If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.
I'm not sure if it is "worth saying" but a google search for "Secret Bayesian Man" turned up nothing so I wrote this:
ET Jaynes was a 1000 year old vampire
Inspired Cog Sci, AI and Eliezer.
The Probabilities,
Is something that we'll see.
Given that we have the same priors.
Secret Bayesian Man,
Secret Bayesian Man,
You update your beliefs,
Based on the evidence. (2x)
A grandmaster of Bayesian Statistics
He'll straighten out your bias and Heuristics
You'll be Less Wrong than most
You'll take a "Rational Approach..."
Given that we have the same priors
Secret Bayesian Man
Secret Bayesian Man
You update your beliefs,
Based on the evidence. (2x)
Aumann states we must come to agreement
If we have common knowledge with no secrets
Our posteriors must be the same
Or one of us is to blame
Given that we have the same priors.
I deeply apologize.
I love the idea of the open thread. So many things I would like to discuss, but that I don't feel confident to actually make discussion posts on. Here's one:
On Accepting Compliments
Something I learned, and taught to all my students is that when you are performing certain things (fire, hoops, bellydancing whatever), people are going to be impressed, and are going to compliment you. Even though YOU know that you are nowhere near as good as Person X, or YOU know that you didn't have a good show, you ALWAYS accept their compliment. Doing otherwise is actually an insult to the person who just made an effort to express their appreciation to you. Anyways, you see new performers NOT following this advice, all the time. And I know why. It's HARD to accept compliments, especially when you don't feel deserving of them. But you have to learn to do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do.
Same idea, said better by somebody else
...This is one of those things that's probably a pet peeve of mine because I use to do it myself, but I figured I would share what I was told during my performance days. I've seen this phenomenon a bunch, a performer or presenter gets done, an audience member comes up
A common claimed Great Filter issue is that Earth-like planets need a large moon to stabilize their orbit. However, recent research seems to indicate that this view is mistaken. In general, this seems to be part of a general pattern where locations that are conducive to life seem more and more common(for another recent example see here) (although I may have some confirmation bias here?). Do these results force us to conclude that a substantial part of the Great Filter is in front of us?
Is it worth posting a series of videos that makes up a gentle introduction to the basics of game theory from the AI class on LW for people who aren't in the class and aren't very good at math?
This is the one of the videos from the series. There are also a few easy practical exercises and their solutions.
John Cheese from Cracked.com pulls out another few loops of bloodsoaked intestine and slaps them on the page as a ridiculously popular Internet humour piece: 9 YouTube Videos That Prove Anyone Can Get Sober. I hate watching video, and I sat down and watched the lot. Horrifying and compelling. I've been spending this afternoon reading the original thread. It's really bludgeoning home to me just how much we're robots made of meat and what a hard time the mind has trying to steer the elephant. Fighting akrasia is one thing - how do you fight an addiction with...
I was musing on the old joke about anti-Occamian priors or anti-induction: 'why are they sure it's a good idea? Well, it's never worked before.' Obviously this is a bad idea for our kind of universe, but what kind of universe does it work in?
Well, in what sort of universe would every failure of X to appear that time interval make X that much more likely? It sounds a bit vaguely like the hope function but actually sounds more like an urn of balls where you sample without replace: every ball you pull (and discard) without finding X makes you a little more co...
Cf. Eric Flint, I've always found the idea of bringing technology back in time very interesting. Specifically, I've always wondered what technology I could independently invent and how early I could invent it. Of course, the thought experiment requires me to handwave away lots of concerns (like speaking the local language, not being killed as a heretic/outsider, and finding a patron).
Now, I'm not a scientist, but I think I could invent a steam engine if there was decent metallurgy already. Steam engine: Fill large enclosed container with water, heat wat...
Of course; it's a common thought-experiment among geeks, ever since A Connecticut Yankee. There's even a shirt stuffed with technical info in case one ever goes back in time.
(FWIW, I think you'd do better with conceptual stuff like Descartes and gravity, which you can explain to the local savant and work on hammering out the details together; metallurgy is hard, and it's not like there weren't steam engines before the industrial revolution - they were just uselessly weak and expensive. Low cost of labor means machines are too expensive to be worth bothering with.)
I'm usually a lurker here. I generally spend a little too much time on this site. I'm making a personal resolution to leave the site alone for the rest of the day, whenever i read an article here and find that i have nothing to say about it. Under this policy, i expect that i will be spending less time here, and also that i will be contributing more.
For those interested in the Big Five: "The Big-Five Trait Taxonomy: History, Measurement, and Theoretical Perspectives".
I'm curious what happened to SarahC. I enjoyed her presence, but I haden't seen her recently and I notice she's deleted her account (http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/3f00). Anyone know what happened?
It might confuse newbies that regular meetups don't appear on the meetup map (only irregular ones), and this can be easily fixed. Is there any reason to leave it as is?
I'm having a wall-banging philosophical disputation with someone over the word "scientism", but mostly over qualia and p-zombies, here. I ask your help on trying to work out if any commonality is resolvable in between the spittle-flecked screaming at each other. (I would suggest diving in only if you have familiarity with the participants - assume we're all smart, particularly the guy who's wrong.)
There is an unfortunate equivocation in the word theory (compare "Theory of Evolution" to "Just War Theory"). Popper says that theory can only be called scientific if it is falsifiable. Using that conceptual terminology, Freudian theory is pseudoscience, not a scientific theory. But many things that the vernacular calls theories are not falsifiable. (What would it mean to falsify utilitarian theory?)
Does that mean that we can't talk about moral theories? What word should we use instead? Because it seems like talking about moral th...
New experiment supports evopsych idea that some out-group prejudice is related to disease risk (though I wish it had been controlled with a state of generalized non-disease stress to see whether it's just stress that increases prejudice).
I'm interested in conducting a simple, informal study requiring a moderate number of responses to be meaningful. Specifically, I want to look at some aspects of the "wisdom of the crowd". I'm new here, so I want to ask first: is LessWrong Discussion a good place to put things like this that ask people to take a quick survey in the name of satisfying my curiosity? Are there other websites where this is appropriate?
If we believe that our conscious experience is a computation, and we hold a universal prior which basically says that the multiverse consists of all Turing machines, being run in such a fashion that the more complex ones are less likely, it seems to be very suggestive for anthropics.
I visualize an array of all Turing machines, either with the simpler ones duplicated (which requires an infinite number of every finite-length machine, since there are twice as many of each machine of length n as of each machine of length n+1), or the more complex ones getting...
Transhumanism is important-- it's the only way we can live up to the possibilities offered by our toys.
When _ozymandias posted zir introduction post a few days ago, I went off and binged on blogs from the trans/men's rights/feminist spectrum. I found them absolutely fascinating. I've always had lots of sympathy for transgendered people in particular, and care a lot about all those issues. I don't know what I think of making up new pronouns, and I get a bit offput by trying to remember the non-offensive terms for everything. For example, I'm sure that LGBT as a term offends people, and I agree that lumping the T with the LGB is a bit dubious, but I don't kno...
I'm writing a discussion post titled "Another Way of Thinking About Mind-States". I'm not sure at all whether my draft explains what I'm talking about clearly enough for anyone reading it to actually understand it, so I'd appreciate a beta volunteer to take a look at it and give me some feedback. If you'd like to beta, just reply here or send me a PM. Thanks!
Do these open treads serve as places to make comments or ask small questions? Personally, I was reading Luke's new Q and A and I was thinking that I would like to have a thread full of people's questions. If the purpose of this thread is for comments and not questions, should we make a new recurring-monthly post?
Random Thought Driving Home:
I hate when all my programmed radio stations are on commercial. Why does this always happen?
Say a radio station spends 25% of it's air time playing commercials. This sounds pretty conservative. It would mean that for every 45 minutes of music, it plays 15 minutes of commercials.
I have 6 pre-programmed stations. That means if the commercials were evenly spaced out, they would only ALL have commercials on .25 ^ 6 = 0.00024 = .02% of the time.
Say I spend an hour a day driving. Then only .014 hours, or 0.86 seconds, of that time...
I am writing a discussion post called "On "Friendly" Immortality" and am having some difficulties getting my thoughts fully verbalized. I would appreciate a volunteer that's willing to read it before I post and provide feedback. If you are willing to be my "beta" either reply to this comment, or send me a pm. Thank you!
There is an unfortunate equivocation in the word theory (compare "Theory of Evolution" to "Just War Theory"). Popper says that theory can only be called scientific if it is falsifiable. Using that conceptual terminology, Freudian theory is pseudoscience, not a scientific theory. But many things that the vernacular calls theories are not falsifiable. (What would it mean to falsify utilitarian theory?)
Does that mean that we can't talk about moral theories? What word should we use instead? Because it seems like talking about moral theories is doing something productive.
For some context, I'm starting this post to separate off this conversation from a distinct conversation I'm having here
And just wait until you get to "critical theory". I fear the word "theory" in English is indeed stretched in a continuous fog from the hardest of physics to the foggiest of spurious postmodernist notions, with little in the way of joins to carve it at. Thus, cross-domain equivocation will be with us for a while yet.