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All of Onelier's Comments + Replies

How can we get more and better LW contrarians?
Onelier100

Stream of consciousness. Judge me that ye may be judged. If you judge it by first-level Less Wrong standards, it should be downvoted (vague unjustifiied assertions, thoughtlessly rude), but maybe the information is useful. I look first for the heavily downvoted posts and enjoy the responses to them best.

I found the discussion on dietary supplementation interesting, in your link and elsewhere. As I recall, the tendency was for the responses (not entrants, but peoples comments around town) to be both crazy and stupid (with many exceptions, e.g., Yvain, ... (read more)

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5Luke_A_Somers
??? Seriously?
TimS130

A whole lot of Less Wrong seems to be going for less detail, less knowledge, more use of frameworks of universal applicability and little precision. The sequences seem similar to me: Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can't. And always too long. I've read about four paragraphs of them in total. The quality of conversation here is high for a blog, of course, but low for a good academic setting. Some of the mild sneering at academics around here sounds ridiculous (an AI researcher believes in God). AI's a weak field. All round, papers don

... (read more)
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8Viliam_Bur
I like your style of writing. Though: too many ideas, difficult to rate and respond. Karma always has a random component. Karma of one comment is not significant. Karma of 10 comments shows a trend. I have once received a negative karma for a comment showing an obvious error in reasoning of others; but it only happened once in maybe hundred comments, so I don't make a drama of it. But yeah, it might be painful if that happened to someone's first comment on LW. Instrumental rationality is a known problem of intelligent people. My worst experience was Mensa: huge signalling, almost nothing ever done; and if something is done, it's usually always done by the same two or three people, who could just as well have it done on their own. Compared with that, people at LW are relatively high in instrumental rationality -- they have a working website, they write good articles, they do research, they organize meetups and seminars. But yes, we could do a lot better. Instead of going meta, people could focus and write about things they care about. Not doing this on a web discussion is probably a symptom of not doing it in the real life. Yes, being convinced of one's own rationality can lead to overconfidence. I don't know a cure. Perhaps repeated exposure to disagreement of other rational people will eventually move one to update. Another reason for people focusing on what they are good at -- providing more evidence for their rationalist friends. Re: last three paragraphs -- the choice to stay or leave is on you. Don't participate in the discussions you consider worthless, write something about the real things you work on. (And perhaps I should do the same.) But this is not a new idea -- we have regular threads "what are you working on" here.
Call for Papers on AI/robot safety
Onelier00

I would say this exchange basically exemplifies why I don't participate in Less Wrong.

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Call for Papers on AI/robot safety
Onelier10

Plenty of good open access journals and it's a now standard business model, depending on field, and will have zero impact on how the article is perceived. The good PLoS or BMC journals, for example, will be as well regarded as any somewhat focussed journal. Likewise, if you pay the open access fee to a journal that doesn't automatically require it, no one will imagine you're bribing them or something ridiculous like that. This journal, in particular, is probably not a great idea (Hindawi) and the thought process hinted at (re: editor) may not be great.

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-1Dmytry
It's called monetizing. You get the perception of status somehow, you go public, you have shareholders, you are obligated to monetize this asset, aka sell this status for money, which devalues the status, but works for some time due to inertia. Paying people to grade the work - especially if they only get money if they grade the work as good - that's selling the grades. Granted, an upper class restaurant may refuse to serve a drunk, and may have a dress code, but don't mistake this for peer review. Conflicts between monetary and other interests are consistently resolved in favour of monetary interests.
Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute
Onelier10

What paper or text should I read to convince me y'all want to get to know reality? That's a sincere question, but I don't know how to say more without being rude (which I know you don't mind).

Put another way: What do you think Harry Potter (of HPMOR) would think of the publications from the Singularity Institute? (I mean, I have my answer).

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