An interesting natural experiment happened on the Pacific Theater of WWII. American and Canadian forces attacked an island which had been secretly abandoned by the Japanese weeks prior. Their unopposed landing resulted in dozens of casualties from friendly fire and dozens of men lost in the jungle. Presumably, a similar rate of attrition occurred in every other landing, on top of casualties inflicted by the deliberate efforts of enemy troops.
jaime2000
Karma: 1,125
Would you be willing to freeze if your family did? Your friends and family? Your whole country? Or even if everyone in the world was preserved, would you expect the structure of society post-resurrection be different enough that you would refuse preservation?
I cannot parse your question. Can you rephrase?
And what does the “Yudkowsky’s recent pwnedness” swipe refer to?
For what it’s worth, when I asked Nyan Sandwich and Nydwracu whether they thought Eliezer Yudkowsky was pwned, they cited his support for open borders and his evangelical polyamory as evidence that he was, indeed, pwned.
Agree with the general point, though I think people complaining about dates in history are referring to the kind of history that is “taught” in schools, in which you have to e.g. memorize that the Boston Massacre happened on March 5, 1770 to get the right answer on the test. You don’t need that level of precision to form a working mental model of history.
The goodness of a school is not a property of the school’s organizational structure or teaching methodology so much as it is a property of the students who attend the school (“a ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn’t a physical location, its people”). Discrimination on the basis of anything but money is illegal, so good schools are either public schools in areas in which it is expensive to live, or private schools which cannot be attended without paying expensive tuition.
“Good schools” is a euphemism.
Perhaps blame it on Yvain, AKA Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex.com for attaching this strange intellectual node to LessWrong. ; )
This is just wrong. Neoreaction has had a presence on LessWrong since before it existed; back in the days of Overcoming Bias, Moldbug used to comment under the handle “Mencius.” Vladimir_M, Aurini, and sam0345 were reactionary LW users who made their last comments in 2012; Dr. Alexander’s “Nutshell” essay was posted in March of 2013. Hell, at one point, Multi got so annoyed that he wrote a post called “I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions.”
Good times.
Rationality Quotes September 2014
Good Night seems specifically optimised to chill EY, was it your goal?
Oh, good heavens no! The thought that Mr. Yudkowsky would ever read the story did not even occur to me until long after it was finished.
I am a bit puzzled by one aspect of Good Night, but that may be because I don’t understand the tech level that the characters are operating at.
At the level of magitek I envisioned the characters having, your solution should definitely be possible. The realistic answer is that the prompt gave us twelve hours of prep time and one hour of writing time; I did not think of your idea during the allotted time, and if I had I would have mercilessly cut it at the planning stage so that I could fit the whole story into one hour. Even disregarding the time limit, rnpu nethzrag V unq Pryrfgvn naq Gjvyvtug qvfphff jnf n fvatyr, ovt, eryngviryl fvzcyr pbaprcg; vzzbegnyf zhfg zbqvsl fb gung gurl pna rgreanyyl ybbc, be gurl zhfg tebj, be gurl zhfg qvr. Your idea is more complex, and it doesn’t fit the theme. If you had handed me a beautifully written section which covered the whole issue in three paragraphs while I was writing, I would have had no choice but to murder it for the sake of the story as a whole.
Literary concerns aside, my Twilight would disagree with the notion that lbh pna pubbfr juvpu vafgnaprf bs lbh lbh fhowrpgviryl rkcrevrapr onfrq ba jurgure lbh vqragvsl jvgu gurz be abg.
A Verb Called Self
I am the playing, but not the pause.
I am the effect, but not the cause.
I am the living, but not the cells.
I am the ringing, but not the bells.
I am the animal, but not the meat.
I am the walking, but not the feet.
I am the pattern, but not the clothes.
I am the smelling, but not the rose.
I am the waves, but not the sea
Whatever my substrate, my me is still me.
I am the sparks in the dark that exist as a dream -
I am the process, but not the machine.~Jennifer Diane “Chatoyance” Reitz, Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens
Have you tried using Calibre combined with the Wiki Reader plug-in?
I have not. All I know of it is what Eliezer quoted in CFAI.
I recently decided to bite the bullet and started to use the Markdown standard in my plain-text documents (I would have preferred the syntax of txt2tags or Org-mode, but neither of those is nearly as widespread and well-supported). It’s proven so useful that I am seriously considering uninstalling LibreOffice. Who needs a WYSIWYG editor when you have readable source code which can be easily converted to an html document? Not to mention that Notepad++ opens instantly, while LibreOffice Writer takes forever.
I highly recommend that anyone who deals with lots of text documents try Markdown. It will change your digital life. If you need help getting started, try the Markdown Tutorial.
I have uploaded a collection of My Little Pony one-shots called Flashes of Insight to both FIMFiction.net and FanFiction.net. While most of the stories have no particular relevance to LessWrong, “Good Night” draws heavily on ideas I first encountered on this site, and I expect most people here will find it enjoyable. Eliezer Yudkowsky called it “chilling,” which, coming from him, I consider a very great compliment.
Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
I think Moloch is a metaphor for the actual, uncaring and often hostile universe, as contrasted with an imagined should-universe
No, that’s Gnon (Nature Or Nature’s God). Moloch is the choice between sacrificing a value to remain competitive against others who have also sacrificed that value, or else to stop existing because you are not competitive. The name comes an ancient god people would sacrifice their children to.
What motivated you to learn Esperanto in the first place?
Please change the “referred by a link on another blog” option to “referred by a link on another blog or website”. It’s been bugging me for years.
Again, your relationship style question conflates very different clusters. There is a big difference between traditional monogamy and serial monogamy, or between the ideal of polyamory preached in rationalist circles and the harem type of polyamory (polygyny, mistresses, etc...) which is traditional for a sufficiently high-status man to have. The obvious way to solve this is to split the “prefer monogamous” and “prefer polyamorous” answers into two answers each, each of which describes the relevant clusters in a short sentence similar to the answer choices in the political question.
You are asking too many calibration questions for me. I might answer 1, 2, or, at a stretch, 3. 10 questions is gonna cause me to leave that whole section blank.
Likewise, I don’t think I’m gonna answer the probabilities section unless you switch to radio buttons, like you use in the extra credit political section.
Per your own advice, you may want to add a completely implausible question to the survey so you can measure our Lizardman’s constant and subtract it from the other results.
I’d suggest a section asking opinions on famous thought experiments. “Do you flip the switch in the trolley problem?”, “do you push the fat man in the modified Trolley problem?”, “is the China brain conscious?”, “do you one box against Omega?”, “does the Star Trek transporter kill you?”, etc… maybe some not so famous though experiments, too. Eliezer has that thing in which a primitive culture which is afraid that cameras will steal your soul but does not realize that the eye is basically a camera is used as an analogy for crbcyr jub ner nsenvq bs hcybnqvat, and you asked that question about the angel which offers you reincarnation as a metaphor for pelbcerfreingvba.
My bonus question is “Do you read non-rationalist fanfiction? That is to say, do you read fanfiction other than HPMOR, Luminosity, Friendship is Optimal, etc… and their derivative fanfanfiction?”