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
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