This sounds related to this “proof of induction” by Alexander George. Sample quote:
So, to repeat, it can indeed be proved that there is a rule—the “Hardin-Taylor rule”, I shall call it — that will, for any arbitrarily chosen function f, correctly predict most values of f on the basis of its past be- havior; that is, for most t the rule will correctly predict f(t) on the basis of f’s values at all s< t.
This is mostly a semantical question, as different compatibilist philosophers might use the words “having a will” to mean different things. (They are not words with a fixed technical meaning in philosophy). Some may think “having a will” is synonymous with “having free will”, while others might think that e.g. if you a mind-controlled without knowing it you might “have a will” (a subjective sense of willing to do things) while not satisfying the conditions for compatibilist free will.
Do the prisoners guess all at the same time, or in order (and thus after hearing finitely many other guesses)? If the second, is the guessing order known beforehand, or will it be at the whim of the guards?
This is also one of the standard heuristics in chess. When you gain an advantage large enough, e.g. a couple of pawns, the best course of action is usually to stop trying to gain more advantages and instead trade as many pieces as you can, to avoid counterplay and reach a simple-to-win endgame.
Scott Aaronson reviews Max Tegmark’s book on the Mathematical Universe hypothesis. Tegmark responds in the comments, with an interesting and still ongoing back-and-forth.
I don’t know if you intended your disclaimer to be funny, but I found it funnier than the original joke.
Happens in Safari, not in Firefox.
Here are the results of a survey of philosophers of religion specifically. It has lots of interesting data, among them:
Most philosophers of religion are committed Christians.
The most common reasons given for specializing in philosophy of religion presupposed a previous belief in religion. (E.g. “Faith seeking understanding”; “Find arguments in order to witness”, etc.)
Most belief revisions due to studying philosophy of religion were in the direction of greater atheism rather than the opposite. However, this seems to be explained by a combination of two separated facts: most philosophers of religion begin as theists as mentioned above, and most (from both sides) become less dogmatic and more appreciative of arguments for the opposing view with time.
I have looked at your recent comments and, though you have participated in some potentially mindkilling discussions, you also have some downvotes that are completely inexplicable on that account. For example this comment and this comment were both downvoted at least once. I suspect therefore that your karma drop is due to having a mass-downvoting “enemy” as some others have complained of recently. (Though a piece of counter-evidence is that not all your comments have been downvoted, which is the usual M.O.)
By a strange coincidence (unless you saw it and thus had it on your mind) today’s SMBC is about exactly this.
You are right. Perhaps the argument could be modified by replacing “is a flying pig” by “is a typical pig in all respects, and flies”?
Copying the description of the argument from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with just one bolded replacement of a definition irrelevant to the formal validity of the argument:
Say that an entity possesses “maximal excellence” if and only if it is a flying pig. Say, further, that an entity possesses “maximal greatness” if and only if it possesses maximal excellence in every possible world—that is, if and only if it is necessarily existent and necessarily maximally excellent. Then consider the following argument:
There is a possible world in which there is an entity which possesses maximal greatness.
(Hence) There is an entity which possesses maximal greatness.
One problem with that suggestion is that these discussions often arise organically in a LW thread ostensibly dedicated to another topic, and they may arise between people who don’t have other blogs or natural places to take the conversation when it arises.
I voted Yes, but only if a community norm emerges that any discussion on any part of LW that becomes political (by which I include not just electoral politics, but also and especially topics like sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, etc.) is moved to the latest political thread. The idea is to have a “walled garden inside the walled garden” so that people who want LW to be a nominally politics-free environment can still approximate that experience, while does who don’t get to discuss these topics in the specific threads for them, and only there.
Here is a very simple recipe for fish that doesn’t feel like fish. I made it yesterday :). In addition to being simple, it is easily tweak able/optimizable for your tastes and dietary needs. All quantities are rough approximations:
Throw in a pot 1 onion (chopped), 4 celery sticks (chopped), 1 potato (diced), 2 cod fillets, and 2-3 cups of watered tomato sauce. (The one I use is a super-simple homemade one: 2 tablespoons tomato paste, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 2 cups water, 1 tablespoon sugar, and salt and pepper to the taste). Bring to the boil and simmer until cooked. (I do it in a pressure cooker, where it takes 20-25 minutes. In a normal pot it would take longer and you probably need to use more water). And there you have it. The defining taste is the celery in tomato sauce; the fish (which breaks down) and the potato are just white chunks in it giving the feelings of protein and starch without changing the taste. Makes 3-4 servings.
Also quantum physics, in no-collapse interpretations. (Except for a few processes like kaon decays, that arguably are time invariant “in spirit” because they are CPT invariant).
What is the HPMOR approach? Having so many characters be super-intelligent plotters, so that the prior probability that the explanation for something involves a complicated plot is much higher than in real life?
I’m not sure. The criminal is always caught, but only because of a genius Great Detective; the regular police are usually portrayed as incompetent, at least in the true classics of the genre (Conan Doyle, early Christie). Modern shows like CSI might be a case where your statement applies better.
Yes, that was part of my point too. Maximizing P(E|H) at the expense of P(H) is much less likely (in real life) to give you a true solution than maximizing P(H|E) with Bayes, even if some components of P(E|H) are not particularly high (which is normal in real life).
A nice puzzle which I found in this Math Overflow page: Is there a position with a finite number of chess pieces on an infinite chessboard, such that White has a forced win in ω moves? The meaning of this is that White has a move such that, for every possible response of Black, White has a guaranteed checkmate in a number of moves bounded by a finite number N; but before Black’s first move, we cannot put a bound on how large N might be.
The thread gives a solution, and also links to this paper, where higher ordinals and questions of computability in infinite chess are also considered.