imaxwell

Karma: 180

imaxwell 1 Nov 2012 15:50 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Proofs, Implications, and Models
In fancy math-talk, we can say apples are a semimodule over the semiring of natural numbers.
- You can add two bunches of apples through the well-known “glomming-together” operation.
- You can multiply a bunch of apples by any natural number.
- Multiplication distributes over both natural-number addition and glomming-together.
- Multiplication-of-apples is associative with multiplication-of-numbers.
- 1 is an identity with regard to multiplication-of-apples.
You could quibble that there is a finite supply of apples out there, so that (3 apples) + (all the apples) is undefined, but this model ought to work well enough for small collections of apples.

imaxwell 5 Sep 2012 17:28 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
True, and I hope no one thinks it is. So we can conclude that doing bad shows at first is not a strong indicator of whether you have a future as a showman.

I guess I see the quote as being directed at people who are so afraid of doing a bad show that they’ll never get in enough practice to do a good show. Or they practice by, say, filming themselves telling jokes in their basement and getting critiques from their friends who will not be too mean to them. In either case, they never get the amount of feedback they would need to become good. For such a person to hear “Yes, you will fail” can be oddly liberating, since it turns failure into something accounted for in their longer-term plans.

imaxwell 3 Sep 2012 22:01 UTC
31 points
on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.
- Louis C.K., on Reddit

imaxwell 24 Apr 2012 7:48 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eisenherz’s comment on: Timeless Physics
Well sure, if you parametrize with a time factor the result will be a periodic function. But you can still de-parametrize and simply have a closed loop described relationally. A parametrization of a circle usually consists of periodic functions, but that doesn’t mean the circle itself is periodic. It’s just there.

Also remember that “exactly the same configuration” means exactly the same configuration, of everything, including for instance your calendar, your watch, and your brain and its stored memories. So pretty much by definition there would be no record of such a thing happening. We wouldn’t need another variable to encode it because we wouldn’t need to encode it in the first place.

imaxwell 20 Feb 2012 20:31 UTC
0 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
I agree with most of what you say, but I’m not so sure about the last two. As others have pointed out, there are many, many cases where the primary suspect of a crime is never prosecuted. Given a choice, prosecutors will usually choose “easy” cases. So an alternate explanation for America’s high prison population and incredibly high black prison population is that
- more criminals are prosecuted and convicted in America, and
- jurors are biased and black criminals are therefore easier to convict; and/or prosecutors are biased and therefore prosecute more black criminals.
Now, since I don’t think it’s actually optimal for everyone who ever breaks a law to be punished, I have no problem saying, for example, “More criminals are prosecuted and convicted here, and that’s too bad.”

imaxwell 20 Feb 2012 19:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jesch’s comment on: Timeless Physics
This is off the top of my head, so it may be total bullshit. I find the idea of memory in a timeless universe slippery myself, and can only occasionally believe I understand it. But anyway...

If you want to implement a sort of memory in your 2D space with one particle, then for each point (x0,y0) in space you can add a coordinate n(x0,y0), and a differential relation

dn(x0,y0) = δ(x-x0,y-y0) sqrt(dx^2 + dy^2)

where δ is the Dirac delta. Each n(x0,y0) can be thought of as an observer at the point (x0,y0), counting the number of times the particle passes through. There is no reference to a time parameter in this equation, and yet there is a definite direction-of-time, because by moving the particle along a path you can only increase all n(x0,y0) for points (x0,y0) along that path.

A point in this configuration space consists of a “current” point (x,y), along with a local history at each point. If you don’t make any other requirements, these local histories won’t give you a unique global history, because the points could have been visited in any order. But if you impose smoothness requirements on x and y, and your local histories are consistent with those smoothness requirements, then you will have only one possible global history, or at most a finite number.

imaxwell 20 Feb 2012 18:25 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Manon_de_Gaillande’s comment on: Timeless Physics
Super-late answer!

If you ask about a configuration X, “Where does this configuration come from?” I will point at a configuration W for which the flow from W to X is very high. If you ask, “Well, where does W come from?” I will point to a configuration V for which the flow from V to W is very high. We can play this game for a long time, but at each iteration I will almost certainly be pointing to a lower-entropy configuration than the last. Finally I may point to A, the one-point configuration. If you ask, “Where does A come from?” I have to say, “There is nowhere it comes from with any significant probability.” At best I can give you a uniform distribution over all configurations with epsilon entropy. But all this means is that no configuration has A in its likely future.

The thing is, it doesn’t make sense to ask what is the probability of a configuration like A, external to the universe itself: you can only ask the probability that a sufficiently long path passing through some specific configuration or set of configurations will have A in
- its future, or
- its past. The probability of the former is probably 0, so we don’t expect a singularity in the future. That of the latter is probably 1, so we do expect a singularity in the past.

imaxwell 18 Nov 2011 16:58 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light
It sounded like a bad idea at first, but if the bet is 1 upvote / 1 downvote vs. 89 upvotes/89 downvotes, it could actually be a good use of the karma system. The only way to get a lot of karma would be to consistently win these bets, which is probably as good an indicator for “person worth paying attention to” as making good posts.

imaxwell 15 Sep 2011 3:53 UTC
4 points
on: How can humans make precommitments?
The most obvious solution is to coerce your future self, by creating a future downside of not following through that is worse than the future downside of following through. Nuclear deterrence is a tough one, but In principle this is no different from coercing someone else. (I guess one could ask if it’s any more ethical, at that...)

imaxwell 14 Sep 2011 7:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ahartell’s comment on: Open Thread: September 2011
Hmm… I’m not sure. I’d take the word of someone with experience on an admissions committee, if you can get it.

If you do it, I think you’d be better off talking just a little about the character and much more about the community you found. Writing to the prompt is not really important for this sort of thing. (Usually one of the prompts is pretty much “Other,” confirming that.)

imaxwell 13 May 2011 2:15 UTC
4 points
in reply to: imaxwell’s comment on: Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin
Update: 14.01 bitcoins are “in the mail” (read: sitting in ClearCoin waiting for the transaction to expire). At current exchange rates, that’s around $100.

imaxwell 5 May 2011 16:05 UTC
6 points
on: Timeless Physics
Years after first reading this, I think I’ve internalized its central point in a clear-to-me way, and I’d like to post it here in case it’s useful to someone else with a similar bent to their thinking.

Without worrying about the specific nature of the Schrodinger equation, we can say the universe is governed by a set of equations of form x[i] = fi, where each x[i] is some variable in the universe’s configuration space, each f[i] is some continuous function, and t is a parameter representing time. This would be true even in a classical universe—the configuration space would just look more like the coordinates for a bunch of particles, and less like parameters of a waveform. All this is really saying is that the universe has some configuration at every time.

Now, one thing you can do with parametric equations is eliminate the parameter. If we have, say, 1000 parametric equations relating x[1] through x[1000] to t, we can convert these to 999 equations relating x[1] through x[1000] to one another, and “cut out the middleman” so to speak. Your new equations will define the same curve in configuration space, and you can determine the relative order of events just by tracing along that curve (as long as there are no “singularities”—points where two different values of t gave you the same point in the configuration space).

Moreover, from inside the universe there’s no way to tell the difference between these two situations. “Two hours ago” can mean either “at t − 2hr” or it can mean “at the point on this curve in configuration space where the clocks all say it’s 7:00 instead of 9:00”, and there’s no experimental distinction to be made between these meanings. So positing a fundamental thing called “time” doesn’t actually have any explanatory power!

From this understanding, timeless physics is better viewed as a more parsimonious way to frame any theory, rather than a part of quantum theory specifically. We could just as well explain Newtonian physics timelessly.

imaxwell 4 May 2011 14:11 UTC
5 points
on: Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin
There’s a bitcoin escrow service called ClearCoin that includes the option of sending escrowed funds to one of their listed nonprofits, rather than back to the payer, if the escrow expires. I asked the site owner to include the SI donation address as an option and have been using it since.

Unfortunately for SI, everyone I’ve dealt with has been honest so far! I’ll have to actually donate on purpose instead of incidentally, it seems.

imaxwell 2 May 2011 12:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Psy-Kosh’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
I just had to comment on this, it’s too perfect. Thanks.

imaxwell 16 Mar 2011 15:41 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Kevin’s comment on: Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin
If one other person will make an offer to round out the 70BTC, I can create a new BPM account and handle the distribution myself, returning the principal to Kevin and whomever else and sending the rest to SIAI.

Edited to point out: a higher bid will still win.

imaxwell 16 Mar 2011 4:47 UTC
8 points
on: Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin
If you want to donate to SIAI, I have an offer that will probably allow you to donate more!

My Radeon 5970 should generate close to 125 BTC per core per month at current difficulty levels. For an up-front fee of 70 BTC (about $60) or more, I will direct one core at the server of your choice (I recommend a pooling service like that at mining.bitcoin.cz) for one calendar month. I will gain the certainty of paying my huge electric bill, and you will gain a better-than-80% expected profit in only a month.

If you’re interested in this offer, message me with a bid. Preference will be given to higher bids and to those who plan to donate some or all of their profit to SIAI—the higher the promised donation, the better.

If you’re interested but don’t know how to set up a mining server, I will walk you through it if your bid is accepted. It’s really quite easy.

imaxwell 15 Mar 2011 15:08 UTC
1 point
on: Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin
I got 0.05 BTC from the Bitcoin Faucet. It looks like there’s nothing meaningful I can do with 0.05 BTC, and I’m not certain I’ll ever have more, so I’m donating it to SIAI instead of back to the Faucet.

I’m really just posting this so that the 0.05 BTC donation doesn’t come off as the signalling equivalent of a 10-cent tip. If I do make more BTC, I’ll donate at least some of that as well. (Actually, donating all of it sounds like a good way to avoid annoying tax questions, so I’m considering that.)

imaxwell 4 Feb 2011 15:30 UTC
4 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
I never thought of this quote outside the context of programming before reading it here, but it does seem pretty generally applicable. The force behind premature optimization is the force that causes me to spend so much time comparison shopping that the time lost eventually outvalues the price difference; or to fail to give money to charity at all because there may be a better charity to give it to. (I’ve recently started donating the dollar to Vague Good Cause at stores and restaurants when asked, because it’s all well and good to say “SIAI is better,” but that defense only works if I then actually give the dollar to SIAI.)

imaxwell 31 Jan 2011 15:38 UTC
5 points
on: Optimal Employment
Is overqualification a concern? That is: if I’m already working toward a Ph.D. and I decide to complete that first, will it work against me in finding hospitality work? (I’d guess such jobs have sufficiently high rotation anyway that the answer is no.)

Do you know if the situation is equally good for more “career-like” jobs? (I.e. instead of making good money without too much strain, can I bust my ass to make even more money?)

Even if both the answers are the less-desired, I’m going to seriously discuss this with my wife.

imaxwell 20 Dec 2010 23:50 UTC
5 points
on: The Santa deception: how did it affect you?
I don’t think learning the truth really affected my development one way or the other. One day when I was I-don’t-remember-how-old, I asked to be told the truth and I was. I do remember that I wasn’t very good at maintaining the conspiracy former my younger siblings, and almost let the truth slip a few times—and I’m still not very good at it and have almost let the truth slip to children in my family.

I am wary of whether lying to kids habitually is really as good for them as we rationalize, but the real reason I’m inclined not to spread this myth to my hypothetical children is because I am so uncomfortable with lies myself—I can barely even bring myself to do it for the sake of a surprise party or something innocuous like that. I’d rather tell it as what it is: a fun story, like Cinderella or Harry Potter.