Viliam_Bur

• Viliam_BurMar 2, 2016, 9:28 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: At­ten­tion! Fi­nan­cial scam tar­get­ing Less Wrong users

  I also am not sure they’re scams in the traditional sense.

  If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?

  Typically the reason for contacting people individually, when the public announcement would be the natural way, is to prevent the contacted people from seeing each other’s reactions.

• Viliam_BurMar 1, 2016, 10:19 PM

  24 points

  on: Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016

  moderator action: Old_Gold is banned

  Another account of Eugine_Nier /​ Azathoth123 /​ Voiceofra /​ The_Lion /​ The_Lion2 is banned, effective now. I am posting this as a comment in Open Thread to avoid writing articles about banning the same person again and again, thus reducing the administrative cost of enforcing the already existing ban.

  This specific change of policy does not apply to other potentially banned users (unless they are obvious spammers or scammers) who still deserve a separate post.

  What links here?

  • Viliam_Bur's comment on Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016 by Gunnar_Zarncke (Mar 20, 2016, 8:49 PM; 16 points)

• Viliam_BurMar 1, 2016, 10:05 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb 8 - Feb 15, 2016

  Thank you for the explanation! I posted a warning in a separate article. (Ironically, the second private message mentioned in the article was sent to my account.)

• Viliam_BurFeb 3, 2016, 11:12 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  Here are some existing Python scripts for LW.

  If you can look at them, and then write a script that takes a number (or a list of numbers) as an input, and displays total number of LW users, and number of LW users with karma smaller than given number… well, that would be the first step. Otherwise, we need to wait until someone does it.

• Viliam_BurFeb 2, 2016, 10:49 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  Sounds like this could work.

  Well, depends on how large fraction of votes currently comes from users with karma under 250. It would be bad to reduce the total number of votes drastically. They do have a positive role, in general; most people use them correctly.

• Viliam_BurJan 31, 2016, 2:32 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Houshalter’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  Did he start out this way or did this develop over time as he got more frustrated?

  I don’t remember.

• Viliam_BurJan 31, 2016, 10:36 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  Traditionally he posted quotes in Rationality Quotes threads to farm karma he could use for the downvotes. Maybe he got tired of doing that.

• Viliam_BurJan 31, 2016, 10:32 AM

  25 points

  0

  in reply to: Houshalter’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  Eugine’s beliefs are “politically incorrect”, but that’s not completely unusual at LW. The main reason why we don’t see them here often is that we don’t debate politics often. And ironically, Eugine’s downvoting crusades have contributed significantly to reducing the political debates on LW. There were times when we used to have a political debate in a separate thread or in an Open Thread once in a while. And at some moment, such debates started predictably ending with someone saying “I have disagreed with Eugine yesterday, and today I see I have lost hundreds of karma points and most of my old comments are at −1; fuck this”. This makes the debate unpleasant even for the people who on object level happen to agree with Eugine on the specific topic. Most of us see the difference between “I won the debate by providing convincing arguments” and “I won the debate by strategically downvoting or otherwise harrassing my opponents” (or “I won the debate because my opponents were harrassed by a third party”).

  Also, Eugine’s comments seem like optimized to offend. Such comments are “convincing for the already believing, and irritating for the unbelieving”. They don’t change anyone’s opinion, and are usually used by a majority, to silence a minority. Ironically, majority is exactly what Eugine doesn’t have here. So this leaves me with two models:

  • Eugine is too mindkilled to understand all this nuance, despite having spent years here. He still doesn’t get what LW is about. In such case, his mental abilities are insufficient for LessWrong.

  • Eugine may understand the nuance, he just doesn’t give a fuck about rationality or LW culture. For him, victory of his tribe is the ultimate goal. That also means he doesn’t belong here, just for different reasons.

  Regardless of whether he understands or doesn’t understand what he is doing wrong, he has shown no capacity to learn or to improve his behavior. Like, come on, it’s not like moderators are paranoidly observing IP addresses of every user to make sure the lifelong bans stay enforced. All he would have to do is to create a new account and change his behavior so that no one would suspect it’s the same person. He is either incapable or unwilling to do that. Well, fuck him; we are not here to provide him group therapy.

  I mean, feel free to speculate about his true reasons. I am just saying they don’t change anything about the ban.

• Viliam_BurJan 31, 2016, 9:11 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  NancyLebovitz is currently the main moderator, with the right to ban accounts, so you can send her a private message.

• Viliam_BurJan 30, 2016, 8:12 PM

  14 points

  in reply to: Good_Burning_Plastic’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  We don’t even have a good specification yet. Even if you add a specific number, “casting too many votes” isn’t really what we need.

  Ironically, I believe the problem could actually be not enough voting by the regular users. That gives a rabid voter such large fraction of the total votes on the website.

  For the record, I would support a software solution, but it would be one that would do data analysis in order to find various kinds of voting abuse (retributive downvoting, sockpuppetry, etc.) and would provide reports to moderators. Clicking the “ban” button is the part that only takes a few seconds. Analysing the data to find out if the user really does what they are accused of, that takes a lot of time, because it’s currently done ad-hoc, and because the Reddit code and database are unnecessarily complicated.

• Viliam_BurJan 30, 2016, 3:28 AM

  10 points

  in reply to: casebash’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  I am sorry, this is an announcement post; I will not handle the requests posted here. This was a one-time action for me, and I will soon return to hibernation as a moderator.

  The currently active moderator is NancyLebovitz. If you have a strong suspicion that something wrong is going on, please send a private message to her.

• Viliam_BurJan 30, 2016, 3:06 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: [mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

  In theory, yes. However, LW is based on Reddit code, and the code and the database structure are quite difficult. (See some example database scripts here.)

• Viliam_BurJan 30, 2016, 2:46 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Exactly. Eugine/​Azathoth/​Ra/​Lion was already sufficiently transparently banned in 2014.

  He either didn’t get the memo, or he pretends to be dumb for the sake of scaremongering, or maybe he actually is delusional. I don’t care which one; the outcome is the same.

[mod­er­a­tor ac­tion] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

• Viliam_BurMay 4, 2015, 11:51 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Com­mu­ni­ties: A sin­gle mod­er­a­tor is of­ten su­pe­rior to the wis­dom of crowds

  There are about 30 accounts banned during the whole history of LW.

  Most of them are spammers, who created their accounts, posted one or ten spam comments, subsequently had their accounts banned and comments removed. (The comments of the banned users have to be removed separately; banning the user merely disallows them to log in again.)

  For curious people, the spam does not seem related to LW context. There were spam accounts promoting:

  • iPhones,

  • wedding rings,

  • silver earrings,

  • silver necklaces,

  • a Korean casino,

  • astrological service,

  • a computer games website,

  • jackets, caps, and handbags,

  • fake passports and driving licenses,

  • a collection of links without description that I didn’t click,

  • some generic text (“I like this website, thank you, also look at my website”) followed by a link that I didn’t click

  The number of non-spam users banned is less than one per year.

  In addition to banning users, moderators can also remove individual comments. I don’t have a good statistics for this. But I suppose that if this ability would be abused, the users would complain in their other comments.

• Viliam_BurMay 4, 2015, 11:29 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: An Ex­per­i­ment In So­cial Sta­tus: Soft­ware Eng­ineer vs. Data Science Manager

  Reminds me of a joke:

  (at a job interview)
  Q: “What is your biggest fault?”
  A: “Sincerity.”
  Q: “Well, I don’t think that sincerity is a fault.”
  A: “Well, I don’t give a fuck about what you think.”

• Viliam_BurMay 4, 2015, 11:26 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: So­cial sta­tus hacks from The Im­prov Wiki

  Uhm, countersignalling? “I am so powerful that I do not need this ability.”

  Specifically: “I am so powerful that I do not need the abilities that make cooperation easier; others obey me anyway.”

• Viliam_BurApr 13, 2015, 6:50 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Elo’s comment on: What have we learned from mee­tups?

  Depending on the day. But most of the time, yes. As a chatting club, we were rather okay. As a rationalist group… not so much.

• Viliam_BurApr 3, 2015, 11:37 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How has less­wrong changed your life?

  I didn’t have any specific article in mind. It is just a topic that I am aware of in my life. For example, I love learning new things, but instead of using them I often just jump to learning another thing. Which seemed like widening my options, until a few years later I realized that I keep forgetting the old things and that I actually never used most of them. Thus learning is an enjoyable hobby for me, but to make it useful, I have to go beyond mere learning.

  There is such thing as “learning too much”, or more precisely, being so obsessed by learning that you never actually use what you learned. (The problem is not much knowledge per se, but zero application of that knowledge beyond mere signalling.) And this is a mistake that probably many smart people do, and you can get a lof of applause for promoting it as the most noble way of life. On the other hand, as Steve Jobs alegedly said: “Real artists ship.”

  Of course there is also the opposite mistake of doing some stuff every day for years, and never taking time to learn how to do it better. But among educated people this is considered a low-status mistake, while learning many useless things is a high-status mistake.

• Viliam_BurApr 2, 2015, 12:24 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How has less­wrong changed your life?

  The eternal conflict between exploration and exploitation. Keeping your options is what keeps the good options within your reach, and prevents you from going too far in the blind alleys. But at the end, if you have walked through the whole shop and didn’t buy anything, you leave empty-handed. At some point you gotta have a job (or other source of income) and people are going to pay you for something specific.

  I think this is even more complicated when people are not explicitly aware of the skills they really have. They may feel like they don’t specialize in anything, when in fact they do. For example I have a friend working in IT whose programming skills are not very impressive: he can do simple things in many systems, but is not very good at math, cannot write complicated algorithms, and is not really nerdy enough to spend evenings obsessing over some technical details. Yet somehow his career was at least as successful as mine. Because what he lacked in programming skills, he compensated by great communication and leadership skills. But he didn’t realize this was his real strong point; he identified with being a programmer, because that’s what most of his friends were. It took him a few years to fully realize that he is more fit for a role of a manager or consultant in an IT company, and that instead of trying to learn yet another programming language (he somehow believed that his lack of mathematical skills could be fixed by finding the “right” programming language; which is a delusion many bad programmers and IT managers seem to share), he should rather find a position where he gets paid explicitly for doing what he is good at. This more or less doubled his salary, and he is no longer worried about not sufficiently understanding some abstract things his nerdy friends debate about. -- So he actually was a specialist all the time, but in a skill he didn’t think about as essential for his job.

  Are most people entrepreneurs here or what?

  I think entrepreneurs are a minority here, but still a larger fraction that in the general population. Also other types of people need motivation and efficiency while working relatively alone, for example PhD students.

  I don’t need better time management because I don’t have enough tasks to fill out my workday and if I could I wouldn’t as it would not result in a raise or promotion as they are generally not visible ones.

  Do you have any goals outside of your work where being more productive could help you reach them better? My promotion options are also rather limited (and as far as they exist, this website seems more relevant than LW). But I also have other goals, where productivity helps. I am doing the productivity stuff for myself, not for my boss.

  The planning fallacy happens to people who plan aggressively, but why the hell would people want to do that … I just make a comfortable guess and multiply it by three to six

  I most frequently think about planning fallacy when correcting the estimates of my colleagues at work. For example, last week: We had to do 3 critical things, each of them requiring the same resources for at least 1 day. So my colleague immediately sends an e-mail to the customer promising that it will be done in 3 days. Which in reality means 2.5 days, because then we have to travel to the customer, fill the paperwork, install the stuff, and hope that nothing goes wrong. And it assumes there will be no non-trivial bugs in a project that wasn’t maintained for a month, doesn’t have a proper documentation, and two programers who worked on it, including the previous team leader, have left the company during that month. And my colleague just doesn’t care: she sends the promise to the customer, puts my e-mail in the copy, and the problem is “solved”. She doesn’t even tell me; if I would miss the e-mail, she would only tell me on the third day. So me and a few helpful coworkers voluntarily stayed at work for 12 hours a day, fix a few horrible bugs, completed the stuff in 3.5 days (that included waiting half day until a broken server was fixed), delivered the result to the customer… and the next day I am invited to the CEO where my colleague blames me for failing the customer and for “making her look stupid”. (And the only thing that saved my ass was completely unrelated to my skills or work, it was a random office-politics advice from internet that I decided to test experimentally at work a few days ago, and luckily it worked.) -- Uhm, okay, this is not really about planning fallacy, but about a completely fucked up system. But planning fallacy apears here all the time. Pretty much all deadlines we have ever made were unrealistic, and all of them were done like this: “don’t think about details, just make a very simplified model, imagine the best-case scenario for that model, and write it down as the official estimate”.

  I feel like somehow the methods are optimized for a very competitive, confident, driven, accomplishment-oriented approach. Probably it requires that you feel that you get rewarded for things you do. This was always missing for me, in my life experience in what you and what you get is really loosely related.

  Heh, my work experience also suggests that what I do and what I get is loosely related, and I think this years-long experience also has contributed to my laziness. (It is hard to get motivated when your uncosciousness insists that what you do it completely unrelated to the outcome, and it is hard to make yourself think otherwise when you have a ton of experimental evidence supporting that.) But I think the life outside of the work doesn’t have to be like this. If I decide to make a computer game in my free time, it is up to me. I do have a computer and a development environment, I know programming, I do have a few hours of free time every week… and it is my choice how to use them.