The first terrifying shock comes when you realize that the rest of the world is just so incredibly stupid.
The second terrifying shock comes when you realize that they’re not the only ones.
BT_Uytya
Karma: 642
Bayesianism for humans: “probable enough”
$10.00
I’m a student and this is my second PayPal transaction ever, so I was a bit scared to donate more.
Hopefully my example will inspire anybody else. $10.00 isn’t very much, but come on, it’s not like it is worse than not donating anything at all.
Bayesianism for humans: prosaic priors
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stphenson proves to be a very good, intelligent book series.
“Why does the tide rush out to sea?”
“The influence of the sun and the moon.”
“Yet you and I cannot see the sun or the moon. The water does not have senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon, so far away, affect the water?”
“Gravity,” responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot.
“That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say ‘gravity.’ It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”
Daniel Waterhouse and Colonel Barnes in Solomon’s Gold
I took the survey.
Guys, you are seriously need to start using metric system or at least include the necessary number in the meters. Going to Google twice in order to calculate the relevant numbers was… frustrating.
(By the way, I have never donated to any charity before, but I sworn in a grand manner that it will be in the list of the first five things I will do with my PayPal account when I get one)
lesswrong.ru domain for translation project?
This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. <...> Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.
Symbolically, however…
The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. She had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.
To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.
Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior
But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well—what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind.
Now consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before us has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert—by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who’ve not perceived a thousandth part of what you have.
Newton makes his discoveries in geometrical realms, where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ’tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword fights.
Daniel Waterhouse says to Hooke in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver
It’s interesting to note that this is almost exactly how it works in some role-playing games.
Suppose that we have Xandra the Rogue who went into dungeon, killed a hundred rats, got a level-up and now is able to bluff better and lockpick faster, despite those things having almost no connection to rat-killing.
My favorite explanation of this phenomenon was that “experience” is really a “self-esteem” stat which could be increased via success of any kind, and as character becomes more confident in herself, her performance in unrelated areas improves too.
I will gladly post the rest of the conversation because it reminds me of question I pondered for a while.
“Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”
“I’ve never claimed to understand them.”
“Ah, that is very wise practice.”
“All that matters is, he does,” Barnes continued, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck-planks.
“Does he then?”
“That’s what you lot have been telling everyone. <> Sir Isaac’s working on Volume the Third, isn’t he, and that’s going to settle the lunar problem. Wrap it all up.”
“He is working out equations that ought to agree with Mr. Flamsteed’s observations.”
“From which it would follow that Gravity’s a solved problem; and if Gravity predicts what the moon does, why, it should apply as well to the sloshing back and forth of the water in the oceans.”
“But is to describe something to understand it?”
“I should think it were a good first step.”
“Yes. And it is a step that Sir Isaac has taken. The question now becomes, who shall take the second step?”
After that they started to discuss differences between Newton’s and Leibniz theories. Newton is unable to explain why gravity can go through the earth, like light through a pane of glass. Leibniz takes a more fundamental approach (roughly speaking, he claims that everything consist of cellular automata).
Daniel: “<...> Leibniz’s philosophy has the disadvantage that no one knows, yet, how to express it mathematically. And so he cannot predict tides and eclipses, as Sir Isaac can.”
“Then what good is Leibniz’s philosophy?”
“It might be the truth,” Daniel answered.
I find this theme of Baroque Cycle fascinating.
I was somewhat haunted by the similar question: in the strict Bayesian sense, notions of “explain” and “predict” are equivalent, but what about Alfred Wegener, father of plate tectonics? His theory of continental drift (in some sense) explained shapes of continents and archaeological data, but was rejected by the mainstream science because of the lack of mechanism of drift.
In some sense, Wegener was able to predict, but unable to explain.
One can easily imagine some weird data easily described by (and predicted by) very simple mathematical formula, but yet I don’t consider this to be explanation. Something lacks here; my curiosity just doesn’t accept bare formulas as answers.
I suspect that this situation arises because of the very small prior probability of formula being true. But is it really?
[tinfoil hat]
mark him as his equal
Suppose that Killing Curse just bounced off the night Voldemort died, just refused to work for some reason. If “magically embodied preference for death over life” haven’t worked on someone, I would pretty much say that it means something.
Also, possible foreshadowing in chapter 5:
“I have formed an idea...” said Professor McGonagall. “After meeting you, that is. You triumphed over the Dark Lord by being more awful than he was, and survived the Killing Curse by being more terrible than Death.”
Funny to think about, but probably I just see patterns where there are none.
remnant of the other
My a bit stretched interpretation is that Bayesian Conspiracy and Chaos Legion are Harry’s remnants.
[/tinfoil hat]
No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.
Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior
Relevant quote, conversation with a Sorting Hat:
“And you would find loyalty and friendship in Hufflepuff, a camaraderie that you have never had before. You would find that you could rely on others, and that would heal something inside you that is broken.”
It seems that something broken was healed at last.
PS: Tangentially related to the Harry’s inability to rely on others: chapter 31, chapter 70 (Maybe if there were more heroes, their lives wouldn’t be so lonely, or so short.), chapter 93.
Amusingly, I read this story, but completely forgot about it. The example here is perfect. Probably I should re-read it.
For those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Investigation
I need help: Device of imaginary results by I J Good
Just remembered a serious objection, originally from Tarhish on reddit:
I had been thinking about this possibility for a while, but now it also requires Dumbledore to have lied about Lily and James hearing the prophecy in the Hall of Prophecy. Because if they did, then it means they were mentioned in the prophecy, and this theory does not, at first thought, seem to allow that.
(from here, it’s only 4 months old, you still can upvote that)
This argument can be somewhat handwaved away by “James is ascendant of Ignotus Peverell, and prophecy talks about several possible futures”, but still.
Hello, good time of day.
My name is Victor, I’m 19. I’m a student of computer science from Russia (so my English is far from perfect, and probably there will be lack of articles; please excuse me).
There wasn’t any bright line between rationalist!Victor and ordinary!Victor. If I remember correctly, five years ago I was interested in paranormal phenomena like UFO, parallel worlds or the Bermuda Triangle (I’m not sure I truly believed in it, probably I just had fun thinking about it: but I might have confessed the cached thought about scientists not knowing important things about the world) and liked reading the pop-science books at the same time. Then I realized that there is a beauty, honesty and courage in the scientific worldview and shortly thereafter, I became a person from the Light Side: not because science was true, but because it was fun.
But at least I rejected the Bermuda Triangle. I was too honest to leave inconsistencies in my pool of beliefs; so long, pseudoscience!
Maybe at the same time I discovered the concept of the utility function and blog of a psychologist arguing that there is nothing wrong with an egoism. Something clicked in my mind; the explanation of human behaviour was beautiful in it’s simplicity, and there were some interesting implications of this explanation. Then Dawkins and realization that evolution is just a natural continuation of the laws governing non-organic matter. Evolution was fun, and also it was true. I became an Guardian Of The Evolution, and I was fighting superstitions. It was point of no return: it was impossible to defend telepathy again (why there aren’t any telepathic wolves?).
There was moment of marvel, when I realized that there wasn’t any reason to expect any intellectual feats from a naked ape living in town; our brain wasn’t adapted to the current environment, but it is still working, and it is working much better than you should reasonably expect. Intelligence is fragile, and humanity is the underdog I should root for. At that time, I had already known about cognitive biases, but my feelings towards this topic became different after this insight.
I don’t remember when I started reading LW. I might have learned about utility functions here, but I’m not sure. LW was changing me gradually. In the course of two or three years I have been noticing some small changes: I started admiring the scientific method, I understood the power of the intelligence, sometimes I withdrew from an argument because there wasn’t any disagreement about anticipated experience there, et cetera.
I don’t know where to draw a line between “non-rational age” and “rational age”. But I sure as hell I’m with you guys now.
(By the way, tags on the opening post are wrong. There should be a tag reading “harry_potter”, not two separate tags for the first and last name.)
-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto