This is encouraging, thank you. I’ve got a 15-month-old, and the reduction in my free time has been making me feel like a shadow of my former self.
Straw Vulcan
Karma: 33
👋 Hey All, I’m basically new here, though I’ve been lurking for about two years. Although I’ve been interested in mathematical logic and epistemology as long as I can remember, and I had accidentally stumbled upon and bought Godel, Escher, Bach while ducking into a Barnes and Noble to use the bathroom, RAZ was what really tied everything together for me. I found that after someone recommended the HPMOR podcast to me, and then looked up all the references...
The link is broken, but I found the article elsewhere on starcitygames.com: https://articles.starcitygames.com/premium/stuck-in-the-middle-with-bruce/
I found the bit at the end contrasting Bayesian truth-seeking posture from believing-in and fighting-to-change-something posture was helpful. Interesting that you’ve seen lots of LessWrongers just passively watch to see if something will go well instead of fighting for it because of the Bayesian posture.
It seems to me there’s an important analog to descriptive statistics versus causal inference. The probability of X given Y is actually completely different from the probability of X given that I make Y happen. You can convert between them in aggregate sometimes with the do-calculus, so there is a link, but the one can be very different from the other in any given case. A thing can have really low probability in the base rate, or “if I do nothing about it” and yet have much higher probability if we rally around it to effect a change.