Done. Thank you for running these.
lavalamp
Karma: 2,088
Thanks for running these, I took it. :) Love the prize question.
...I’m way off on the population of Europe, as I expected.
It’s probably a much more accurate feeling than the opposite one, though...
The threat of massive perfectly symmetrical violence, on the other hand...
Everything computable by a quantum computer is computable by a classical computer (only slower, in some cases). Even if the human brain does in fact do some quantum calculations, a corresponding classical brain could be made. If you really believe that functionalism requires dualism, then I do not see how quantum mechanics can possibly help.
I’m bothered by the fact that you speak of modeling brains with fMRI. fMRI tracks blood flow, not neural activity (they are correlated). It will not be useful AFAIK for scanning a brain at the neuronal level, and we will (most likely) have to map every neural connection before we’d be able to emulate a brain. Speaking of “coarse-grained neurocomputational states” may be nonsensical; we don’t know how much of the brain we’ll have to emulate to get it right.
Lastly, my recollection from back when I went searching for evidence that the brain was a quantum computer in a feeble and ultimately doomed attempt to maintain my belief in dualism, is that it was very unlikely that the brain used quantum computation.
Downvote: save the nuclear option for a larger infraction, preferably one protested by the author and committed without remorse.
Skype ID? Call me when it’s my turn? I have a minute but not an inconvenience-adjusted minute...
But the practice things were fun, even though I don’t know python.
The illustration that immediately sprung to my mind was of the characters Samantha Carter and Jack O’Neill in the television sci-fi show...
Beware fictional evidence! Main characters in serial TV shows really should follow “Pascal’s Goldpan”, because that’s the way their universe (usually) works! The episode wouldn’t have been written if there wasn’t a way out of the problem. I suspect that experiencing just two or three such “insoluble” problems get resolved ought to make a proper rationalist wonder if they were living in a fictional universe.
But our universe doesn’t seem to have that property. (Or perhaps I’m just not a main character.) What is true seems to be true independent from how much utility I get from believing it.
BTW, that isn’t keeping me from loving your coined expressions!
Cryonic suspension where?
First, they must be convinced to play the game
This was possibly an expensive experiment in terms of social capital...
I think it would have been better to have waited longer. After only three days, his response seems reasonable. Perhaps after two weeks, it would be more difficult to believe that he would have ever published your data.
I’m working on a top-level post about how Stoicism is an instrumentally useful philosophy to adopt, and figured I should give other philosophies a fair shake as well
Error: bottom line may have been written first!
You asked us to make them safe, not happy!
--”Adventure Time” episode “The Businessmen”: the zombie businessmen are explaining why they are imprisoning soft furry creatures in a glass bowl.
In order that this post should not be overlong, I will not argue at length here for the proposition that functionalism implies dualism...
This seems like such a necessary component of your argument that I think it was a bad place to skimp on the explanation. The outline you gave did little to convince me, I’m afraid. I could be wrong, but my perception is that I won’t be alone here in that position. Split the post in two if it makes it too long...
AI Challenge: Ants
I was going to downvote for ingroup bias until I got to the end. Sounds like a cool idea to me!
Just give up already
I cannot say how many arguments I’ve had where this would have prevented hurt feelings. Often, after the argument, I discover the other person persisted in arguing for about 10 minutes after they realized they were wrong, all the while getting more angry at me for shooting down ever worse rationalizations.
To be fair, the way this happens isn’t that the person persists in arguing for something they know to be false; instead, they drop a subtle hint that maybe they might be wrong and we should stop talking about it now (presumably so they can save face). I invariably miss this hint (well, I’m better now that I know to be looking for it, but not a lot) because it’s usually in the form of a ridiculous but hard to disprove objection, to which I (because I’m weird) will come up with a medium-good response. This pisses my interlocutor off, because I missed their social cue, and because I’ve now forced them to defend a belief (their lousy objection) that they don’t actually hold.
This behavior is very understandable; once I noticed others doing it, I noticed a tendency in myself. It’s surprisingly hard to say, “Oops, I guess I’m wrong,” or, “I can’t see a good counter argument to what you’re saying; maybe I need to reconsider.”
Anyway, I’m saying this because the article linked by the quoted phrase wasn’t quite what I was hoping for on the subject. :)
reads article
He seems to model government as a single agent that plans and executes according to its best interests.
I model government as a collection of agents, mostly incompetent, with different incentives and interests.
If BTC indeed drops to zero via the mechanism he outlines in the coming year, I will be impressed and increase my opinion of him, which is (at the moment) somewhat low (this article being the only thing of his I’ve read).
I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:
Pros:
No bullies
Teaches you how to teach yourself
No PE/sports
Go to college early
Cons:
Go to college early
Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.
No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)
After Algebra II, you’re on your own.
With Saxon math books.
No sense of position among one’s peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I’m maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.
History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)
Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don’t believe evolution (I’m still pissed about this)
Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old
Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you’re aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal person.
I really hated school as a kid. My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.
Needs a TL;DR:
Politicians probably conform to the median voter’s views.
Most voters are not the median, so most people usually dislike the winning politicians.
But people dislike the politicians for different reasons.
Nerds should avoid giving advice that boils down to “behave optimally”. Instead, analyze the reasons for the current failure to behave optimally and give more targeted advice.