Warrigal comments on Rationality Quotes: April 2011 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: benelliott 04 April 2011 09:55AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (384)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ata 06 April 2011 10:02:17PM 8 points [-]

Even further:

Hofstadter's Law+: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account the limit of infinite applications of Hofstadter's Law+.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 April 2011 01:01:16AM 8 points [-]

For all ordinal numbers n, define Hodstadter's n-law as "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's m-law for all m < n."

Comment author: ata 07 April 2011 01:13:46AM *  7 points [-]

For all natural numbers n, define L_n as the nth variation of Hofstadter's Law that has been or will be posted in this thread. Theorem: As n approaches infinity, L_n converges to "Everything ever takes an infinite amount of time."

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 April 2011 05:56:38AM 17 points [-]

Actually it takes longer than that.

Comment author: roystgnr 13 April 2011 07:30:40PM 4 points [-]

I've got a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, but it would take forever to write it all out.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 April 2011 07:34:35PM 1 point [-]

Hofstadter's Shiny Law: It always takes longer than you expect, especially when you get distracted discussing variants of Hofstadter's Shiny Law.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 07 April 2011 06:28:00AM *  3 points [-]

...which then forces things to take an infinite amount of time once you get to n=omega_1, so thankfully things stop there.

EDIT April 13: Oops, you can't actually "reach" omega_1 like this; I was not thinking properly. Omega_1 flat out does not embed in R. So... yeah.