Eliezer’s “The Plan to Singularity” and “Staring into the Singularity” (last updated in 2000 and 2001, respectively) contain numerous references to passive singularity prediction dates and interventionist singularity target dates.
jaime2000
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That’s my guess, too. I know that both Eliezer and Robin posted there. Eliezer had definitely come to Robin’s attention by 1999; he is cited in Robin’s “Comments on Vinge’s Singularity” page.
Of course, the most straightforward way to answer this question is to simply ask either of them.
(Also, that crab thing is fascinating.)
Oh, definitely. It’s a really good analogy for the NRx view of civilization, too. That’s why Gnon’s symbol is a crab.
If you want to read another non-obscurantist explanation of Gnon, try Nyan Sandwich’s “Natural Law and Natural Religion”.
Gnon is reality, with an emphasis towards the aspects of reality which have important social consequences. When you build an airplane and fuck up the wing design, Gnon is the guy who swats it down. When you adopt a pacifist philosophy and abolish your military, Gnon is the guy who invades your country. When you are a crustacean struggling to survive in the ocean floor, Gnon is the guy who turns you into a crab.
Basically, reality has mathematical, physical, biological, economical, sociological, and game-theoretical laws. We anthropomorphize those laws as Gnon.
Most of Ritalin’s recent comments have been on political subjects, namely the internet standards for undeveloped nations thread. Anybody who makes lots of political noise gets a downvote or two per comment; see, for example, Azathoth123 and advancedatheist.
Can confirm. I meant a rocketpunk setting in which combustion engines and simple vacuum tube electronics work, but human operators are still required to run space stations capable of monitoring the weather, handling international communications, or spying on enemy countries.
Why betas should have longer attention span than alphas?
...seriously?
The point Azathoth is making is that there is only so many hours in a day. An alpha male may sleep with many women, but he can only give his attention to one or a few. Beta males, who are lucky to have one woman, are free to concentrate all their attention on her and her children. Therefore, females who fail to attract the alpha male for anything but a quickie have a preference for fooling beta males into raising the resulting alpha male’s children. Beta males, obviously, do not share this preference.
Space stations? As in, stations with humans in them? Pretty much none. Your best bet is to postulate some sort of alternate history in which electronics and computers never took off. Or you can go in the other direction, and postulate tiny space stations which house computing hardware running uploaded humans.
Oh, be serious. I wasn’t crazy about Eliezer’s handling of the basilisk, either, but ubermenschen do not grow on trees. Who do we have around who is willing and able to become LessWrong’s great leader now that he has left? All of the potentially strong leaders I can think of are busy running their own websites, projects, and/or communities.
I can’t find the link now, but I seem to recall him saying that Facebook was more hedonic than LessWrong because he could simply delete and block people who lowered the discussion quality without technical obstacles or social controversy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing a new sequence called “Yudkowsky’s Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters.” On the one hand, it’s great; quite interesting to read and very useful to rational fiction writers. On the other hand, I’m kinda saddened that Eliezer appears to have given up on LessWrong; the sequence is posted entirely on his Tumblr, and uses his Facebook as a discussion forum.
Neoreaction is an intellectual tradition of right-wing political philosophy composed of bloggers who are ideologically descended from the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, better known as Mencius Moldbug. If you want the five-minute version, read Konkvistador’s summaries. If you are willing to read a much longer introduction, try one of these. Or just read the Neoreactionary Canon, which includes all three.
Anyway, the relevance to the grandparent is that LessWrong has a non-trivial neoreactionary minority (3% as of the last survey), and that former SIAI employee Michael Anissimov and his friends went and made a neoreactionary website called MoreRight (an obvious pun on LessWrong). Eliezer Yudkowsky was not amused.
It was in Yvain’s dark matter essay.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-’n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
Exposure worked great for me. I used to be scared of all sizes of cockroaches. After living in an apartment which was absolutely filled with small German cockroaches for a couple of years, I have lost all fear of roaches that size and smaller, while still retaining fear of the larger American cockroaches. I predict that if I were to move into Joe’s apartment, my fear of large roaches would likewise be cured in due time.
I have also slowly lost my fear of spiders (and other long-legged critters such as crane flies) by virtue of encountering and examining them from ever closer distances. My usual response to seeing a spider in the bathroom these days is to grab a generous amount of toilet paper and squash the disgusting thing, whereas a few years ago they would forced me to flee the scene. I like to think of it as having leveled up to the point where I can now defeat my house’s random encounters.
If you develop a reputation for not finishing your stories, men who value closure are going to be reluctant to read them. Consider that you have already abandoned Myou’ve Gotta be Kidding Me.
Of course there is. Why, there’s _Luminosity_, Friendship is Optimal and the wider Optimalverse, Myou’ve Gotta be Kidding Me, “Mortality Report”, “Mortal” and “Mother of Nations”, “Good Night”, Hamlet and the Philosopher’s Stone, Branches on the Tree of Time, The Metropolitan Man, “The Amazing Peter Parker”…
Or you can just look at the TVTropes page.
Gibberish is in ROT13.
Well, this is awkward.
I took the survey because of this subthread, and now I find that I have a profile in an effective altruist website.
Oh, what the hell. There are worse websites to have a profile in.
Am I doing the digit thingy right? I scanned my hands and used MS Paint to make a line through each finger, then divided the number of pixels in each line.
By analogy to the other questions, it should be something like “How would you describe your opinion of pick-up artistry, as you understand the term?” and either a link to an external page describing PUA or a short inline explanation as with the HBD question. You could try to tease apart descriptive and normative claims, but note that no such distinction is attempted with e.g. the feminism question.
The traditional neoreactionary counter is that increased quality of life is due to technological advancement, and that social “progress” has been neutral at best and detrimental at worst.