I certainly agree. Most of those I instantly believed, and I had a bit of doubt for the one about southern blacks preferring southern to northern white officers (or maybe that is belief as attire, or hindsight bias) but as you said it is crazy that the opposite of what is true is believable when told it is correct.
EngineerofScience
I will do asteroids.
Just wondering, where will the donated money actually go? An important thing to think about.
It also is less reliable when you cite only one source because what that source says could be false(either intentionally or accidentally).
I’m not sure how effective this is considering most people who would see this are rationalists and people like to think good of themselves.
I can probably write one of the hundred word descriptions. I also could probably make an image as well.
That works for some purposes but it is not truly random so it would be better to use a dice or other more random number if available. Of course, be realistic with getting random numbers. If the situation calls for a quickly thought decision, that works. If you have dice in your pocket go ahead and pull them out.
I think that this shows not just that splitting people into groups makes the people in one group like themselves and hate the people in the other group, but also that when people figure problems out together that they like eachother more.
I don’t know the exact numbers, nor how carefully that was found out. The point is that asteroids contain mor metals than we ever mined ever and that adds up to be a lot of money.
No. In this case, game theory says that if both people are using the same logic and they know that, then what I showed above is correct: cooperating is the best choice. However, that is not always the case in reality.
Going into game theory, if an opponent makes a truly random decision between two numbers, and you win if you guess which number they guessed, that would be a time that you should fight randomness with randomness. There aren’t a lot of other situations where randomness should be fought with randomness but in situations similar to that situation that is the right move.
I can see that, and I realize that there are advantages to having a store that can sell illegal things. I would now say that such a store would be benificial. There would have to be some restrictions to what that type of store could sell. Explosives like fireworks still could be for use by a licensed person, and nukes would not be sold at all.
One thing I have noticed relating to this in school is that on tests sometimes I put down an answer on a quiz that I know is wrong because the teacher will give me points if I put that. For example, on a Physical Education quiz the teacher briefly talked about how sugar affects the human body. One of the questions was multiple choice and it said “Sugar is a...” and I selected carbohydrate even though I knew it was wrong because that is what we were taught.
So is there ever a time where you can use absence of evidence alone to disprove a theory, or do you always need other evidence as well? Because is some cases absence of evidence clearly does not disprove a theory, such as when quantum physics was first being discovered, there was not a lot of evidence for it, but can the inverse ever be true will lack of evidence alone proves the theory is false?
What is a Fermi Estimate? If you could provide a link to an article talking about that I would be thankful.
I agree. It is bad to do what scams say, even if you think that you can trick the scammer. Plus, they will put you on a “vulnerable” list and you will get more scams.
I am not so sure that rationalists don’t win, but rather that “winning”(ie. starting a company, being a celebrity, etc.) is rare enough and that few people are rationalists that people that win tend not to be rationalists because being a rationalist is rare enough that very few people that win are rationalists, even if each rationalist has a better chance of winning.
I think this is a really good idea. I have wished I could “blink” and then be in the future but still have been doing work during that time, and this is just the way to do that. I am trying to to this because it is a really great idea.
Also, can I write in my asteroid essay the potential helpfullness of asteroids? We belive that one asteroid(just one!) could be worth $1,000,000,000,000. In other words, catching one asteroid could be worth one-trillion dollars. Could I mention that in my hundred word blurb?
I joined lesswrong because my friends suggested it to me. I really like all the articles and the fact that the comments on the articles are useful and don’t have lots of bad language. This really surprised me.