Two questions, as I take the survey:
What does “spiritual” mean, in the context of “Atheist [but | and not] spiritual”?
I genuinely have no idea whether I’d prefer low or high redistribution of wealth. What do I tick for my political opinion?
Two questions, as I take the survey:
What does “spiritual” mean, in the context of “Atheist [but | and not] spiritual”?
I genuinely have no idea whether I’d prefer low or high redistribution of wealth. What do I tick for my political opinion?
One of the genuinely new memes I picked up from this blog was the idea that passion is not the antithesis of rationality, and I think this is an excellent example of that.
My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.
-- Aristosophy (again)
Now someone just has to write a book entitled “The Rationality of Sisyphus”, give it a really pretentious-sounding philosophical blurb, and then fill it with Grand Theft Robot.
I think we could generalise problem 2 to be problematic for any decision theory XDT:
There are 10 boxes, numbered 1 to 10. You may only take one. Omega has (several times) run a simulated XDT agent on this problem. It then put a prize in the box which it determined was least likely to be taken by such an agent—or, in the case of a tie, in the box with the lowest index.
If agent X follows XDT, it has at best a 10% chance of winning. Any sufficiently resourceful YDT agent, however, could run a simulated XDT agent themselves, and figure out what Omega’s choice was without getting into an infinite loop.
Therefore, YDT performs better than XDT on this problem.
If I’m right, we may have shown the impossibility of a “best’ decision theory, no matter how meta you get (in a close analogy to Godelian incompleteness). If I’m wrong, what have I missed?
I had a dream that I met a girl in a dying world. [...] I knew we didn’t have long together. She grabbed me and spoke a stream of numbers into my ear. Then it all went away.
I woke up. The memory of the apocalypse faded to mere fancy, but the numbers burned bright in my mind. I wrote them down immediately. They were coordinates. A place and a time, neither one too far away.
What else could I do? When the day came, I went to the spot and waited.
And?
It turns out wanting something doesn’t make it real.
~ Randall Munroe, xkcd #240: Dream Girl
Don’t think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.
I’m no expert, but that seems to be the moral of a lot of Greek myths.
Read as:
the auction gains even more money from people who have seen it before [and are nevertheless willing to play again] than it does from naive bidders
One of the most important social structures of modern society is the corporation—a framework for large groups of people to band together and get absolutely huge projects done. In this framework, the structure itself is more important than individual excellence at most levels. To a lesser extent, the same applies to academia and even “society as a whole”.
In that context, I think preferring negative selection to positive makes sense: a genius data-entry clerk is less helpful than an insubordinate data-entry clerk is disruptive.
And remember that we have side routes so real geniuses (of some kinds) can still make it: set up their own company, start their own political party, start publishing their work online, design games in their basement, and so on.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you’re talking about anti-deathism (weak or strong) as if it was a defining value of the LessWrong community. This bothers me.
If you’re successful, these rituals will become part of the community identity, and I personally would rather LW tried to be about rationality and just that as much as it can. Everything else that correlates with membership—transhumanism, nerdiness, thinking Eliezer is awesome—I would urge you not to include in the rituals. It’s inevitable that they’d turn up, but I wouldn’t give them extra weight by including them in codified documents.
As an analogy, one of the things that bugged me about Orthodox Judaism was that it claims to be about keeping the Commandments, but there’s a huge pile of stuff that’s done just for tradition’s sake, that isn’t commanded anywhere (no, not even in the Oral Lore or by rabbinical decree).
This seems to be something of a fake explanation. The statement is: Sometimes the brain provides false information, that actually answers a different question to the one asked.
That would be true no matter what answer was being given (unless it was completely random), because so long as the answer thrown up correlates with something, you can say: “Aha! The brain has substituted something for the question you thought was being asked!”
And since this explanation could be given for any answer the brain throws up, it doesn’t actually give us any new information about the cognitive algorithm being used.
Anecdotal supporting evidence: In my last days as a religious person, I found myself imagining myself presenting my pro-religion arguments to the author of the Sequences, and literally could not fantasize a scenario where he found them convincing.
Zach Wiener’s elegant disproof:
Think of the strangest thing that’s true. Okay. Now add a monkey dressed as Hitler.
(Although to be fair, it’s possible that the disproof fails because “think of the strangest thing that’s true” is impossible for a human brain.)
When scientists discuss papers:
”I don’t think this inference is entirely reasonable. If you’re using several non-independent variables you’re liable to accumulate more error than your model accounts for.”
When scientists discuss grants:
”A guy who worked at the NSF once told me if we light a candle inside this jackal skull, the funders will smile upon our hopes.”
″I’ll get the altar!”
~ Zach Weiner, SMBC #2559
How’d they react? Did it work?
It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as “magic” to someone six hundred years ago.
The issue is that “magic”, in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isn’t a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you’ve actually got it, it’s not “magic” any more; it’s “electrons” or “distortion of spacetime” or “computers” or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.
Take the witch trials, for example—to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn’t have called them “witches”, but “scientists” or “politicians” or “guys with swords”.
Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as “magic” to some people, but “magic” almost always does. Which is why, once you’ve solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.
I would take it to be about art in general rather than music specifically. It’s socially acceptable for works of art to support a particular viewpoint—and try to convert their consumers to it—without supplying much evidence to show that it’s actually true.
One example that will probably ring true with LWers is the strong lesson in lots of fiction that following one’s “heart” is a better (more moral, or more likely to lead to success) course of action than following one’s “head”.
Because throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be… Not Magic
-- Tim Minchin, Storm
Hi, AspiringKnitter!
There have been several openly religious people on this site, of varying flavours. You don’t (or shouldn’t) get downvoted just for declaring your beliefs; you get downvoted for faulty logic, poor understanding and useless or irrelevant comments. As someone who stopped being religious as a result of reading this site, I’d love for more believers to come along. My impulse is to start debating you right away, but I realise that’d just be rude. If you’re interested, though, drop me a PM, because I’m still considering the possibility I might have made the wrong decision.
The evaporative cooling risk is worrying, now that you mention it… Have you actually noticed that happening here during your lurking days, or are you just pointing out that it’s a risk?
Oh, and dedicating an entire paragraph to musing about the downvotes you’ll probably get, while an excellent tactic for avoiding said downvotes, is also annoying. Please don’t do that.
SMBC Comics #2719