ping
faul_sname
Karma: 1,510
How many seconds have you been in the room?
Let’s say the time between t1 and t2 is 1 trillion seconds. Let us further assume that all people go through the rooms in the same amount of time (thus people spend 1 second each in room A, and 1 million seconds each in room B).
100 trillion of the 100.1 trillion observer moments between 0 and 1 seconds in a room occur in room A. All of the observer moments past 1 second occur in room B (this is somewhat flawed in that it is possible that the observers don’t all spend the same amount of time in a given room, but even in the case where 100 million people stay in room A for 1 million seconds each, and the rest spend zero time, an observer who’s been in a room for 1 million seconds is still overwhelmingly likely to be in room B. So basically the longer you’ve been in the room, the more probably you should consider it that you’re in room B).
If an observer doesn’t know how long they’ve been in a given room, I’m not sure how meaningful it is to call them “an” observer.
I have taken the survey.
What does 0.01% on the wrong answer get you?
It was a memetic hazard.
(not really)
I’m not sure, not having read the paper, but I would expect that “Lifetime manic features at age 22-23 years” means “number of manic features experienced in the time prior to 22-23 years of age” (i.e. we measured IQ of a bunch of 8-year-olds 15 years ago, and those people are now in the range of 22-23 years of age, and we ask how many manic episodes they’ve had in that time).
Why tunnels, not canals? Particularly in the case of Denver, you’ve got a huge elevation gain, so you’d need the locks anyway, and digging tunnels is expensive (and buying farmland to put your canal through is relatively cheap).
How difficult would this be, out of curiosity, keeping in mind that you don’t need 100% accuracy? I can think of a couple approaches, though probably nothing that would be supported by any revenue model I can think of off the top of my head.
If those 100 billion true statements were all (or even mostly) useful and better calibrated than my own priors, then I’d be likely to believe you, so yes. On the other hand, if you replace $100,000 with $100,000,000,000, I don’t think that would still hold.
I think you found an important caveat, which is that the fact that an agent will benefit from you believing a statement weakens the evidence that the statement is true, to the point that it’s literally zero for an agent that you don’t trust at all. And if an AI will have a human-like architecture, or even if not, I think that would still hold.
I can come up with a few examples that seemed obvious that they wouldn’t work in retrospect, mostly having to do with gene insertion using A. tumefaciens, but none that I honestly predicted before I learned that they didn’t work. Generally, the biological research at my institution seemed to be pretty practical, if boring. On the other hand, I was an undergrad, so there may have been obvious mistakes I missed—that’s part of what I’d be interested in learning.
My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought “these people are different so I don’t have to worry about that.”
I suspect that you’re correct that you don’t have to worry about arrogance as a strong communication barrier here—I noticed that you registered as arrogant, but didn’t really count it against you. Based on the other comments, it sounds like most readers did the same.
There’s a lot of conversation about status in the LW-sphere, particularly in the Overcoming Bias region. Since you wrote a post on social skills, and since that post did not seem to be using the social skill of status management, several commentators felt that it was worthwhile to tell you.
I really don’t have any similar observations, since I mostly focused on biochem and computational bio in school.
I’m actually not entirely sure what details you’re thinking of—I’m imagining something like the influence of selective pressure from other members of the same species, which could cover things like how redwoods are so tall because other redwoods block out light below the canopy. On the other hand, insight into the dynamics of population biologists and those studying plant physiology would also be interesting.
According to the 2014 survey we have about 30 biologists on here, and there are considerably more people here who take an interest in such things. Go ahead and post—the community might say they want less of it, but I’d bet at 4:1 odds that the community will be receptive.
I, for one, would be interested in such a post.
Syntax highlighting, and a compiler that highlights errors as you type them (e.g. SyntasticCheck for vim). It’s really useful.
It’s almost crazy to me that you wouldn’t call strawberries sour. Strawberries taste quite sour to me, and quite sweet as well. I’ve always thought of sourness as relating to acidity (strawberries and grapefruits actually have pretty similar pH’s). I perceive bitterness to be entirely different (strawberries are not bitter, grapefruits are slightly to moderately bitter, depending on the grapefruit, kale is very bitter to me but not at all sour).
I think that the relevant joke was that this was a rambling, 2000 word restatement of “politics is the mind killer”.
Look at the date.
The worrying questions have somewhat less worrying answers. Here is the cause of the length limit of 20 (in r2/r2/templates/login/html):
<input id=”passwd_${op}” name=”passwd_${op}” type=”password” maxlength=”20″/>Removing the maxlength=”20″ restriction on password fields allows longer passwords without a problem (I’m actually unsure why that’s there in the first place—it doesn’t actually prevent a malicious actor from sending a 1 GB password, as it’s a client-side check).
The word “set” in my dictionary has a definition spanning an entire page. Most other pages have between 20 and 50 words on them. This implies that the word “set” will be chosen about 1 in 1000 times, giving only 10 bits of entropy, whereas choosing completely at random, each word would have about a 1 in 50,000 chance of being chosen, giving about 15 bits of entropy.
In practice, picking 5 random pages of a 1000 page dictionary, then picking your favorite word on each page would still give 50 bits of entropy, which beats the correcthorsebatterystaple standard, and probably a more memorable passphrase.
An interesting conclusion here is that if you save more than 2 minutes per mile (going 15 mph instead of 10mph, for example) of time sitting in traffic by riding a motorcycle instead of driving a car, the number of not-sitting-in-traffic minutes of your life actually increases by riding your bike.
Though note that the above calculation assumed that your risk of dying in a motorcycle crash while weaving through stopped traffic is not higher than 1⁄6 micromorts per mile. Also note that if your expected life span is 60 years, you now need to save 6 minutes per mile to “break even”, which is unlikely—if traffic is moving that slowly (remember that this is based on the average speed across the entire trip) you’re probably better off walking.