The Ultima Online thing may (or may not) be an artefact of some feature of the game. In a particular MMPORPG I used to play, alliances couldn’t have more than 60 players in them, but often you would get such an alliance to split into two wings so they could recruit more members while staying de facto allied to each other.
A1987dM
I’ve read a few of the posts in it, and I’m going to read the rest in the next few days.
our equations describe the territory and not our maps of it
I would disagree on similar statements about pretty much any physical theory (or even, any theory at all). Our equations describe a model which approximates the real world to a good-enough degree in their scope of applicability, but is not the real world. (For example, standard QFT describes a world with a fixed background flat spacetime, and the real world isn’t like that.)
What affects the world is real. (If things can affect the world without being “real”, it’s hard to see what the word “real” means.) Configurations and amplitude flows are causes, and they have visible effects; they are real.
“That’s nonsense,” says the shaman. “You’re right there! I’m seeing you, not an image of you! Now I ask you again, on your honor: Do we Hu’wha still have our souls since you came among us, or not?”
“Have you never seen yourself or someone else reflected into a poll of water or something? We’ve found out that something similar happens in your eyes.”
John starts to look worried. “I was hoping for a simple ‘Yes’, there. Am I made of the same atoms as before, or not?”
“Well, according to quantum mechanics, all atoms of the same type are “the same” anyway, and even if that weren’t the case, your body wasn’t the same atoms when you were 18 as when you were 17, as you ate/drunk/inhaled lots of atoms and pissed/shitten/exhaled/puked lots of other atoms.” “Whatever. Is my body still made of cells with my DNA? Is my brain still made of neurons?”
Why couldn’t they just fake being unable to pass a Turing test? :-)
Even if you assume the centre of mass of the universe to stay fixed, if all particles in the universe except one blinked, then you would see the one particle that didn’t blink being kicked the opposite direction; if half the particles in the universe blinked, you would see those which blinked being kicked at half the speed, and those which didn’t being kicked at half the speed in the opposite direction, etc. So it’s not like the case when all particles blink is the only special one.
Economic Weirdtopia: http://xkcd.com/512/ of course. What else?
Sexual Weirdtopia: To maximize heterozygosity, once a month each man aged between 14 and 60 is compelled to have sex with a fertile woman randomly chosen throughout the world.
Governmental Weirdtopia: The winner of the yearly World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing Championship automatically becomes the world dictator for a 12-month term.
Technological Weirdtopia: After a plan to activate a paperclip-maximizing super-AI is uncovered and its participants convicted, paperclips are banned worldwide. Staple manufacturers rejoice.
Cognitive Weirdtopia: All schoolchildren are expected to learn Lady Gaga lyrics by heart, read all Dan Brown books, and stuff like that.
The statement “x approximately equals 98” and the statement “x approximately equals 100” will likely be interpreted in different ways. I’d normally interpret the former to mean that x is likely between 97.5 and 98.5, and unlikely to be less than 96 or more than 100; whereas I’d usually interpret the latter more broadly (e.g. between 90 and 110). In particular, if the latter was rephrased to “x approximately equals 10^2”, I wouldn’t object to it being used to mean something as vague as “x is very likely to be somewhere between 30 and 300”.
Maybe some kind of hindsight bias is at work, but I think I would have found Statement 2′ a lot less crazy than Statement 2: the latter requires there being several billion male prostitutes, which (assuming that less than 20% of all males will be prostitutes and about 50% of all people will be male) would require a world population of several tens of billions.
(One of the main reasons why I would’ve found Statement 1′ very unlikely is the “exactly 670616629.2” part, but I’m sure that was not your point: I’m sure you would assign a much lower prior to “I (army1987) generated a random 32-bit number a few minutes ago and it was 735,416,352” than to “… and it was more than 1 billion”, but you won’t be shocked to know only the former is true. So I’ll pretend it said “between 600 and 700 million miles per hour” instead.) I think I would’ve found Statement 1 crazier than 1′, too: the idea that one particular colour (within the convex hull of the set of all colours I’ve seen before) has quasi-magical powers but an ever-so-slightly bluer or greener one has no weird properties at all sounds pretty bizarre to me (and possibly unfalsifiable, if there exist infinitely many colours), in a way that the idea that there is a speed (several orders of magnitude larger than anybody ever experienced) such that weirder and weirder things happen the closest you get to it wouldn’t.
And imperial units such as the mile weren’t standardized yet across countries, nor was the metre defined in terms of c and the second, so c wasn’t “exactly 670616629.2 miles per hour” according to the 1901 meaning of mile.
A simpler example would be an emotional drive to eat. We have hunger, but that is just a sensation.
A majority of people in first-world countries not on a weight-loss diet or something seldom feel real hunger (as opposed to appetite), and the “I wouldn’t mind a snack right now” feeling (despite having had lunch a couple of hours before) feels much more like an emotion such as missing someone or being worried than like a sensation such as having to pee or feeling cold.
Intensional:
Shoe: one of a pair of rigid or semi-rigid objects worn on the feet to thermally insulate them and/or to protect their skin and/or for aesthetic reasons.
Hope: emotion usually associated with assigning a non-negligible (but usually small) probability of some desirable outcome.
Wire: a strand of metal (or several such strands twisted together), thin enough to be flexible, often cladded with a flexible sheath of insulating material.
Green: the colour of light with frequencies which, in vacuum, correspond to wavelengths within a couple tens of nanometres of 530 nm.
Politician: someone holding a public office or otherwise involved in politics.
Apple: the fruit of the apple tree (Malus domestica).
From the easiest to the hardest: apple, green, wire, shoe, hope, politician
Extensional:
Shoe: runners, moccasins, boots, sandals, etc.
Hope: (It is notoriously hard to define feelings extensionally. When a woman asked Napoleon how he felt when some foreign soldiers were after him, he ordered his soldiers to point their guns at the woman, and then he told her “That’s the way I was feeling.” I’m gonna try to do something similar.) “Five minutes from now, I’m going to cast a die, and if the six comes up, I’m going to give you ten dollars. … Hope is what you’re feeling right now.”
Wire: each of the strands you can find in a power cable, a network cable, a pair of earphones, etc.
Green: the colour of chlorophyll, the second primary in sRGB, these three words (assuming you’re using a colour display and no custom stylesheet or stuff like that and you’ve not followed the link before), etc.
Politician: heads of state (e.g. Barack Obama), heads of government (e.g. David Cameron), ministers, members of legislative assemblies, mayors, etc.
Apple: a fruit like the one depicted on the logo of Apple Inc., you know, the one on an iPod or a Mac.
From the easiest to the hardest: green, wire, politician, shoe, apple, hope
Apple was much easier for to define intensionally than extensionally because the membership criterion is straightforward, but I can’t think of any specimen of apple the listener is likely to have seen. Politician was the other way round because there are lots of well-known people or classes of people who I’d consider to be politicians, but I can’t think of a good-enough criterion.
(How damn hard is it to get the list markup to work?!?!)
“It wouldn’t.”
I would guess focusing on other goals while raising multiple pre-teen/early-teen kids wouldn’t be that easy.
I get it now… The point is that while you’re performing steps 2 and 3, your children will be taken care of by your parents (their grandparents), right?
Is Parfit’s Hitchhiker essentially the same as Kavka’s toxin, or is there some substantial difference between the two I’m missing?
My state of knowledge about the coin prior to Omega appearing is that I don’t even know that the coin is going to be flipped, actually.
The Omega is also known to be absolutely honest and trustworthy, no word-twisting, so the facts are really as it says, it really tossed a coin and really would’ve given you $10000.
How do I know that? I would assign a lower prior probability to that than to me waking up tomorrow with a blue tentacle instead of my right arm; so, it such a situation, I would just believe Omega is bullshitting me.
Hello everyone, I’m a 24-year-old graduate student from Italy. I found this site after reading someone quoting Yudkowsky: “Quantum physics is not “weird”. You are weird.” I’ve been reading this blog the whole past few days. :-)