Most people want to live, and so because they want to live they want to avoid dying.
But it would be more polite not to say things like “you don’t actually have a reason for why you think you don’t want to live forever,” and just say “you don’t have a reason not to want to live forever” or something similar.
If they actually have no logical basis then it would be hard to expect that they would be better than random.
But a feeling that something is likely true is a logical basis, since it is caused by something, and it could be a reason why someone can make correct judgments at a rate better than random. For example, when I tried calibration games, whenever a binary question came up and I had no knowledge of the topic, I guessed based on what I happened to feel was more likely. So for example if the question was “Did team A or team B win the superbowl in 1984?” I had no knowledge of the answer because I am not interested in sports and pay no attention to them. But one of the team names might have felt slightly more familiar than the other, and so I guessed that name.
Following that policy of following my feelings, I was not able to get less than 60% accuracy on the binary questions that I had no real knowledge about.
TezlaKoil doesn’t include his whole argument here. Basically he is using Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem. The theorem proves that a theory sufficiently complex to express arithmetic cannot have a proof of the statement corresponding to “this theory is consistent” without being an inconsistent theory.
This doesn’t show that arithmetic has a proof of “this theory is inconsistent” either. If it does, then arithmetic is in fact inconsistent. Since we think arithmetic is consistent, we think that the arithmetical formula corresponding to “arithmetic is consistent” is true but undecidable from within arithmetic.
It also doesn’t imply that the theory composed of arithmetic plus “arithmetic is consistent” is inconsistent, because this theory is more complicated than arithmetic and does not assert its own consistency.
Of course we think the more complicated theory is true and consistent as well, but adding that would just lead to yet another theory, and so on.
If you try to use mathematical induction to form a theory that includes all such statements, that theory will have an infinite number of postulates and will not be able to be analyzed by a Turing machine.
I would agree that it’s not very satisfying, in the sense that there is no satisfying resolution to the paradox of the liar.
But logic is actually crippled in reality in that particular way. You cannot assume either that “this is false” is true, or that it is false, without arriving at a contradiction.
As people have been saying, if H can make this argument it is inconsistent and does not work properly (i.e. it does not return True or False in the correct situations.)
People often want to die long before they commit suicide or even consider it. I think Sister Y said at one point that she had wanted to die for years, without ever committing suicide.
It doesn’t seem to me highly unlikely that the point of psychological exhaustion would be close to the physical one. That seems like the sort of fit that evolution could produce pretty easily.
“If you could prove any algorithm will halt or not halt, then you can easily make a halt-detection machine that works in all cases.”
That is only true if your proofs work from the same one set of axioms. But in reality you can choose different sets of axioms as needed. So it may be possible to prove of each and every algorithm that it will halt or not, but you cannot make a halt-detection machine that works in all cases, because your proofs use different sets of axioms.
I don’t remember the number of questions but I played it for quite a while. I remember being frustrated because I couldn’t get the 50% option calibrated, since I didn’t want to purposely choose the option that felt less likely. Presumably more practice would have helped distinguish between weaker and stronger impressions of that kind.
I agree that the brain does this kind of thing computationally, and it would be a mistake to suppose that there is some other non-computational way to do it.
It seems like most procrastination is just feeling that working right now would be painful. But it is true that there are times when you know that finishing one task will just give you several new tasks, so you put off finishing the one task in order to avoid the work of the new tasks.
I haven’t gone back and checked, but I seem to remember hearing that Eugene_Nier, when contacted by a moderator the first time, said he was trying to drive away people that he considered unproductive. So if it’s the same person it’s likely that he still tries to drive people away.
Actually, I think when I said “always distracting” I was thinking about myself. I’m pretty much in front of a computer during my entire waking hours, so always involved with text. I agree that it doesn’t have to be distracting for other kinds of activities like manual work.
With the ADHD study, I wonder if that might work by the music actually distracting them, but not by as much as other things would distract them without the music. Of course even if this is the case, the study would still show that it is helpful for them.
If you live in an extended family or something similar, as long as you don’t give out physically, it’s helpful not to give out psychologically. So if psychological exhaustion is something that naturally happens, selection could push it off until physical exhaustion so that you can keep contributing to the tribe as long as possible.
Of course this is a just-so story but I don’t see why it’s an unreasonable one.
This happens the same way you change any other preference or opinion. The reasons for your preference or opinion change on a roughly continuous basis, but in the end you do change the preference or opinion on a particular day.
I agree that this is not a good design, and even when you use the link which gives both main and discussion, I dislike the format compared with the normal discussion page.
I now read all articles (from both main and discussion) using an rss feed, but it would be better if there were a link at the top to “all posts”, formatted in the style of the discussion page.
Yes, that’s what I remembered.
It sounds like Jiro was saying that the Jester really does not assume that “The content of the boxes can be deduced from the the inscriptions.” He just assumes “The inscriptions are either true or false,” and it logically follows from what the inscriptions say that he can deduce the contents. So the problem wasn’t making an assumption about how the contents could be discovered, but making an assumption that the inscriptions had to be either true or false.
These seem like pretty good reasons not to sneer, whether or not your criticism is solid.
I think the ingrained hostility doesn’t come from high school and media, but from human nature which doesn’t like it when people are trying to raise their status relative to you.
But anyway, the motive of speaking the truth is different from the motive of displaying intelligence, so to the degree that someone has the second motive that is likely enough to hinder the first. So if someone has the second motive, that isn’t a good reason to be hostile, but it is a good reason to take what they say with a grain of salt.
Right, it seems like people actually have instincts for bad mental posture more than for good mental posture.
Still, I think it might not be too difficult to look at ourselves and determine when we are using good mental postures and bad ones.
For example, consider conversations. Pretty much everyone has had good conversations and bad conversations. In the bad ones, they degenerate (in the worst cases) into you and your conversational partner straight out contradicting each other, insulting each other, talking about each other’s motivations and unreasonableness, and so on. In the good ones, each of you point out the good points made by the other and very possibly converge on something close to the truth. In the best conversations I’ve had, sometimes one of us reversed his position and jumped to defending a position more extreme than the one held by the other—exactly the kind of “absurdity” predicted by Aumann’s agreement theorem for rational conversation partners.
And we usually know even while it’s happening whether we’re engaging in the reasonable kind of conversation or the unreasonable kind.
Gwern seems to have some evidence that music is always distracting.