You write stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences which exhibit abnormal disclosure of self while still actually making sense (if one can be bothered parsing them). Not only do you share this trait with Will, the themes and the phrasing are the same. You have a deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought, yet you also advocate Christian metaphysics and monogamy. Again, that’s Will.
That’s not yet “extremely obvious”, but it should certainly raise suspicions. I expect that a very strong case could be made by detailed textual comparison.
I think if Will knew how to write this non-abstractly, he would have a valuable skill he does not presently possess, and he would use that skill more often.
By the time reflective and wannabe-moral people are done tying themselves up in knots, what they usually communicate is nothing; or, if they do communicate, you can hardly tell them apart from the people who truly can’t.
What I’m saying is that most people who write a Less Wrong comment aren’t totally stressing out about all the tradeoffs that inevitably have to be made in order to say anything at all. There’s a famous quote whose gist is ‘I apologize that this letter is so long, but I didn’t have very much time to write it’. The audience has some large and unknown set of constraints on what they’re willing to glance at, read, take seriously, and so on, and the writer has to put a lot of work into meeting those constraints as effectively as possible. Some tradeoffs are easy to make: yes, a long paragraph is a self-contained stucture, but that’s less important than readibility. Others are a little harder: do I give a drawn-out concrete example of my point, or would that egregiously inflate the length of my comment?
There are also the author’s internal constraints re what they feel they need to say, what they’re willing to say, what they’re willing to say without thinking carefully about whether or not it’s a good idea to say, how much effort they can put into rewriting sentences or linking to relevant papers while their heart’s pumping as if the house is burning down, vague fears of vague consequences, and so on and so forth for as long as the author’s neuroticism or sense of morality allows.
People who are abnormally reflective soon run into meta-level constraints: what does it say about me that I stress out this much at the prospect of being discredited? By meeting these constraints am I supporting the proliferation of a norm that isn’t as good as it would be if I met some other, more psychologically feasible set of constraints? Obviously the pragmatic thing to do is to “just go with it”, but “just going with it” seems to have led to horrifying consequences in the past; why do I expect it to go differently this time?
In the end the author is bound to become self-defeating, dynamically inconsistent. They’ll like as not end up loathing their audience for inadvertently but non-apologetically putting them in such a stressful situation, then loathing themselves for loathing their audience when obviously it’s not the audience’s fault. The end result is a stressful situation where the audience wants to tell the author to do something very obvious, like not stress out about meeting all the constraints they think are important. Unfortunately if you’ve already tied yourself up in knots you don’t generally have a hand available with which to untie them.
ETA: On the positive side they’ll also build a mega-meta-FAI just to escape all these ridiculous double binds. “Ha ha ha, take that, audience! I gave you everything you wanted! Can’t complain now!”
And yet, your g-grandparent comment, about which EY was asking, was brief… which suggests that the process you describe here isn’t always dominant.
Although when asked a question about it, instead of either choosing or refusing to answer the question, you chose to back all the way up and articulate the constraints that underlie the comment.
Hm? I thought I’d answered the question. I.e. I rewrote my original comment roughly the way I’d expect AK to write it, except with my personal concerns about justification and such, which is what Eliezer had asked me to do, ’cuz he wanted more information about whether or not I was AK, so that he could make money off Mitchell Porter. I’m reasonably confident I thwarted his evil plans in that he still doesn’t know to what extent I actually cooperated with him. Eliezer probably knows I’d rather my friends make money off of Mitchell Porter, not Eliezer.
You know, in some ways, that does sound like me, and in some ways it really still doesn’t. Let me first of all congratulate you on being able to alter your style so much. I envy that skill.
What I’m saying is that most people who write a Less Wrong comment aren’t totally stressing out about all the tradeoffs that inevitably have to be made in order to say anything at all.
Your use of “totally” is not the same as my use of “totally”; I think it sounds stupid (personal preference), so if I said it, I would be likely to backspace and write something else. Other than that, I might say something similar.
There’s a famous quote whose gist is ‘I apologize that this letter is so long, but I didn’t have very much time to write it’.
I would have said ” that goes something like” instead of “whose gist is”, but that’s the sort of concept I might well have communicated in roughly the manner I would have communicated it.
The audience has some large and unknown set of constraints on what they’re willing to glance at, read, take seriously, and so on, and the writer has to put a lot of work into meeting those constraints as effectively as possible. Some tradeoffs are easy to make: yes, a long paragraph is a self-contained stucture, but that’s less important than readibility. Others are a little harder: do I give a drawn-out concrete example of my point, or would that egregiously inflate the length of my comment?
An interesting point, and MUCH easier to understand than your original comment in your own style. This conveys the information more clearly.
There are also the author’s internal constraints re what they feel they need to say, what they’re willing to say, what they’re willing to say without thinking carefully about whether or not it’s a good idea to say, how much effort they can put into rewriting sentences or linking to relevant papers while their heart’s pumping as if the house is burning down, vague fears of vague consequences, and so on and so forth for as long as the author’s neuroticism or sense of morality allows.
This has become a run-on sentence. It started like something I would say, but by the end, the sentence is too run-on to be my style. I also don’t use the word “neuroticism”. It’s funny, but I just don’t. I also try to avoid the word “nostrils” for no good reason. In fact, I’m disturbed by having said it as an example of another word I don’t use.
However, this is a LOT closer to my style than your normal writing is. I’m impressed. You’re also much more coherent and interesting this way.
People who are abnormally reflective soon run into meta-level constraints:
I would probably say “exceptionally” or something else other than “abnormally”. I don’t avoid it like “nostrils” or just fail to think of it like “neuroticism”, but I don’t really use that word much. Sometimes I do, but not very often.
what does it say about me that I stress out this much at the prospect of being discredited?
Huh, that’s an interesting thought.
By meeting these constraints am I supporting the proliferation of a norm that isn’t as good as it would be if I met some other, more psychologically feasible set of constraints?
Certainly something I’ve considered. Sometimes in writing or speech, but also in other areas of my life.
Obviously the pragmatic thing to do is to “just go with it”, but “just going with it” seems to have led to horrifying consequences in the past; why do I expect it to go differently this time?
I might have said this, except that I wouldn’t have said the first part because I don’t consider that obvious (or even necessarily true), and I would probably have said “horrific” rather than “horrifying”. I might even have said “bad” rather than either.
In the end the author is bound to become self-defeating,
I would probably have said that “many authors become self-defeating” instead of phrasing it this way.
dynamically inconsistent
Two words I’ve never strung together in my life. This is pure Will. You’re good, but not quite perfect at impersonating me.
They’ll like as not end up loathing their audience for inadvertently but non-apologetically putting them in such a stressful situation, then loathing themselves for loathing their audience when obviously it’s not the audience’s fault.
Huh, interesting. Not quite what I might have said.
The end result is a stressful situation where the audience wants to tell the author to do something very obvious, like not stress out about meeting all the constraints they think are important.
...Why don’t they? Seriously, I dunno if people are usually aware of how uncomfortable they make others.
Unfortunately if you’ve already tied yourself up in knots you don’t generally have a hand available with which to untie them.
I’m afraid I don’t understand.
ETA: On the positive side they’ll also build a mega-meta-FAI just to escape all these ridiculous double binds. “Ha ha ha, take that, audience! I gave you everything you wanted! Can’t complain now!”
And I wouldn’t have said this because I don’t understand it.
Thank you, that was interesting. I should note that I wasn’t honestly trying to sound like you; there was a thousand bucks on the table so I went with some misdirection to make things more interesting. Hence “dynamically inconsistent” and “totally” and so on. I don’t think it had much effect on the bet though.
Yes. Haven’t tried SSRIs yet. Really I just need a regular meditation practice, but there’s a chicken and egg problem of course. Or a prefrontal cortex and prefrontal cortex exercise problem. The solution is obviously “USE MOAR WILLPOWER” but I always forget that or something. Lately I’ve been thinking about simply not sinning, it’s way easier for me to not do things than do things. This tends to have lasting effects and unintended consequences of the sort that have gotten me this far, so I should keep doing it, right? More problems more meta.
IME, more willpower works really poorly as a solution to pretty much anything, for much the same reason that flying works really poorly as a way of getting to my roof. I mean, I suspect that if I could fly, getting to my roof would be very easy, but I can’t fly.
I also find that regular physical exercise and adequate sleep do more to manage my anxiety in the long term (that is, on a scale of months) than anything else I’ve tried.
Have you tried yoga or tai chi as meditation practices? They may be physically complex/challenging enough to distract you (some of the time) from verbally-driven distraction.
I suspect that “not sinning” isn’t simple. How would you define sinning?
Verbally-driven distraction isn’t much of an issue, it’s mostly just getting to the zafu. Once there then even 5 minutes of meditation is enough to calm me down for 30 minutes, which is a pretty big deal. I’m out of practice; I’m confident I can get back into the groove, but first I have actually make it to the zafu more than once every week or two. I think I want to stay with something that I already identify with really powerful positive experiences, i.e. jhana meditation. I may try contemplative prayer at some point for empiricism’s sake.
Re sinning… now that I think about it I’m not sure that I could do much less than I already do. I read a lot and think a lot, and reflectively endorse doing so, mostly. I’m currently writing a Less Wrong comment which is probably a sin, ‘cuz there’s lots of heathens ’round these parts among other reasons. Huh, I guess I’d never thought about demons influencing norms of discourse on a community website before, even though that’s one of the more obvious things to do. Anyway, yah, the positive sins are sorta simplistically killed off in their most obvious forms, except pride I suppose, while the negative ones are endless.
I do meditate at home! “Zafu” means “cushion”. Yeah, I have trouble remembering to walk 10 feet to sit down in a comfortable position on a comfortable cusion instead of being stressed about stuff all day. Brains...
Not sure what the question mark is for. Heathens are bad, it’s probably bad to hang out with them, unless you’re a wannabe saint and are trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly. Sin is all about contamination, you know? Hence baptism and stuff. Brains...
trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly.
You are not doing this in any way, shape, or form, unless I missed some post-length or sequence-length argument of yours. (And I don’t mean a “hint” as to what you might believe.) If you have something to say on the topic, you clearly can’t or won’t say it in a comment.
I have to tentatively classify your “trying” as broken signaling (though I notice some confusion on my part). If you were telling the truth about your usual mental state, and not deliberately misleading the reader in some odd way, you’ve likely been trying to signal that you need help.
Sorry, wait, maybe there’s some confusion? Did you interpret me saying “convert” as meaning “convert them to Christianity”? ’Cuz what I meant was convert people to the side of reason more generally, e.g. by occasionally posting totally-non-trolling comments about decision theory and stuff. I’m not a Christian. Or am I misinterpreting you?
I’m not at all trying to signal that I need help, if I seem to be signaling that then it’s an accidental byproduct of some other agenda which is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MANLYYYY than crying for help.
I’m not at all trying to signal that I need help, if I seem to be signaling that then it’s an accidental byproduct of some other agenda which is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MANLYYYY than crying for help.
Love the attitude. And for what it’s worth I didn’t infer any signalling of need for help.
Quick response: I saw that you don’t classify your views as Christianity. I do think you classify them as some form of theism, but I took the word “convert” to mean ‘persuade people of whatever the frak you want to say.’
Sorry for the misunderstanding about where you meditate—I’m all too familiar with distraction and habit interfering with valuable self-maintenance.
As for heathens, you’re from a background which is very different from mine. My upbringing was Jewish, but not religiously intense. My family lived in a majority Christian neighborhood.
I suppose it would have been possible to avoid non-Jews, but the social cost would have been very high, and in any case, it was just never considered as an option. To the best of my knowledge, I wasn’t around anyone who saw religious self-segregation as a value. At all. The subject never came up.
I hope I’m not straying into other-optimizing, but I feel compelled to point out that there’s more than one way of being Christian, and not all of them include avoiding socializing with non-Christians.
Ah, I’m not a Christian, and it’s not non-Christians that bother me so much as people who think they know something about how the world works despite, um, not actually knowing much of anything. Inadvertent trolls. My hometown friends are agnostic with one or two exceptions (a close friend of mine is a Catholic, she makes me so proud), my SingInst-related friends are mostly monotheists these days whether they’d admit to it or not I guess but definitely not Christians. I don’t think of for example you as a heathen; there are a lot of intelligent and thoughtful people on this site. I vaguely suspect that they’d fit in better in an intellectual Catholic monastic order, e.g. the Dominicans, but alas it’s hard to say. I’m really lucky to know a handful of thoughtful SingInst-related folk, otherwise I’d probably actually join the Dominicans just to have a somewhat sane peer group. Maybe. My expectations are probably way too high. I might try to convince the Roman Catholic Church to take FAI seriously soon; I actually expect that this will work. They’re so freakin’ reasonable, it’s amazing. Anyway I’m not sure but my point might be that I’m just trying to stay away from people with bad epistemic habits for fear of them contaminating me, like a fundamentalist Christian trying to keep his high epistemic standards amidst a bunch of lions and/or atheists. Better to just stay away from them for the most part. Except hanging out with lions is pretty awesome and saint-worthy whereas hanging out with atheists is just kinda annoying.
Because I’m sinful? And not all of them are heathens, I’m just prone to exaggeration. I think this new AspiringKnitter person is cool, for example; likelihood-ratio-she apparently can supernaturally tell good from bad, which might make my FAI project like a billion times easier, God willing. NancyLebovitz is cool. cousin it is cool. cousin it I can interact with on Facebook but not all of the cool LW people. People talk about me here, I feel compelled to say something for some reason, maybe ’cuz I feel guilty that they’re talking about me and might not realize that I realize that.
Please don’t consider this patronizing but… the writing style of this comment is really cute.
I think you broke whatever part of my brain evaluates people’s signalling. It just gave up and decided your writing is really cute. I really have no idea what impression to form of you; the experience was so unusual that I felt I had to comment.
Thanks to your priming now I can’t see “AspiringKnitter” without mentally replacing it with “AspiringKittens” and a mental image of a Less Wrong meetup of kittens who sincerely want to have better epistemic practices. Way to make the world a better place.
I think I only ever made one argument for Christianity? It was hilarious, everyone was all like WTF!??! and I was like TROLOLOLOL. I wonder if Catholics know that trolling is good, I hear that Zen folk do. Anyway it was naturally a soteriological argument which I intended to be identical to the standard “moral transformation” argument which for naturalists (metaphysiskeptics?) is the easiest of the theories to swallow. If I was expounding my actual thoughts on the matter they would be significantly more sophisticated and subtle and would involve this really interesting part where I talk about “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and how Jesus is basically like Colin Mochrie specifically during the ‘make stupid noises then we make fun of you for sucking but that redeems the stupid noises’ part. I’m talking about something brilliant that doesn’t exist I’m like Borges LOL!
Local coherence is the hobgoblin of miniscule minds; global coherence is next to godliness.
(ETA: In case anyone can’t tell, I just discovered Dinosaur Comics and, naturally, read through half the archives in one sitting.)
Downvoted, by the way. I want to signal my distaste for being confused for you. Are you using some form of mind-altering substance or are you normally like this? I think you need to take a few steps back. And breathe. And then study how to communicate more clearly, because I think either you’re having trouble communicating or I’m having trouble understanding you.
It would probably require the community stopping feeding the ugly little lump.
Also,
“Mood?” Halleck’s voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield’s filtering. “What has mood to do with it? You downvote when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for downvoting.”
It would probably require the community stopping feeding the ugly little lump.
We don’t approve of that kind of language used against anyone considered to be of our in-group, no matter how weird they might act. Please delete this.
That is, I would expect a comment of which the Hivemind strongly disapproves to accumulate a negative score over a month-plus.
That’s what I’d expect, as well, though I wish it weren’t so. I usually try to make the effort to upvote or downvote comments based on how informative, well-written, and well-reasoned they are, not whether I agree with them or not (with the exception of poll-style comments). Of course, just because I try to do this, doesn’t mean that I succeed...
For what it’s worth, I agree. Will’s kind of awesome, in a weird way. (Though my first reaction was “Wait, just our in-group? That’s groupist!”) But I’m not nearly as confident in my model of what others approve or disapprove of.
Are you using some form of mind-altering substance[...]?
On second thought maybe I am in a sense; my cortisol (?) levels have been ridiculously high ever since I learned that people have been talking about me here on LW. For about a day before that I’d been rather abnormally happy—my default state matches the negative symptoms of schizophrenia as you’d expect of a prodrome, and “happiness” as such is not an emotion I experience very much at all—which I think combined with the unexpected stressor caused my body to go into freak-out-completely mode, where it remains and probably will remain until I spend time with a close friend. Even so I don’t think this has had as much an effect on my writing style as reading a thousand Dinosaur Comics has.
my default state matches the negative symptoms of schizophrenia...”happiness” as such is not an emotion I experience very much at all
Have you sought professional help in the past? If not, do nothing else until you take some concrete step in that direction. This is an order from your decision theory.
Yes, including from the nice but not particularly insightful folk at UCSF, but negative symptoms generally don’t go away, ever. My brain is pretty messed up. Jhana meditation is wonderful and helps when I can get myself to do it. Technically if I did 60mg of Adderall and stayed up for about 30 to 45 hours then crashed, then repeated the process forever, I think that would overall increase my quality of life, but I’m not particularly confident of that, especially as the outside view says that’s a horrible idea. In my experience it ups the variance which is generally a good thing. Theoretically I could take a bunch of nitrous oxide near the end of the day so as to stay up for only about 24 hours as opposed to 35 before crashing; I’m not sure if I should be thinking “well hell, my dopaminergic system is totally screwed anyway” or “I should preserve what precious little automatic dopaminergic regulation I have left”. In general nobody knows nothin’ ‘bout nothin’, so my stopgap solution is moar meditation and moar meta.
Have you tried doing a detailed analysis of what would make it easier for you to meditate, and then experimenting to find whether you’ve found anything which would actually make it easier? Is keeping your cushion closer to where you usually are a possibility?
Not particularly detailed. It’s hard to do better than convincing my girlfriend to bug me about it a few times a day, which she’s getting better at. I think it’s a gradual process and I’m making progress. I’m sure Eliezer’s problems are quite similar, I suppose I could ask him what self-manipulation tactics he uses besides watching Courage Wolf YouTube videos.
Technically if I did 60mg of Adderall and stayed up for about 30 to 45 hours then crashed, then repeated the process forever, I think that would overall increase my quality of life
I suspect it would, at least in some ways. I’m mentally maybe not too dissimilar, and have done a few months of polyphasic sleeping, supported by caffeine (which I’m way too sensitive to). My mental abilities were pretty much crap, and damn was I agitated, but I was overall happier, baseline at least.
I do recommend 4+ days of sleep deprivation and desperately trying to figure out how an elevator in HL2 works as a short-term treatment for can’t-think-or-talk-but-bored, though.
Are you using some form of mind-altering substance or are you normally like this?
No and no. I’m only like this on Less Wrong. Trust me, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve thought about this very carefully and thoroughly for a long time. It’s not that I’m having trouble communicating; it’s that I’m not trying to. Not anything on the object level at least. The contents of my comments are more like expressions of complexes of emotions about complex signaling equilibria. In response you may feel very, very compelled to ask: “If you’re not trying to communicate as such then why are you expending your and my effort writing out diatribes?” Trust me, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve thought about this very carefully and thoroughly for a long time. “I’m going to downvote you anyway; I want to discourage flagrant violations of reasonable social norms of communication.” As expected! I’m clearly not optimizing for karma. And my past selves managed to stock up like 5,000 karma anyway so I have a lot to burn. I understand exactly why you’re downvoting, I have complex intuitions about the moral evidence implicit in your vote, and in recompense I’ll try harder to “be perfect”.
It’s not that I’m having trouble communicating; it’s that I’m not trying to.
So it is more just trolling.
The contents of my comments are more like expressions of complexes of emotions about complex signaling equilibria.
Which, from the various comments Will has made along these lines we can roughly translate to “via incoherent abstract rationalizations Will_Newsome has not only convinced himself that embracing the crazy while on lesswrong is a good idea but that doing so is in fact a moral virtue”. Unfortunately this kind of conviction is highly resistant to persuasion. He is Doing the Right Thing. And he is doing the right thing from within a complex framework wherein not doing the right thing has potentially drastic (quasi-religious-level) consequences. All we can really do is keep the insane subset of his posts voted below the visibility threshold and apply the “don’t feed the troll” policy while he is in that mode.
One of my Facebook activities is “finding bits of Chaitin’s omega”! I am an interesting and complex person! I am nice to my girflriend and she makes good food like fresh pizza! Sometimes I work on FAI stuff, I’m not the best at it but I’m surprisingly okay! I found a way to hack the arithmetical hierarchy using ambient control, it’s really neat, when I tell people about it they go like “WTF that is a really neat idea Will!”! If you’re nice to me maybe I’ll tell you someday? You never know, life is full or surprises allegedly!
This particular post of yours was, last night, at 4 upvotes. Do you have any hypothesis as to why that was the case? I am rather curious as to how that happened.
This particular post of yours was, last night, at 4 upvotes.
An instance of the more general phenomenon. If I recall the grandparent in particular was at about −3 then overnight (wedrifid time) went up to +5 and now seems to be back at −4. Will’s other comments from the time period all experienced a fluctuation of about the same degree. I infer that the fickle bulk upvotes and downvotes are from the same accounts and with somewhat less confidence that they are from the same user.
Do you have any hypothesis as to why that was the case?
It’s possible that the aesthetic only appeals to voters in certain parts of the globe.
Are you saying there is a whole country which supports internet trolls? Forget WMDs, the next war needs to be on the real threat to (the convenience of) civilization!
If I told you that God likes to troll people would that raise your opinion of trolls or lower your opinion of GOD DAMMIT I can’t take it anymore, why does English treat “or” as “xor”? We have “either x or y” for that. Now I have to say “and/or” which looks and is stupid. I refuse.
If I told you that God likes to troll people would that raise your opinion of trolls or lower your opinion of GOD
Which God? If it is Yahweh then that guy’s kind of a dick and I don’t value his opinion much at all. But he isn’t enough of a dick that I can reverse stupidity to arrive at anything useful either.
If I told you that God likes to troll people would that raise your opinion of trolls or lower your opinion of GOD
Neither, really. There are trickster figures all over the place in mythology; it’d take a fairly impressive argument to get me to believe that YHWH is one of them, but assuming such an argument I don’t think it’d imply many updates that “Coyote likes trolling people” (a nearly tautological statement) wouldn’t.
Hm? Even if YHWH existed and was really powerful, you still wouldn’t update much if you found out He likes to troll people? Or does your comment only apply if YHWH is a fiction?
What’s the hypothesis, that the Bible was subtly optimized to bring about Rick Astley and Rickrolling 1,500 or so years later? That… that does seem like His style… I mean obviously the Bible would be optimized to do all kinds of things, but that might be one of the subgoals, you never know.
Aw, wedrifid, that’s mean. :( I was asleep during that time. There’s probably some evidence of that on my Facebook page, i.e. no activity until about like 5 hours ago when I woke up. Also you should know that I’m not so incredibly lame/retarded as to artificially inflate a bunch of comments’ votes for basically no reason other than to provoke accusations that I had done so.
Is it? I didn’t think it was something that you would be offended by. Since the mass voting was up but then back down to where it started it isn’t a misdemeanor so much as it is peculiar and confusing. The only possibility that sprung to mind was that it could be an extension of of your empirical experimentation. You (said that you) actually made a bunch of the comments specifically so that they would get downvotes so that you could see how that influenced the voting behavior of others. Tinkering with said votes to satisfy a further indecipherable curiosity doesn’t seem like all that much of a stretch.
No, not really at all, I was just playing around. I don’t really get offended; I get the impression that you don’t either. And yeah upon reflection your hypothesis was reasonable, I probably only thought it was absurd ‘cuz I have insider knowledge. (ETA: Reasoning about counterfactual states of knowledge is really hard; not only practically speaking ’cuz brains aren’t meant to do that, but theoretically too, which is why people get really confused about anthropics. The latter point deserves a post I mean Facebook status update at some point.)
ETA: Reasoning about counterfactual states of knowledge is really hard; not only practically speaking ’cuz brains aren’t meant to do that, but theoretically too, which is why people get really confused about anthropics. The later point deserves a post I mean Facebook status update at some point.
That’s true. It’s tricky enough that Eliezer seems to get confused about it (or at least I thought he was confusing himself back when he wrote a post or two on the subject.)
I guess that sounds fun? Or why do you think it sounds fun? I think it’d only be worth if if the thread was really public, like when that Givewell dude made that one post about naive EU maximization and charity.
Why does that sound fun? I don’t know. I do know that when I am less-than-lucid, I am liable to lead individuals on conversational wild-goose chases. Within these conversations, I will use a variety of tactics to draw the other partner deeper into the conversation. No tactic in particular is fun, except in-so-far as it confuses the other person. Of course, when I am of sound mind, I do not find this game to be terribly fun.
I assume that you play similar games on Lesswrong. Purposely upvoting one’s own comments in an obvious way, followed by then denying that one did it, seems like a good way to confuse and frustrate other people. I know that if the thought occurred to me when I was less-than-lucid, and if I were the sort of person to play such games on Lesswrong, I probably would try the tactic out.
This seems more likely than you having a cadre of silent, but upvoting, admirers.
Both seem unlikely. I’m still confused. I think God likes trolling, maybe He did it? Not sure what mechanism He’d use though so it’s not a particularly good explanation.
Wedrifid said that too. I don’t have a model that predicts that. I think that most of the time my comments get upvoted to somewhere between 1 and 5 and then drop off as people who aren’t Less Wrong regulars read through; that the reverse would happen for a few hours at least is odd. It’s possible that the not-particularly-intelligent people who normally downvote my posts when they’re insightful also tend to upvote my posts when they’re “worthless”. ETA: thomblake’s hypothesis about regional differences in aesthetics seems more plausible than mine.
Erm. I can’t say that this raises my confidence much. I am reminded of the John McCarthy quote, “Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say.”
I feel responsible for the current wave of gibberish-spam from Will, and I regret that. If it were up to me, I would present him with an ultimatum—either he should promise not to sockpuppet here ever again, and he’d better make it convincing, or else every one of his accounts that can be identified will be banned. The corrosive effect of not knowing whether a new identity is a real person or just Will again, whether he’s “conducting experiments” by secretly mass-upvoting his own comments, etc., to my mind far outweighs the value of his comments.
I freely admit that I have one sockpuppet, who has made less than five comments and has over 20 karma. I do not think that having one sockpuppet for anonymity’s sake is against community norms.
ETA: I mean one sock puppet besides Mitchell Porter obviously.
I freely admit that I have one sockpuppet, who has made less than five comments and has over 20 karma.
I have a private message, dated 7 October, from an account with “less than five comments and [...] over 20 karma”, which begins, “I’m Will_Newsome, this is one of my alts.” (Emphasis mine.)
Will, I’m sorry it’s turning out like this. I am not perfect myself; anyone who cares may look up users “Bananarama” and “OperationPaperclip” and see my own lame anonymous humor. More to the point, I do actually believe that you want to “keep the stars from burning down”, and you’re not just a troll out to waste everyone’s time. The way I see it, because you have neither a job to tie you down, nor genuine intellectual peers and collaborators, it’s easy to end up seeking the way forward via elaborate crazy schemes, hatched and pursued in solitude; and I suspect that I got in the way of one such scheme, by asserting that AK is you.
I have those! E.g. I spend a lot of time with Steve, who is the most rational person in the entire universe, and I hang out with folk like Nick Tarleton and Michael Vassar and stuff. All those 3 people are way smarter than me, though arguably I get around some of that by way of playing to my strengths. The point is that I can play intellectualism with them, especially Steve who’s really good at understanding me. ETA: I also talk to the Black Belt Bayesian himself sorta often.
I suspect that I got in the way of one such scheme, by asserting that AK is you.
Ahhhh, okay, I see why you’d feel bad now I guess? Admittedly I wouldn’t have started commenting recently unless there’d been the confusion of me and AK, but AK isn’t me and my returning was just ’cuz I freaked out that people on LW were talking about me and I didn’t know why. Really I don’t think you’re to blame at all. And thinking AK is me does seem like a pretty reasonable hypothesis. It’s a false hypothesis but not obviously so.
I was only counting alts I’d used in the last few months. I remember having made two alts, but the first one, User:Arbitrarity, I gave up on (I think I’d forgotten about it) which is when I switched to the alt that I used to message you with (apparently I’d remembered it by then, though I wasn’t using it; I just like the word “arbitrarity”).
ETA: Also note that the one substantive comment I made from Arbitrarity has obvious reasons for being kept anonymous.
Anyway I can’t see any plausible reason why you should feel responsible for my current wave of gibberish-spam. [ETA: I mean except for the gibberish-spam I’m writing as a response to your comment; you should maybe feel responsible for that.] My autobiographical memory is admittedly pretty horrible but still.
I don’t follow; your confidence in the value of trolling or your confidence in the general worthwhileness of fairly reading or charitably interpreting my contributions to Less Wrong? ’Cuz I’d given up on the latter a long time ago, but I don’t want your poor impression of me to falsely color your views on the value of trolling.
Eliezer please ban Mitchell Porter, he’s one of my sock puppets and I feel really guilty about it. Yeah I know you’ve known the real Mitchell Porter for like a decade now but I hacked into his account or maybe I bought it from him or something and now it’s just another of my sock puppets, so you know, ban the hell out of him please? It’s only fair. Thx bro!
Thanks! Um do you know any easy way to provide a lot of evidence that I have only one sockpuppet? I’m mildly afraid that Eliezer is going to take Mitchell Porter’s heinous allegations seriously as part of a secret conspiracy is that redundant? fuck. anyway secret conspiracy to discredit me. I am the only one who should be allowed to discredit me!
Um do you know any easy way to provide a lot of evidence that I have only one sockpuppet?
Ask a moderator (or whatever it takes to have access to IP logs) to check to see if there are multiple suspicious accounts from your most common IP. That’s even better than asking you to raise your right hand if you are not lying. It at least shows that you have enough respect for the community to at least try to hide it when you are defecting! :P
I’m confused. What happened overnight that made people suddenly start appreciating Will’s advocacy of his own trolling here and the surrounding context? −5 to +7 is a big change and there have been similar changes to related comments. Either someone is sockpuppeting or people are actually starting to appreciate this crap. (I’m really hoping the former!)
Do you specifically appreciate the advocacy of trolling comments that are the context or are you just saying that you appreciate Will’s actual contributions such as they are?
I often appreciate his contributions as well. He is generally awful at constraining his abstract creativity so as to formulate constructive, concrete ideas but I can constrain abstract creativity just fine so his posts often provoke insights—the rest just bumps up against my nonsense filter. Reading him at his best is a bit like taking a small dose of a hallucinogenic to provide my brain with a dose of raw material to hack away at with logic.
Folks like you might wanna friend me on Facebook, I’m generally a lot more insightful and comprehensible there. I use Facebook like Steven Kaas uses Twitter. https://www.facebook.com/autothexis
Re your other comment re mechanisms for psi, I can’t muster up the energy to reply unfortunately. I’d have to be too careful about keeping levels of organization distinct, which is really easy to do in my head but really hard to write about. I might respond later.
Either someone is sockpuppeting or people are actually starting to appreciate this crap.
Did I say 5 years? Whoops...
Regarding sockpuppeting, that would suck. Can’t someone take a look at the database and figure out if many votes came from the same IP? Even better, when there are cases of weird voting behavior someone should check if the votes came from dummy accounts by looking at the karma score and recent submissions and see if they are close to zero karma and if their recent submissions are similar in style and diction etc.
I think you severely underestimate the value of trolling.
And I suspect you incorrectly classify some of your contributions, placing them into a different subcategory within “willful defiance of the community preference” than where they belong. Unfortunately this means that the subset of your thoughts that are creative, deep and informed rather than just incoherent and flawed tend to be wasted.
My creative, deep, and informed thoughts are a superset of my thoughts in general not a subset wedrifid. Also I do not have any incoherent or flawed thoughts as should be obvious from the previous sentence but I realize that category theory is a difficult subject for many people.
ETA: Okay good, it took awhile for this to get downvoted and I was starting to get even more worried about the local sanity waterline.
Okay good, it took awhile for this to get downvoted and I was starting to get even more worried about the local sanity waterline.
I suspect that the reason for this is that the comment tree of which your post was a branch of is hidden by default, as it originates from a comment with less than −3 karma.
Um, on another note, could you just be less mean? ‘Mean’ seems to be the most accurate descriptor for posting trash that people have to downvote to stay hidden, after all.
I suspect that the reason for this is that the comment tree of which your post was a branch of is hidden by default, as it originates from a comment with less than −3 karma.
No, I ran an actual test by posting messages in all caps to use as a control. Empiricism is so cool! (ETA: I also wrote a perfectly reasonable but mildly complex comment as a second control, which garnered the same number of downvotes as my insane set theory comment in about he same length of time.)
Re meanness, I will consider your request Dorikka. I will consider it.
The problem I have is that you claim to be “not optimising for karma”, but you appear to be “optimising for negative karma”. For example, the parent comment. There are two parts to it; acknowledgement of my comment, and a style that garners downvotes. The second part—why? It doesn’t fit into any other goal structure I can think of; it really only makes sense if you’re explicitly trying to get downvoted.
One of my optimization criteria is discreditable-ness which I guess is sort of like optimizing for downvotes insofar as my audience really cares about credibility. When it comes to motivational dynamics there tends to be a lot of crossing between meta-levels and it’s hard to tell what models are actually very good predictors. You can approximately model the comment you replied to by saying I was optimizing for downvotes, but that model wouldn’t remain accurate if e.g. suddenly Less Wrong suddenly started accepting 4chan-speak. That’s obviously unlikely but the point is that a surface-level model like that doesn’t much help you understand why I say what I say. Not that you should want to understand that.
And my past selves managed to stock up like 5,000 karma anyway so I have a lot to burn.
I’m confused. Have you sockpuppeted before?
The contents of my comments are more like expressions of complexes emotions about complex signaling equilibria.
I think I might understand what you’re saying here, in which case I see… sort of. I think I see what you’re doing but not why you’re doing it. Oh, well. Thank you for the explanation, that makes more sense.
Yes, barely, but I meant “past selves” in the usual Buddhist sense, i.e. I wrote some well-received posts under this account in the past. You might like the irrationality game, I made it for people like you.
On another note I’m sorry that my taste for discreditability has contaminated you by association; a year or so ago I foresaw that such an event would happen and deemed it a necessary tradeoff but naturally I still feel bad about it. I’m also not entirely sure I made the correct tradeoff; morality is hard. I wish I had synderesis.
“Deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought” can be explained by her having lurked a lot, and the rest of those features are not rare IME (even though they are under-represented on LW).
I put some text from recent comments by both AspiringKnitter and Will_Newsome into I write like; it suggested that AspiringKnitter writes “like” Arthur Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey and other books) while Will_Newsome writes “like” Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books). I’ve never read either, but it does look like a convenient textual comparison doesn’t trivially point to them being the same.
Also, if AspiringKnitter is a sockpuppet, it’s at least an interesting one.
When I put your first paragraph in that confabulator, it says “Vladimir Nabokov”. If I remove the words “Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books)” from the paragraph, it says “H.P. Lovecraft”. It doesn’t seem to cut possible texts into clusters well enough.
I just got H.P. Lovecraft, Dan Brown, and Edgar Allan Poe for three different comments. I am somewhat curious as to whether this page clusters better than random assignment.
ETA: @#%#! I just got Dan Brown again, this time for the last post I wrote. This site is insulting me!
Looks like you are right. Two of my (larger, to give the algorithm more to work with) texts from other sources gave Cory Doctorow (technical piece) and again Lovecraft (a Hacker News comment about drug dogs?)
You write stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences which exhibit abnormal disclosure of self while still actually making sense (if one can be bothered parsing them). Not only do you share this trait with Will, the themes and the phrasing are the same. You have a deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought, yet you also advocate Christian metaphysics and monogamy. Again, that’s Will.
That’s not yet “extremely obvious”, but it should certainly raise suspicions. I expect that a very strong case could be made by detailed textual comparison.
AspiringKnitter’s arguments for Christianity are quite different from Will’s, though.
(Also, at the risk of sounding harsh towards Will, she’s been considerably more coherent.)
I think if Will knew how to write this non-abstractly, he would have a valuable skill he does not presently possess, and he would use that skill more often.
By the time reflective and wannabe-moral people are done tying themselves up in knots, what they usually communicate is nothing; or, if they do communicate, you can hardly tell them apart from the people who truly can’t.
Point of curiosity: if you took the point above and rewrote it the way you think AspiringKnitter would say it, how would you say it?
(ETA: Something like this:)
What I’m saying is that most people who write a Less Wrong comment aren’t totally stressing out about all the tradeoffs that inevitably have to be made in order to say anything at all. There’s a famous quote whose gist is ‘I apologize that this letter is so long, but I didn’t have very much time to write it’. The audience has some large and unknown set of constraints on what they’re willing to glance at, read, take seriously, and so on, and the writer has to put a lot of work into meeting those constraints as effectively as possible. Some tradeoffs are easy to make: yes, a long paragraph is a self-contained stucture, but that’s less important than readibility. Others are a little harder: do I give a drawn-out concrete example of my point, or would that egregiously inflate the length of my comment?
There are also the author’s internal constraints re what they feel they need to say, what they’re willing to say, what they’re willing to say without thinking carefully about whether or not it’s a good idea to say, how much effort they can put into rewriting sentences or linking to relevant papers while their heart’s pumping as if the house is burning down, vague fears of vague consequences, and so on and so forth for as long as the author’s neuroticism or sense of morality allows.
People who are abnormally reflective soon run into meta-level constraints: what does it say about me that I stress out this much at the prospect of being discredited? By meeting these constraints am I supporting the proliferation of a norm that isn’t as good as it would be if I met some other, more psychologically feasible set of constraints? Obviously the pragmatic thing to do is to “just go with it”, but “just going with it” seems to have led to horrifying consequences in the past; why do I expect it to go differently this time?
In the end the author is bound to become self-defeating, dynamically inconsistent. They’ll like as not end up loathing their audience for inadvertently but non-apologetically putting them in such a stressful situation, then loathing themselves for loathing their audience when obviously it’s not the audience’s fault. The end result is a stressful situation where the audience wants to tell the author to do something very obvious, like not stress out about meeting all the constraints they think are important. Unfortunately if you’ve already tied yourself up in knots you don’t generally have a hand available with which to untie them.
ETA: On the positive side they’ll also build a mega-meta-FAI just to escape all these ridiculous double binds. “Ha ha ha, take that, audience! I gave you everything you wanted! Can’t complain now!”
And yet, your g-grandparent comment, about which EY was asking, was brief… which suggests that the process you describe here isn’t always dominant.
Although when asked a question about it, instead of either choosing or refusing to answer the question, you chose to back all the way up and articulate the constraints that underlie the comment.
Hm? I thought I’d answered the question. I.e. I rewrote my original comment roughly the way I’d expect AK to write it, except with my personal concerns about justification and such, which is what Eliezer had asked me to do, ’cuz he wanted more information about whether or not I was AK, so that he could make money off Mitchell Porter. I’m reasonably confident I thwarted his evil plans in that he still doesn’t know to what extent I actually cooperated with him. Eliezer probably knows I’d rather my friends make money off of Mitchell Porter, not Eliezer.
Oh! I completely missed that that was what you were doing… sorry. Thanks for clarifying.
You know, in some ways, that does sound like me, and in some ways it really still doesn’t. Let me first of all congratulate you on being able to alter your style so much. I envy that skill.
Your use of “totally” is not the same as my use of “totally”; I think it sounds stupid (personal preference), so if I said it, I would be likely to backspace and write something else. Other than that, I might say something similar.
I would have said ” that goes something like” instead of “whose gist is”, but that’s the sort of concept I might well have communicated in roughly the manner I would have communicated it.
An interesting point, and MUCH easier to understand than your original comment in your own style. This conveys the information more clearly.
This has become a run-on sentence. It started like something I would say, but by the end, the sentence is too run-on to be my style. I also don’t use the word “neuroticism”. It’s funny, but I just don’t. I also try to avoid the word “nostrils” for no good reason. In fact, I’m disturbed by having said it as an example of another word I don’t use.
However, this is a LOT closer to my style than your normal writing is. I’m impressed. You’re also much more coherent and interesting this way.
I would probably say “exceptionally” or something else other than “abnormally”. I don’t avoid it like “nostrils” or just fail to think of it like “neuroticism”, but I don’t really use that word much. Sometimes I do, but not very often.
Huh, that’s an interesting thought.
Certainly something I’ve considered. Sometimes in writing or speech, but also in other areas of my life.
I might have said this, except that I wouldn’t have said the first part because I don’t consider that obvious (or even necessarily true), and I would probably have said “horrific” rather than “horrifying”. I might even have said “bad” rather than either.
I would probably have said that “many authors become self-defeating” instead of phrasing it this way.
Two words I’ve never strung together in my life. This is pure Will. You’re good, but not quite perfect at impersonating me.
Huh, interesting. Not quite what I might have said.
...Why don’t they? Seriously, I dunno if people are usually aware of how uncomfortable they make others.
I’m afraid I don’t understand.
And I wouldn’t have said this because I don’t understand it.
Thank you, that was interesting. I should note that I wasn’t honestly trying to sound like you; there was a thousand bucks on the table so I went with some misdirection to make things more interesting. Hence “dynamically inconsistent” and “totally” and so on. I don’t think it had much effect on the bet though.
Have you looked into and/or attempted methods of lowering your anxiety?
Yes. Haven’t tried SSRIs yet. Really I just need a regular meditation practice, but there’s a chicken and egg problem of course. Or a prefrontal cortex and prefrontal cortex exercise problem. The solution is obviously “USE MOAR WILLPOWER” but I always forget that or something. Lately I’ve been thinking about simply not sinning, it’s way easier for me to not do things than do things. This tends to have lasting effects and unintended consequences of the sort that have gotten me this far, so I should keep doing it, right? More problems more meta.
IME, more willpower works really poorly as a solution to pretty much anything, for much the same reason that flying works really poorly as a way of getting to my roof. I mean, I suspect that if I could fly, getting to my roof would be very easy, but I can’t fly.
I also find that regular physical exercise and adequate sleep do more to manage my anxiety in the long term (that is, on a scale of months) than anything else I’ve tried.
Have you tried yoga or tai chi as meditation practices? They may be physically complex/challenging enough to distract you (some of the time) from verbally-driven distraction.
I suspect that “not sinning” isn’t simple. How would you define sinning?
Verbally-driven distraction isn’t much of an issue, it’s mostly just getting to the zafu. Once there then even 5 minutes of meditation is enough to calm me down for 30 minutes, which is a pretty big deal. I’m out of practice; I’m confident I can get back into the groove, but first I have actually make it to the zafu more than once every week or two. I think I want to stay with something that I already identify with really powerful positive experiences, i.e. jhana meditation. I may try contemplative prayer at some point for empiricism’s sake.
Re sinning… now that I think about it I’m not sure that I could do much less than I already do. I read a lot and think a lot, and reflectively endorse doing so, mostly. I’m currently writing a Less Wrong comment which is probably a sin, ‘cuz there’s lots of heathens ’round these parts among other reasons. Huh, I guess I’d never thought about demons influencing norms of discourse on a community website before, even though that’s one of the more obvious things to do. Anyway, yah, the positive sins are sorta simplistically killed off in their most obvious forms, except pride I suppose, while the negative ones are endless.
I gather that meditating at home is either too hard or doesn’t work as well?
?
I do meditate at home! “Zafu” means “cushion”. Yeah, I have trouble remembering to walk 10 feet to sit down in a comfortable position on a comfortable cusion instead of being stressed about stuff all day. Brains...
Not sure what the question mark is for. Heathens are bad, it’s probably bad to hang out with them, unless you’re a wannabe saint and are trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly. Sin is all about contamination, you know? Hence baptism and stuff. Brains...
You are not doing this in any way, shape, or form, unless I missed some post-length or sequence-length argument of yours. (And I don’t mean a “hint” as to what you might believe.) If you have something to say on the topic, you clearly can’t or won’t say it in a comment.
I have to tentatively classify your “trying” as broken signaling (though I notice some confusion on my part). If you were telling the truth about your usual mental state, and not deliberately misleading the reader in some odd way, you’ve likely been trying to signal that you need help.
Sorry, wait, maybe there’s some confusion? Did you interpret me saying “convert” as meaning “convert them to Christianity”? ’Cuz what I meant was convert people to the side of reason more generally, e.g. by occasionally posting totally-non-trolling comments about decision theory and stuff. I’m not a Christian. Or am I misinterpreting you?
I’m not at all trying to signal that I need help, if I seem to be signaling that then it’s an accidental byproduct of some other agenda which is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MANLYYYY than crying for help.
Love the attitude. And for what it’s worth I didn’t infer any signalling of need for help.
Quick response: I saw that you don’t classify your views as Christianity. I do think you classify them as some form of theism, but I took the word “convert” to mean ‘persuade people of whatever the frak you want to say.’
Sorry for the misunderstanding about where you meditate—I’m all too familiar with distraction and habit interfering with valuable self-maintenance.
As for heathens, you’re from a background which is very different from mine. My upbringing was Jewish, but not religiously intense. My family lived in a majority Christian neighborhood.
I suppose it would have been possible to avoid non-Jews, but the social cost would have been very high, and in any case, it was just never considered as an option. To the best of my knowledge, I wasn’t around anyone who saw religious self-segregation as a value. At all. The subject never came up.
I hope I’m not straying into other-optimizing, but I feel compelled to point out that there’s more than one way of being Christian, and not all of them include avoiding socializing with non-Christians.
Ah, I’m not a Christian, and it’s not non-Christians that bother me so much as people who think they know something about how the world works despite, um, not actually knowing much of anything. Inadvertent trolls. My hometown friends are agnostic with one or two exceptions (a close friend of mine is a Catholic, she makes me so proud), my SingInst-related friends are mostly monotheists these days whether they’d admit to it or not I guess but definitely not Christians. I don’t think of for example you as a heathen; there are a lot of intelligent and thoughtful people on this site. I vaguely suspect that they’d fit in better in an intellectual Catholic monastic order, e.g. the Dominicans, but alas it’s hard to say. I’m really lucky to know a handful of thoughtful SingInst-related folk, otherwise I’d probably actually join the Dominicans just to have a somewhat sane peer group. Maybe. My expectations are probably way too high. I might try to convince the Roman Catholic Church to take FAI seriously soon; I actually expect that this will work. They’re so freakin’ reasonable, it’s amazing. Anyway I’m not sure but my point might be that I’m just trying to stay away from people with bad epistemic habits for fear of them contaminating me, like a fundamentalist Christian trying to keep his high epistemic standards amidst a bunch of lions and/or atheists. Better to just stay away from them for the most part. Except hanging out with lions is pretty awesome and saint-worthy whereas hanging out with atheists is just kinda annoying.
Is this meant to be ironic?
Half-ironic, yeah.
Then upvoted.
So why are you hanging out with them?
Because I’m sinful? And not all of them are heathens, I’m just prone to exaggeration. I think this new AspiringKnitter person is cool, for example; likelihood-ratio-she apparently can supernaturally tell good from bad, which might make my FAI project like a billion times easier, God willing. NancyLebovitz is cool. cousin it is cool. cousin it I can interact with on Facebook but not all of the cool LW people. People talk about me here, I feel compelled to say something for some reason, maybe ’cuz I feel guilty that they’re talking about me and might not realize that I realize that.
Please don’t consider this patronizing but… the writing style of this comment is really cute.
I think you broke whatever part of my brain evaluates people’s signalling. It just gave up and decided your writing is really cute. I really have no idea what impression to form of you; the experience was so unusual that I felt I had to comment.
Thanks to your priming now I can’t see “AspiringKnitter” without mentally replacing it with “AspiringKittens” and a mental image of a Less Wrong meetup of kittens who sincerely want to have better epistemic practices. Way to make the world a better place.
That’s what the SF Less Wrong meetups are missing: Kittens.
Just make sure you don’t have anyone with bad allergies...
Independently of you, I PM’d her the exact same thing. Well, guess I’m in good company.
Are you AspiringKnitter, or the author of AspiringKnitter?
Not as far as I know, but you seemed pretty confident in that hypothesis so maybe you know something I don’t.
I think I only ever made one argument for Christianity? It was hilarious, everyone was all like WTF!??! and I was like TROLOLOLOL. I wonder if Catholics know that trolling is good, I hear that Zen folk do. Anyway it was naturally a soteriological argument which I intended to be identical to the standard “moral transformation” argument which for naturalists (metaphysiskeptics?) is the easiest of the theories to swallow. If I was expounding my actual thoughts on the matter they would be significantly more sophisticated and subtle and would involve this really interesting part where I talk about “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and how Jesus is basically like Colin Mochrie specifically during the ‘make stupid noises then we make fun of you for sucking but that redeems the stupid noises’ part. I’m talking about something brilliant that doesn’t exist I’m like Borges LOL!
Local coherence is the hobgoblin of miniscule minds; global coherence is next to godliness.
(ETA: In case anyone can’t tell, I just discovered Dinosaur Comics and, naturally, read through half the archives in one sitting.)
Downvoted, by the way. I want to signal my distaste for being confused for you. Are you using some form of mind-altering substance or are you normally like this? I think you need to take a few steps back. And breathe. And then study how to communicate more clearly, because I think either you’re having trouble communicating or I’m having trouble understanding you.
I’m not quite in a mood to downvote, but I think you were wildly underestimating how hard it would be for Will to change what he’s doing.
It would probably require the community stopping feeding the ugly little lump.
Also,
Will is good-looking, normal-sized, and not at all lumpy. If you must insult people, can you do it in a less wrong way?
I’m referring to his being an admitted troll.
To be fair Will is more the big and rocky kind of troll. You can even see variability that can only be explained by drastic temperature changes!
That works.
We don’t approve of that kind of language used against anyone considered to be of our in-group, no matter how weird they might act. Please delete this.
Do you normally refer to yourselves as ‘we’? I never noticed that before. (Witty, though.)
Nope, I’m simply being confident that the vast majority of the LW community stands with me here.
(Well, in a sense, it is the Less Wrong Hivemind speaking through me here, so yes, It refers to Itself as “we”.)
Ah. In that case, I have to ask how you explain the vote totals?
That is, I would expect a comment of which the Hivemind strongly disapproves to accumulate a negative score over a month-plus.
Edit: Uh, not sure what the downvote’s for...? I mean no offence.
Vote totals don’t mean what you think they mean.
This is actually a good point! I stand corrected.
That’s what I’d expect, as well, though I wish it weren’t so. I usually try to make the effort to upvote or downvote comments based on how informative, well-written, and well-reasoned they are, not whether I agree with them or not (with the exception of poll-style comments). Of course, just because I try to do this, doesn’t mean that I succeed...
Most people often just don’t notice a comment deep in some thread. But if their attention was drawn to it, I say they’d react this way.
For what it’s worth, I agree. Will’s kind of awesome, in a weird way. (Though my first reaction was “Wait, just our in-group? That’s groupist!”) But I’m not nearly as confident in my model of what others approve or disapprove of.
On second thought maybe I am in a sense; my cortisol (?) levels have been ridiculously high ever since I learned that people have been talking about me here on LW. For about a day before that I’d been rather abnormally happy—my default state matches the negative symptoms of schizophrenia as you’d expect of a prodrome, and “happiness” as such is not an emotion I experience very much at all—which I think combined with the unexpected stressor caused my body to go into freak-out-completely mode, where it remains and probably will remain until I spend time with a close friend. Even so I don’t think this has had as much an effect on my writing style as reading a thousand Dinosaur Comics has.
Have you sought professional help in the past? If not, do nothing else until you take some concrete step in that direction. This is an order from your decision theory.
Yes, including from the nice but not particularly insightful folk at UCSF, but negative symptoms generally don’t go away, ever. My brain is pretty messed up. Jhana meditation is wonderful and helps when I can get myself to do it. Technically if I did 60mg of Adderall and stayed up for about 30 to 45 hours then crashed, then repeated the process forever, I think that would overall increase my quality of life, but I’m not particularly confident of that, especially as the outside view says that’s a horrible idea. In my experience it ups the variance which is generally a good thing. Theoretically I could take a bunch of nitrous oxide near the end of the day so as to stay up for only about 24 hours as opposed to 35 before crashing; I’m not sure if I should be thinking “well hell, my dopaminergic system is totally screwed anyway” or “I should preserve what precious little automatic dopaminergic regulation I have left”. In general nobody knows nothin’ ‘bout nothin’, so my stopgap solution is moar meditation and moar meta.
Have you tried doing a detailed analysis of what would make it easier for you to meditate, and then experimenting to find whether you’ve found anything which would actually make it easier? Is keeping your cushion closer to where you usually are a possibility?
Not particularly detailed. It’s hard to do better than convincing my girlfriend to bug me about it a few times a day, which she’s getting better at. I think it’s a gradual process and I’m making progress. I’m sure Eliezer’s problems are quite similar, I suppose I could ask him what self-manipulation tactics he uses besides watching Courage Wolf YouTube videos.
I suspect it would, at least in some ways. I’m mentally maybe not too dissimilar, and have done a few months of polyphasic sleeping, supported by caffeine (which I’m way too sensitive to). My mental abilities were pretty much crap, and damn was I agitated, but I was overall happier, baseline at least.
I do recommend 4+ days of sleep deprivation and desperately trying to figure out how an elevator in HL2 works as a short-term treatment for can’t-think-or-talk-but-bored, though.
No and no. I’m only like this on Less Wrong. Trust me, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve thought about this very carefully and thoroughly for a long time. It’s not that I’m having trouble communicating; it’s that I’m not trying to. Not anything on the object level at least. The contents of my comments are more like expressions of complexes of emotions about complex signaling equilibria. In response you may feel very, very compelled to ask: “If you’re not trying to communicate as such then why are you expending your and my effort writing out diatribes?” Trust me, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve thought about this very carefully and thoroughly for a long time. “I’m going to downvote you anyway; I want to discourage flagrant violations of reasonable social norms of communication.” As expected! I’m clearly not optimizing for karma. And my past selves managed to stock up like 5,000 karma anyway so I have a lot to burn. I understand exactly why you’re downvoting, I have complex intuitions about the moral evidence implicit in your vote, and in recompense I’ll try harder to “be perfect”.
So it is more just trolling.
Which, from the various comments Will has made along these lines we can roughly translate to “via incoherent abstract rationalizations Will_Newsome has not only convinced himself that embracing the crazy while on lesswrong is a good idea but that doing so is in fact a moral virtue”. Unfortunately this kind of conviction is highly resistant to persuasion. He is Doing the Right Thing. And he is doing the right thing from within a complex framework wherein not doing the right thing has potentially drastic (quasi-religious-level) consequences. All we can really do is keep the insane subset of his posts voted below the visibility threshold and apply the “don’t feed the troll” policy while he is in that mode.
Good phrase, I think I’ll steal it. Helps me quickly describe how seriously I take this whole justification thing.
ACBOD. ;P
HOW CAN ANYONE DOWNVOTE THAT IT WAS SO CLEVER LOL?
NO BUT SERIOUSLY GUYS IT WAS VERY CLEVER I SWITCHED THE C AND THE D SO AS TO MORE ACCURATELY DESCRIBE MY STATE OF MIND LOL?
One of my Facebook activities is “finding bits of Chaitin’s omega”! I am an interesting and complex person! I am nice to my girflriend and she makes good food like fresh pizza! Sometimes I work on FAI stuff, I’m not the best at it but I’m surprisingly okay! I found a way to hack the arithmetical hierarchy using ambient control, it’s really neat, when I tell people about it they go like “WTF that is a really neat idea Will!”! If you’re nice to me maybe I’ll tell you someday? You never know, life is full or surprises allegedly!
Greetings, Will_Newsome.
This particular post of yours was, last night, at 4 upvotes. Do you have any hypothesis as to why that was the case? I am rather curious as to how that happened.
An instance of the more general phenomenon. If I recall the grandparent in particular was at about −3 then overnight (wedrifid time) went up to +5 and now seems to be back at −4. Will’s other comments from the time period all experienced a fluctuation of about the same degree. I infer that the fickle bulk upvotes and downvotes are from the same accounts and with somewhat less confidence that they are from the same user.
Or, you know, memories.
It’s possible that the aesthetic only appeals to voters in certain parts of the globe.
Are you saying there is a whole country which supports internet trolls? Forget WMDs, the next war needs to be on the real threat to (the convenience of) civilization!
If I told you that God likes to troll people would that raise your opinion of trolls or lower your opinion of GOD DAMMIT I can’t take it anymore, why does English treat “or” as “xor”? We have “either x or y” for that. Now I have to say “and/or” which looks and is stupid. I refuse.
The general impression of the Book of Job seems to be to lower people’s opinion of God rather than raise their opinion of trolling.
And it was an atheist philosopher who first called trolling a art.
I DID NOT KNOW THAT THANK YOU. Not only is Schopenhauer responsible for Borges, he is a promoter of trolling… this is amazing.
I hear that Zen people have been doing it for like 1,000 years, but maybe they didn’t think of it as an art as such.
If you like it than you should have put an upvote on it.
Now I have. And on that comment too. All the single comments.
Which God? If it is Yahweh then that guy’s kind of a dick and I don’t value his opinion much at all. But he isn’t enough of a dick that I can reverse stupidity to arrive at anything useful either.
/nods, makes sense.
Neither, really. There are trickster figures all over the place in mythology; it’d take a fairly impressive argument to get me to believe that YHWH is one of them, but assuming such an argument I don’t think it’d imply many updates that “Coyote likes trolling people” (a nearly tautological statement) wouldn’t.
Hm? Even if YHWH existed and was really powerful, you still wouldn’t update much if you found out He likes to troll people? Or does your comment only apply if YHWH is a fiction?
You could say, “x or y or both” in place of “x and/or y”. I’m not sure if that looks more or less stupid.
I’ll try it out at some point at least, thanks for the suggestion.
If the Bible is the world’s longest-running Rickroll, does that count?
What’s the hypothesis, that the Bible was subtly optimized to bring about Rick Astley and Rickrolling 1,500 or so years later? That… that does seem like His style… I mean obviously the Bible would be optimized to do all kinds of things, but that might be one of the subgoals, you never know.
Aw, wedrifid, that’s mean. :( I was asleep during that time. There’s probably some evidence of that on my Facebook page, i.e. no activity until about like 5 hours ago when I woke up. Also you should know that I’m not so incredibly lame/retarded as to artificially inflate a bunch of comments’ votes for basically no reason other than to provoke accusations that I had done so.
Is it? I didn’t think it was something that you would be offended by. Since the mass voting was up but then back down to where it started it isn’t a misdemeanor so much as it is peculiar and confusing. The only possibility that sprung to mind was that it could be an extension of of your empirical experimentation. You (said that you) actually made a bunch of the comments specifically so that they would get downvotes so that you could see how that influenced the voting behavior of others. Tinkering with said votes to satisfy a further indecipherable curiosity doesn’t seem like all that much of a stretch.
No, not really at all, I was just playing around. I don’t really get offended; I get the impression that you don’t either. And yeah upon reflection your hypothesis was reasonable, I probably only thought it was absurd ‘cuz I have insider knowledge. (ETA: Reasoning about counterfactual states of knowledge is really hard; not only practically speaking ’cuz brains aren’t meant to do that, but theoretically too, which is why people get really confused about anthropics. The latter point deserves a post I mean Facebook status update at some point.)
That’s true. It’s tricky enough that Eliezer seems to get confused about it (or at least I thought he was confusing himself back when he wrote a post or two on the subject.)
That actually sounds like a lot of fun, if followed up with a specific denial of having done that.
I guess that sounds fun? Or why do you think it sounds fun? I think it’d only be worth if if the thread was really public, like when that Givewell dude made that one post about naive EU maximization and charity.
Why does that sound fun? I don’t know. I do know that when I am less-than-lucid, I am liable to lead individuals on conversational wild-goose chases. Within these conversations, I will use a variety of tactics to draw the other partner deeper into the conversation. No tactic in particular is fun, except in-so-far as it confuses the other person. Of course, when I am of sound mind, I do not find this game to be terribly fun.
I assume that you play similar games on Lesswrong. Purposely upvoting one’s own comments in an obvious way, followed by then denying that one did it, seems like a good way to confuse and frustrate other people. I know that if the thought occurred to me when I was less-than-lucid, and if I were the sort of person to play such games on Lesswrong, I probably would try the tactic out.
This seems more likely than you having a cadre of silent, but upvoting, admirers.
Both seem unlikely. I’m still confused. I think God likes trolling, maybe He did it? Not sure what mechanism He’d use though so it’s not a particularly good explanation.
Oh. That is certainly a possibility I failed to initially consider. Thank you for pointing this out.
Wedrifid said that too. I don’t have a model that predicts that. I think that most of the time my comments get upvoted to somewhere between 1 and 5 and then drop off as people who aren’t Less Wrong regulars read through; that the reverse would happen for a few hours at least is odd. It’s possible that the not-particularly-intelligent people who normally downvote my posts when they’re insightful also tend to upvote my posts when they’re “worthless”. ETA: thomblake’s hypothesis about regional differences in aesthetics seems more plausible than mine.
I think you severely underestimate the value of trolling.
Erm. I can’t say that this raises my confidence much. I am reminded of the John McCarthy quote, “Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say.”
I feel responsible for the current wave of gibberish-spam from Will, and I regret that. If it were up to me, I would present him with an ultimatum—either he should promise not to sockpuppet here ever again, and he’d better make it convincing, or else every one of his accounts that can be identified will be banned. The corrosive effect of not knowing whether a new identity is a real person or just Will again, whether he’s “conducting experiments” by secretly mass-upvoting his own comments, etc., to my mind far outweighs the value of his comments.
I freely admit that I have one sockpuppet, who has made less than five comments and has over 20 karma. I do not think that having one sockpuppet for anonymity’s sake is against community norms.
ETA: I mean one sock puppet besides Mitchell Porter obviously.
I have a private message, dated 7 October, from an account with “less than five comments and [...] over 20 karma”, which begins, “I’m Will_Newsome, this is one of my alts.” (Emphasis mine.)
Will, I’m sorry it’s turning out like this. I am not perfect myself; anyone who cares may look up users “Bananarama” and “OperationPaperclip” and see my own lame anonymous humor. More to the point, I do actually believe that you want to “keep the stars from burning down”, and you’re not just a troll out to waste everyone’s time. The way I see it, because you have neither a job to tie you down, nor genuine intellectual peers and collaborators, it’s easy to end up seeking the way forward via elaborate crazy schemes, hatched and pursued in solitude; and I suspect that I got in the way of one such scheme, by asserting that AK is you.
I have those! E.g. I spend a lot of time with Steve, who is the most rational person in the entire universe, and I hang out with folk like Nick Tarleton and Michael Vassar and stuff. All those 3 people are way smarter than me, though arguably I get around some of that by way of playing to my strengths. The point is that I can play intellectualism with them, especially Steve who’s really good at understanding me. ETA: I also talk to the Black Belt Bayesian himself sorta often.
With no offense intended to Steve, no, he isn’t.
If you know any rationalists that are better than Steve then please, please introduce me to them.
How about most rational person I know of?
Ahhhh, okay, I see why you’d feel bad now I guess? Admittedly I wouldn’t have started commenting recently unless there’d been the confusion of me and AK, but AK isn’t me and my returning was just ’cuz I freaked out that people on LW were talking about me and I didn’t know why. Really I don’t think you’re to blame at all. And thinking AK is me does seem like a pretty reasonable hypothesis. It’s a false hypothesis but not obviously so.
I was only counting alts I’d used in the last few months. I remember having made two alts, but the first one, User:Arbitrarity, I gave up on (I think I’d forgotten about it) which is when I switched to the alt that I used to message you with (apparently I’d remembered it by then, though I wasn’t using it; I just like the word “arbitrarity”).
ETA: Also note that the one substantive comment I made from Arbitrarity has obvious reasons for being kept anonymous.
Anyway I can’t see any plausible reason why you should feel responsible for my current wave of gibberish-spam. [ETA: I mean except for the gibberish-spam I’m writing as a response to your comment; you should maybe feel responsible for that.] My autobiographical memory is admittedly pretty horrible but still.
Why do you feel responsible? That’s really confusing.
Okay I admit it, Mitchell Porter is one of my many sockpuppets. Please ban Mitchell Porter unless he can prove he’s not one of my many sockpuppets.
I don’t follow; your confidence in the value of trolling or your confidence in the general worthwhileness of fairly reading or charitably interpreting my contributions to Less Wrong? ’Cuz I’d given up on the latter a long time ago, but I don’t want your poor impression of me to falsely color your views on the value of trolling.
It seems obviously the latter, and I find it equally informative.
Eliezer please ban Mitchell Porter, he’s one of my sock puppets and I feel really guilty about it. Yeah I know you’ve known the real Mitchell Porter for like a decade now but I hacked into his account or maybe I bought it from him or something and now it’s just another of my sock puppets, so you know, ban the hell out of him please? It’s only fair. Thx bro!
It’s not often that I laugh out loud and downvote the same comment! ;)
Thanks! Um do you know any easy way to provide a lot of evidence that I have only one sockpuppet? I’m mildly afraid that Eliezer is going to take Mitchell Porter’s heinous allegations seriously as part of a secret conspiracy is that redundant? fuck. anyway secret conspiracy to discredit me. I am the only one who should be allowed to discredit me!
Ask a moderator (or whatever it takes to have access to IP logs) to check to see if there are multiple suspicious accounts from your most common IP. That’s even better than asking you to raise your right hand if you are not lying. It at least shows that you have enough respect for the community to at least try to hide it when you are defecting! :P
I’m confused. What happened overnight that made people suddenly start appreciating Will’s advocacy of his own trolling here and the surrounding context? −5 to +7 is a big change and there have been similar changes to related comments. Either someone is sockpuppeting or people are actually starting to appreciate this crap. (I’m really hoping the former!)
Edit: And now it is back to −3. How bizarre!
I’ve been appreciating it all along. I would not be terribly surprised if there were a dozen or so other people who do.
Do you specifically appreciate the advocacy of trolling comments that are the context or are you just saying that you appreciate Will’s actual contributions such as they are?
I appreciate Will’s contributions in general. Mostly the insane ones.
They remind me of a friend of mine who is absolutely brilliant but has lived his whole life with severe damage to vital parts of the brain.
I often appreciate his contributions as well. He is generally awful at constraining his abstract creativity so as to formulate constructive, concrete ideas but I can constrain abstract creativity just fine so his posts often provoke insights—the rest just bumps up against my nonsense filter. Reading him at his best is a bit like taking a small dose of a hallucinogenic to provide my brain with a dose of raw material to hack away at with logic.
Folks like you might wanna friend me on Facebook, I’m generally a lot more insightful and comprehensible there. I use Facebook like Steven Kaas uses Twitter. https://www.facebook.com/autothexis
Re your other comment re mechanisms for psi, I can’t muster up the energy to reply unfortunately. I’d have to be too careful about keeping levels of organization distinct, which is really easy to do in my head but really hard to write about. I might respond later.
That’s interesting. Which parts of the brain, if you don’t mind sharing? (Guess: qbefbyngreny cersebagny pbegrk, ohg abg irel pbasvqrag bs gung.)
I believe that is spot on, but I can’t recall specifics. Certainly in the neighborhood.
I enjoy following Will’s contributions on facebook (and here when he isn’t being willfully obnoxious). They remind me of, well, myself only worse.
I agree completely.
Did I say 5 years? Whoops...
Regarding sockpuppeting, that would suck. Can’t someone take a look at the database and figure out if many votes came from the same IP? Even better, when there are cases of weird voting behavior someone should check if the votes came from dummy accounts by looking at the karma score and recent submissions and see if they are close to zero karma and if their recent submissions are similar in style and diction etc.
And I suspect you incorrectly classify some of your contributions, placing them into a different subcategory within “willful defiance of the community preference” than where they belong. Unfortunately this means that the subset of your thoughts that are creative, deep and informed rather than just incoherent and flawed tend to be wasted.
My creative, deep, and informed thoughts are a superset of my thoughts in general not a subset wedrifid. Also I do not have any incoherent or flawed thoughts as should be obvious from the previous sentence but I realize that category theory is a difficult subject for many people.
ETA: Okay good, it took awhile for this to get downvoted and I was starting to get even more worried about the local sanity waterline.
I suspect that the reason for this is that the comment tree of which your post was a branch of is hidden by default, as it originates from a comment with less than −3 karma.
Um, on another note, could you just be less mean? ‘Mean’ seems to be the most accurate descriptor for posting trash that people have to downvote to stay hidden, after all.
No, I ran an actual test by posting messages in all caps to use as a control. Empiricism is so cool! (ETA: I also wrote a perfectly reasonable but mildly complex comment as a second control, which garnered the same number of downvotes as my insane set theory comment in about he same length of time.)
Re meanness, I will consider your request Dorikka. I will consider it.
Nope.
THANKS FOR TELLIN ME BRAH
The problem I have is that you claim to be “not optimising for karma”, but you appear to be “optimising for negative karma”. For example, the parent comment. There are two parts to it; acknowledgement of my comment, and a style that garners downvotes. The second part—why? It doesn’t fit into any other goal structure I can think of; it really only makes sense if you’re explicitly trying to get downvoted.
One of my optimization criteria is discreditable-ness which I guess is sort of like optimizing for downvotes insofar as my audience really cares about credibility. When it comes to motivational dynamics there tends to be a lot of crossing between meta-levels and it’s hard to tell what models are actually very good predictors. You can approximately model the comment you replied to by saying I was optimizing for downvotes, but that model wouldn’t remain accurate if e.g. suddenly Less Wrong suddenly started accepting 4chan-speak. That’s obviously unlikely but the point is that a surface-level model like that doesn’t much help you understand why I say what I say. Not that you should want to understand that.
Newsome FTW!
I’m confused. Have you sockpuppeted before?
I think I might understand what you’re saying here, in which case I see… sort of. I think I see what you’re doing but not why you’re doing it. Oh, well. Thank you for the explanation, that makes more sense.
Yes, barely, but I meant “past selves” in the usual Buddhist sense, i.e. I wrote some well-received posts under this account in the past. You might like the irrationality game, I made it for people like you.
On another note I’m sorry that my taste for discreditability has contaminated you by association; a year or so ago I foresaw that such an event would happen and deemed it a necessary tradeoff but naturally I still feel bad about it. I’m also not entirely sure I made the correct tradeoff; morality is hard. I wish I had synderesis.
Well, you’re half right.
Not telling which half.
You’re right.
Wow, is that all of your information? You either have a lot of money to blow, or you’re holding back.
“Deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought” can be explained by her having lurked a lot, and the rest of those features are not rare IME (even though they are under-represented on LW).
.
I put some text from recent comments by both AspiringKnitter and Will_Newsome into I write like; it suggested that AspiringKnitter writes “like” Arthur Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey and other books) while Will_Newsome writes “like” Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books). I’ve never read either, but it does look like a convenient textual comparison doesn’t trivially point to them being the same.
Also, if AspiringKnitter is a sockpuppet, it’s at least an interesting one.
When I put your first paragraph in that confabulator, it says “Vladimir Nabokov”. If I remove the words “Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books)” from the paragraph, it says “H.P. Lovecraft”. It doesn’t seem to cut possible texts into clusters well enough.
I just got H.P. Lovecraft, Dan Brown, and Edgar Allan Poe for three different comments. I am somewhat curious as to whether this page clusters better than random assignment.
ETA: @#%#! I just got Dan Brown again, this time for the last post I wrote. This site is insulting me!
Apparently I write like Stephenie Meyer. And you feel insulted?
Looks like you are right. Two of my (larger, to give the algorithm more to work with) texts from other sources gave Cory Doctorow (technical piece) and again Lovecraft (a Hacker News comment about drug dogs?)
Sorry, and thanks for the correction.