I wonder how the results would change if the experiment changes so that the outcomes of 2B are, “You have a 33% chance of receiving $27k, a 66% chance of not getting anything, and a 1% chance of having someone laugh in your face for not picking 2A”
Luke_A_Somers
If so, this would be one of the few things that might actually put the notion of personality types on firm footing.
I haven’t seen anyone complain about the doors, but the chairs.… oh my, the chairs. They have to be certified as both totally fireproof/acid proof/base proof and highly ergonomic. Unlike the above case, you can see why, and if it didn’t cost 100 times as much, I’d agree. But it does. One certified blessed fireproof / corrosionproof / rustproof / knidproof +5 ergonomics chair costs multiple thousands of dollars. A nice chair satisfying all of the first set of criteria costs multiple tens of dollars. It just won’t be +5 ergonomic.
Okay… but…
We don’t sit in one place for 20 minutes, let alone 8 hours! Give us reasonably comfortable metal chairs and stools! Sigh.
Maybe they just hadn’t finished it yet…
If God did speak plainly, and answer prayers reliably, God would just become one more real thing, sure. But I would sure hope that God would be an awesome real thing, even more so than shuttle launches. And I sure like me some shuttle launches (speaking of specifically-shaped holes in hearts).
Back in my undergrad days, a fellow student of mine implemented a genetic algorithm on a field-programmable gate array with the intention of performing computations. Once he got the thing working in the first place, it took him half a semester to get it able to pass the 7 bits from the 7 input channels to the 7 output channels, in order. He didn’t have time left over to try anything more complicated.
So, yeah.
To those having trouble imagining what to do with something that comes up positive: A snapshot is not conscious. I think we can agree on that. It is allowing the model to run that would make it conscious. So you make the warning functions detect snapshots that if run would be conscious (without running them). If it would be conscious, you can delete or modify it as you please to avoid making it actually be conscious.
- 14 Jan 2013 14:22 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Nonperson Predicates by (
Regulation isn’t a scalar. Your question is malformed.
I’d be interested to know that myself.
I’ve only spoken with a few because it’s a potentially awkward subject. I recall one other strongly and one other regular-strength in favor of MW+decoherence (both in my rough age-group);
one classmate said “decoherence, as I understand it, is a little more reasonable sounding than most”, for ontology, but uses the Copenhagen interpretation when thinking about epistemology;
one professor was against MW just on uneasiness grounds, but didn’t have a firm opinion;
one professor with the philosophy “If it’s just quantum mechanics, I’m not interested. If it’s not quantum mechanics, I’m not interested”, which is formally equivalent to MW + decoherence but without the explicit acknowledgement that it is;
one who was against everything, especially the part with everything in it;
and too many “Let’s stop talking about this/I’m not qualified to have an opinion/Aargh” to count.
~~
In this tiny sample of mostly experimentalists:
People with a preference for the Bohm guide wave interpretation: 0
People with a preference for more sophisticated just-QM interpretations such as transactional or consistent histories: 0
People who accept wavefunction collapse as real: 1 on the fence.
A survey on the subject could be interesting.
The problem is that by declaring something “Absurd” you’re making a very strong bet against it. You’re going to lose a fair number of these bets.
Suppose calling something absurd merely means it’s 1% probable. If you’re right about that 90% of the time, each one you get wrong costs you a factor of 10 on your accuracy, far more than you gain from ascribing the extra 9% probability to the other 9 cases you happened to be right. And 1% is high enough few would call it truly absurd.
Calling something absurd is asking to be smacked hard (in terms of accuracy) if you’re wrong—and feeling safe about it.
I can think of lots of fictional universes I’d love to live in. Either civilization in Against the Fall of Night is pretty nifty, and I wouldn’t mind living there, even during the events of the story. Both could use improvements, sure, but a lot less than our civilization! But that’s not exactly a thrill-a-minute book. Less far-futuristically, The Door into Summer seems pretty cool too, and as long as you’re not the main character you’re just your own person.
More often, I’d restrict it to not during the story. Like, Foundation. Sounds pretty swell, if you live in the thousands of years before it starts, or on Gaia. The Hyperion-verse is just great before Hyperion and more so after Rise of Endymion. The worlds of Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence are fine except when you have reasonable concerns that everything is about to end, and in the latter case very few people are put in that situation at any point. Similarly, Glasshouse’s world is very nice whenever there isn’t a massive galactic war going on and you haven’t been kidnapped.
I would also take the first world. A roadmap informative enough to be useful does not need to be detailed enough to ruin the surprise. And really, I’d rather not be surprised about myself so much as I’d like to be surprised about other people and the environment.
Reading the ‘strategy guide’ a.k.a. ‘first 2⁄3 walkthrough’ that came with Final Fantasy 1? Ruined everything. Looking at the maps? Just as bad.
But reading the spell list? Not a problem. Those are more internal. Even the equipment list is okay. That’s stuff on your side. It’s your toolbox, even if you can’t use all of it yet. The puzzle is in how to use it.
A second point: Discovery is very fun. It is not the only kind of fun. Excelling, communicating, and competing are also. Those aren’t even controversial.
But is there room in eutopia for the fun of beating other people (at something)? I’m thinking Killer types on the Bartle test.
I wouldn’t get so worked up about it. The point of these demos is not to claim that evolution explains mousetraps—it doesn’t—but to undermine the irreducible complexity argument. It’s quite capable of accomplishing that.
Almost anything could have a plausible evolutionary route in the presence of an arbitrary selecting force. But evolution by natural selection does not provide arbitrary selecting forces. Natural selection doesn’t build better mousetraps and clocks and such because those aren’t capable of providing the machinery (i.e. being alive) that makes natural selection work.
I suspect the issue is the vague nature of the ‘some things said about this’ comment. Yes, some things said about it are undoubtedly false, but some quite incisive things said about the conjecture are true!
At a more practical level, Pascal’s Wager’s main failure is to strategically believe rather than rationally believe. Also, the notion that God would put up with a belief of that sort.
This particular failure mode applies to very few other arguments.
I found it amusing to pretend this was to be applied to the horoscope project, not a submission to it.
Interesting that there were no too-high predictions.
Yeah, I guess I meant ‘e.g.‘, not ‘i.e.’
It reads to me as rationalists in general
Hello!
I’m a 32 year old physics PhD, working (so far) on the oh-so-fashionable subfield of graphene and carbon nanotubes. I took Quantum field theory, which is a little unusual for an experimentalist (though not positively rare). I have a background in programming, and a moderate degree of interest in AI.
I came here by way of the Methods of Rationality. After reading that, and upon seeing that there was a sequence on quantum mechanics, I had a suspicion that it wouldn’t be terrible. This suspicion was vastly exceeded. I never encountered the slightest technical flaw, which is better than many physicists can produce on the subject, let alone philosophers and amateur physicists.
I began wandering and seeing what else there was, and it is good. The atmosphere also seems quite good around here, so I thought I’d join the community rather than treating it as a collection of essays and comments.
So here I am.
~~ Edited to add: ~
I am not sure how this got so many upvotes. Was it the praise? The brevity? That I’m a physicist? The score just stands out on the page a bit, and I’m not at all sure why.