All of ToasterLightning's Comments + Replies

I find it rather strange to list "Audere Snyder" as his name on the wiki—"Audere" is an online username rather than something he was changing his name to, he still went by Max/Maximilian to his close friends (Source: i am his ex). It'd be kind of like listing my name as "ToasterLightning Nightingale", either "Audere" or "Maximilian Snyder" would work instead.

2Viliam
What about using the name that is on the legal documents first, then all other important names, separated by slashes. "Maximilian Snyder / Audere", "Jack LaSota / Ziz", etc. (With only the legal name hyperlinked.) Not everywhere, but at least in the main list of criminals & suspects. Also, it should be a list rather than a table. Now it seems like there is a distinction between the left and right columns of the names, which I believe wasn't the intention.

....I know someone named Chase Novinha? I don't think it's the same person, though.

Edit: Confirmed same person, slimepriestess has said they are "safe and accounted for," and are one of the cofounders of its alignment company.

Oh, I don't mean to derail it, I'm just saying that if I pull the lever and pull it back, I still pulled it, so Omega will make their choice based off of that.

Many of these are solveable via the strategy "pull the lever and then quickly pull it back"

2quetzal_rainbow
You failed to consider the trolley

Wow, I came here fully expecting this post to have been downvoted to oblivion, and then realized this was not reddit and the community would not collectively downvote your post as a joke

1notfnofn
I've had reddit redirect here for about almost a year now (with some slip ups here and there). It's been fantastic for my mental health.

Yeah, that's a good point. I certainly don't claim that Michael is to blame for her actions.

the girl in question has publicly declared some of the psychological techniques she uses on people in order to induce altered states to be downstream of michael

2ChristianKl
Michael Vassar has lots of different ideas and is someone who's willing to share his ideas in a relatively unfiltered way. Some of them are ideas for experiments that could be done.  Without knowing concrete facts of what happened (I only talked to Michael when he was in Berlin): Let's say, Michael suggest that doing a certain "psychological technique" might be a valuable experiment. Alice, did the experiment and it had outcome. Michael thinks it had a bad outcome. Alice, however think the outcome is great and continues doing the technique. If you conclude from that that Michael is bad, because he proposed an experiment that had a bad outcome, you are judging people who are experimenting with the unknown for their love of experimenting with the unknown. If you want to criticize Michael because he's to open to experimentation, do that more explicitly because then you need to actually argue the core of the issue. Michael is person who thinks that various Chesterton's fences are no reason to avoid experimentation.  Michael also is very open about talking to anyone even if the person might be "bad", so you might also criticize him for speaking with Olivia in the first place instead of kicking Olivia out from he conversations he had.  Given that Ziz was actually a student at CFAR, calling Ziz a CFARian and blaming CFAR for Ziz would make a lot more sense than blaming Michael for Olivia. Jessica suggests that Olivia was also trying to study from Anna Salomon, so probably Olivia was at CFAR at some point, so might also be called a CFARian.
3Slimepriestess
it's very easy to claim to be downstream of someone without them actually having much to do with them at all. this would be like me claiming that it was Eliezer's fault i stubbed my toe because the house i live in is downstream of reading the sequences. i agree that the woman in question claims to be a "vassarite", but it reads more like cargo culting than anything else.
1AprilSR
Yeah, I don't think it's correct to call it baseless per se, and I continue to have a lot of questions about the history of the rationality community which haven't really been addressed publicly, but I would very much not say that there's good reason to like, directly blame Michael for anything recent!

Yeah I was initially going to dispute it and then I thought some more and realized it was probably correct.

...iirc you had LSD like a week or so before you had the cannabis? And you took the cannabis while fairly sleep deprived. And I definitely started getting worried about your mental state after the LSD, so even if you consider the psychotic break as starting a few days after taking cannabis I definitely think the psychedelics were a compounding factor.

1AprilSR
That's plausible. It was like a week and a half. Edit: I do think the LSD was a contributing factor, but it's hard to separate effects of the drug from effects of the LSD making it easier for me to question ontological assumptions.

Sapph is referring to @AprilSR (I'm involved in the situation, she's also commented down below confirming it to be her)

....is the second person me? You can say it is if it's me, I don't think it's an inaccurate description. Edit: thought about it a bit more and yeah it is probably me

7sapphire
Yes you are the second person observed to have a schizophrenic event. In your case I doubt long lasting.

I'm familiar with the events that Sapph refers to, and for the most part agree with the general description of them as well as the recommendations. If you don't want to become psychotic, don't do the things that are famously associated with becoming psychotic.

4Viliam
More generally, consider the outside view. In theory, it is possible that everyone else is an idiot and was doing X wrong, but you are a smart person with IQ over 9000, and you also did a lot of research on internet, therefore nothing bad will happen to you. But it is also possible that you are uninformed and overconfident, you have only read the sources that confirm your point of view and dismissed the ones that don't, and you will end up as yet another example why people should avoid X. I am not saying that the latter option is necessarily the right one, but you should spend at least 5 minutes seriously imagining the possibility that it is.

Well, perhaps, but due to global commerce I can just go to the store and buy a bar of soap much more easily.

And perhaps you are fond of that particular type of soap and it's a bit harder to find the specific type that you're looking for but it's still not really worth saving the old bathwater for it, instead of just looking for that specific type of soap?

I'm just working my way through these problems in sequence.

1 is not particularly difficult to solve

Let's imagine the base case: B-G. Obviously, there is 1 biochromatic edge. Adding either B or G to a biochromatic edge will turn it into B-B-G or B-G-G respectively, which means there is still 1 bichromatic edge.
If you add B to a B-B or G to a G-G it turns into B-B-B or G-G-G, which does not add or destroy any bichromatic edges.
The final case is adding G to B-B or B to G-G, which makes either B-G-B or G-B-G, adding two bichromatic edges. Since adding two to a

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I’m guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that my driver’s license would say “Mark Xu” on it.

Personally, I wouldn't do it at 20:1 odds even if you said your name was "John Smith," purely because of how many people go by a name different than the one on their driver's license.

"If it is true that you would really do anything to see them perform, that implies that the performance is worth at least +100 utility to you, to make up for the loss of missing the essay. Therefore, I will allow you to turn it in, but only for 75% credit, disincentivizing lying about your true preferences but still preserving most of the mutual utility."

Answer by ToasterLightning20

I don't think you have to necessarily worry about them degrading your own performance (essentially, the mind's "consciousness" works in a sort of all or nothing way unless you explicitly train it to parallel process), so any difference is likely to be negligible to the point of being unnoticeable.

In terms of thinking rationally... well Tulpas can help point out your mistakes, if you don't notice them, but they also use the same hardware as you, so, for example, if you have ADHD, your tulpa will also have ADHD.

An out-of-control dark rationalist tulpa that f

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The comments offering logical reasons to let the AI out really just makes me think that maybe keeping the AI in a box in the first place is a bad idea since we're no longer starting from the assumption that letting the AI out is an unequivocally bad thing.

I mean, to be completely fair, you can't exactly phrase distracting you from your work as a good thing. Perhaps a less distracting lottery would be better?