It’s a bad idea. Don’t do it. You’ll be turned off by all the low-level grudgery and it’ll distract you from the real content.
Most of the time, you’ll know if you found a solid proof or not. Those times you’re not sure, just post a question on math.stackexchange, they’re super-helpful.
The fifth axiom is the only one which requires some effort to understand. Intuitively, it states that parallel lines do not intersect.
No. This is bad and you should feel bad. Parallel lines do not intersect, and the fifth postulate has nothing to do with it. What do you imagine the definition of “parallel lines” is?
Parallel lines do not intersect by definition, in any geometry, Euclidean or non-Euclidean. The parallels postulate talks about something completely different.
I just want to note here that Johnstone’s book is amazing and I’m grateful to you for introducing me to it.
“Herzelia, Israel” should now be “Tel Aviv, Israel” as the location changed, The link to the FB event stays the same. Thanks!
The entire point of that whole battle is to encourage Harry to commit his hidden resources (Lesath under the Cloak). The whole brawl is basically a show put on for Harry’s benefit. Since Quirrell controls the time of Harry’s coming to the scene, he could easily take out Snape himself and move him out of the way earlier. He didn’t need to bring Sprout or manipulate others to come.
Since Quirrell neglected to ask Harry in Parseltongue whether he still has hidden resources Quirrell doesn’t know about, it’s still just about possible that Cedric Diggory, Time-Turned, is following them under the second Cloak. I hope he does.
Seems a bit strange that Quirrell didn’t ask Harry to confirm in Parseltongue that Harry didn’t have any contingency measures beyond those Quirrell already knows about (Lesath under the cloak). In the last chapter’s discussion there were theories that Cedric Diggory might be around, time-turned with Harry. Even if not, why wouldn’t Q make sure H doesn’t have anyone else around to help or set up any other measures? Harry’s promise “shall call for no help” isn’t enough, if things are already set in motion for someone to help him.
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Tel Aviv has had regularly scheduled meetings for a while now, please add it to the regular list.
If you’re offended by any word in any language, it’s probably because your parents were unfit to raise a child. They were too stupid. They should have been neutered. Because all it is is a sound you can make with your mouth. It’s not a weakness that you have naturally. When you come out of that pink ugly hole onto this planet, you’re nothing but a gooey, shrinking, wrinkled ball of weakness. That’s all you are: you’re weak, you’re nothing but weak, and your parents look at that, and they think: “Not weak enough. We can make this thing even weaker by training it to react poorly to different sounds that you can make with your mouth.”
-- Doug Stanhope
I do not see how this suggestion could be positively refuted. It enjoys a status well known in academic circles and doubtless elsewhere,—that of the Remotely Conceivable Alternative, contrary to the obvious implication of the facts, incapable of proof or disproof.
-- Denys L. Page (1908-1978), History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 57
[retracted]
There is no such thing as “the shortest program for which the halting property is uncomputable”. That property is computable trivially for every possible program. What’s uncomputable is always the halting problem for an infinity of programs using one common algorithm.
It is also easy to make up artificial languages in which Kolmogorov complexity is computable for an infinite subset of all possible strings.
You were probably thinking of something else: that there exists a constant L, which depends on the language and a proof system T, such that it’s not possible to prove in T that any string has Kolmogorov complexity larger than L. That is true. In particular, this means that there’s a limit to lower bounds we can establish, although we don’t know what that limit is.
(I doubt this is original)
To help yourself do something regularly on a computer, put a direct link on your bookmarks bar.
Example: you want to keep a diary. Write it in a Google doc document and put the direct link to it in your bookmarks bar, so that one click is all it takes to open it. Not in your bookmarks somewhere else, not in a shortcut on the desktop (your browser is open all the time anyway), not a separate fancy diary-keeping software, but just one click in a place that’s always in front of you. If you’re like me, that’ll help a lot.
Perhaps anti-intuitively, the difference in results is huge even between “one click in the bookmarks bar” and “one click to open a folder in the bookmarks bar and one click on the right link in that folder”.
P.S. Alerts are also good, but this method helps where alerts aren’t helpful. You want to train yourself to write a quick review of every book once you finish it. There’s no way to set an alert to go off when you turn the last page in Kindle. But put a link on your bookmarks bar.
Is there a causal link between being relatively lonely and isolated during school years and (higher chance of) ending up a more intelligent, less shallow, more successful adult?
Imagine that you have a pre-school child who has socialization problems, finds it difficult to do anything in a group of other kids, to acquire friends, etc., but cognitively the kid’s fine. If nothing changes, the kid is looking at being shunned or mocked as weird throughout school. You work hard on overcoming the social issues, maybe you go with the kid to a therapist, you arrange play-dates, you play-act social scenarios with them..
Then your friend comes up to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. Look, your friend says. You were a nerd at school. I was a nerd at school. We each had one or two friends at best and never hung out with popular kids. We were never part of any crowd. Instead we read books under our desks during lessons and read SF novels during the breaks and read science encyclopedias during dinner at home, and started programming at 10, and and and. Now you’re working so hard to give your kid a full social life. You barely had any, are you sure now you’d rather you had it otherwise? Let me be frank. You have a smart kid. It’s normal for a smart kid to be kind of lonely throughout school, and never hang out with lots of other kids, and read books instead. It builds substance. Having a lousy social life is not the failure scenario. The failure scenario is to have a very full and happy school experience and end up a ditzy adolescent. You should worry about that much much more, and distribute your efforts accordingly.
Is your friend completely asinine, or do they have a point?
Hmm, I would disagree. If you have a metaphysical claim, then arguments for or against this claim are not normally epistemological; they’re just arguments.
Think of epistemology as “being meta about knowledge, all the time, and nothing else”.
What does it mean to know something? How can we know something? What’s the difference between “knowing” a definition and “knowing” a theorem? Are there statements such that to know them true, you need no input from the outside world at all? (Kant’s analytic vs synthetic distinction). Is 2+2=4 one such? If you know something is true, but it turns out later it was false, did you actually “know” it? (many millions of words have been written on this question alone).
Now, take some metaphysical claim, and let’s take an especially grand one, say “God is infinite and omnipresent” or something. You could argue for or against that claim without ever going into epistemology. You could maybe argue that the idea of God as absolute perfection more or less requires Him to be present everywhere, in the smallest atom and the remotest star, at all times because otherwise it would be short of perfection, or something like this. Or you could say that if God is present everywhere, that’s the same as if He was present nowhere, because presence manifests by the difference between presence and absence.
But of course if you are a modern person and especially one inclined to scientific thinking, you would likely respond to all this “Hey, what does it even mean to say all this or for me to argue this? How would I know if God is omnipresent or not omnipresent, what would change in the world for me to perceive it? Without some sort of epistemological underpinning to this claim, what’s the difference between it and a string of empty words?”
And then you would be proceeding in the tradition started by Descartes, who arguably moved the center of philosophical thinking from metaphysics to epistemology in what’s called the “epistemological turn”, later boosted in the 20th century by the “lingustic turn” (attributed among others to Wittgenstein).
Metaphysics: X, amirite? Epistemological turn: What does it even mean to know X? Linguistic turn: What does it even mean to say X?
“Ontology” is firmly dedicated to “exist or doesn’t exist”. Metaphysics is more broadly “what’s the world like?” and includes ontology as a central subfield.
Whether there is free will is a metaphysical question, but not, I think, an ontological one (at least not necessarily). “Free will” is not a thing or a category or a property, it’s a claim that in some broad aspects the world is like this and not like that.
Whether such things as desires or intentions exist or are made-up fictions is an ontological question.
Metaphysics: what’s out there? Epistemology: how do I learn about it? Ethics: what should I do with it?
Basically, think of any questions that are of the form “what’s there in the world”, “what is the world made of”, and now take away actual science. What’s left is metaphysics. “Is the world real or a figment of my imagination?”, “is there such a thing as a soul?”, “is there such a thing as the color blue, as opposed to objects that are blue or not blue?”, “is there life after death?”, “are there higher beings?”, “can infinity exist?”, etc. etc.
Note that “metaphysical” also tends to be used as a feel-good word, meaning something like “nobly philosophical, concerned with questions of a higher nature than the everyday and the mundane”.
Yes, I would.
(Have two small children, haven’t needed to).
I didn’t downvote you, but you’re wrong. I don’t particularly want XiXiDu to go away, and I haven’t felt offended by his posts. It’s simply an option that he should consider, given his description of his health problems. If I wanted him to leave, I would have urged him to leave, not suggested that he consider the option.
There’s no “fight”. You’ve been a very aggressive and mean-spirited critic of LW/MIRI/EY for a few years. Doesn’t mean that there’s a fight. Doesn’t mean anyone “wins” if, say, you shut up and go away.
Your suggestion is not constructive, because coming up with retorts to mean-spirited past posts and endorsing them would be a poor use of MIRI’s time, and would only add to drama rather than reduce it. Here’s what you should do instead:
First, consider just going away. It may be best for your physical and mental health to stay away from LW and LW-related topics. Delete your old posts, forget you ever cared about this stuff, take up some other hobbies, etc. If you feel you can’t, presumably because you think these issues are really important, read on.
Come up with a generously-sized kindly-worded update that negates the meanness and stick it on top of your relevant past posts. E.g. if I were in your position I would write something like “I wrote the post below during years in which, I now recognize, I was locked in a venom-filled flamewar against a community which I actually like and appreciate, despite what I perceive as its faults. I do not automatically repudiate my arguments and factual points, but if you read the below, please note that I regret the venom and the personal attacks and that I may well have quote-mined and misrepresented persons and communities. I now wish I wrote it all in a kinder spirit”.
Continue participating on LW as you desire, trying your best to be kind and not get into drama. Plenty of people manage to be skeptical of MIRI/EY and criticize them here without being you. (If you’re not sure you can do this well, ask some regular(s) to help you out. Precommit that if people you asked PM you about your future LW comment or blog post saying you’re being an asshole, you’ll believe them and mend it.)
Accept that some people will continue to hate/dislike/hold a grudge against you. Issue private apologies to them if you feel you should, but don’t do it publicly (because drama). If that doesn’t help, accept and move on.
Note how all the exodus is to places where people own their particular space and have substantial control over what’s happening there. Personal blogs, tumblrs, etc. Not, say, subreddits or a new shinier group blog.
Posting on LW involves a sink-or-swim feeling: will it be liked/disliked? upvoted/downvoted? many comments/tepid comments/no comments? In addition, you feel that your post stakes a claim on everybody’s attention, so you inevitably imagine it’ll be compared to other people’s posts. After all, when you read the Discussion page, you frequently go “meh, could’ve done without that one”, so you imagine other people thinking the same about your post, and that pre-discourages you. In addition, a few years’ worth of status games and signalling in the comments have bred to some degree a culture of ruthlessness and sea-lawyering.
So, these three: fretting about reactions; fretting about being compared with other posts; fretting about mean or exhausting comments. One way to deal with it is to move to an ostensibly less demanding environment. So you post to Discussion, but then everyone starts doing that, Main languishes and the problem reoccurs on Discussion. So you post to open threads, but then Discussion languishes, open threads balloon and become unpleasant to scan, and the problem reoccurs, to a lesser degree, on them too. But if you go off to a tumblr or a personal blog or your Facebook: 2nd problem disappears; 3rd problem manageable through blocking or social pressure from owner (you); 1st problem remains but is much less acute because no downvotes.
It’s useless to say “just don’t fret, post on LW anyway”. The useful questions are “why didn’t this happen in the first 4-5 years of the site?” and “assuming we want this reverted, how?” For the first question, because as the site was growing, the enthusiasm for this exciting community and the desire to count your voice among its voices overrode those feelings of discomfort. But after a few years things changed. Many regulars established lateral links. The site feels settled in, with an established pecking order of sorts (like the top karma lists; these were always a bad idea, but they just didn’t matter much at first). There’s no longer a feeling of “what I’ll post will help make LW into what it’ll be”. And there’s a huge established backlog that feels formidable to build on, especially since nobody’s read it all. So the motivation lessened while the dis-motivation stayed as it was.
How to fix this? I think platformizing LW might work well. Everybody prefers their own space, so give everybody their own space on the common platform. Every user gets a personal blog (e.g. vaniver.lesswrong.com) on the same platform (reddit code under the hood). The global list of users is the same. Everybody gets to pick their reading list (tumblr-style) and have their custom view of new posts. There’s also RSS for reading from outside of course. Blog owners are able to ban users from their particular blog, or disallow downvotes.
Then bring back Main as a special blog to which anyone can nominate a post from a personal blog, and up/downvotes determine pecking order, with temporal damping (HN style). Would also be cool to have a Links view to which everyone can nominate links from other rationality blogs and LWers can discuss.
(I realize that this would require nontrivial programming work, and have a good understanding of how much of it would be required. That isn’t an insurmountable challenge).