jchan
The shoot-the-moon strategy
Texas Freeze Retrospective: meetup notes
Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse
Proof of posteriority: a defense against AI-generated misinformation
Charging for the Dharma
The Schelling Game (a.k.a. the Coordination Game)
Adversarial epistemology
Through a panel, darkly: a case study in internet BS detection
Austin LW meetup notes: The FTX Affair
[Question] Is there a good way to award a fixed prize in a prediction contest?
[Question] What is some unnecessarily obscure jargon that people here tend to use?
On the proper date for solstice celebrations
I wrote up the following a few weeks ago in a document I shared with our solstice group, which seems to independently parallel G Gordon Worley III’s points:
To- | morrow can be brighter than [1]
to- | day, although the night is cold [2]
the | stars may seem so very far
a- | way… [3]
But | courage, hope and reason burn,
in | every mind, each lesson learned, [4]
[5] | shining light to guide to our way,
[6] | make tomorrow brighter than [7]
to- | day....It’s weird that the comma isn’t here, but rather 1 beat later.
The unnecessary syncopation on “night is cold” is all but guaranteed to throw people off.
If this is supposed to rhyme with “today” from before, it falls flat because “today” is not really at the end of the line, despite the way it’s written.
A rhyme is set up here with “burn”/”learned,” but there is no analogous rhyme in the first stanza.
It really feels like there should be an unstressed pickup syllable here, based on the expectation set by all the previous measures.
Same here.
The stanza should really end here, but it goes on for another measure. (A 9-measure phrase? Who does that?)
To clarify some of these points:
1 & 3: There’s a mismatch between the poetic grouping of words and the rhythmical grouping, which is probably why bgaesop stumbles at that spot. This mismatch is made obvious by writing out the words according to the rhythmical grouping, as above.
2: The “official” version has “night is cold” on a downbeat with the rhythm “16th, 8th, quarter”, which is a very unusual rhythm. Notice that in the live recording here, the group attempts the syncopated rhythm the first time, but stumbles into “the stars may seem...”, and then reverts to the much more natural rhythm “8th, 8th, dotted-8th” in all subsequent iterations.
7: Mozart’s Musical Joke makes fun of bad compositions by starting off with a 7-measure phrase. Phrases are usually in powers or 2 or “nice” composite numbers like 6 or 12; a large prime number like 7 is silly because it can’t be imagined as having any internal regularity. You could maybe get away with 9 if it can be thought of as 3 3-measure subphrases, but this song doesn’t do that.
In my opinion, a good singalong song must have very low or zero tolerance for any irregularities in rhyme or rhythm. In LW jargon, if you think of the song as a stream of data which people are trying to predict in real time, you want them to quickly form an accurate, low-Kolmogorov-complexity model of the whole song based on just a small amount of input at the beginning.
(I’ve always hated singing “the bombs” in the Star-Spangled Banner!)
You are forced to trust what others tell you.
The difference between fiction and non-fiction is that non-fiction at least purports to be true, while fiction doesn’t. I can decide whether I want to trust what Herodotus says, but it’s meaningless to speak of “trusting” the Sherlock Holmes stories because they don’t make any claims about the world. Imagining that they do is where the fallacy comes in.
For example, kung-fu movies give a misleading impression of how actual fights work, not because the directors are untrustworthy or misinformed, but because it’s more fun than watching realistic fights, and they’re optimizing for that, not for realism.
[Question] To what extent is your AGI timeline bimodal or otherwise “bumpy”?
Austin meetup notes Nov. 16, 2019: SSC discussion
Interest survey: Forming an MIT Mystery Hunt team (Jan. 15-18, 2021)
Crossword puzzle: LessWrong Halloween 2022
To make it slightly more concrete, we could say: one copy is put in a red room, and the other in a green room; but at first the lights are off, so both rooms are pitch black. I wake up in the darkness and ask myself: when I turn on the light, will I see red or green?
There’s something odd about this question. “Standard LessWrong Reductionism” must regard it as meaningless, because otherwise it would be a question about the scenario that remains unanswered even after all physical facts about it are known, thus refuting reductionism. But from the perspective of the test subject, it certainly seems like a real question.
Can we bite this bullet? I think so. The key is the word “I”—when the question is asked, the asker doesn’t know which physical entity “I” refers to, so it’s unsurprising that the question seems open even though all the physical facts are known. By analogy, if you were given detailed physical data of the two moons of Mars, and then you were asked “Which one is Phobos and which one is Deimos?”, you might not know the answer, but not because there’s some mysterious extra-physical fact about them.
So far so good, but now we face an even tougher bullet: If we accept quantum many-worlds and/or modal realism (as many LWers do), then we must accept that all probability questions are of this same kind, because there are versions of me elsewhere in the multiverse that experience all possible outcomes.
Unless we want to throw out the notion of probabilities altogether, we’ll need some way of understanding self-location problems besides dismissing them as meaningless. But I think the key is in recognizing that probability is ultimately in the map, not the territory, however real it may seem to us—i.e. it is a tool for a rational agent to achieve its goals, and nothing more.
This suggests an interesting idea: A charity drive for the week leading up to Petrov Day, on condition that the funds will be publicly wasted if anyone pushes the button (e.g. by sending bitcoin to a dead-end address, or donating to two opposing politicians’ campaigns).