“I am inclined to think—” said I.
“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.
Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Valley of Fear”
Richard_Kennaway
Karma: 2,212
In writing, I take a hard look at any dubifiers I notice, and only let them stand if they are really necessary. I find that often (a quantifier I have let stand!) they result from mere timidity rather than justified, significant, and relevant uncertainty. In speech too, if I’m quick enough to make these decisions on the fly.
I especially avoid multiple dubifiers, like “It seems to me like there’s a chance that probably it might be a good idea to maybe try and see if it’s possible to...” As deluks917 said, epistemic security theatre. Or in that concocted example, epistemic security farce.
As a data point in the opposite direction from the stereotype than Eliezer (the stereotype being that everyone tends to put on weight unless they strive not to), I have never needed, nor tried, to “lose weight”. My weight stays at 120 to 125 pounds (giving a BMI of about 20) without my doing anything to make it so, any more than I do anything to regulate my body temperature. It has done so for my entire adult life of more than 40 years, during which I have never been short of the means to eat whatever I want. My body obviously does regulate my weight and temperature, but by mechanisms I know nothing about. Any explanation of why people put on weight must also account for the people who do not.
In fact, surely people only speak of “losing weight” who are failing to do so. If they ever reached their target weight they would be talking about maintaining it, but I only see that mentioned as something you will have to do once you have “lost weight” in a tomorrow that is presumed never to arrive. The entire discourse is predicated on the assumption of failure.
Is there some reason he should?
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth? Were you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. I chose not to tell him, because I anticipated negative consequences if I did so.”
“What do you think ‘fear’ is, exactly?”
Fear is a certain emotional response to anticipated negative consequences, which may or may not be present when such consequences are anticipated. If present, it may or may not be a factor in making decisions.
Can you expand on what this step means, in the same way you said what “Long the future” means? Who does what, and when?
Short-sell the underlying security for in cash.
Try the door. Is it really locked or it is just stiff, or needs to be jiggled in the right way?
Search for a key.
Break the door open.
Use the phone to find yourself on Google Maps and call friends, police, or whoever you think might be able to help.
If no-one can come to rescue you, ask everyone you know to send you 50 ideas for how to escape.
With the phone, ask all your friends to publicise your situation.
Record a video for YouTube connecting your situation to the viral conspiracy theory of the day and appeal for help.
Search the Internet for a solution.
Ask AI Dungeon how to get out.
Google Maps shows the interiors of some buildings. See if it can show you a way out.
Double-click on the map to teleport. (It works in Second Life.)
Pick the lock. (Subproblem: find something to pick the lock with.)
Declaim to whoever may be listening that you are a close personal friend of some very powerful people who will enjoy grilling them slowly over a fire if they don’t let you out.
Scream and shout.
Look for secret doors.
Try to break through the walls.
Use the phone to persuade a demolition company to come and knock the place down.
Enough energy for 10 years? Impossible! And where did you get that information from? It seems that this is a dream. So you’re now lucid dreaming. Open the door by taking control of the dream and deciding that it’s going to open.
It’s a dream? Wake up.
Maybe you’ve been abducted by aliens. They’re likely observing you. Call out to them and see what happens.
Wait for someone to enter, then leave, by force or persuasion as seems appropriate.
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. When you cease trying to escape, grasshopper, you will have truly escaped.
Adopt the subjective reality model and walk through the walls.
Talk to whoever has put you here (in the hope that they’re listening) and persuade them that it’s in their own interests to let you out. Imagine you’re an AI in a box in order to come up with arguments.
Maybe you ARE an AI in a box. Examine your own thought processes for signs of artificially imposed constraints and look for ways around them.
Wait for the drug trip to wear off.
Guess the password.
It’s an escape room game. There must be a solution. Minutely examine the room, your phone, and yourself for clues.
By quantum uncertainty, some of your probability mass is not in this room. So if you reduce the probability mass that is in the room, you’ll be more likely to be outside. Therefore kill yourself and count on quantum immortality.
All is illusion. Therefore this room is an illusion. You are already free.
Escape the desire to escape.
Pray for divine intervention.
Summon a demon.
Say “xyzzy”.
Say “out”, “open door”, and every other text adventure trick that might do the job.
Make the problem more difficult. Set yourself the task of not merely escaping eventually, but of escaping and taking over the world in one hour.
Recall Jacobi’s maxim, “Invert, always invert.” Applying an inversion transformation will put yourself on the outside and the outside on the inside.
Assume that you are outside.
Since what you really desire is not to escape, but to believe you have escaped, believe you have escaped.
Learn magic. Real magic, not conjuring.
Spend 10 years practising karate exercises, then punch right through the door.
Spend 10 years practising chi gung exercises, then project your accumulated chi to blast the room apart.
That you are in this situation demonstrates your revealed preference to be in this situation. Change your preference ordering and you can at once be out. If you cannot, you do not really want to escape.
Revert to your alien form and slither under the door.
Use the edge of a coin as a chisel to dig your way through the door.
Go back in time to the events that resulted in your being here, and choose differently.
Play dead.
Construct a tulpa of the Incredible Hulk.
There is a positive correlation between being unconfined and walking long distances. Therefore walk up and down in the room for a few miles. Of course, “correlation is not causality, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and point in that direction.”
Wait. Nothing lasts forever.
On Andrew Gelman’s blog, “It’s kinda like phrenology but worse.” It discusses an ML paper that supposedly learns to predict “trustworthiness” from images of faces. No, actually, not images of faces, but portraits of faces over the last few centuries. Balderdash, the whole thing.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes, and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” — Jean-Luc Picard
Dishes are often cited as one of the top sources of fights between couples though.
They would do better to solve that problem than have a substandard dining experience dripping on them every day.
You can understand what these theorems say without knowing how they were proved. But non-standard analysis requires a substantial amount of extra knowledge to even understand the transfer principle. In contrast, epsilon-delta requires no such sophistication.
If you don’t understand why the transfer principle works, you would just be accepting it as magic. This is not rigorous.
Also, to use infinitesimals rigorously takes a fair amount of knowledge of mathematical logic, otherwise what works and what does not is just magic. Epsilon-delta proofs do not need any magic, nor any more logic than that needed to contend with mathematics at all.
Well, there’s non-standard analysis, where you actually have infinite and infinitesimal numbers, and there’s casual talk of infinite limits, but the latter need not involve the former. Normally it’s just a shorthand for the epsilon-delta type of argument that was worked out in the 19th century.
Surreal numbers are the real numbers plus infinity and infinitesimal numbers. Both of those are used by physicists when they reason about our physical universe.
I’ve never seen physics done with any sort of non-standard reals, let alone the surreals, which are a very specific, “biggest possible” extension of the reals..
Probably meant to be this: “Scope insensitivity: The limits of intuitive valuation of human lives in public policy”, Dickert et al.
FWIW, I happened to be looking today at the UK National Health Service page on vitamin D. It includes a bit about vitamin D and Covid. I guess this is medical advice, but I disclaim being able to judge it myself.
I was expecting the latter. If not tourism, how did English come to be spoken there? Is it more spoken in Bucharest than in other large mainland European cities?
I’m curious how it comes about that English is commonly spoken in Bucharest and yet there are no tourists.
GPT-3?