PlaidX

Replying to.

I don't like contentless discussions of art either, but spewing paragraph after paragraph of awkward, stilted jargon about your hypothetical personal feelings isn't content, especially when they relate to a movie you haven't even seen!

If my friend says "That movie sucked", and I disagree, I ask "why".

If my friend says "I liked the animation, but the timing is terrible. Everyone telegraphs their reactions", that's a discussion of the film that's actually going somewhere.

If my friend says "Like everyone, I enjoy the physical experience of laughter, but-" and five minutes later they're still talking, I take a moment to look back at my life and wonder how I possibly thought it would be a good idea to see a movie with this person.

Replying toMeasuring aversion and habit strength

PlaidX15y

Measuring aversion and habit strength

The latter. Actually, I guess I still consume a lot of unknown things, but now almost exclusively online, where when the thing sucks, you can instantly move on to something else.

Much better to download a movie and watch five minutes of it and delete it than to coordinate going to the theater with someone, buy overpriced popcorn, watch a bunch of ads, then sit through an hour and a half of something you don't really like.

I can't really tell whether this is me failing to appreciate some aspect of human experience, or just that the way people tend to do things is stupid.

-1

Replying toThe non-painless upload

PlaidX15y

The non-painless upload

Yeah, really what I find to be the ugliest thing about lesswrong by far is the sense of self-importance, which contributed to the post deletion quite a bit as well.

Maybe it's the combination of these factors that's the problem. When I read mainstream philosophical discourse about pushing a fat man in front of a trolley, it just seems like a goofy hypothetical example.

But lesswrong seems to believe that it carries the world on its shoulders, and that when they talk about deciding between torture and dust specks, or torture and alien invasion, or torture and more torture, i get the impression people are treating this at least in part as though they... (read more)

Replying to.

PlaidX15y

The objective is to go from "__ sucked/was awesome" to "__ caused me to have internal experiences A, B, C, H, and R. Did you have different experiences? If so, why?"

This article caused me to have internal experiences of "oh jesus", "what is he thinking", and "how can people claim lesswrong isn't autistic with a straight face?"

Here are some factors that may have contributed to these experiences: I ate a slice of cheese pizza today, I want to signal my superiority in the domain of art criticism, and the way you write (and apparently talk) makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

-5

Replying toThe non-painless upload

PlaidX15y

The non-painless upload

Considering this style of thinking has lead lesswrong to redact whole sets of posts out of (arguably quite delusional) cosmic horror, I think there's plenty of neurosis to go around, and that it runs all the way to the top.

I can certainly believe not everybody here is part of it, but even then, it seems in poor taste. The moral problems you link to don't strike me as philosophically illuminating, they just seem like something to talk about at a bad party.

Replying toMeasuring aversion and habit strength

PlaidX15y

Measuring aversion and habit strength

I've found that I have the opposite problem. When given the opportunity to try something new, I take it, thinking "maybe this time", and invariably regret doing so.

Now I order the same food every time in restaurants, never go to shows, and am a happier person for it.

-1

Replying toWhat makes Less Wrong awesome?

PlaidX15y

What makes Less Wrong awesome?

Someone even more cynical might say that lesswrong only departs from mainstream skeptical scientific consensus in ways that coincidentally line up exactly with the views of eliezer yudkowsky, and that it's basically an echo chamber.

That said, rational thinking is a great ideal, and I think it's awesome that lesswrong even TRIES to live up to it.

Replying toWhat bothers you about Less Wrong?

PlaidX15y

What bothers you about Less Wrong?

I haven't read TOO much mainstream philosophy, but in what I have, I don't recall even a single instance of torture being used to illustrate a point.

Maybe that's what's holding them back from being truly rational?

Replying toWhat bothers you about Less Wrong?

PlaidX15y

What bothers you about Less Wrong?

I've heard that before, and I grant that there's some validity to it, but that's not all that's going on here. 90% of the time, torture isn't even relevant to the question the what-if is designed to answer.

The use of torture in these hypotheticals generally seems to have less to do with ANALYZING cognitive algorithms, and more to do with "getting tough" on cognitive algorithms. Grinding an axe or just wallowing in self-destructive paranoia.

If the point you're making really only applies to torture, fine. But otherwise, it tends to read like "Maybe people will understand my point better if I CRANK MY RHETORIC UP TO 11 AND UNCOIL THE FIREHOSE AND HALHLTRRLGEBFBLE"

There's a number of things that make me not want to self-identify as a lesswrong user, and not bring up lesswrong with people who might otherwise be interested in it, and this is one of the big ones.

Replying toWhat bothers you about Less Wrong?

PlaidX15y

What bothers you about Less Wrong?

Creepily heavy reliance on torture-based what-if scenarios.

Nonsuperintelligent AI threat

PlaidX

15y

Something that I don't think I've seen discussed here is the threat posed by an AI which is smarter than we are when it comes to computer security without being generally intelligent.

Suppose there were a computer virus that could read code, to the extent of looking at the programs on a computer, seeing how they process input from the internet, and how they could be exploited to run arbitrary code. Historically, viruses have been annoyances. How much smarter would a virus have to be in order to be a threat on the scale of say, a planetary EMP burst?

Rationality vs. intelligence

PlaidX

15y

This site often speaks of rationality and intelligence as though they were the same thing, and that someone, by becoming more rational, becomes more intelligent for practical purposes.

Certainly it seems to me that this must be to some extent the case, but what is the exchange rate? If a person has an IQ of 100, and then they spend a year on lesswrong, reading all the sequences and taking the advice to heart, training their skills and identifying their biases and all that, at the end of it, presumably their raw IQ score is still 100, but if we measure how they do on correlated indicators regarding their lifestyle or something, should... (read more)

Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

PlaidX

16y

This is our monthly thread for collecting arbitrarily contrived scenarios in which somebody gets tortured for 3^^^^^3 years, or an infinite number of people experience an infinite amount of sorrow, or a baby gets eaten by a shark, etc. and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions. As everyone knows, this is the most rational and non-obnoxious way to think about incentives and disincentives.

Please post all infinite-torture scenarios separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
No more than 5 infinite-torture scenarios per person per monthly thread, please.

139

lessmeta

PlaidX

16y

The social bookmarking site metafilter has a sister site called metatalk, which works the same way but is devoted entirely to talking about metafilter itself. Arguments about arguments, discussions about discussions, proposals for changes in site architecture, etc.

Arguments about arguments are often less productive than the arguments they are about, but they CAN be quite productive, and there's certainly a place for them. The only thing wrong with them is when they obstruct the discussion that spawned them, and so the idea of splitting off metatalk into its own site is really quite a clever one.

Lesswrong's problem is a peculiar one. It is ENTIRELY devoted to meta-arguments, to the extent that people... (read more)

Lore Sjöberg's Life-Hacking FAQK

PlaidX

16y

Lore Sjöberg's Life-hacking FAQK

Pretty self-explanatory. Also available as a podcast.

Applying Double Standards to ‘‘Divisive’’ Ideas

PlaidX

16y

This is a commentary by Linda Gottfredson on a paper by Hunt and Carlson about a paper by Richard Nisbett regarding studies done by Arthur Jensen. It's ultimately about race and intelligence, but it seemed meta enough to link to here.

Warning: PDF

Applying Double Standards to ‘‘Divisive’’ Ideas

The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend

PlaidX

16y

One day, you and the presumptuous philosopher are walking along, arguing about the size of the universe, when suddenly Omega jumps out from behind a bush and knocks you both out with a crowbar. While you're unconscious, she builds two hotels, one with a million rooms, and one with just one room. Then she makes a million copies of both of you, sticks them all in rooms, and destroys the originals.

You wake up in a hotel room, in bed with the presumptuous philosopher, with a note on the table from Omega, explaining what she's done.

"Which hotel are we in, I wonder?" you ask.

"The big one, obviously" says the presumptuous philosopher. "Because of... (read more)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

Nonsuperintelligent AI threat

Rationality vs. intelligence

lessmeta

PlaidX

PlaidX

Nonsuperintelligent AI threat

Rationality vs. intelligence

Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

lessmeta

Lore Sjöberg's Life-Hacking FAQK

Applying Double Standards to ‘‘Divisive’’ Ideas

The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend

PlaidX

Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

Nonsuperintelligent AI threat

Rationality vs. intelligence

lessmeta

PlaidX

PlaidX

Nonsuperintelligent AI threat

Rationality vs. intelligence

Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

lessmeta

Lore Sjöberg's Life-Hacking FAQK

Applying Double Standards to ‘‘Divisive’’ Ideas

The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend