It is correct that we can never find enough evidence to make our certainty of a theory to be exactly 1 (though we can get it very close to 1). If we were absolutely certain in a theory, then no amount of counterevidence, no matter how damning, could ever change our mind.
lucidfox
Karma: 586
I wonder: do the names Y’ha-nthlei, Y’not’ha-nthlei, and At’gra’len’ley mean anything? I assume Y’ha and Y’not’ha mean “you have” and “you don’t have”, but beyond that it just seems random.
Indeed, if the two axes are the coordinates of the two particles, then one blob should be in the lower left and the other in the upper right. Seems Eliezer made a mistake with this diagram.
the median rationalist is still struggling to get a date
First, [citation needed].
Second, if it’s true, perhaps one should look at oneself and ask why.
Just because I read the sequences doesn’t mean I’m particularly likely to agree with any of them. Some, yes, but not all. Many of the statements you listed are controversial even on LW. If they were unanimously accepted here without further discussion, it would be a worrying sign.
Because Laurie is a person?
Ah, the struggles of people who want to quantify everything in video game terms, whether it makes sense or not. Reminds me of Christian Weston Chandler’s “heart level”.
(Warning: Googling that name is not for the faint of heart. May cause insanity, outrage, or disillusionment with humanity.)
Where did I demand anything?
That was a joke on my part, but one warning against using overly general umbrella terms. Our copyright and patent laws developed as a result of certain historical circumstances, and it is entirely possible that a hypothetical alien civilization would treat sharing and distribution of ideas entirely differently and not resembling any of our historical precedents.
...I didn’t? Drat. Sorry.
This is what I get for not looking over my own comments before I post them. I’ll be more vigilant in the future.
In Russia and China one can be shot for being different.
I think you might need to update your beliefs about Russia. The ones you seem to have are stuck in the 1930s-1940s.
If Newton tried to derive his law purely from empirical measurements, then yes, he would never be exactly sure (ignoring general relativity for a moment) that the exponent is exactly 2. For all he would know, it could actually be 2.00000145...
But that would be like trying to derive the value of pi or the exponents in the Pythagorean theorem by measuring physical circles and triangles. If the law of gravity is derived from more general axioms, then its form can be computed exactly provided that these axioms are correct.
I don’t see discussion posts as being inherently of lesser value and lesser impact to readers than promoted posts. I judge posts based on their content and the points they bring up, not by their location on the site.
If you only accept beliefs that are implied by your existing ones, you’ll never believe anything new. And as such, you’ll stop updating your beliefs.
galactic intellectual property law
Be precise. Do you mean galactic patent law, galactic copyright law, or galactic trademark law?
I said “to the effect of”. I didn’t mean literally the same wording.
I sympathize with your distaste for taking apart love to see what it’s made from
More like distaste for trying to reduce love to something it’s not. You cannot reduce an abstract, complex facet of human experience to something simple and easily definable, otherwise you make yourself vulnerable to utopia plans that are doomed to fail.
People I showed lukeprog’s original post to were universal in their reaction: “Wow, talk about neckbeardery”.
As for PUA, I won’t comment on that. If all you care about is one-night stands, then I guess you can be cynical about that. Actual love is a different matter entirely.
whereupon if I’m playing WOW, I roleplay an elf. <...> If I’m on LessWrong, I roleplay a rationalist.
Or you can roleplay a rationalist elf in WoW. :)
A long time ago, back before I quit WoW, I roleplayed an atheist draenei who refused to believe in the night elf goddess Elune. The catch here is that we players know she actually exists in the setting, because Blizzard told us so, but the characters would have no way of verifying this since she never appeared in the world in person. From my character’s point of view, the magical powers that priests of Elune attributed to their goddess were actually (unknown to them) given to them by other, non-personified sources of power followed by other priests in the setting.
P(A|B) = P(A|~B) is equivalent to the classic definition of independence, and intuitively it means that “whether B happens or not, it doesn’t affect the likelihood of A happening”.
I guess that since other basic probability concepts are defined in terms of set operations (union and intersection), and independence lacks a similar obvious explanation in terms of sets and measure, I wanted to find one.
OP here. In case you’ve found this post via Google (as I did unexpectedly, having found my own post when searching for something different) and are wondering how I’m faring now, rest easy: I transitioned years ago, and now live a much, much happier life now than I did when I wrote this post. I live as a woman, I’ve become a lot more social and (IMO) a lot less socially awkward, friends and strangers don’t even realize I’m trans (or if any do, they aren’t showing it and aren’t treating me any differently).
I didn’t regret my transition even once.
My views on gender identity have become more nuanced since I wrote this post. My 2010 self overcomplicated things when they didn’t need to be this complicated. “Feeling X on the inside” may well be an untestable proposition, but quality of life and positive impressions by other people are definitely facts about the real, observable world.
I see now that my fear that my belief was irrational — that nothing could convince me I was wrong about my gender identity — was unfounded. If I had regretted my transition and detransitioned, that would have been the evidence that my initial judgment was wrong. Instead, in hindsight, the hypothesis has stood the test of time, and transition was one of the best, most life-improving decisions I’ve ever made.
If anyone who once commented on this post is reading this: thank you all for your support and encouragement!