“There always comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two plus two equals four is punished with death … And the issue is not a matter of what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not two plus two equals four.” – Albert Camus, The Plague
RobertLumley
“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” – Jean de la Bruyère
“If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.” – Roger Bacon
Well for what it’s worth, I don’t think he means it literally. Or at least so exactly. My interpretation is that he is saying that you must accept a rational basis and explanation for everything, or believe that nothing can be explained—you must accept that the laws of physics apply to every one and everything, and that there are no mysterious phenomena, or you must deny the laws of physics and believe everything is mystical.
And thanks, it’s a great blog. I’ve learned so much reading Eliezer’s work. Well, perhaps learned isn’t the best word. Realized may be more appropriate.
Ah, so someone knows where I found this quote. :-)
But that doesn’t make it rational to live that way...
The things that need to be distinguished are “guilty” and “committed murder”. “Not guilty” and “innocent” are very, very different terms. I haven’t met anyone who thinks she didn’t commit the murder, but A. was there enough evidence to prove it, and B. Did the prosecution actually prove it? Maybe, and absolutely not.
The other thing that’s bothered me as of late about a purely Bayesian approach is this: I’m reading Elizer’s OB posts in order from the beginning, and I’m almost to 2008. Perhaps he addresses it at some point, but he hasn’t yet in my reading. (I’ve also read the intuitive explanation, but having had three separate statistics classes, Bayes was a subject I understood pretty well to begin with.)
Shouldn’t there be some accounting of the standard deviation of your estimate of your priors? If I have a prior that I’ve reached by amounting ten bits of evidence, that is quite different from a prior that I’ve reached by amounting one bit of evidence. I don’t see how a traditionally Bayesian approach takes this into account.
(And sorry that’s somewhat off topic, it’s just bothered me for awhile now.)
“Doesn’t the defense also have a burden to explain the duct tape, the stench, etc.? Has the defense met that burden?”
In law, there is no such burden. It doesn’t matter. The only thing the defense must prove is that the prosecution failed to prove their case. And 12 jurors who spent far more time in the courtroom than either you or I agreed that they did not. And did so quite quickly, as jury deliberations go. But the prosecution had no murder weapon, so solid motive, and no time of death. From what I’ve read (which is admittedly limited) they even did a poor job with cause of death.
I’m not sure the common cause is rationality as much as it is (trans)humanism. There are many traits that readers of this blog tend to share, and rationality certainly isn’t the only one. I’m the same way, and while I think rationality may be part of the cause, I suspect the larger cause is my humanist tenancies. I’m also rule utilitarian about lying, so there’s that.
And of course one could argue that the distal cause of the humanism/utilitarianism is rationality, but let’s not go there.
Thanks, I’ll read those when I get a chance.
I’m not sure how familiar with voting theory (or cake cutting theory) the average LessWrong reader is, so I may be preaching to the choir. But Arrow’s theorem (You can wiki it, I can’t give a precise mathematical definition off the top of my head.) pretty much states that having a decent voting system is impossible. Of course, we use the worst one possible (plurality) so anything would be an improvement. But mathematically, any solution proposed here will not be perfect, or perhaps even any good.
That comment is a misinterpretation of the mathematical definition of IIA—but it does raise a good point. The proposed system would, in actuality, be rather poor, it would encourage strategic voting to a tremendous degree, which would make it almost exactly like approval voting—which doesn’t fit all criteria.
That’s interesting. Thanks for linking to that. As I said in my other comment though, there are still significant problems with that voting system—even if it does technically meet all of Arrow’s criterion. It encourages strategic voting to a tremendous degree, as you have no incentive to give any points to a candidate that you don’t want to see win. In that sense, it would likely result in an election almost identical to approval voting—which doesn’t fit Arrow’s criteria.
If you could trust voters to actually rank their preferences, then almost any voting system would work well—it’s just a question of opinion on which you think is “fairest”. I’m a IRV person, myself. Or a slight modification thereof. But I digress.
My recollection from the class was that cake cutting was impossible to be done fairly as well, but we only briefly discussed it for about 30 minutes. In reading Wikipedia, it seems I’m wrong—it just takes many, many cuts. Thanks for correcting me.
Yeah, it seems as though that would have been a better approach. I never got that.
But the class was almost three years ago and it was just a one credit hour Credit/No Credit “freshman honors symposium”. It wasn’t exactly the most rigorous of introductions.
Isn’t 12.0 something like quadruple-beta of the “Stable” version of Chrome? Maybe you shouldn’t be surprised.
I mean, I use Nightly, the triple-beta of FF because it has a 64-bit version (And let’s be honest here, I like feeling superior to to people) but whenever I get an error, I chalk it up to using an experimental browser and move on (or switch browsers.)
That being said, Nightly works far better than I would have expected for a highly experimental browser, even considering that it doesn’t support Java or Silverlight.
Ahh, I guess it is. It’s been a long time since I used Chrome, I thought they were around 8.0 or 9.0.
I think he largely obfuscates around the point, as many philosophers often do. He never gives, in my opinion, a satisfactory definition of free will, and even intentionally avoids doing so. After about reading 3/4ths of it I was so frustrated trying to figure out what he meant by the words he was using I just gave up.
To me, the question of free will is the question of a deterministic universe. There are three questions I ask anyone who attempts to argue for free will. 1. Do you believe our actions are controlled by our brain? 2. Do you believe our brains are made of atoms? 3. Do you believe those atoms follow the laws of physics, even if we may not know exactly what those laws are (yet)? It seems absurd to answer “no” to any of those questions to me. But at least at this point I’ve gotten the person with whom I am arguing to admit that that is eir answer.
It would be interesting to see a study on the memories/decision making skills under pressure of RTS gamers vs non gamers. As someone who plays a not insignificant amount of SC2 I have to agree with you.
Edit: Addiction habits would also be interesting to study. This may, of course, have been done and I’m just unaware...
I’m new to LW (Well, I’ve been reading Eliezer’s posts in order, and am somewhere in 2008 right now, but I haven’t read many of the recent posts) so these may have been posted before. But quote collecting is a hobby of mine and I couldn’t pass it up.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein