All of SpaceFrank's Comments + Replies

When life gives you lemons, order miracle berries.

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Eliezer Yudkowsky Clinton Township wgah'nagl fhtagn

Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics_Institute)

Considering the ridiculous context of the rest of the conversation, (i.e. Dumbledore either pretending to be insane or actually letting some real insanity slip through) is it too far outside the realm of possibility for that comment to be a joke? It seemed like Dumbledore was going out of his way to screw with Harry in this chapter. Even if the machine actually does what he said it does, I could easily see the comment about "how much work it took to nail that down" being a joke Dumbledore told for his own amusement, knowing that Harry was too young to "get it".

I had to look it up, but I definitely agree. Especially considering how quickly the karma changes reversed after I edited in that footnote.

I wish I could upvote this post back into the positive.

(It seems pretty obvious to me that is a direct satire of the previous post by a similar username. What, no love for sarcasm?)

Such a great game. Seeing this makes me want to play it again, having discovered this site and done some actual reading on transhumanism and AI. It might change the choice I'd make at the end...

Of course, this goes even further than just proving the old saying about Deus Ex, considering you never even mentioned the title!

I know this is a serious necro-post, but I felt compelled.

Thanks! I hadn't read that article yet, but I became familiar with the concept when reading one of Eliezer Yudkowsky's papers on existential risk assessment. (Either this one or this one) I did have a kind of "Oh Shit" moment when the context of the article hit me.

Now that I think about it, "natural selection" seems more appropriate.

Exactly. I also suspect that logical overconfidence, i.e. knowing a little bit about bias and thinking it no longer affects you, is magnified with higher intelligence.

I can't help but remember that saying about great power and great responsibility.

Hello, Less Wrong.

Like some others, I eventually found this site after being directed by fellow nerds to HPMOR. I've been working haphazardly through the Sequences (getting neck-deep in cognitive science and philosophy before even getting past the preliminaries for quantum physics, and loving every bit of it).

I can't point to a clear "aha!" moment when I decided to pursue the LW definition of rationality. I always remember being highly intelligent and interested in Science, but it's hard for me to model how my brain actually processed information... (read more)

(I'm neither a theology scholar nor an anthropologist, so I may lack some important background on this.)

I agree that the idea of early church leaders isolating members in order to explicitly limit the introduction of new ideas sounds far-fetched. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would only be said after the fact, by a historian looking for meaning in the details. But attributing those member-isolating rules to something like "preserving group identity" seems like the same thing.

I find myself wondering if something like the anthropic princi... (read more)