I felt that the comic is quite entertaining. This marks the first time that I have seen Bayes be mentioned in the mainstream (if you can call XKCD the internet mainstream). Hopefully it will introduce Bayes to a new audience.
I feel that it is a good representation of frequentists and Bayesians. A Bayesian would absolutely use this as an opportunity to make a buck.
This is an interesting story illustrating the influence of a group’s culture and dynamic onto willing participants. Each member of the group shared a certain value and talent, and when brought together, they went into a positive feedback loop, and ended up optimizing their search for software defects.
The theatrics is a pretty time as well.
On the other hand, I imagine it would be difficult to replicate. In my experience, groups like these start off with two or three ‘heroes’, who take the charge down the road less traveled.
Has anyone had a group which parallels the black team above?
Good catch on the omitted word. Corrected. Up-vote for you.
I have wondered what a bayesian secret idenity would look like. That is to say, I desire to use bayes theorem in my own life, day-to-day, but it seems impracitical. Does anyone have any success stories here about using bayes or other rationalist techniques for the win in their career/personal life?
What Bill said is criminal in Germany, and so is your account of what Bill said. Criticism of Islam is criminal in some Muslim countries. Without exaggeration, to convert from Islam to Christianity carries the death penalty in some Muslim nations.
In contemporay America, it is generally forbidden to publically criticize or defame Muhammad or Islam, particularly on public media. Compare/contrast treatment of Christianity/Catholicism/Jesus on comedy shows, particuarlly on Comedy Central. The debacle with South Park is the most notable.
What types of social desires do you satisfy through your tulpa which you have not been able to with your online or meatspace friends?
Here is a second resource, the successor of Jacob, creator of ERE, Mr. Money Mustache. This website has the same concept, taken to the same extremes, though he has a more colloquial style. He proclaims to live a luxurious life on 8,000 a year a person (family of three). This includes taking multiple road trips with his family, eating organic foods and other such “luxuries”.
I concur with your sediment. I posted this on the munckin thread, but it bears repeating MMM Simple Math of Early Retirement. Going purely on your investments and saving(i.e. no government programs) you should be able to retire in 51 years if you save 10% of your income annually. However, if you save 20% of your income, it drops to 37 years.
MMM and Early Retirement Extreme advocate investing 50-75% of your income, if not more. This will let you retire between 7 and 17 years, leaving plenty of time to enjoy your retirement.
Myself, I am not a utilitarian, but a deontologist. I would flip the switch, because I have been given the choice to choose between two different losses, inescapably, and I would try to minimize this loss. As for pushing someone else in front of the trolley, I could not abide someone doing that to me or a loved one, throwing us from relative safety into absolute disaster. So I would not do it to another. It is not my sacrifice to make.
As for throwing myself in front of the trolley…
I would want to. In the calm state I am in right now, I would do it. In the moment, there is a more than probable chance that fear will take hold and I would not sacrifice myself for five others. But in this scenario, I would probably be too stressed to think to throw another person into a train, let alone myself. So if we are taking the effects of stress out of my cognitive calculations, I will take the effects of stress out of my moral calculations.
I would do it.
I would add: Get those endorphins flowing! Set up for a positive success spiral or jump up and down and get your body moving, either way get the blood pumping and you will be more amendable to starting and finishing your task.
I am now doing Anki about 3 times a week now. I am currently creating an Anki deck for my Psychology 101 book and another for “An Idiot’s Guide to Game Theory” which I picked up the other day. I am also learning HTML and CSS on an online course, again using Anki and practice tests to reinforce what I have learned.
I picked up these techniques at LessWrong.
You are right, the costs of putting new drugs in the market are extremely high, and maybe 1 in 10 make the cut. Very few people would be willing to invest that much money on such a return. Investing in a pharmaceutical company would give an investor a financial return, and investing in an efficient charity will give a philanthropist the best return for lives saved.
I see the same biases and problems which occur in current financial markets occuring in this. Rumors, market manipulation, risky speculation leading to a bubble and insider information will all happen and will need to be regulated in order to be operable.
What is immorality then? Even a theist would say “morality is that which is good and should be done, and immorality is that which is not good and should not be done.” If you think it would be immoral to spare you wife and child, then you are saying it is not a good thing and shouldn’t be done. I am pretty sure protecting your family is a good thing, and most people would agree.
The problem is, I think, is not that it is immoral to not push you wife and child in front of a moving train, albeit to save 5 others, but that it is immoral to push any individual in front of a train to save some other individuals.
If you increase the numbers enough, though, I would think it changes, since you are not just saving others, but society, or civilization or a town or what have you. Sacrificing others for that is acceptable, but rarely does this require a single person’s sacrifice, and it usually requires the consent and deliberation of the society under threat. Hence why we have the draft.
I have seen the phenomena of intelligent students doing enough just to “get by”. Hell, I was one of them. But I have met plenty of over-achievers, and they were above average intellects.
Besides this, I agree with your post. Grit has a lot to say for it.
I told this to a friend of mine. I was the type of person who happy enough to know that I was the most intelligent and clever person in the room, but not to show it. So I would go into math class, ignore the teacher, and do 4 or 5 problems in the book instead. Once I knew that I knew the subject, I would just kick back and relax, while everyone else was still listening to the lecture.
Sure enough, once the test would roll around, I would pass.
Not get an A, but pass, because I accidently skip a small step, which I wouldn’t have done if I practiced more, or because I didn’t carry a 1, which I didn’t notice because I did not check my work. And when I saw the red marks on my exam, I would think, “Wow, that was a stupid mistake. But I passed anyways, didn’t even try, because I am so freaking brilliant.”
I created these habits at a young age, for various reasons, mostly because I was bored by the material and I saw no point it in.
But now in my twenties, I am trying to overcome those habits and make up for lost time. And I did not think so before, but grit is the perfect word to describe this sediment.
Why would you use healthy members of society to test the effectiveness of cryogenic revitalization when animal testing is perfectly legal, and would demonstrate feasibility? After demonstrating feasibility with other primates, then it would be easier to gain voluntarily human participants.
I would probably enjoy creating several copies of myself, allow them to pursue their (my interest’s) wholly, gather all the experiences they can along the way, and merge them together at a later time. Then repeat.
I can see that. It will be a difficult choice, but I would do the same. I think it is morally defensible.
[Edit] On second thought, I am not a husband or father, but I would like to think I will one day have a family who has heroic virtue enough to be willing to sacrifice their live for others. How I would behave, again is subject to my emotions, but I would like to honor that wish.
I suppose the message here is that though the inscriptions (literally) labeled the boxes as X and Y, this does not conform in reality. The words do not make it true, and the Jester made the mistake of presuming that his strict logic meant that reality has to follow the labels that were given. His last words, sadly, was “It’s logically impossible!” One should reconsider calling things logical impossibilities, when they are occurring right in front of you. Who know what other logical impossibilities you were missing.
If I were man of literature, I would also comment on the juxtaposition of the Jester and King. The Jester, who is a fan of logic, lives in the court. His devotion to logical reasoning plays itself out in entertainment form, whether privately in his bedroom, or by sticking an angry frog onto a king. The King, on the other hand, lives in a world of politics, diplomacy, and war. He does not have the luxury of syllogisms, as he is surrounded by flatterers, rivals and enemies. He cannot presume that anything that is presented is not an exaggeration, inaccurate or an outright lie.
The final moral; do not stick angry frogs on someone who has the ability and the potential disposition to kill you. Or more generally, do not stick angry frogs onto people, it is just bad behavior. Just don’t do it.