That seems silly. I’d think the time difference thoroughly breaks the symmetry that the TDT answer to the prisoner’s dilemma that I’ve seen relies on. It’s like if one of the prisoners got to hear the other prisoners’ answer before deciding.
But I suppose your answer does increase the usefulness of this problem as something to think about.
And now it’s Parfit’s hitchhiker! :D
Except instead of having psychic powers and only accepting people who intend to pay, now the driver accepts everyone and is a mute.
Hm, so perhaps hazing isn’t quite like this asymmetric PD, since the current generation cannot give anything back to the older generation. But still, it’s interesting to talk about, so:
Would the second player cooperate even if the first player defected, since that’s what they would do if they’d precommitted?
You should read the interview that was linked to; they talked about this very thing. And the guest cited evidence that she claimed supported her, which you should be aware of before arguing against her claim.
Wow, that’s interesting.
Still, it doesn’t look like it separates correlation from causation. All sorts of things might cause the partners of rich men to be more likely to have orgasms.
Oh, okay. I hadn’t fully understood how restricted the range of “cooperate” was by the lack of information about the other player.
Perhaps they could program something specifically related to rationality.
One example: the activity leader gives everyone else a standardized input/output structure to move around a soccer field/gladiatorial arena/asteroid mining station/scene of the crime, then the group members write a program that they think will win whatever the game is. The activity leader throws the group’s programs in a file together (maybe after writing some competitors obeying simple principles, so that the group leader has something to do and the players have a benchmark), and out spits a detailed analysis of what happened and who won. Then people get to apply their skills to understand why things turned out as they did.
I agree, I don’t think the baseball analogy is useful when thinking about fields like computer programming without more careful consideration of the differences
My advice is to go anywhere, look at the nearby patterns, and then think about them. What do people here walk by every day that is absolutely fascinating?
Perhaps an example: the other day I was waiting for a pizza, and so I naturally noticed that the gas inside some of the neon lights seemed to be forming a pattern, as if there were bubbles. In some places the bubbles moved or vibrated quickly, and in other places the bubbles were stationary.
Quick inspection showed that the bubbles were stationary near the ends and near joins in the glass, which was interesting. Placing my hand near the glass kept the bubbles stationary. Noise levels or tapping didn’t seem to change the behavior of the bubbles. Since this is a thread about originality, I guess I won’t share my guesses.
I’m reminded of the “Surely You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman” story that starts with him working out the physics of a spinning dinner tray for fun. The story ends with him winning a Nobel prize.
“In frequentist statistics, they’d tell you that, no other information being given, the probability of each possibility is equal.”
Many bayesians would call it the principle of indifference. That’s not why your reasoning goes off the rails.
It goes off the rails soon after because you try to reason from a non-integrable distribution. Bad plan. E.T. Jaynes would tell you to construct the infinite distribution as the limit of a finite distribution. A non-straw frequentist would jump to the end and tell you that the Poisson distribution should be a reasonable first approximation to when humanity will end, since the chances of extinction shouldn’t vary too much with time.
A frequentist perspective on the doomsday argument, that maybe someone can translate into bayesian thinking: While technically valid, it’s not useful. This is because the variance of the mean is equal to the variance of the distribution of humans. If humanity ends tomorrow your variance turns out to have been small, but if humanity lives forever your variance turns out to have been infinite. This makes it a prediction of everything, and therefore nothing.
I second watching the TED talk.
Oops, it looks like I messed up. I misinterpreted you as talking about a distribution of when humanity would go extinct. But you weren’t talking about a distribution—you just said ” if humanity lives forever, that contradicts intuition about our chances of biting it in finite time.”
Maybe it’s because I think a distribution is the correct way to think about it. If the chances of humanity going extinct are a Poisson distribution normalized to 0.75, we have a 25% chance of living forever AND a finite chance of biting it in finite time—the apparent exclusion is resolved.
Of course, that still doesn’t answer the question “why were we born now and not infinitely later?” To do that, you have to invoke the axiom of choice, which is, in layman’s terms, “impossible things happen all the time, because it makes more sense than them not happening.”
-
“As for your last part, why is variance important?”
It’s because a prediction is only powerful if it excludes some possibilities. If any real measurement is within a standard deviation of the prediction, it’s a pretty boring prediction—it’s not enough to tell me that I will die in 50 years if the error bars are +/- 100.
Of course, the more I think about it the more I question how I got my result. It was pretty dependent on thinking of the mean as something drawn from a distribution rather than just plugging and chugging the obvious way.
The axiom of choice was just to justify how it’s possible to be born now even if there are infinite people, which is an objection I have seen before, though you didn’t make it. Also it’s a fun reference to make.
It’s possible I’m wrong, but I’ll try to walk you through my logic as to why it isn’t informative that we’re born now. Imagine the “real” set of people who ever get born. When choosing from this bunch o’ people, the variance is - ^2 = N^2 /3-N^2 /4 = N^2 /12 (for large N).
So the standard deviation is proportional not to the square root of N, as you’d expect if you’re used to normal distributions, but is instead proportional to N. This means that no matter how big N is, the beginning is always the same number of standard deviations from the mean. Therefore, to a decent approximation, it’s not more surprising to be born now if there are 10^20 total people born than if there are 10^100.
Of course, writing this out highlights a problem with my logic (drat!) which is that standard deviations aren’t the most informative things when your distribution doesn’t look anything like a normal distribution—I really should have thought in two-tailed integrals or something. But then, once you start integrating things, you really do need a prior distribution.
So dang, I guess my argument was at least partly an artifact of applying standard distributions incorrectly.
The author makes a claim: “it is impossible to predict how a given species will respond to environmental change.”
This claim has been shown false. The first thing that comes to mind is the bajillion fruit fly studies.
It’s basically equivalent to the claim that experiments in evolution are not repeatable. Partly true, but mostly false. The E. Coli in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment evolved the ability to live on citrate, after all. They didn’t grow wings and fly. In fact, I think one of the papers that’s come out of that experiment was an analysis showing that the rate of beneficial mutations was roughly constant.
He also displays a number of bad traits, such as appeal to authority rather than giving evidence, that sort of thing.
This is indeed the standard thought, but be careful not to make a mountain out of a molehill.
“You’ll never actually die” only holds if you define “you” to be “you who doesn’t die.” If you include “you who does die” as also you, then you do die! In short, both the mind-blowing and confusifying powers of quantum immortality are related to the fact that it is a tautology in disguise. It’s a question of definitions and not a property of the universe because the universe doesn’t really care whether you’re alive or dead; dead bodies make great quantum observers, they interact with their environment just fine. But we choose to divide up the possible universes into “us alive” and “us dead,” and then only look at what happens in one of those groups, making the answer predetermined by our fairly arbitrary choice of which universes to look at.
The standard response to that fact is “yes, but we choose to care about the universes where we live for a very special reason: you can’t think about yourself being dead when you’re dead. Cogito ergo sum.”
And then I would say: “This is true, but just be careful. Though by definition we won’t perceive ourselves as dead, that doesn’t mean we can’t die, unless we redefine ‘we.’ Pronouns beyond here become confusing; for a clearer view try to think of things following fuzzy worldlines in spacetime, with events being points in spacetime.”
-
To make quantum immortality not confusing is to make the mountain back into a molehill, relatively speaking at least. “The big complicated space that we exist in can be thought of like parallel universes, and in some of those parallel universes you’ll live forever.” Cool!
Downvoted for urging people to commit suicide. Just because you define “you” to be “me who lives” does not mean that the colloquial you will not have death happen.
Look, maybe this would help: are you guys familiar with p-zombies? Let’s say that I define myself to become a p-zombie if I measure a quantum spin to be up. This is exactly identical to quantum immortality, since “the only being I will identify with will be the being that decohered into the wavefunction that guessed correctly.” Using this argument, you (notice the confusion caused by my use of the pronoun) should be able to measure a quantum spin to be down just by thinking that you’ll become a p-zombie if you don’t.
Okay, now replace “measure a quantum spin to be down” with “get superpowers.” Aaaand GO! Congratulations, I have now turned you into a p-zombie.
Oh, okay. Odd way to maximize (literal, I assume) paperclips, considering humans are currently the major producers of paperclips.
And yeah, perhaps I should have just said “you identify yourself as someone who consistently measures spin down,” but it’s always fun to make references and I wanted a slightly more intuitive analogue to death.
If you think about it, the most predictable harms should come from the same mechanisms as the benefits. And the mechanism? Complicated economics. Or at least that’s the mechanism I’d like to emphasize, since it’s harder to quantify the other ones.
And what do I mean when I say complicated economics? I mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony#Minimum_wage . Look at the diagram to the right. It took me about an hour of actual work to understand what that diagram means to the minimum wage, so no rush.
6) Hiring a $500/hr tutor is straight-up dumb and doesn’t need an objective explanation.
Of course, you could still look for a subjective explanation of what was going through the parents’ heads, and that might fall in 1-5, but it’s less interesting to me.
Humans are bad at small numbers. Your vote does indeed matter. But it only matters 10^-8 of a presidency. With littering you’re probably anchored to 1 piece of litter, so 1 matters. But in voting you’re probably anchored to 1 presidency, rather than, say, 1 dollar. Noting, of course, that on the order of 10^10 dollars get spent per presidential race, so your vote is about $100.
From a human perspective, other people have a right to (what seems to you) stupidity as much as they have a right to anything.
To assert something like “you know what’s best” is to assert omniscience, which if true wipes away all ethical questions when you can just ask “what is the best course of action?” and take that.