It is, as you’ve already pointed out, a matter of perspective. A player (like me, I’m ashamed to admit) who considers minesweeper an instinct akin to breathing will be able to focus on the dilemma between taking a risk or stopping, if they reach a point where taking a risk is required to progress. Of course, a minesweeper addict capable of playing without shutting their mind off (wait, that’s why I’m playing it in the first place!) will recognise the mine and population densities as prior probabilities, and try to workout the conditional probabilities, and how they’re likely to impact the outcome.
ZankerH
Karma: 567
Agreed, fixed, updated.
Well caught, fixed.
You quit with the ‘q’ key.
In my experience, even getting just around a third of the mines produces around twice the survivors (~80) of when you don’t flag anything. Maybe you flagged an empty cell? That causes all your flags to be disregarded. And, of course, there is always an element of chance.
That’s what it prints if there’s zero pain. Should it be “infinity” instead?
Instructors on my university had no problem with people bringing copied books to open-book exams.
Agreed, but the argument of the “deaf culture”, as far as I can see, isn’t “being deaf is good”, it’s refusing to trade away what they see as “native” culture for social acceptance. And besides, cochlear implants are far inferior to normal hearing capabilities, I expect their attitude to them will change as the quality improves.
Would you view a homosexual refusing a (real, working) treatment for his “condition” as equally irrational? The deaf culture isn’t just a pathetic rationalisation like deathism.
Hear, hear. Reading about Luke’s wonderful conversion from irrationality and what working with the SIAI is like has just made me realise how profoundly irrational the social interactions of us normal folk are. Knowing my acquaintances as well as I do, I’m unfortunately afraid of even pointing this out to them.
But is the ability to distinguish a discrete and limited number of tones that you have to learn to interpret properly to have any benefit from at all (even more so if the person in question was born deaf) worth an invasive medical procedure?
All things being equal, you are of course correct. If cochlear implants cost €1, could be worn like earbuds and replicated normal human hearing perfectly, this wouldn’t be an issue at all. The issue is precisely the fact that all things are not equal.
Clock speed isn’t the only measure of CPU performance. In fact, it isn’t much of a measure at all, given that new processors are outperforming Pentium 4 chips (ca. 2005) by the factor you’d expect from Moore’s law, despite the fact that their clock speeds are lower by as much as a half.
As a practical matter, since we’re talking about capturing a finite surface flux, I don’t see any way for this to be go exponential in watts/dollar for practical purposes, given the cost of land use.
Orbital solar power stations. Granted, it’s only a temporary extension before the exponential starts stagnating, but it’s just one example of how the limit of Earth’s land area could be overcome. The eventual limit is capturing all of sun’s energy output, e.g. with a Dyson sphere, with near-perfect efficiency.
Wrong. A two-fold increase in CPU clock rate implies a twofold increase in CPU cycles per second, and nothing more. Any number of pure hardware improvements—for example, increasing the number of instructions, decreasing the number of CPU cycles an instruction takes to execute, improving I/O speed, etc—can improve performance without changing the clock rate, or even while decreasing the clock rate, without introducing parallel processing cores.
This one has had three confirmed transits so far, so at least we’re pretty certain it’s real, unlike Gliese 581g. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be far less Earth-like than initial press releases would have us believe, but you’ve got to admit it, this is the closest we’ve got so far. It even orbits a sun-like star, has an orbital period not that distant from Earth’s, and probably isn’t tidally locked.
I’m not cheer-leading for a new Earth. I want to believe the truth, therefore I want to learn the truth. And I don’t see the correlation between your wishes about extra-terrestrial life and actual astronomy.
And, again, whether or not they do has zero relevance to what the actual truth is. You’re acting like what people believe or want to believe is going to change the great filter.
The main argument appears to be that on average, higher intelligence implies a higher rate of mental disorders such as autism and Asperger’s syndrome. I don’t see how this relates to humans “making themselves smarter”—supposedly, if we have the technology to improve our brains, we’ll of course also be able to get rid of the nasty side effects introduced by the alien god that’s been improving it for us thus far.
Then again, defining disorders by self-reporting isn’t that much more accurate than going with “any mental condition considered weird by the society”.
Only the cartesian, polar and cos-sin forms were obvious to me, and I was still able to make sense of the Taylor series proof.
He asked with the intent to publish the information, exposing this blatant brainwashing for what it is.
Well? Don’t leave us hanging here, did this actually happen / where is it published?
Hello, I’ve been reading articles on LW for some time, but even if I’ve slowly began to grasp what you’re teaching, the community in general seemed so far above me in terms of however you want to measure intellectual capacity, I didn’t even feel entitled to post. Might as well start here.
I’m a 21.7 years old university student from Slovenia, Europe. My interests are primarily maths, physics and computer science. Biological sciences interest me somewhat, but my knowledge in that area is on a layman’s level. For philosophy, politics or social sciences I’ve never cared much. My passing interest in arts has been described as true random in taste by those with an affiliation to a particular genre, and I have little artistic talent myself. Professionally, I study electrical engineering and instruct high-school mathematics to pay for my living costs. My hobbies include Free software activism (helping in local communities, mostly), programming, backyard astronomy and mountain biking. I’ve been reading a lot of science and science fiction material since I was a child.
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Although the environment I grew up in isn’t traditionally religious, most people ascribe to what can only be described as irrational beliefs and practices. No organised belief system, either, just little bits of ‘wisdom’ like “only clip your nails on Thursdays, during the day”, “when you sneeze, don’t think about your descendants”, “sleep with your socks under your pillow”, and so on. Even during my early youth, I was frustrated by the fact that there were these actions I was supposed to perform that made no sense, and the only explanation I was provided for them was “they bring luck” or “doing it otherwise is bad luck”, and I wasn’t provided any explanation for that. At the age of 12, I catalogued most of these practices that I suspected were complete nonsense (I even gave some the benefit of the doubt) and conducted a semi-scientific experiment, doing the precise opposite of what I was supposed to do for a month—this is why I excluded some of the non-obvious ones to me at the time, like “don’t talk under a doorway”, because in my model, the more sense it made, the stronger the consequences of disobeying it would be. Unsurprisingly, nothing tragic or out of the ordinary happened during my month of covert disobedience—and I considered one month to be the limit of long-term consequences at the time. I considered this conclusive proof that everyone in my family circle suffered from collective insanity. However, to my surprise, they were completely unwilling to be talked out of it, or to even talk about it at all. This frustrated me immensely, and I grew distant from my family with years. A few months ago, in an internet discussion over irrational beliefs, an LW member directed me to this site for an explanation of some psychological concept—I can’t remember precisely which.