Done.
Solvent
Karma: 1,424
LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation
That’s optimistic.
Has it occurred to anyone else how good magic would be for psychological experimentation?
To start with, imagine you get the consent of your subjects to be Obliviated. Then, you can try exposing the subjects to differing stimuli while they’re in exactly the same starting state, and you can precisely and easily measure the effect of whatever change you’ve made.
Even better, imagine the marketing opportunities. Think of Mr Hat and Cloak’s dictionary attack, but with a focus group, and different advertisements for your new product. Show them the ad, then ask them how much they liked it, then Obliviate them again.
Also, you could try to remove the effect of priming on yourself with self-targeted obliviation.
And you could go on 4chan, knowing that what has been seen actually can be unseen, leaving you with only a note saying “Don’t look at SqueeHorse” or something.
I really want magic.
I took the survey.
I’ve reccommended this before, I think.
I think that you should get Eliezer to say the accurate but arrogant sounding things, because everyone already knows he’s like that. You should yourself, Luke, be more careful about maintaining a humble opinion.
If you need people to say arrogant things, make them ghost-write for Eliezer.
Personally, I think that a lot of Eliezer’s arrogance is deserved. He’s explained most of the big questions in philosophy either by personally solving them or by brilliantly summarizing other people’s problems. CFAI was way ahead of its time, as TDT still is. So he can feel smug. He’s got a reputation as an arrogant eccentric genius anyway.
But the rest of the organisation should try to be more careful. You should imitate Carl Shulman rather than Eliezer.
My summary of Eliezer’s position on free will
I don’t think Eliezer’s Introduction to Bayes’s Theorem should be on here. I seriously don’t think it’s that good. It labors its points, and after I read the whole thing I still didn’t get that you could use it to judge between different hypotheses, which is pretty much the most amazing thing I’ve learned this year, incidentally.
However, his new version, which he’s working on and I got to read when I volunteered as an illustrator briefly, is absolutely amazing. When he gets that one finished, it will deserve its place on this list.
This reminded me of the post on connectionism. I tried searching “a person who isn’t Genghis Khan” and surely enough, the first things it comes up with are all related to Genghis Kahn.
I think that “imagine you’re using Google” could be a fairly useful heuristic for trying to phrase queries to your brain.
Does anyone know any kid geniuses?
Anyone have any questions for David Chalmers?
An extremely intelligent friend of mine who is studying physics as an undergraduate read the quantum physics sequence for me. He said that it’s an alright explanation of the physics, in an extremely qualitative way. He said that he would personally prefer to learn QM properly via a textbook with more math.
He says that the argument given for many-worlds is valid iff you’re a scientific realist, which not all scientists are.
Why not just call it Less Wrong, or some variation on that?
oh yeah? ALSO I EAT KITTENS
Two can play at this game.
He didn’t actually make any arguments in that essay. That frustrates me.
A variant on the trolley problem and babies as unit of currency
Wes Weimer from Udacity presents his list of things you should learn
The most upvoted post of all time on LW is Holden’s criticism of SI. How many pageviews has that gotten?
Young adult male here.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m nowhere near as attractive or good with girls as I thought I was.
I got my first girlfriend pretty much by accident last year. It was so incredibly amazing that I decided that romantic success was something I needed to become very good at. I spent quite a while reading about it, and thinking about how to be attractive and successful with women. I broke up with my girlfriend as I moved to a small town for two months at the beginning of this year, during which time I practiced approaching girls and flirting with them.
Then I moved to college, and the first attractive, smart girl I saw, I went up to her and got her as a girlfriend pretty much immediately. I thought that I must have been very good and attractive to have gotten such a gorgeous girlfriend so quickly. She broke up with me after a month or two. She immediately moved through two or three boyfriends over the space of a month or two. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking for a new girlfriend, but haven’t had any success.
So I thought I was attractive and good with girls, and then it turned out that I just had a wild stroke of luck. So it goes.
I’m suspicious that I was simply arrogant about how good I was, and if I had thought more dispassionately, I wouldn’t have been so wrong in my assessment of my own attractiveness.
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions