All of rabidchicken's Comments + Replies

I have wished for a nearby LW group for a while and will be attending U of Waterloo in January. I will nearly certainly be there.

Good link, typo in title, have a good day, thank you for posting on Lesswrong.

Does it flow, or simulate a flow?

I think I should be less secretive and try to let other people know about problems before coming up with a solution on my own more often. All of my attempts to come up with a specific scenario to mention in this post already violate the tendency which I am trying to eliminate. It is a vicious cycle. I suspect this post may have been pointless...

Excellent post, I will keep these ideas in mind in future arguments.

I make a habit of muttering incoherently and then scornfully rejecting my own opinions to maximize reasonable creativity. Of course, this is a bad course of action in public, but very helpful when I need to make a game engine in two days.

I agree that expressing outrage is normally a bad idea, it generally does not convince the other person and negatively effects my ability to be rational.

Did they ever encourage it?

Thank you for the summary, I have considered looking for information on SIAI's costs before, so presenting it in a readable way is helpful.

I understand both of their arguments, but the emotions involved are incomprehensible...

I suppose I would have said nearly the same thing in Moly's position, and would not have predicted that I was being offensive. It would be helpful to be able to empathize with peoples emotions, but I am apparently horrible at it.

I don't understand, you cannot talk about whether a rock is moral?

Given that a rock appears to have no way to recieve input from the universe, create a plan to satisfy its goals, and act, I would consider a rock morally neutral - In the same way that I consider someone to be morally neutral when they fail to prevent a car from being stolen while they are in a coma in another country.

I would be interested in seeing a more fleshed out version if at all possible.

I lack the priors to understand this. But if you explained the joke, it would make it less funny for people who would actually understand it already... Maximizing the comedic potential of a sentence is too difficult.

I approve of Delete = Disable account, for the reasons you outlined.

When I saw the names of the articles and that you had posted twice in a row, I thought you were delibrately invoking your advice to try quantity over quality. It is rather amusing that you ended up doing this accidentally.

That was harsh...

I was in exactly the same situation when I was 15 before I was diagnosed with asthma, probably worse since there were a few days where I could not even walk up stairs because my lungs would seize up instantly. My doctor told me to try exercising more in spite of me having a low BMI, being unusually active, and having asthma, since the drugs which are available for people with asthma mainly treat the symptoms. If you want to avoid needing them in the first place, increasing your stamina is the only fix.

Of course, before you can exercise at ... (read more)

I guess it is rather bizarre. But most of the unusual conventions on IRC and other chat services are in order to make it more like a face to face conversation. They generally either allow you to narrate yourself from a third person perspective, or speed up common interactions that take much longer to type than they do in real life.

Although "nodnod" seems unusually nonsensical, since it takes longer to type than "yes". I cannot say I have seen that used before.

Nothing very significant, but all of the additional rules I found seemed hard to justify. Just forcing myself to become comfortable asking for help from strangers seems harmless and should be beneficial however. I have already been doing something similar for a few weeks actually.

You can know you are unjustly negative without being able to change your disposition. Why do you think people choose to take counselling and antidepressants?

I know I am cynical

Thats an interesting definition of philosophy, but I think philosophy does far more than that.

I worked the same way until I started doing correspondence courses. With nobody to hassle me, no classes to hand stuff in at, and no peers I had to learn to motivate myself and follow a schedule fast.

I am motivated well by deadlines as well, but its amazing how much easier schoolwork is when you actually choose when to do it. instead of cramming in a sleep deprived state for the night before, you can break it up into easier pieces when you are most alert. Hopefully these newfound skills will carry over when I start university...

Intelligence is notoriously hard to quantify, and I am slightly insulted by your generalization. Perhaps I know very unusual sixteen year olds, but I think maturity would be a better word to use in this context.

Based on what little research I did, there seems to be a lot of variation in how iffy it looks. Some models of rejection therapy would probably help me, others look pointless or counter productive. So essentially... good thing they are giving a free test for their program.

I took an interesting computer science course in high school... Grade 11 was exactly what you would expect from a comp-sci course, and by the end of it all of us were fairly fluent in two languages, but the second year was quite different. In a group of about five students, we were given problems to solve (like how to delete a node from a binary tree and rebalance it), had to develop an algorithm, and then learn how to implement it in a language none of us had used before. Our teacher knew that we could all follow instructions and learn from him fairly wel... (read more)

Does karma even matter once you have enough to not get silenced instantly? It is more a measure of experience with the site than intelligence. I cannot think of a short series of comments i could make that would drain all of my karma at this point, which would not get me banned even if I had several thousand.

Test the limits of their free travel offer ;p

It is intended to automatically filter trolls, but being locked out after one bad comment does seem harsh. I would not worry about managing your karma now though... It would take a significant series of widely detested posts for you to be stuck making a new account.

I deliberately condition myself to not be afraid of losing karma. Trying to strike a balance between accepting other peoples opinions and listening to my own judgement is difficult. But when too many people delete anything which is unpopular, a sites content becomes monolithic.

Although since it was an easy to misinterpret joke, my karma policies may be irrelevant. Feel free to downvote.

Who knows... If they do not get enough responses I expect them to change the length. They probably just wrote down everything they ideally would like to have time to teach, and figured out how long they thought it would take at a breakneck pace,

Yeah, I really should be saving up over the summer as well. But then again... It will probably only get more difficult to go in the future. They might start charging, I will probably have a full time job, and an apartment to deal with.

Sounds good to me... I cannot say that I have ever been involved in something this long that could take up nearly all of my time, but I tend to do well under pressure.

Intensive training often involves doing things you would not normally make yourself do, but if I go and they ask me to do anything truly insane or unethical, I would opt out whether it was tolerated or not. That said, I trust most people here enough that I am extremely doubtful this will be necessary.

Though the privacy concern was valid, the post was really interesting and made me think more carefully about possible negative impacts of rationality.

If you ever feel you can write something similar that avoids the concerns people had, that would be great.

Covering room, board, and airfare? That is very generous. I will check my schedule for the summer, this sounds like it could be interesting.

Also, I stand to gain enough from this that I will be applying anyway, but how selective are you planning to be? I guess this is still a work in progress, but if there are any age restrictions, limits on how many people can attend, or application costs I would like to know.

I would not be worried about people looking for instructions on how to murder someone nearly as much as I would be worried about officials who could find it.

Given our lack of experience or research, I do not think we could give very useful pointers. (I hope...)

Unless, you REALLY want to.

Potentially unusual anecdotal evidence; I have been groped three times in as many years by complete strangers (who were females of about my age). It wasn't a big deal to me, and I imagine that anyone who knew about it would just find it hilarious. Sexual harassment of men is probably heavily underreported, so people tend to forget it exists.

The media just reflects popular assumptions, so if you encourage people to reconsider their beliefs about how each gender behaves you might be able to equalize objectification.

Because I am on the utilitarian ethics bandwagon?

I think that (3^^^3(change in happiness when watching kitten 1 s)) > (1(average change in happiness in awesome life 3.15*10^9 s))

(assuming subject lives 100 years = 3.15 10^9 seconds). In fact, I think that change in happiness from seeing a kitten /second is probably comparable to the average change in happiness of a sublime life /second, so I could take the video even for around 3.1510^9 viewers. (But would be tempted to do more research first) With 3^^^3 viewers, its not much of a decision.

Perhaps I have been studying AI to much, but I do not really think of myself or anyone else as an observer at all. Sure I have an unusual capacity to react to my environment, but the entire process can be reduced down to a large number of electrical signals interacting in predictable ways. What I find strange is NOT thinking of people as objects. Does this have any effect on how I treat women? I don't think so... except perhaps an unusual ability to ignore people of both genders completely.

I choose the youtube video of a cat jumping into a box.

I lurked on lesswrong for about a year, because I used to be worried about losing karma and looking like an idiot. I guess I got used to it after enough terrific failures. If you want to appear consistently intelligent, this is a very hard site to do it on (even after you do the research)

I would not describe myself as curious, but my brain automatically creates a few absurd theories per day, and I go nuts if I don't test them all. (which generally means I spend half an hour on wikipedia, and then repeat the process tomorrow with the new data)

I wish you luck trying to spread rationality, you will probably need it.

Also, if you do make a program for high school students then depending on the location I may be interested in attending. (Technically not a high school student, but I am 17) And I can help if you want feedback on whatever ideas you have.

Comment deleted... What on earth did I just miss?

It is also worth note that you can often get nice clothes for about the same price as less fashionable clothing, if you look in second hand stores. (although this may require more time shopping, and be dependant on where you live)

I would be interested to see these...are they still on the site?

I will try not to make this particular mistake in the future, but I still seem to be horrible at choosing when to just say nothing...

Good advice, I tend to model how other people deal with negative emotions extremely poorly.

My reply was more ill considered, I will restrain myself in the future if I feel tempted to say anything like this.