As others noted, you seem to be falling prey to the selection bias. Do you have an estimate of how many “IMO gold medalists” gave up on MIRI because its founder, in defiance of everything he wrote before, confidently picks one untestable from a bunch and proclaims it to be the truth (with 100% certainty, no less, Bayes be damned), despite (or maybe due to) not even being an expert in the subject matter?
EDIT: My initial inclination was to simply comply with your request, probably because I grew up being taught deference to and respect for authority. Then it struck me as one of the most cultish things one could do.
Is this an April Fool’s joke? He says nothing of the kind. The post which comes closest to this explicitly says that it could be wrong, but “the rational probability is pretty damned small.” And counting the discovery of time-turners, he’s named at least two conceivable pieces of evidence that could change that number.
What do you mean when you say you “just don’t put nearly as much confidence in it as you do”?
Do you have an estimate of how many “IMO gold medalists” gave up on MIRI because [X]
The number of IMO gold medalists is sufficiently low, and the probability of any one of them having read the QM sequence is sufficiently small, that my own estimate would be less than one regardless of X.
(I don’t have a good model of how much more likely an IMO gold medalist would be to have read the QM sequence than any other reference class, so I’m not massively confident.)
This discussion is really hilarious, especially the attempts to re-frame commoner orientated, qualitative and incomplete picture of QM—as something which technical people appreciate and non-technical people don’t. (Don’t you want to be one among the technies?) .
Selectivity, in the relevant sense, is more than just a question of how many people are granted something.
How many people are not on that site, but could rank highly if they chose to try? I’m guessing it’s far more than the number of people who have never taken part in the IMO, but who could get a gold medal if they did.
(The IMO is more prestigious among mathematicians than topcoder is among programmers. And countries actively recruit their best mathematicians for the IMO. Nobody in the Finnish government thought it would be a good idea to convince and train Linus Torvalds to take part in an internet programming competition, so I doubt Linus Torvalds is on topcoder.)
There certainly are things as selective or more than the IMO (for example, the Fields medal), but I don’t think topcoder is one of them, and I’m not convinced about “plenty”. (Plenty for what purpose?)
It’s very hard to evaluate selectivity. It’s not just the raw number of people participating. It seems that large majority of serious ACM ICPC participants (both contestants and their coaches) are practising on Topcoder, and for the ICPC the best college CS students are recruited much the same as best highschool math students for IMO.
I don’t know if Linus Torvalds would necessarily do great on this sort of thing—his talents are primarily within software design, and his persistence as the unifying force behind Linux. (And are you sure you’d recruit a 22 years old Linus Torvalds who just started writing a Unix clone?). It’s also the case that ‘programming contest’ is a bit of misnomer—the winning is primarily about applied mathematics—just as ‘computer science’ is a misnomer.
In any case, its highly dubious that understanding of QM sequence is as selective as any contest. I get it fully that Copenhagen is clunky whereas MWI doesn’t have the collapse, and that collapse fits in very badly. That’s not at all the issue. However badly something fits, you can only throw it away when you figured out how to do without it. Also, commonly, the wavefunction, the collapse, and other internals, are seen as mechanisms of prediction which may, or may not, have anything to do with “how universe does it” (even if the question of “how universe does it” is meaningful, it may still be the case that internals of the theory have nothing to do with that, as the internals are massively based upon our convenience). And worse still, MWI is in many very important ways lacking.
Selectivity, in the relevant sense, is more than just a question of how many people are granted something.
Of course. There’s the number of potential participants, self selection, and so on.
How many people are not on that site, but could rank highly if they chose to try? I’m guessing it’s far more than the number of people who have never taken part in the IMO, but who could get a gold medal if they did.
IMO is a highschool event, and ‘taking part’ in terms of actually winning entails a lot of very specific training instead of education.
(The IMO is more prestigious among mathematicians than topcoder is among programmers. And countries actively recruit their best mathematicians for the IMO. Nobody in the Finnish government thought it would be a good idea to convince and train Linus Torvalds to take part in an internet programming competition, so I doubt Linus Torvalds is on topcoder.)
Nobody can recruit Grigori Perelman for IMO, either.
There’s ACM ICPC, which is roughly the programming equivalent of IMO . Finalists have huge overlap with TC. edit: more current . Of course, TC lacks the prestige of ACM ICPC , but on the other hand it is not a school event.
There certainly are things as selective or more than the IMO (for example, the Fields medal), but I don’t think topcoder is one of them, and I’m not convinced about “plenty”. (Plenty for what purpose?)
Plenty for the purpose of coming across that volume of technical brilliance and noting and elevating it to its rightful place by now. Less facetiously: a lot of people know everything that was presented in the QM paper, and of those pretty much everyone either considers MWI to be an open question, an irrelevant question, or the like.
Well, I’m sorry to say this, but part of what makes authority Authority is that your respect is not always required. Frankly, in this case Authority is going to start deleting your comments if you keep on telling newcomers who post in the Welcome thread not to read the QM sequence, which you’ve done quite a few times at this point unless my memory is failing me. You disagree with MWI. Okay. I get it. We all get it. I still want the next Mihaly to read the QM Sequence and I don’t want to have this conversation every time, nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer.
Just to correct a few inaccuracies in your comment:
You disagree with MWI.
I don’t, I just don’t put nearly as much confidence in it as you do. It is also unfortunately abused on this site quite a bit.
nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer.
I don’t even warn every newcomer who mentions the QM sequence, let alone “every newcomer”, only those who appear to be stuck on it. Surely Mihaly had no difficulties with it, so none of my warnings would interfere with “still want the next Mihaly to read the QM Sequence”.
You have a point, it’s easy to read my first comment rather uncharitably. I should have been more precise:
“My standard advice to all newcomers [who mention difficulties with the QM sequence]...” which is much closer to what actually happens. I don’t bring it up out of the blue every time I greet someone.
You are right. In my mind I read it as “I read through everything up until this, and this quantum thing looks scary and formidable, but it’s next, so I better get on with it”, which could have been a total misinterpretation of what was meant. So yeah, I have probably jumped in a bit early. Not that I think it was a bad advice. Anyway, it’s all a moot point now, I have promised EY not to give unsolicited advice to newcomers telling them to skip the QM sequence.
Hmm, the above got a lot of upvotes… I have no idea why.
Egalitarian instinct. Eliezer is using power against you, which drastically raises the standards of behavior expected from him while doing so—including less tolerance of him getting things wrong.
Your reply used the form ‘graceful’ in a context where you would have been given a lot of leeway even to be (overtly) rude. The corrections were portrayed as gentle and patient. Whether the corrections happen to be accurate or reasonable is usually almost irrelevant for the purpose of determining people’s voting behavior this far down into a charged thread.
Note that even though I approve of Eliezer’s decision to delete comments of yours disparaging the QM sequence to newcomers I still endorse your decision to force Eliezer to use his power instead of deferring to his judgement simply because he has the power. It was the right decision for you to make from your perspective and is also a much more desirable precedent.
I deliberately invoke this tactic on occasion in arguments on other people’s turf, particularly where the rules are unevenly applied. I was once accused by an acquaintance who witnessed it of being unreasonably reasonable.
It’s particularly useful when moderators routinely take sides in debates. It makes it dangerous for them to use their power to shut down dissent.
Egalitarian instinct. Eliezer is using power against you, which drastically raises the standards of behavior expected from him while doing so—including less tolerance of him getting things wrong.
Nailed it on the head. As my cursor began to instinctively over the “upvote” button on shminux’s comment I caught myself and thought, why am I doing this?. And while I didn’t come to your exact conclusion I realized my instinct had something to do with EY’s “use of power” and shminux’s gentle reply. Some sort of underdog quality that I didn’t yet take the time to assess but that my mouse-using-hand wanted badly to blindly reward.
I’m glad you pieced out the exact reasoning behind the scenes here. Stopping and taking a moment to understand behavior and then correct based on that understanding is why I am here.
That said, I really should think for a long time about your explanation before voting you up, too!
I’m glad you pieced out the exact reasoning behind the scenes here.
If it is as right as it is insightful (which it undeniably is), I would expect those who come across wedifid’s explanation to go back and change their vote, resulting in %positive going sharply down. It doesn’t appear to be happening.
If it is as right as it is insightful (which it undeniably is), I would expect those who come across wedifid’s explanation to go back and change their vote, resulting in %positive going sharply down.
A quirk (and often a bias) humans have is that we tend to assume that just because a social behavior or human instinct can be explained it must thereby be invalidated. Yet everything can (in principle) be explained and there are still things that are, in fact, noble. My parents’ love for myself and my siblings is no less real because I am capable of reasoning about the inclusive fitness of those peers of my anscestors that happened to love their children less.
In this case the explanation given was, roughly speaking “egalitarian instinct + politeness”. And personally I have to say that the egalitarian instinct is one of my favorite parts of humanity and one of the traits that I most value in those I prefer to surround myself with (Rah foragers!).
All else being equal the explanation in terms of egalitarian instinct and precedent setting regarding authority use describes (what I consider to be) a positive picture and in itself is no reason to downvote. (The comment deserves to be downvoted for innacuracy as described in differentcomments but this should be considered separately from the explanation of the reasons for upvoting.)
In terms of evidence I would say that I would not consider mass downvoting of this comment to be (non-trivial) evidence in support of my explanation. Commensurately I don’t consider the lack of such downvoting to be much evidence against. As for how much confidence I have in the explanation… well, I am reasonably confident that the egalitarian instinct and politeness are factors but far less confident that they represent a majority of the influence. Even my (mere) map of the social forces at work points to other influences that are at least as strong—and my ability to model and predict a crowd is far from flawless.
The question you ask is a surprisingly complicated one, if looked at closely.
They could just be a weird sort of lazy whereby they don’t scroll back up and change anything. Or maybe they never see his post. Or something else. I don’t think the -%positive-not-going-down-yet is any indication that wedrifid’s comment is not right.
You may well be right, it’s hard to tell. I don’t see an easy way of finding out short of people replying like you have. I assumed that there enough of those who would react to make the effect visible, and I don’t see how someone agreeing with wedrifid’s assessment would go back and upvote my original comment, so even a partial effect could be visible. But anyway, this is not important enough to continue discussing, I think. Tapping out.
In discussions where everyone tapping out is superior to the available alternatives, I’m more inclined to refer to the result as “minimizing loss” than “winning”.
Note that even though I tired of your talking about QM years ago
This is the second time you mention shminux having talked about QM for years. But I can’t find any comments or posts he’s made before July 2011. Does he have a dupe account or something else I don’t know about?
Since you are asking… July 2011 is right for the join date and some time later is when I voiced any opinion related to the QM sequence and MWI (I did read through it once and browsed now and again since). No, I did not have another account before that, as a long-term freenode ##physics IRC channel moderator, I dislike being confused about user’s previous identities, so I don’t do it myself (hence the silly nick chosen a decade or so ago, which has lost all relevance by now). On the other hand, I don’t mind people wanting a clean slate with a new nick, just not using socks to express a controversial or karma-draining opinion they are too chicken to have linked to their main account.
I also encourage you to take whatever wedrifid writes about me with a grain of salt. While I read what he writes and often upvote when I find it warranted, I quite publicly announced here about a year ago that I will not be replying to any of his comments, given how counterproductive it had been for me. (There are currently about 4 or 5 people on my LW “do-not-reply” list.) I have also warned other users once or twice, after I noticed them in a similarly futile discussion with wedrifid. I would be really surprised if this did not color his perception and attitude. It certainly would for me, were the roles reversed.
This is the second time you mention shminux having talked about QM for years. But I can’t find any comments or posts he’s made before July 2011. Does he have a dupe account or something else I don’t know about?
I don’t keep an exact mental record of the join dates. My guess from intuitive feel was “2 years”. It’s April 2013. It was July 2011 when the account joined. If anything you have prompted me to slightly increase my confidence in the calibration of my account-joining estimator.
If the subject of how long user:shminux has been complaining about the QM sequence ever becomes relevant again I’ll be sure to use Wei Dai’s script, search the text and provide a link to the exact first mention. In this case, however, the difference hardly seems significant or important.
Does he have a dupe account or something else I don’t know about?
I doubt it. If so I praise him for his flawless character separation.
Thanks for clarifying. I asked not because the exact timing is important but because the overstatement seemed uncharacteristic (albeit modest), and I wasn’t sure whether it was just offhand pique or something else. (Also, if something funny had been going on, it might’ve explained the weird rancour/sloppiness/mindkilledness in the broader thread.)
Thanks for clarifying. I asked not because the exact timing is important but because the overstatement seemed uncharacteristic (albeit modest), and I wasn’t sure whether it was just offhand pique or something else.
Just an error.
Note that in the context there was no particular pique. I intended acknowledgement of established disrespect, not conveyance of additional disrespect. The point was that I was instinctively (as well as rationally) motivated to support shminux despite also approving of Eliezer’s declared intent, which illustrates the strength of the effect.
Fortunately nothing is lost if I simply remove the phrase you quote entirely. The point remains clear even if I remove the detail of why I approve of Eliezer’s declaration.
Also, if something funny had been going on, it might’ve explained the weird rancour/sloppiness/mindkilledness in the broader thread.
The main explanation there is just that incarnations of this same argument have been cropping up with slight variations for (what seems like) a long time. As with several other subjects there are rather clear battle lines drawn and no particular chance of anyone learning anything. The quality of the discussion tends to be abysmal, riddled with status games and full of arguments that are sloppy in the extreme. As well as the problem of persuasion through raw persistence.
Bluntly, IMO gold medalists who can conceive of working on something ‘crazy’ like FAI would be expected to better understand the QM sequence than that. Even more so they would be expected to understand the core arguments better than to get offended by my having come to a conclusion. I haven’t heard from the opposite side at all, and while the probability of my hearing about it might conceivably be low, my priors on it existing are rather lower than yours, and the fact that I have heard nothing is also evidence. Carl, who often hears (and anonymizes) complaints from the outside x-risk community, has not reported to me anyone being offended by my QM sequence.
Smart people want to be told something smart that they haven’t already heard from other smart people and that doesn’t seem ‘obvious’. The QM sequence is demonstrably not dispensable for this purpose—Mihaly said the rest of LW seemed interesting but insufficiently I-wouldn’t-have-thought-of-that. Frankly I worry that QM isn’t enough but given how long it’s taking me to write up the Lob problem, I don’t think I can realistically try to take on TDT.
Yeah, that confused me on initial reading, though some googling clarified matters, and I inferred from the way shminux (mis)quoted that something similar might be going on there, which is why I mentioned it.
As others noted, you seem to be falling prey to the selection bias. Do you have an estimate of how many “IMO gold medalists” gave up on MIRI because its founder, in defiance of everything he wrote before, confidently picks one untestable from a bunch and proclaims it to be the truth (with 100% certainty, no less, Bayes be damned), despite (or maybe due to) not even being an expert in the subject matter?
EDIT: My initial inclination was to simply comply with your request, probably because I grew up being taught deference to and respect for authority. Then it struck me as one of the most cultish things one could do.
Is this an April Fool’s joke? He says nothing of the kind. The post which comes closest to this explicitly says that it could be wrong, but “the rational probability is pretty damned small.” And counting the discovery of time-turners, he’s named at least two conceivable pieces of evidence that could change that number.
What do you mean when you say you “just don’t put nearly as much confidence in it as you do”?
Maybe it’s a reference to the a priori nature of his arguments for MW? Or something? It’s a strange claim to make, TBH.
The number of IMO gold medalists is sufficiently low, and the probability of any one of them having read the QM sequence is sufficiently small, that my own estimate would be less than one regardless of X.
(I don’t have a good model of how much more likely an IMO gold medalist would be to have read the QM sequence than any other reference class, so I’m not massively confident.)
There’s plenty of things roughly comparable to IMO in terms of selectivity (IMO gives what, ~35 golds a year?)… E.g. I’m #10th of all time on a popular programming contest site ( I’m dmytry ).
This discussion is really hilarious, especially the attempts to re-frame commoner orientated, qualitative and incomplete picture of QM—as something which technical people appreciate and non-technical people don’t. (Don’t you want to be one among the technies?) .
Selectivity, in the relevant sense, is more than just a question of how many people are granted something.
How many people are not on that site, but could rank highly if they chose to try? I’m guessing it’s far more than the number of people who have never taken part in the IMO, but who could get a gold medal if they did.
(The IMO is more prestigious among mathematicians than topcoder is among programmers. And countries actively recruit their best mathematicians for the IMO. Nobody in the Finnish government thought it would be a good idea to convince and train Linus Torvalds to take part in an internet programming competition, so I doubt Linus Torvalds is on topcoder.)
There certainly are things as selective or more than the IMO (for example, the Fields medal), but I don’t think topcoder is one of them, and I’m not convinced about “plenty”. (Plenty for what purpose?)
I’ve tried to compare it more accurately.
It’s very hard to evaluate selectivity. It’s not just the raw number of people participating. It seems that large majority of serious ACM ICPC participants (both contestants and their coaches) are practising on Topcoder, and for the ICPC the best college CS students are recruited much the same as best highschool math students for IMO.
I don’t know if Linus Torvalds would necessarily do great on this sort of thing—his talents are primarily within software design, and his persistence as the unifying force behind Linux. (And are you sure you’d recruit a 22 years old Linus Torvalds who just started writing a Unix clone?). It’s also the case that ‘programming contest’ is a bit of misnomer—the winning is primarily about applied mathematics—just as ‘computer science’ is a misnomer.
In any case, its highly dubious that understanding of QM sequence is as selective as any contest. I get it fully that Copenhagen is clunky whereas MWI doesn’t have the collapse, and that collapse fits in very badly. That’s not at all the issue. However badly something fits, you can only throw it away when you figured out how to do without it. Also, commonly, the wavefunction, the collapse, and other internals, are seen as mechanisms of prediction which may, or may not, have anything to do with “how universe does it” (even if the question of “how universe does it” is meaningful, it may still be the case that internals of the theory have nothing to do with that, as the internals are massively based upon our convenience). And worse still, MWI is in many very important ways lacking.
Of course. There’s the number of potential participants, self selection, and so on.
IMO is a highschool event, and ‘taking part’ in terms of actually winning entails a lot of very specific training instead of education.
Nobody can recruit Grigori Perelman for IMO, either.
There’s ACM ICPC, which is roughly the programming equivalent of IMO . Finalists have huge overlap with TC. edit: more current . Of course, TC lacks the prestige of ACM ICPC , but on the other hand it is not a school event.
Plenty for the purpose of coming across that volume of technical brilliance and noting and elevating it to its rightful place by now. Less facetiously: a lot of people know everything that was presented in the QM paper, and of those pretty much everyone either considers MWI to be an open question, an irrelevant question, or the like.
edit: made clearer with quotations.
Perelman is an IMO gold medalist.
Hmm. Good point. My point was though that you can’t recruit adult mathematicians for it.
Well, I’m sorry to say this, but part of what makes authority Authority is that your respect is not always required. Frankly, in this case Authority is going to start deleting your comments if you keep on telling newcomers who post in the Welcome thread not to read the QM sequence, which you’ve done quite a few times at this point unless my memory is failing me. You disagree with MWI. Okay. I get it. We all get it. I still want the next Mihaly to read the QM Sequence and I don’t want to have this conversation every time, nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer.
Sure, your site, your rules.
Just to correct a few inaccuracies in your comment:
I don’t, I just don’t put nearly as much confidence in it as you do. It is also unfortunately abused on this site quite a bit.
I don’t even warn every newcomer who mentions the QM sequence, let alone “every newcomer”, only those who appear to be stuck on it. Surely Mihaly had no difficulties with it, so none of my warnings would interfere with “still want the next Mihaly to read the QM Sequence”.
The claim you made that prompted the reply was:
It is rather disingenuous to then express exaggerated ‘let alone’ rejections of the reply “nor is it an appropriate greeting for every newcomer”.
Uhuh.
That said, kudos to you for remaining calm and reasonable
You have a point, it’s easy to read my first comment rather uncharitably. I should have been more precise:
“My standard advice to all newcomers [who mention difficulties with the QM sequence]...” which is much closer to what actually happens. I don’t bring it up out of the blue every time I greet someone.
Sorry, could you point out where difficulties with the QM sequence were mentioned? All I could find was
You are right. In my mind I read it as “I read through everything up until this, and this quantum thing looks scary and formidable, but it’s next, so I better get on with it”, which could have been a total misinterpretation of what was meant. So yeah, I have probably jumped in a bit early. Not that I think it was a bad advice. Anyway, it’s all a moot point now, I have promised EY not to give unsolicited advice to newcomers telling them to skip the QM sequence.
Fair enough, I thought I might have somehow missed it.
Hmm, the above got a lot of upvotes… I have no idea why.
Egalitarian instinct. Eliezer is using power against you, which drastically raises the standards of behavior expected from him while doing so—including less tolerance of him getting things wrong.
Your reply used the form ‘graceful’ in a context where you would have been given a lot of leeway even to be (overtly) rude. The corrections were portrayed as gentle and patient. Whether the corrections happen to be accurate or reasonable is usually almost irrelevant for the purpose of determining people’s voting behavior this far down into a charged thread.
Note that even though I approve of Eliezer’s decision to delete comments of yours disparaging the QM sequence to newcomers I still endorse your decision to force Eliezer to use his power instead of deferring to his judgement simply because he has the power. It was the right decision for you to make from your perspective and is also a much more desirable precedent.
I deliberately invoke this tactic on occasion in arguments on other people’s turf, particularly where the rules are unevenly applied. I was once accused by an acquaintance who witnessed it of being unreasonably reasonable.
It’s particularly useful when moderators routinely take sides in debates. It makes it dangerous for them to use their power to shut down dissent.
Nailed it on the head. As my cursor began to instinctively over the “upvote” button on shminux’s comment I caught myself and thought, why am I doing this?. And while I didn’t come to your exact conclusion I realized my instinct had something to do with EY’s “use of power” and shminux’s gentle reply. Some sort of underdog quality that I didn’t yet take the time to assess but that my mouse-using-hand wanted badly to blindly reward.
I’m glad you pieced out the exact reasoning behind the scenes here. Stopping and taking a moment to understand behavior and then correct based on that understanding is why I am here.
That said, I really should think for a long time about your explanation before voting you up, too!
If it is as right as it is insightful (which it undeniably is), I would expect those who come across wedifid’s explanation to go back and change their vote, resulting in %positive going sharply down. It doesn’t appear to be happening.
A quirk (and often a bias) humans have is that we tend to assume that just because a social behavior or human instinct can be explained it must thereby be invalidated. Yet everything can (in principle) be explained and there are still things that are, in fact, noble. My parents’ love for myself and my siblings is no less real because I am capable of reasoning about the inclusive fitness of those peers of my anscestors that happened to love their children less.
In this case the explanation given was, roughly speaking “egalitarian instinct + politeness”. And personally I have to say that the egalitarian instinct is one of my favorite parts of humanity and one of the traits that I most value in those I prefer to surround myself with (Rah foragers!).
All else being equal the explanation in terms of egalitarian instinct and precedent setting regarding authority use describes (what I consider to be) a positive picture and in itself is no reason to downvote. (The comment deserves to be downvoted for innacuracy as described in different comments but this should be considered separately from the explanation of the reasons for upvoting.)
In terms of evidence I would say that I would not consider mass downvoting of this comment to be (non-trivial) evidence in support of my explanation. Commensurately I don’t consider the lack of such downvoting to be much evidence against. As for how much confidence I have in the explanation… well, I am reasonably confident that the egalitarian instinct and politeness are factors but far less confident that they represent a majority of the influence. Even my (mere) map of the social forces at work points to other influences that are at least as strong—and my ability to model and predict a crowd is far from flawless.
The question you ask is a surprisingly complicated one, if looked at closely.
I believe that I already knew I was acting on egalitarian instinct when I upvoted your comment.
They could just be a weird sort of lazy whereby they don’t scroll back up and change anything. Or maybe they never see his post. Or something else. I don’t think the -%positive-not-going-down-yet is any indication that wedrifid’s comment is not right.
You may well be right, it’s hard to tell. I don’t see an easy way of finding out short of people replying like you have. I assumed that there enough of those who would react to make the effect visible, and I don’t see how someone agreeing with wedrifid’s assessment would go back and upvote my original comment, so even a partial effect could be visible. But anyway, this is not important enough to continue discussing, I think. Tapping out.
I completely agree with what you are saying and also tap out, even though it may be redundant. Let us kill this line of comments together.
If you both tap out, then anyone who steps into the discussion wins by default!
In many such cases it may be better to say that if both tap out then everybody wins by default!
-3 karma, apparently.
In discussions where everyone tapping out is superior to the available alternatives, I’m more inclined to refer to the result as “minimizing loss” than “winning”.
Well to your credit you don’t see LW as a zero sum game.
What does he win?
This is the second time you mention shminux having talked about QM for years. But I can’t find any comments or posts he’s made before July 2011. Does he have a dupe account or something else I don’t know about?
Since you are asking… July 2011 is right for the join date and some time later is when I voiced any opinion related to the QM sequence and MWI (I did read through it once and browsed now and again since). No, I did not have another account before that, as a long-term freenode ##physics IRC channel moderator, I dislike being confused about user’s previous identities, so I don’t do it myself (hence the silly nick chosen a decade or so ago, which has lost all relevance by now). On the other hand, I don’t mind people wanting a clean slate with a new nick, just not using socks to express a controversial or karma-draining opinion they are too chicken to have linked to their main account.
I also encourage you to take whatever wedrifid writes about me with a grain of salt. While I read what he writes and often upvote when I find it warranted, I quite publicly announced here about a year ago that I will not be replying to any of his comments, given how counterproductive it had been for me. (There are currently about 4 or 5 people on my LW “do-not-reply” list.) I have also warned other users once or twice, after I noticed them in a similarly futile discussion with wedrifid. I would be really surprised if this did not color his perception and attitude. It certainly would for me, were the roles reversed.
I’m also interested in this. Hopefully it’s not an overt lie or something.
I don’t keep an exact mental record of the join dates. My guess from intuitive feel was “2 years”. It’s April 2013. It was July 2011 when the account joined. If anything you have prompted me to slightly increase my confidence in the calibration of my account-joining estimator.
If the subject of how long user:shminux has been complaining about the QM sequence ever becomes relevant again I’ll be sure to use Wei Dai’s script, search the text and provide a link to the exact first mention. In this case, however, the difference hardly seems significant or important.
I doubt it. If so I praise him for his flawless character separation.
Thanks for clarifying. I asked not because the exact timing is important but because the overstatement seemed uncharacteristic (albeit modest), and I wasn’t sure whether it was just offhand pique or something else. (Also, if something funny had been going on, it might’ve explained the weird rancour/sloppiness/mindkilledness in the broader thread.)
Just an error.
Note that in the context there was no particular pique. I intended acknowledgement of established disrespect, not conveyance of additional disrespect. The point was that I was instinctively (as well as rationally) motivated to support shminux despite also approving of Eliezer’s declared intent, which illustrates the strength of the effect.
Fortunately nothing is lost if I simply remove the phrase you quote entirely. The point remains clear even if I remove the detail of why I approve of Eliezer’s declaration.
The main explanation there is just that incarnations of this same argument have been cropping up with slight variations for (what seems like) a long time. As with several other subjects there are rather clear battle lines drawn and no particular chance of anyone learning anything. The quality of the discussion tends to be abysmal, riddled with status games and full of arguments that are sloppy in the extreme. As well as the problem of persuasion through raw persistence.
Bluntly, IMO gold medalists who can conceive of working on something ‘crazy’ like FAI would be expected to better understand the QM sequence than that. Even more so they would be expected to understand the core arguments better than to get offended by my having come to a conclusion. I haven’t heard from the opposite side at all, and while the probability of my hearing about it might conceivably be low, my priors on it existing are rather lower than yours, and the fact that I have heard nothing is also evidence. Carl, who often hears (and anonymizes) complaints from the outside x-risk community, has not reported to me anyone being offended by my QM sequence.
Smart people want to be told something smart that they haven’t already heard from other smart people and that doesn’t seem ‘obvious’. The QM sequence is demonstrably not dispensable for this purpose—Mihaly said the rest of LW seemed interesting but insufficiently I-wouldn’t-have-thought-of-that. Frankly I worry that QM isn’t enough but given how long it’s taking me to write up the Lob problem, I don’t think I can realistically try to take on TDT.
Again, you seem to be generalizing from a single example, unless you have more data points than just Mihaly.
Note that the original text was “gold,” not “good”.
I assume IMO is the International Mathematical Olympiad(1). Not that this in any way addresses or mitigates your point; just figured I’d point it out.
(1) If I’ve understood the wiki article, ~35 IMO gold medals are awarded every year.
Thanks, I fixed the typo.
Huh. I’d assumed it was short for “In My Opinion”.
Yeah, that confused me on initial reading, though some googling clarified matters, and I inferred from the way shminux (mis)quoted that something similar might be going on there, which is why I mentioned it.