Aumann agreement theorem

Don't expect too much from Armondikov on this. Clever as he may be in other circumstances, he has been drinking too much Yudkowskian kool-aid to get that the evidence can sometimes be tricky and not easily interpreted in a simple formula. It would be so much better if everyone (especially those stupid AI researchers and physicists who don't see what a genius Yudkowsky is) just agreed with whatever Yudkowsky says. Oh, and if you don't donate to the Singularity Institute even though you have heard of it, the singularity might torture you forever!

You're a fucking idiot.

Tsk, tsk. Roko's basilisk gave you nightmares again?

Yes, I can't sleep because I think a computer will eat me. You have it spot on exactly.

I knew it!

Btw, your guru is still wrong about morality. There is no objective morality. It is fallacious to assume that utilitarianism is somehow the correct moral system.

If you do insist on saying stupid things, I will treat you with sarcasm and contempt, you know this, right?

I will keep calling you out for being an apologist for a pseudoscience-promoting crank. I thought referring to Roko's basilisk would get you thinking about just where the stupidity can be found, but apparently not.

You and the Cult of Yudkowsky forming on the LW talk page are setting up a very difficult false dichotomy to work with. To you, the world is split in two, and only two, starkly contrasted categories: you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists. You're labelling those who don't seem to fall in to the category of uncritically and unquestioningly despising Yudkowsky, anyone who signs up to LW - which is, after all, a website composed of individuals - and everything they say without regard to what it is that they say, as "apologists".

Please, grow up.

Hahaha ok then, what is the accepted amount of criticism of LW? You show me. Heck, my latest thread on the talk page was a possible defense of LW, or at least an opportunity to clarify it. Face it, LW pushes plenty of fringe and crank ideas, and these are absolutely fair game, whatever you might think. Their belief that LW/SIAI is saving the world is just silly, as even someone there recognized.

Your reference to "individuals" ignores that the LW community has certain memes shared by most of the active LWers. It's akin to Thatcher's claim that society doesn't exist, only individuals and families do. Libertarians have a well-known tendency to ignore that individuals live in an environment called society.

And no, I don't despise "anyone who signs up to LW". I don't despise David Gerard for instance. Heck, I don't even despise Luke Muehlhauser, he can't help to have been raised a fundamentalist Christian and being unable to reject the basic way of thinking that comes with it.

You mistake me for someone who gives more than a picofuck.

I can't resist commenting on this anymore. This whole week-long discussion has been a deranged laugh riot. It is utterly hilarious that you and David Gerard are being tarred as LW apologists. You two have incredibly well-thought-out and nuanced opinions on the LW source material, but it's all for naught, because apparently any defense of LW means that you're the William Lane Craig of Singularitarianism. I applaud your patience - I would have ragequit days ago. Makes me glad I'm (mostly) in lurk mode nowadays.

Also, I'm totally stealing "picofuck."

I'm also apparently a part of the Yudkowsky cult, despite the fact that I probably disagree with him on more things than ADK and David Gerard, mostly on esoteric cognitive science stuff. I think he's a computational fundamentalist, something which I see as a vestige of the days of early cog sci and GOFAI.

Oh, and he also buys into Santa Barbara brand evo psych, which means he endorses the hardest form of massive modularity. IMO, that's a bunch of hokum that flies in the face of the research in neuroscience, but then again, that's true of a lot of things that the hardcore AI-types think about the brain. I don't think Yudkowsky even realizes this, which is probably the worst part.

And what the fuck is this shit? Apparently PZ telling some computer programmers that they need to learn biology before commenting on how to simulate a brain can only be responded to with "PZ needs to learn more about computers".

Thanks for the links! Looks like I have some interesting reading ahead of me. At the moment, I don't know anything about either of these issues, so I don't really have anything to add to the discussion just yet. As a CS type myself, I'm pretty ignorant of cognitive science and philosophy, and I have more than a bit of catching up to do. (I've always been ignorant of these topics, but until recently I had a vastly overinflated sense of how much I knew.) I'll have to read at least those two articles and get back to you.

"I'm also apparently a part of the Yudkowsky cult..." Where have I said that? You are just making shit up.

Can you be bothered to actually live by the graph on your profile page? Whenever I respond to you, and you (presumably) don't know how to reply in a reasonable way, you reply that you don't care or with an ad hominem.

You don't care? Fine. But then why did you even bother to post in the first place? Moron.

Yes, I do live by the flow chart. But since you basically opened up with "don't expect much of this person, he's sucked into a cult" (which, by the way, is and ad hominem attack, whereas calling someone an idiot is just a crass insult - they're not the same thing) you left the chart by one of the exits pretty early and I had no particularly compelling desire to return to it, leaving the game open for excesses of contempt and sarcasm, which is far more enjoyable because frankly there's nothing better in the whole world than being snide to someone who thinks they're intelligent. I did give you a reasonable reply, one stating that you've set up a false dichotomy (and continue to do so), yet you did not really take this on board and instead tried to de-rail it onto something else.

Now, as I said before, I give about half a femto-fuck about Yudkowsky, yet you insisted on saying I practically worship him as a guru - without any evidence apart from the fact I have a fairly middle-of-the-road opinion that goes along the lines of "sometimes right, sometimes wrong, meh". Now, why did I post? Well, thanks to the magic of how forum threads work we can track up above, and you'll see two things, these are, in no particular order:

a) that this is my user page, so it's only polite to respond in some way. b) you made the first post digging something up that is a few weeks old (and also, started by someone else).

Evidence, which is there for people to see, doesn't quite fit your notions with respect to that. That and the fact you seem to be constantly attacking me, without much consideration for making a constructive point - "drinking too much Yudkowskian kool-aid" as you put it - then I'll recalibrate my fuck-o-meter to read between 200 and 800 milli-fucks.

So, in conclusions, you still have this "you are either with us or you are with the terrorists" mentality with respect to Less Wrong, and until you drop that I really have no inclination to give your personal obsession over everything Eliezer Yudkowsky says any more thought. Indeed, the only reason this post is as long as it is is because, as I said above, I like being snide to people who think they're intelligent.

Well you are the one who complained that it's not fair to say that LW is a "claptrap of pseudoscience", despite the fact that LW promotes more than its fair share of pseudoscience, fringe ideas and crankery. Yudkowsky is not getting off the hook, get it? If he promotes pseudscience (he does), then he is called out on it.

And I clearly pointed out to you that I don't hate all LWers, yet you repeat that claim. Are you unable to comprehend or are you lying?