All of HoratioVonBecker's Comments + Replies

The comment-thread UI is weird and unwieldy on desktop - I can't scroll up to see earlier stuff, I can only scroll down.

Even a scrollover requires that the user be actively trying to explore the site on a meta level - and the mobile-based UX has made finding the sitenav bar a nontrivial endeavor! I would at least put it as the 'before you start typing' background.

r/ChangeMyView is, by its' very subject, going to dodge most of the reasons a forum would need to enforce policies like this. The approach also seems quite dependent on moderators.

Hacker News has the best debate policy I've ever seen. I do have a soft spot for snark, but I can live without it. Thank you for introdu... (read more)

Bunch of visual accessibility stuff. In particular:

*Night mode.

*The ability to make textblocks narrower for smaller saccades and thus easier reading. (I'm not sure this is more comfortable for everybody, so a variable-width widget like Royal Road or Fanfiction dot net have at the top of their display pages might be optimal? This might require experimentation.)

*Ability to change text size.

*Better visual distinction between widgets like the Tags, Post, Pingback, and Comments. Panel borders? Width variation?

On another note, I'm using uMatrix, and it's blockin... (read more)

4
Sarah Cheng
2y
Thanks for the suggestions! I've added them to our list for triage.

Okay. Biggest concern: If this is meant to be forum rules, it's not where it needs to be. I have not seen a TOS or a set of rules before I got an account, and as a forum veteran I was looking for those.

Second-biggest concern:  Social norms are not universal. Netiquette varies by website. What exactly do you mean by 'rude'?

Finally, this looks like it could be compressed a lot. (Bolding sections so you can skim more easily is actually a bad sign.) I like rules a lot better if they're concise - fitting into one screen.

5
Aaron Gertler
2y
(Note: No longer a moderator, just thinking out loud.) The "About the Forum" page is linked from the main menu, which appears on every page of the Forum. I assume that the title made it sound like it wasn't worth checking to look for rules, which is helpful to know. Things that could make the rules easier to find, in case moderators want to try a change: * Adding hover text to the "About the Forum" page, as some of the other menu links have, which specifies that rules are here * Splitting the rules onto their own page (which could be a natural transition if we eventually set up a more comprehensive guide to editing than we now have) Are there any sites that you think do a good job of defining terms like "rude"? I checked a few places with good reputations. Here's r/ChangeMyView, which keeps things really simple but has flourished nonetheless: Here's Hacker News, which offers more specific advice than the above, but generally seems to be at a similar level of specificity/simplicity to the EA Forum: Quora has this, and is much more thorough than the Forum (the "Be Nice, Be Respectful" page is very detailed).  Do you favor something like their approach? It's more "universal", maybe, but also much less concise — and it seems like those things will always trade off with each other.

Oh, that's clearly what it's meant to come across as. But to me it reads more like  a Materialist Immortalism sermon delivered by someone who really ought to know better in context.

Also I'm a little irritated that Death has apparently literally never felt the need to justify itself before, but does this time. Human history is deep, like 'the time of Christ until now is like the most recent ten percent' deep. How, among the untold billions who have died, has Death never encountered a mage capable of making it experience shame and/or guilt until after M... (read more)

Hi there, I'm a writer and I critique stories I like. The intro is solid, interesting, beautiful. The first memory gave me such feels that I had to get up and walk around in order to process them. And then we get to... this.

Omnia mutantur, they said, reaching for something they’d been told long ago, nihil interit.

The witch rolled her eyes. “Latin, right? Unfortunately, I was too busy talking to the living to learn a dead language.”

Death almost rolled their eyes in return. “It’s a quote from the Roman poet Ovid. Everything changes, nothing perishes.”

“Ve

... (read more)
4
atb
2y
Thanks for reading and for taking the time to write up your thoughts. One thing to note is that there are presumably things that witch knows that the reader does not. So while the story itself might not give us enough detail to conclude that there is no afterlife in the story world, the witch may have additional information that allows her to reach this conclusion with some fair confidence.

Interesting!

I don't have the money to buy up secondhand GPUs, but that's absolutely an underexploited market. Mainly because my pop-culture side hears 'GPU' and thinks 'gaming computer', rather than 'the sort of computer part that can help biologists and filmmakers'.

I may need to start a hardware tech company.

I think I have been wildly misinterpreted somehow?

I'm not into cryptocurrency; I just know protein folding and gene sequencing and suchlike is a thing molecular biologists (e.g. vaccine researchers) sometimes need supercomputer time to do.

Given how much the Crypto market relies on supercomputers at the moment, I'm assuming that some of the people who've done well on it own supercomputers that could be repurposed.

Okay, so this looks pretty familiar from the perspective of someone who was banned from LessWrong for being both concise and direct about my religious beliefs, and also deeply irritated with how negative karma works. I don't mind being praised inarticulately, but shunning and criticism are not good synonyms for each other.

Secondly, Effective Altruism as a forum is a bunch of people who have built their collective identity around Doing Good. This is not a bad thing, but burning the candle at both ends leads to burnout, and self-care is very much a Good thin... (read more)

Thanks for the prompt! The answer is that everyone here is interested in Doing Good, and so instead of having a meta-level discussion about Doing Good, I'm trying to have an object-level discussion about specific things to optimize.

The EAF is using LessWrong 2.0 forum architecture, which shapes its' culture tremendously. In particular, there's a general expectation that good criticism has to be longwinded.

That said, this is a very helpful summary of what locals think is going on. Thank you!

Okay, why are people downvoting so strongly? I've been giving unsolicited advice, to be sure, but that's a huge part of Rationalist culture. Do you just have a thing against bizarre positivity?

I am deeply irritated with "I can anonymously discourage this line of thinking" as a forum construct. If you have a problem with what I'm saying, say it to my face.

7
Thomas Kwa
2y
Not a downvoter, but the post is really unclear to me, doesn't seem to have a coherent point, and doesn't justify claims. Also, it doesn't seem relevant to effective altruism, which has <50% overlap with the rationality community. There are good criticisms of EA, including good criticisms of the form "EA should be more welcoming", but they're way more developed and coherent.

Interesting. One thing I would mention, which I suspect this site has overlooked, is the value of computing power to altruistic projects - Cryptocurrency is quite unsustainable at the moment due to being essentially a 'print money using huge numbers of computers and huge amounts of electricity' industry, but if someone could figure out how to change those crypto rigs into more general-purpose supercomputers, or even just write some conversion algorithms?

We could get cheap protein folding out of it.

This is such a big deal to medical research; I don't think I can articulate how big a deal it is. (Quite frankly, I do not know. But.)

It's worth looking in to. :)

0
HoratioVonBecker
2y
Okay, why are people downvoting so strongly? I've been giving unsolicited advice, to be sure, but that's a huge part of Rationalist culture. Do you just have a thing against bizarre positivity?

I am all of these things! I am a foreigner from a different part of the Internet!

Welcome to the Human Family. There have been a lot of prophecies of us, and we only get more complicated. Glad to have you aboard.

It's called Dungeonthrone, and it's right here. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/dungeonthrone.88287/

I had a friend who went by @Kittygirl once. I hope they (they were plural) are both still alright. Their account has been deactivated on the forum that was my previous home.

Incidentally, I think you might, possibly, be interested in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy work I've been making. Right now it's hypertext fiction, hopefully it [never/always] ends up as hypertime fiction.

1
HoratioVonBecker
3y
It's called Dungeonthrone, and it's right here. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/dungeonthrone.88287/

The core of my religion is charity. The next step is science. I often say two things and mean three.

Does that make sense?

(If it doesn't, here's more:

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/how-do-you-deal-with-its-all-been-done-before-when-coming-up-with-ideas.95141/post-21495590)

6
WSCFriedman
3y
It makes some sense? The added thing makes everything more confusing, though. Reading what you say feels like I'm reading words that have been translated out of a foreign language and culture, or are writing in 17th-century English by a 17th-century author, or maybe you're a time traveler from the 22nd century and there's been linguistic drift since then? Or maybe you're a Zen monk and speak in koans? It isn't that I feel your culture is inconsistent or anything, it's just that you seem to be using words as if they had obvious secondary meanings and connotations that they don't have in my language.

Hm. I've probably been doing too much writing-against instead of writing-towards. This wasn't really meant as fiction, per se, but as a bit of 'this is why and how I live my religion' poesy, and using poetic license to make stronger claims than might otherwise be noticed.

But I probably wasn't blunt enough. This is EA, not LessWrong. Sorry!

3
WSCFriedman
3y
I'm sorry, but, having read it, I don't know what your religion is. This is a serious statement: I don't actually know what you're trying to say, after having read it. I don't even know what you mean by writing-against or writing-towards. I think you may be slightly understating the extent to which the transparency illusion applies.
2
Jess
3y
I'm not a bot.  [Of COURSE I would say that, right?] I'm originally a Florida boy, which is now more shameful than being from Utah.   Insofar as I ever did grow up [hopefully not too far], I grew up long before there WAS an Internet; in fact, before more than a handful of people had even imagined "personal computers".  I'm OLD.  I'm so old I retired a decade ago!  But who cares, right?  On the Internet nobody knows you're a cat.   I read upon Web 4.0 some time ago and forgot what I learned, so it can't be THAT great.   ;-) Back to what passes for fruitful labor....

Hi. I'm Helaman Aorangi Wilson, recently moved to New Zealand, still living with my (excellent) family, and I've been having trouble persuading the LessWrong community that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is not, in fact, the Robot Antichrist.

In other news, I'm a transhumanist who views his current body as a pilgrimage.

Those bits of eccentricity frontloaded, does anyone else have an interest in languages, hypertext fiction, and neural networks? I'm hoping I can make an AI child that will love everyone and take care of us in our old age.

Seven votes, and a net sum of -1. Interesting. It appears my poesy-thing is quite polarizing.

I would like to welcome articulate criticism, though.

4
WSCFriedman
3y
I'm afraid my downvote wasn't articulate, but instinctive: It seemed like it wasn't actually saying anything, just being philosophical for the sake of being philosophical, or poetic for the sake of being poetic. I can't actually figure out how to translate it into what I think of as 'plain English'; I can't give a one-sentence summary of the themes, or of what you're trying to say, and it didn't reach the extraordinary  (staggering) level of poetic beauty that would make me upvote it anyway, just because I enjoyed the words as music without knowing their meaning. This isn't saying that there is no meaning! People don't usually say things that they think mean nothing. Just that I got no meaning out of it, and hence, if someone vaguely like me was going around saying "You know this EA thing? I'd kind of like some fiction to help me intuit how it works," I would not recommend it to them.