I’m just currently genuinely very interested in the kinds of questions this post was about, and selfishly thought I’d get very useful criticism and comments if I’d post here like this (as did indeed happen).
I’ve found it hard to avoid doing this kind of thing. Luckily I have people at the Singularity Institute to discuss this kind of hypothesis with. If you post it to the Open Thread, it will like as not be ignored, and if you make a top level post about it, then it will like as not be downvoted (but at least you’ll get feedback). Perhaps it would be best if a lot of Less Wrongers made blogs and advertised those blogs in a top level post using some sort of endorsement method? I’ve thought about writing my own blog before, but it’d be annoying to have to ask a lot of people to check it out or subscribe. But if a lot of LWers did it, it wouldn’t be nearly as annoying. Then posts like the one you wrote could still get feedback without taking up space in the minds of a multitude of Less Wrong readers who don’t care about the decision theory of simulations.
Getting downvoted so much is something that I for some reason enjoy very much :) It probably has to do with me thinking, that while there are very valid points on which my post and my decision to post it can be criticized, I suspect that instead of thinking of those valid reasons to dislike what I did, and seeing them as a reason to downvote, the downvoters probably just had a knee-jerk reaction to religion as a topic (probably even suspecting that I’d have religious views that I don’t actually have).
This totally does not work unless you have a way of discovering evidence to distinguish between the two hypotheses, and I don’t think you have such a method. Commenters are more likely to have more sophisticated reasons for disagreeing than the average LW lurker who sees the word ‘faith’ in anything but a totally negative light and immediately downvotes, so posting this gave you little evidence. The downvotes are most likely to come from both the least and most sophisticated of LWers: the least because they’re allergic to anything to do with religion, the most because they’re allergic to hypotheses that fail to carve reality at its joints. If I was going to downvote the post it’d be because of the latter, but I still don’t know what the median reason would be for a downvote.
I’ve found it hard to avoid doing this kind of thing. Luckily I have people at the Singularity Institute to discuss this kind of hypothesis with. If you post it to the Open Thread, it will like as not be ignored, and if you make a top level post about it, then it will like as not be downvoted (but at least you’ll get feedback). Perhaps it would be best if a lot of Less Wrongers made blogs and advertised those blogs in a top level post using some sort of endorsement method? I’ve thought about writing my own blog before, but it’d be annoying to have to ask a lot of people to check it out or subscribe. But if a lot of LWers did it, it wouldn’t be nearly as annoying. Then posts like the one you wrote could still get feedback without taking up space in the minds of a multitude of Less Wrong readers who don’t care about the decision theory of simulations.
This totally does not work unless you have a way of discovering evidence to distinguish between the two hypotheses, and I don’t think you have such a method. Commenters are more likely to have more sophisticated reasons for disagreeing than the average LW lurker who sees the word ‘faith’ in anything but a totally negative light and immediately downvotes, so posting this gave you little evidence. The downvotes are most likely to come from both the least and most sophisticated of LWers: the least because they’re allergic to anything to do with religion, the most because they’re allergic to hypotheses that fail to carve reality at its joints. If I was going to downvote the post it’d be because of the latter, but I still don’t know what the median reason would be for a downvote.