I don't understand why this comment is downvoted and I want to go on record to say it wasn't me. I appreciate when people tell me why they downvote my posts.
I definitely did expect mixed reactions to the original post. I'll be honest and say that I'm surprised that people keep downvoting it to levels that I associate with malicious trolls, rather than let it stay hidden at -5 which seems appropriate for a failed attempt at humor. But it doesn't really matter, it would take much more than negative reactions to a joke to stop me from making Less Wrong great again :)
Hi there, Mac. I'm a Matrix overlord. Can I have my 10 dollars, please?
Could you specify whether you want answers as percentage probability, probabilities, odds, or expected number of launches? My answer was intended as a percentage
So there is free money to be had by posing as a rabbi and offering a bet to Robert Aumann?
Using OxyContin(tm) for a job interview seems like a distinctly bad idea. Particularly if the employer asks for drug screening.. If you absolutely have to, I suggest sticking with Oxytocin.
Why do you care about the 'original' meaning of the word?
Let's imagine we are arguing about trees falling in the forest. You are a lumberjack who relies on a piece of fancy expensive equipment that unfortunately tends to break if subjected to accoustic vibrations. You therefore create a map where the word "sound" means accoustic vibrations. This map works well for you and helps you resolve most disguised queries you could be interested in
Then you meet me. i make a living producing cochlear implants. My livelihood depends on making implants that reliably generate the qualia of sound. I therefore have a different map from you, where the word 'sound' means the subjective experience in a person's brain. This works well for the disguised queries that I care about.
If we meet at a cocktail party and you try to convince me that the 'original' meaning of sound is accoustic vibrations, this is not a dispute about the territory. What is happening is that you are arguing the primacy of your map over mine, which is a pure status challenge.
The purpose of categories in this context is to facilitate communication, ie transfer of information about the territory from one mind to another. Agreeing on a definition is sometimes important to avoid confusion over what is being said. However, if there is no such confusion, insisting on one definition over another is a pure monkey status game
What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?
The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is "It depends on what your disguised query is".
If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don't see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of "defecting by accident".
I can see why this would look strange to a German speaker. It was just intended as a joke/reference to the Wikipedia article on the Vienna Circle. I've fixed the grammar
Seriously, who are these tech support people? Clearly this database belongs to the owner of less wrong (whoever that is). As far as I can tell, when moderators ask for data, they ask on behalf of the owners of that data. What is going on here? Has tech support gone rogue ? Why do they then get their contract renewed? Are they taking orders from some secret deep owners of LW that outrank the moderators ?