I didn’t do the engineering, and I didn’t do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.
Jamie Hyneman
I didn’t do the engineering, and I didn’t do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.
Jamie Hyneman
If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice: and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then you still have work to do.
Richard Askey
“Thus Aristotle laid it down that a heavy object falls faster than a light one does. The important thing about this idea is not that he was wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to check it.” Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The definition of limit: “lim x → a f(x) = c ” means for all epsilon > 0, there exists delta > 0 such that for all x, if 0 < |x-a|<delta then |f(x) - c| < epsilon.
The definition of derivative: f’(x) = lim h → 0 (f(x+h) - f(x))/h
That is, for all epsilon > 0, there exists delta > 0 such that for all h, if 0 < |h| < delta then |(f(x+h) - f(x))/h—f’(x)| < epsilon.
At no point do we divide by 0. h never takes on the value 0.
I’ll be providing support in ##patrickclass on freenode.
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
Terry Pratchett
I’m afraid I must disagree kurige, for two reasons. The first is that they smack of false modesty, a way of insuring yourself against the social consequences of failure without actually taking care not to fail. The second is that the use of such terms don’t really convey any new information, and require the use of the passive voice, which is bad style.
“Evidence indicates an increase in ice cream sales” really isn’t good science writing, because the immediate question is “What evidence?”. It’s much better to say “ice cream sales have increased by 15%” and point to the relevant statistics.
The problem isn’t really lacking citations (after all, Yudkowsky’s posts generally don’t have many citations). The problem is saying “The evidence for X is overwhelming”, while failing to provide any evidence of X. It’s effectively saying “take my word for it”.
With a few brackets it is easy enough to see that 5 + 4 is 9. What is not easy to see is that 5 + 4 is not 6.
Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult.
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee
Point me to where Luke denied that academia has any advantages over LW. If you’re going to claim that LW is obviously not “the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web”, it would help your case to provide an obvious counterexample (academic channels themselves are generally not on the web, and LW has some advantages over them, even if the reverse is also true). LW is also not as homogeneous as you appear to believe; plenty of us are academics.
You’re straw-manning here. Not conceding isn’t the same thing as denying. To not concede something, one just has to omit the concession from one’s writing. But this is just quibbling. The real issue is the attitude, or the arrogance, that LW may have with respect to academia. Nobody wants to waste time justifying themselves to a bunch of arrogant amateurs after all.
Anyway, some web channels where academics hang out:
MathOverflow
LambdaTheUltimate
The arXiv
StackExchange
The N-Category Cafe http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/
ScienceBlogs
(Cracked.com probably does a better job of being a smart, general interest forum than Less Wrong, it’s a great deal more popular at least. But being the highest quality popular forum is a bit like being the smartest termite in the world. Specialized forums are where the elite action is.)
Alright! a few points that I can sort of disagree on or feel were omitted in the essay. I’m being skeptical, not a cultist at all! .
My fears aren’t really that you’re trying to foster a cult, or that it’s cultish to agree with you. I got worried when you said that you wanted more people to vocalize their agreement with you and actually work towards having a unified rationalist front. For some reason, I had this mental picture of you as a supervillain declaring your intention to take over the world. So I reflected that I was doing things, somewhat unconventional things (which I focus on more) because of your advice, but hey, it’s good advise and I should probably take it (btw it’s good to hear that cryonics is less expensive than I thought it was, sorry for making your life difficult by propagating false information). I mean, I followed similar patterns when I decided to learn lisp as a first programming language.
I think I’m worried because you’re charismatic, and that makes you much more persuasive than an ineloquent and unimpressive philosopher/AI Hacker. Combined with the fact that I get really happy and a little self righteous when there’s an eloquent speaker who makes a really persuasive argument for something I agree with, makes reading you, and other charismatic people in the atheist/revolutionary/technophile cluster, a rather deep experience with uncomfortable parallels to religion.
I’ve thought it over though, and this particular pattern probably won’t cause too many problems, the reason is that Eliezer Yudkowsky isn’t the only eloquent speaker in the world. I’m betting on something similar to the “three stooges syndrome” where I get shaped by too many intelligent and charismatic people to be influenced in to making large mistakes, because they’ll probably call each other out on the more contentious claims and my bullshit detector will be reactivated.
I’m not even sure if I even agree with you more than average, but it does feel better to agree with you than usual, so that might be the source of worry, in your trip to the library of convenient rhetorical metaphors, it might be that the reason people are so anxious to say that they’re not copying you is because your deep, piercing stare and badass coffee metaphors
So other than that you’ve totally persuaded my fear of your ability to totally persuade me away. Well it’ll probably gone in a week after my subconscious stops thinking you’re a super-villain.
Almost anything can be attacked as a failure, but almost anything can be defended as not a significant failure. Politicians do not appreciate the significance of ‘significant’.
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby
I will attend. Is it OK if I bring my boyfriend (User:MixedNuts) along via my iPad?
The philosophers beat you to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_%28fallacy%29
Don’t I feel like an idiot. Sorry Katja!
On some other subjects people do wish to be deceived. They dislike the operation of correcting the hypothetical data which they have taken as basis. Therefore, when they begin to see looming ahead some such ridiculous result as 2 + 3 = 7, they shrink into themselves and try to find some process of twisting the logic, and tinkering the equation, which will make the answer come out a truism instead of an absurdity; and then they say, “Our hypothetical premiss is most likely true because the conclusion to which it brings us is obviously and indisputably true.” If anyone points out that there seems to be a flaw in the argument, they say, “You cannot expect to get mathematical certainty in this world,” or “You must not push logic too far,” or “Everything is more or less compromise,” and so on.
-- Mary Everest Boole
I’m open to coworking generally.
My ideal coworker is someone who is funny and interested in maths, physics and computer science. My plan would be to read books like Mathematics Form and Function or The Feynman Lectures on Physics and try to summarize / explain the content. For co working where I shut up, I am working on re-implementing MC-AIXI for my honours thesis.
Please contact me if interested, my email is patrick.robotham2@gmail.com my skype nick is grey_fox26
The belief that one can find out something about real things by speculation alone is one of the most long-lived delusions in human thought. It is the spirit of antiscience which is always trying to lead men away from the study of reality to the spinning of fanciful theories out of their own minds. It is the spirit which every one of us (whether he is engaged in scientific investigation or in deciding how to use his vote in an election) must cast out of his own mind. Mastery of the art of thought is only the beginning of the task of understanding reality. Without the correct facts it can only lead us into error.
-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking
Steve Yegge