No, by 2 I mean 1.999...
A_A
Nominull3
Karma: 339
The first terrifying shock comes when you realize that the rest of the world is just so incredibly stupid.
The second terrifying shock comes when you realize that they’re not the only ones.
Probability is a “more difficult concept than it seems”, you say, but in what sense is it difficult? It does not require a vast and complex formalism to avoid the sort of error we see in the jellybean problem, so clearly it is not an inherently difficult error to avoid. If it is a “difficult concept”, then, it’s difficult because our brains are fundamentally not wired to deal with it appropriately, which is a failure of the brain, or colloquially a “stupidity”.
Isn’t a completely accurate explanation of the universe correct by definition?
I guess the lesson we are supposed to take here is that there is a pacifism bias that we need to overcome, or else we will not be able to kill the people who need killin’?
I don’t have anything desperately important to me, and you say I’m not allowed to just pick something. Given this, what am I supposed to do, to become more rational? Am I just doomed? I really desperately want to believe true things and not false things, but you say that’s not good enough.
I’d love to say I’d find some way of picking randomly just to piss Omega off, but I’d probably just one-box it. A million bucks is a lot of money.
The interesting thing about this game is that Omega has magical super-powers that allow him to know whether or not you will back out on your commitment ahead of time, and so you can make your commitment credible by not being going to back out on your commitment. If that makes any sense.
You have to be careful where you put your nails, lest you rip reality.
I am distinct from my brain. My brain does a lot of stuff without consulting me at all.
I’m surprised that this point is controversial enough that Eliezer felt the need to make a post about it, and even more surprised that he’s catching heat in the comments for it. This “reductionism” is something I believe down to the bone, to the extent that I have trouble conceptualizing the world where it is false.
The pattern that seems to be playing out repeatedly is: Eliezer begins a series of posts on a topic → Commenters complain that the topic is straying from the nominal topic of the blog, i.e. bias → Eliezer brings the topic around and shows how it applies to bias. In this case, though, the connection to bias seems pretty clear.
On a side note, does it feel weird to anybody else to refer to Eliezer as Eliezer, like you’re on a first name basis with him? I mean, blogging is an informal style of writing, and one would expect that to carry over into the comments, but I still feel like I should be referring to him as “The Master” or something. :)
FWIW, it took a long time between aquiring an understanding of how the moon orbits the earth and Sputnik.
The idea that you’re not significant is invalid in the internet age. You can write an operating system in your mom’s basement and distribute it around the world.
A lot of people need some specialized scientific knowledge to do their jobs. They may not be interested in the rest of it, but they are interested in that because it matters to what they’re doing. If we hide science behind a general scientific conspiracy, people like that won’t join, and they won’t be able to do their jobs effectively, and society will be poorer as a result.
Grades in school motivate people to gain the ability to successfully take exams, which is actually pretty well correlated to understanding the material, especially compared to, e.g., drinking until you pass out. You may be able to achieve some gains by being motivated by learning rather than by grades, but you’re way better off being motivated by grades than by nothing.
We have to accept the reality of the situation; the system is not set up to haelp people learn who desperately want to. That is actually just and good, because the fraction of the population who actually desperately want to learn is the size of a rounding error.
It works like a Fourier transform? That’s very interesting, thank you.
So what you’re saying is that God does not play dice, and that frequentism is fundamentally true.
The cut and thrust of intellectual debate is pragmatically a good way to stimulate one’s mind on a subject. Unfortunately, you can only practice it if you disagree with someone of comparable intellect on the subject you want to think about. So what are you supposed to do when the only people of comparable intellect to you that you have handy agree with you, and naturally will not debate you? You take on the mantle of Devil’s Advocate, and create an artificial debate.
For what it’s worth, Benoit Essiambre, the things you have just said are nonsense. The reason logicians seem to be unable to make a distinction between 1.999… and 2 is that there is no distinction. They are not two different definable real numbers, they are the same definable real number.