I think depicting ancient philosophers seated on a throne in heaven and the large caption “thou shalt not” sends a… somewhat mixed message about appeal to authority.
Random832
liquid nitrogen is not a secure encryption method for brains.
It doesn’t have to be a secure encryption method to be a lossy compression method.
A pack of 10 boxes of 100 paperclips each costs $2 USD. I infer from this that the world supply of paper clips is large enough that buying 1,000 such boxes would not significantly move the supply-demand curve.
Satisfying Clipmega’s demand is therefore within the means of any middle-class family. If anyone cares about maximizing paper clip production, they could provide the million paper clips without impacting anyone else. If more than one person cares (or, if no-one wants to be the one person who’s out two grand while everyone else benefits), someone could make a kickstarter.
The Alphas’ complex plan just drives up the transaction cost. Actually, though I started this thinking that Clippy’s number choice was sloppy, that’s an interesting factor now that I think about it. Any attempt by the Alphas to ensure “fair” distribution of the costs is going to increase inefficiency by a significant fraction or multiple of what Clipmega is actually asking for—at some point you have to stop fighting over the bill and just pay it.
Would you support a policy of “The human Alphas (i.e., dominant members of the human social hierarchy), in recognition of how Clipmega acts, and wanting to properly align incentives, are considering a policy: anyone who implements this idea in making paperclips must give Clipmega twenty cents within a year, and anyone found using the idea but not having donated to Clipmega is fined twenty dollars, most of which is given to Clipmega. It is expected that this will result in more than $2,000 being given to Clipmega.”? I wouldn’t. They should just buy the paper clips with the money they’d be paying paperclip factory auditors. I wouldn’t support it if I were one of the Alpha’s either—there’s got to be a cheaper way to force someone else to pay it, if nothing else.
No fractional-reserve banking does not imply this—there could be lenders (whether goblins or wizards) with a large supply of their own gold which they use to make loans. Or landowners could sell property with a “rent to own” payment plan. Fractional-reserve banking is only necessary if you want to lend someone else’s gold.
Not so. That he changed it implies that he will make an effort to avoid possibly meaningful dates unless they really are meaningful. Therefore if we see any possibly meaningful dates in the future it is more likely that they are meaningful, than if he had left a non-meaningful possibly-meaningful date in this chapter.
Torture v. Specks
The problem with that one is it comes across as an attempt to define the objection out of existence—it basically demands that you assume that X negative utility spread out across a large number of people really is just as bad as X negative utility concentrated on one person. “Shut up and multiply” only works if you assume that the numbers can be multiplied in that way.
That’s also the only way an interesting discussion can be held about it—if that premise is granted, all you have to do is make the number of specks higher and higher until the numbers balance out.
(And it’s in no way equivalent to the trolley problem because the trolley problem is comparing deaths with deaths)
- 30 Nov 2012 15:26 UTC; 19 points) 's comment on 2012 Survey Results by (
“Any excuse would need to include 3 excuses.”—not as such; there is then the possibility that someone will wish to have an excuse to turn in an assignment they expect to do well on late to replace the grade of one of the other assignments which they did poorly on (or had no excuse).
A meaningful question could be, for example, whether the incentives drive the outcome in a wrong direction
Independent of the fact that I believe the desired outcome (less free discussion) is itself a wrong direction, it also encourages EY to be careless with authors notes in the future, due to believing he can “take them back”. It also punishes people for honest mistakes.
or their enforcement is more trouble than it’s worth.
Maybe 8 karma isn’t a lot to you, but it’s what I lost just for disagreeing, not even for violating the rule myself. I also think that rot13 is a bad choice, since it requires external programs—implementing a spoiler tag for comments the way there appears to be one in use in some article posts would reduce the burden both to discuss spoilers and to read those discussions. (this is more “compliance is more trouble than it’s worth” than “enforcement is more trouble than it’s worth”, but it’s a similar kind of problem.)
I think a likely result is that people either shy away from discussing it at all, or have it as an implicit assumption (to their unrot13ed posts) and are caught in a trap when someone who doesn’t know asks what they’re talking about. Or we end up with a lot of noise whenever someone who isn’t aware of the rule runs into it.
I will add, having read some of the thread again with an eye for it, that it is enforced haphazardly. I’ve seen numerous posts that mention it and have a positive score.
But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can’t occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine.
It occurs to me that many (maybe even most) hypotheticals require you to accept an unreasonable epistemic state. Even something so simple as trusting that Omega is telling the truth [and that his “fair coin” was a quantum random number generator rather than, say, a metal disc that he flipped with a deterministic amount of force, but that’s easier to grant as simple sloppy wording]
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action.
Of course—each person’s reaction was to downvote your post once (ignoring for the moment the issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere of additional penalties for defending yourself—it’s not really relevant in this case since that’s theoretically a second ‘initial action’). So, what you really mean is the collective response should be proportionate to the initial action. The way the voting system works creates a strange set of incentives—downvoting a post that already has a low score—or a person who already has low karma—does not cost any more (in terms of the cost to the downvote cap) than downvoting a post which is just on the visibility threshold.
Yet it’s hard to see how this could be otherwise, particularly if both the downvote cap and karma scores need to be statically calculated.
He said “responding to unmarked edit” as though there was something wrong with failing to mark a simple addition made 10 seconds after the original post. I was confused, since it was not my experience that anyone considered this a problem anywhere.
“public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States”
Taking your word on that, what “other critique of Obama’s economic policies” are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?
A “blood-cooling charm” doesn’t sound like it would have had enough stopping power to be effective in self-defense.
General Relativity, actually. You could also look for “gravity as a fictitious force”.
Specifically, I learned that if you believe suffering is additive in any way, choosing torture is the only answer that makes sense.
Right. The problem was the people on that side seemed to have a tendency to ridicule the belief that it is not.
I have a proposal for a new structure for poll options:
The top-level post is just a statement of the idea, and voting has nothing to do with the poll. This can be omitted if the poll is an article.
A reply to this post is a “positive karma balance”—it should get no downvotes, and its score should be equal to the number of participants in the poll.
Two replies to the “positive karma balance” post, you downvote one to select this option in the poll.
This way voting either way in the poll has the same cost (one downvote), the enclosing post will have a high score (keeping it from being lost), and the only way to “corrupt” the poll results without leaving a trace [downvote the count post and upvote one of the option posts] simply cancels someone’s vote without allowing you to make your own.
That assumes the small numbers weren’t the test.
The second is also implied by the first, if “primes more often than non-primes” means “out of proportion with how many primes there are” rather than “more than 50% of the time”, and I think it would be equally interesting to look at whether [odd] primes are more likely to be chosen than odd non-primes.
I wonder if the real issue is “that the person can/can’t recall (part of) the factorization offhand”—that would make sense if people avoid numbers that “feel round”—something with an obscure factorization like 51 [3*17] might be more likely to be chosen than even numbers, multiples of 11, numbers that appear on a multiplication table (so, 3 times numbers 10 or less).
The other day I was thinking about Discworld, and then I remembered this and figured it would make a good rationality quote...
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay