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.
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.