Mathematician, alignment researcher, doctor. Never bore fools gladly, and is no longer paid to bear them at all. Surely neither a real prince nor a real fox, right? Reach out to me on Discord and tell me you found my profile on LW if you’ve got something interesting to say; you have my explicit permission to try to guess my Discord handle if so.
Lorxus
Karma: 40
To make no choice is to make a choice, and to take no action is to take an action. I’d ask the flip side of Lao Mein here—how confident are you, exactly, that your current state of affairs is all that great in an absolute sense, and what are you willing to risk a small chance of in exchange for clear benefits now and in future?
Nuke might miss the moon
and fall back to earth, where it would detonate, because of the planned design which would explode upon impact
in the USSR
in the non-USSR (causing international incident)
and circle sadly around the sun forever
• and circle gleefully about the Earth-Moon Langrange points, wandering around the Earth’s Hill sphere, causing consternation for years
I am an Asian ~30yo man (ethnically Korean, specifically) who has suffered from bad cavities all his life and who also suffers from Asian glow to the point of it being uncomfortable to drink; I am also planning to get the Lumina treatment. I do not think that the amount of alcohol produced is particularly relevant; I drink occasionally and eat a ton of fruit, and thus I think that my marginal risk is basically negligible.
I don’t smoke, and to the best of my knowledge, I have no particular family history of cancer, let alone oral/esophageal cancer, despite high rates of smoking in my family history.
As such, I’m pretty sure that the expected value calculation is overdetermined towards “get the Lumina”, given how unpleasant caries and carie treatment are for me and the (weak but maybe real?) connection between caries and Alzheimer’s. Given a choice of damnations, I think I’d prefer oral cancer to Alzheimer’s even with ~identical proportional changes in likelihood; given how dubious I am on the marginal risk of oral cancers to start with, I’m only that much more set on fixing my oral microbiome.
If anyone wants me to take measurements or keep data or logs of observations, please let me know.
Adam:
You could argue a similar thing about lawyers, that prosecutors and defense lawyers speak the same jargon and have more of a repeated game going than citizens they represent. And yet we have a system that mostly works.
Yud:
Lawyers combined cannot casually exterminate nonlawyers.
Adam:
…
Uh… what? If we stretch the definition of “lawyer” a bit to mean “anyone who carries out, enforces, or whose livelihood primarily depends on the law”—that is, we include government agents, cops, soldiers, and so on… yes they absolutely totally can? (In the same sense that anyone can drench their own house with gasoline and burn it down.) But maybe that’s only a weird tangent—although I’d argue that some of the power dynamics that fall out of that are likely disquietingly similar.
Gonna put a few more recommendations here, given that I seem to have broadly overlapping puzzle taste (especially Stephen’s Sausage Roll, which I even got to beta test!):
Clearly in the same vein: Antichamber, English Country Tune
Less clearly in the same vein for various reasons but still very very good: Return of the Obra Dinn (ish), Contradiction (the FMV game, less good), Gorogoa (very weird, not quite complete information, stylistically gorgeous)
My submission to the ALTER Prize
If you thought this was too hard or too technical or too weird, I recommend that you take a look at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Een2oqjZe6Gtx6hrj/an-elementary-introduction-to-infra-bayesianism , which is intended as a companion piece to mine for those with less in the way of mathematical chops, or who’d simply rather have a less technical overview.
That sounds like it also works. I’ve seen the proof both ways and I think I was mixing them together in my head.
The number of such sets is specifically uncountable. Each set is of itself countable. Apologies, I’ll fix the OP.
This seems correct. I’ll add it to the list of fixes.
Consider the following example for the interval X = (0, 1) (which is homeomorphic to R). Suppose we wanted to assign measures to all of its subsets, and do so in accordance with the ordinary desiderata of sigma-additivity and m(X) = 1.
Now partition the interval into an uncountable family of countable sets X_i such that two numbers live in the same subset iff they differ by a rational number. (Make sure you fully understand this construction before continuing!)
What measure should we assign to any such X_i? We can quickly see that the X_i are all of equal cardinality (that of Aleph-null) and even have natural maps to each other (given by adding irrationals mod 1).
We can’t assign them measure 0 - by sigma-additivity that gives us m(X) = 0. We can’t assign them positive measure—again by sigma-additivity that gives us m(X) >> 1.
Thus we cannot assign such subsets any measure, so we must have been wrong from the start that 2^X was a reasonable sigma-algebra to pick as the foundation of our measure in X.
This seems approximately correct as the motivation, which IMO is expressible/ cashable-out in several isomorphic ways. (In that, in Demiurgery, in distributions over game-tree-branches, in expected utility maximinning...)
If you have questions/requests for [explanation/clarification], comments, feedback, or job offers, I’d be happy for any of those. I promise I don’t generally bite.
Untangling Infrabayesianism: A redistillation [PDF link; ~12k words + lots of math]
Some even worse meta-effects: I have had some fairly bad experiences already in my attempts to get grants or a research position. I wish I could detail them more here, but I am not stupid, and I know that the people who deal with those grant applications or sit on those hiring panels come here and read. Probably this is already too much to have said. If you want, you can reach out to me privately and I’ll happily speak on this.
If that’s the case, that seems like a huge hole in your argument/concern. But from statistics taken for the US, it looks like AAPIs get oropharynx cancers at a significantly lower rate than both non-Hispanic Whites and general population both, despite a possibly-higher rate of smoking (for cultural reasons) and a definitely-much-higher rate of defective ALDH polymorphisms.