Closet survey #1

What do you believe that most people on this site don't?

I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.

I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.

So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.

What do you believe that most people on this site don't?

So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.

So I'm not a mathematician but we note the outcomes of chance events all the time probably thousands to tens of thousands of times in your life depending on how much gaming you do. Given about 1000 low-likelihood events per person over their lifetime (which I'm basically making up, but I think its conservative) 1 in 100 million should experience 1 in 100 billion events, right? So basically there might be two other people with stories like yours living in the US. It is definitely a neat story, but I don't think its the kind of thing we should never have expected to happen. Its not like the quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects or anything.

re: Recognizing low probability events.

During an eighth grade science class in Oklahoma, my older sister was watching as her teacher gave a slide presentation of his former job as a forest ranger. One of the first slides was a picture of the Yellow Stone National Park entrance sign. Four young children were climbing on the sign and parked next to the sign was a green Ford Mercury. My sister jumped out of her chair yelling, "That's us." Sure enough that picture had captured a chance encounter years ago, far away, before my sister and her teacher h... (read more)

8glenra17y

1000 is extremely conservative. Every time you play any game with an element of chance - risk, backgammon, poker, scrabble, blackjack, or even just flipping a coin - the odds against you getting the exact sequence of outcomes you do get will be astronomical. So the limiting factor on how many unbelievable outcomes you perceive in a lifetime is how good you are at recognizing patterns as "unusual". Somebody who studied numerology or had "lucky numbers" or paid attention to "lucky streaks" would see them all the time. In the case at hand, that same series of rolls would be just as unlikely if it had happened at the beginning of the game or in the middle or spread throughout the match and hadn't determined the outcome. Unless there was something special about this particular game that made its outcome matter - perhaps it was being televised, there was a million dollars bet on it, or it was otherwise your last chance to achieve some important outcome - the main thing that makes that sequence of rolls more noteworthy than any other sequence of rolls of equivalent length is selection bias, not degree of unlikeliness.

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Closet survey #1

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