post is a good example of why LW is dying. Specifically, that it was posted as a comment to a garbage-collector thread in the second-class area. Something is horribly wrong with the selection mechanism for what gets on the front page.
Underconfidence is a sin. This is specifically about gwern's calibration. (EDIT: or his preferences)
Not everyone is in the same situation. I mean, we recently had an article disproving theory of relativity posted in Main (later moved to Discussion). Texts with less value that gwern's comment do regularly get posted as articles. So it's not like everyone is afraid to post anything. Some people should update towards posting articles, some people should update towards trying their ideas in Open Thread first. Maybe they need a little nudge from outside first.
H...
Let's talk about the fact that the top two comments on a very nice contribution in the open thread is about how this is the wrong place for the post, or how it is why LW is dying. Actually let's not talk about that.
[citation needed]
This seems like a wilfully unfair description of Chris's position.
It's a scam if you take someone's money intending to do something other than what you tell them you'll do with it, or (maybe) intending to do it for very different reasons from the ones you give them, or with very different prospects of success. But Chris's hypothetical youngster is doing with the money exactly what his/or her parents expect (getting educated), with the same purpose and the same likely outcomes as if s/he were straight. Where's the scam?
And the donors in question aren't gene...
Does that actually work better than just setting a higher bar for significance? My gut says that data is data and chopping it up cleverly can't work magic.
Cross validation is actually hugely useful for predictive models. For a simple correlation like this, it's less of a big deal. But if you are fitting a local linearly weighted regression line for instance, chopping the data up is absolutely standard operating procedure.
If I have no value as a human, I desire to believe I have no value as a human.
Are you planning to do any analysis on what traits are associated with defection? That could get ugly fast.
(I took the survey)
Well, remember that that's a zero sum game within the community since it's coming out of Yvain's pocket. I was going to reflexivly cooperate, then I remembered that I was cooperating in transfering money from someone who was nice enough to create this survey, to people who were only nice enough to answer.
Probably the only two things the True Patronus can look like are humans and snakes. Possibly flying squirrels?
There's room for improvement, but this is just a rant. It's useless for the project of improvement, because he's attacking anything he can find a clever turn of phrase for, rather than the things that especially deserve attack.
It's not even useful to see where the PR failure is, because once something set him off, everything suddenly became a PR failure. Look for insight in saner places than this, please.
It looks like he's turned the flawed methodology of the skeptic community (things like pattern-matching against surface features of known bullshit and mockery as an argument) on the skeptic community itself. I'd say "serves them right" except we're supposed to be virtuous identity-free robots who take no pleasure in or offense from anything.
It strikes me as a little awful to only care about bad people inasmuch as they're likely to become good people. Maybe I've been perverted by my Catholic upbringing, but I was taught to love everyone, including the sinners, including the people you'd never want to hang out with. This appeals to me in part because I sin and people don't want to hang out with me, and yet I want to be loved regardless.
It's possible that I am the weird one here, but shows with complex but evil characters such as Breaking Bad do seem largely popular. There is a large current i...
I think this is probably being too kind to my unhandicapped abilities. Rather than handicapping myself because I'm too powerful, I think the key issue is that I see things on a metalevel and analytically, such that I can notice that there is little difference between "social adeptitude" and "manipulation". And so, in order to avoid being manipulative, I consciously avoid developing social skills. I think reflectivity and pathological non-hypocrisy are the key dynamics, not inherent manipulative ability.
Right, but he seems to implicitly claim that characters who follow those disvirtues are necessarily unsympathetic. Some of us are sometimes disvirtuous.
I suspect the thermostat is closer to the human mind than his conception of the human mind is.
Today we kneel only to hypocrisy.
You're confusing "evil" with "unsympathetic". Maybe those mean the same thing to you, but we don't all have your unimpeachable moral character.
Peace if possible, truth at all costs. -- Martin Luther
The fact that he started some really bloody wars over something that didn't even turn out to be true should maybe give us some pause before we endorse virtues like this.
That's harder to distinguish from the outside.
If you run in social circles where having well-calibrated beliefs is high-status, not gonna name any names.
Wait, systematic cheating is far worse than systematic racism? That seems, uh, non-obvious to me.
Because when I introspect on my preferences it doesn't seem to hold.
I don't trust the transitivity axiom of VNM utility. Thought I should mention this to make it clear that the "most of us" in your post is not a rhetorical device and there really are actual people who don't buy into the VNM hegemony.
I dunno, I feel like judgments of awesomeness are heavily path-dependent and vary a lot from person to person. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the project of Coherent Extrapolated Volition, but I hold out even less for Coherent Extrapolated Awesomeness. So the vision of the future is people pushing back and forth, the chuunibyous trying to fill the world with dark magic rituals and the postmodernists wincing at their unawesome sincerity and trying to paint everything with as many layers of awesome irony as they can.
Also, from a personal perspective, I r...
No. A is [1,3,5,7], B is [4,4,4,4]. A random member of A will be closer to a random member of B than to another random member of A.
The Curry Fallacy.
Censorship is particularly harmful to the project of rationality, because it encourages hypocrisy and the thinking of thoughts for reasons other than that they are true. You must do what you feel is right, of course, and I don't know what the post you're referring to was about, but I don't trust you to be responding to some actual problematic post instead of self-righteously overreacting. Which is a problem in and of itself.
Given how anxious he is about the idea of romance I would think he would tend to shy away from anything that realistic. Snape is safe since a teacher/student relationship would be excluded on ethical grounds. Draco could actually happen, and so better not to think about.
I was basically quoting Quirrell from his first DDA lesson. He says that he's teaching defense against wizards because they can keep you from being able to run. From this I drew the conclusion that wizards can keep you from being able to run, and this is a problem you might have to worry about in practice, even when facing wizards less powerful than Voldemort.
Apparation can be blocked. That's what makes Dark Wizards more dangerous than any other monster you might fight - you can't just Apparate away.
..."One of the dark truths of the Killing Curse, son, is that once you've cast it the first time, it doesn't take much hate to do it again."
"It damages the mind?"
Again Moody shook his head. "No. It's the killing that does that. Murder tears the soul - but that's just the same if it's a Cutting Hex. The Killing Curse doesn't crack your soul. It just takes a cracked soul to cast." If there was a sad expression on the scarred face, it could not be read. "But that doesn't tell us much about Monroe. The ones like Dumbledore who'
Please don't learn anything from the black arts threads. That's why they're called "black arts", because you're not supposed to learn them.
No, not "of course". It only implies that if they're rational actors, which of course they are not. They are deal-averse and if they see you trying to pump them around in a circle they will take their ball and go home.
You can still profit by doing one step of the money pump, and people do. Lots of research goes into exploiting people's circular preferences on things like supermarket displays.
There's a whole literature on preference intransitivity, but really, it's not that hard to catch yourself doing it. Just pay attention to your pairwise comparisons when you're choosing among three or more options, and don't let your mind cover up its dirty little secret.
People can't order outcomes from best to worst. People exhibit circular preferences. I, myself, exhibit circular preferences. This is a problem for a utility-function based theory of what I want.
You talk like you've solved qualia. Have you?
"Qualia" is something our brains do. We don't know how our brains do it, but it's pretty clear by now that our brains are indeed what does it.
I'd pick the $1.03, so long as it was in the form of an electronic funds transfer and not more pennies to clutter up my pockets. I guess I probably qualify as a very strange person though?
My math was "do I need any more money than I have or could borrow in the next 60 days, no, ok I'll take the higher amount". I suppose this heuristic fails if the higher amount is higher by less than the interest rate I could earn over 60 days, but short term interest rates are effectively 0 right now.
Well, I tried to make a post once, got downvoted into oblivion, and decided not to put myself through that again. So yeah this happens for real, although perhaps in my case it is no big loss.
The power of the banhammer is roughly proportional to the power of the dungeon. If it seems less threatening, it's only because an online community is generally less important to people's lives than society at large.
A bad king can absolutely destroy an online community. Banning all the good people is actually one of the better things a bad king can do, because it can spark an organized exodus, which is just inconvenient. But by adding restrictions and terrorizing the community with the threat of bans, a bad king can make the good people self-deport. And then the community can't be revived elsewhere.
Well, I agree, but "mere" probably isn't a sensationalist enough way to describe a 7 point drop in IQ.
Maybe it just means Reddit-folk are surprisingly smart? I mean, IQ 130 corresponds to 98th percentile. The usual standard for surprise is 95th percentile.
The destruction of LW culture has already happened. The trigger was EY leaving, and people without EY's philosophical insight stepping in to fill the void by chatting about their unconventional romantic lives, their lifehacks, and their rational approach to toothpaste. If anything, I see things having gotten somewhat better recently, with EY having semi-returned, and with the rise of the hypercontrarian archconservative clique, which might be wrong about everything but at least they want to talk about it and not toothpaste.
Uploads would at least have them in the first place to be attached to.
And we independently observe that almost no one can do good philosophy at all, so the theory checks out.
Nothing better than a hypothesis that makes correct empirical predictions!
Yeah, it sucks that you can't do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that's life. We don't listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that's a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150. Sometimes fields have prerequisites.
I'd point to myself as a counterexample, I appreciate the DMV sticking it to those externality-creating motorists while I enjoy proper liberal low-emissions modes of transportation.
Is it really a modern city without conservatives whining about poor service at the DMV? Although I guess if you got rid of all the clerks service would probably get even worse.
the past is a third-world country
The past is in some respects worse than a third world country. In the United States around 1900, the life expectancy ranged from around 50 climbing steadily to reach around 60 around 1930 (curiously the Great Depression didn't cause a slump in life expectancy, although the rate of growth did slow). Source with related data(pdf). But, if one looks at current life expectancy in many countries in the developing world, most countries exceed the US-1900 numbers. Similar comparisons can be made for literacy and many other metrics of success. The middling develo...
Your mistake lies in using the word "I" like it means something. There is some mwengler-stuff, it has some properties, then there is a split and the mwengler-stuff is in two separate chunks. They both experience their "stream of consciousness" showing up in their particular branch, they both wonder how it is that they ended up in the one branch rather than the other.
Yeah, I feel like in real world situations, hypothesizing time travel when things don't make sense is not likely to be epistemically successful.
Wasn't there a proverb about generalizing from fictional evidence? Especially from fiction that intentionally doesn't make sense?