Will_Newsome comments on Rationality quotes January 2012 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Thomas 01 January 2012 10:28AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (462)

Tags: quotes

Comments (462)

Sort By: Best

Show:

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

Comment author: [deleted] 01 January 2012 02:51:00AM * 20 points [-]

AUGUSTUS: I've had premonitions. Premonitions of death.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: We all have them.

AUGUSTUS: No, no, no. This is serious. Listen, old friend, let me tell you. Two weeks after we came back from you know where, I was in Mars Field giving a libation. A little ceremony. You remember?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: I remember, but I wasn't there.

AUGUSTUS: No? Well. nearby, there's a temple built in memory of Marcus Agrippa.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Yes, I know it.

AUGUSTUS: An eagle circled me five times, then flew off and settled on the "A" of Agrippa's name.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Well. Caesar...

AUGUSTUS: No, don't lie to me. It's clear what it means. It was telling me that my time had come and that I must give way to someone by the name of Agrippa.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Postumus?

AUGUSTUS: Who else?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Did you consult an augur?

AUGUSTUS: No. I don't need an augur.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Well. you're not an expert on the interpretation of signs.

AUGUSTUS: Then listen to this. The following day, lightning melted the "C" on my name on a statue nearby. It struck the "C" off "Caesar". Do you follow? What does "C" mean?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: A hundred.

AUGUSTUS: A hundred. Exactly! Livia saw it. She went to an augur to find out what it meant. She wouldn't tell me, but I forced it out of her. It means that I have only a hundred days to live. I shall die in a hundred days.

(long pause)

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Or weeks.

AUGUSTUS: Eh?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Why shouldn't it be weeks? Or months? Why shouldn't it mean that you'll live to be a hundred?

--I, Claudius, "Poison Is Queen"

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 January 2012 02:10:27AM * 3 points [-]

Because days is the Schelling point interpretation, and if gods are communicating with you they'll probably go for the Schelling point. Lightning implies Zeus-Jupiter, so Augustus should look into historical examples of Zeus talking to people to see if Zeus tends to be misleading in ways similar to those Fabius warns of; in fact the augur had probably already considered things like this before speaking with Livia. And Fabius should trust the augur, who is a specialist in the interpretation of signs and probably has more details of the case than he does. I mean seriously, what are the chances that the letter C would get struck by lightning? We are beyond the point of arbitrary skepticism. Deny the data or trust the professionals. (I'm not familiar with the series in question, I'm just filling in details in the most likely way I can think of.)

ETA: Wait, maybe Fabius is trolling Augustus/me? ...Nice one Fabius! I approve of your trolling. Downvote retracted. (Oh yeah and this is an excuse to link to the Wiki article on assassination markets.)

Comment author: Will_Newsome comment score below threshold [+] (13 children)

Comment author: Manfred 09 January 2012 10:15:23AM 3 points [-]

"100 days to live" is only the sensible, natural interpretation for "lightning struck the C in Caesar" after you've already heard someone suggest it. There's this thing called priming, you see...

Comment author: [deleted] 09 January 2012 10:12:00AM * 10 points [-]

My new voting policy is to downvote every single comment that makes baseless inferences from raw karma, starting with this one. It's much less informative than you seem to think it is. At minimum, in general, most comments don't even receive enough votes for the karma balance to be statistically significant. (Otherwise, the variance in karma would be significantly higher, assuming reddit-like distributions.)

If by "lack of local sanity" you are referring solely to people who have voted on your previous comment, then do notice that you have very little information from which to inform a prior on how many people have read your comment, how many people have voted upon it, and the distribution of votes thereof. Whatever alien calculus you have that converts raw net karma to a measure of sanity seems horrifically flawed and horrendously underinformed.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 January 2012 10:23:20AM 5 points [-]

At minimum, in general, most comments don't even receive a statistically significant number of votes. (Otherwise, the variance in karma would be significantly higher, assuming reddit-like distributions.)

This seems to be an incorrect application of the concept of statistical significance.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 January 2012 10:56:55AM 0 points [-]

You should thank the people who explained your comment for you, where you should have yourself. Fixed... perhaps?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 09 January 2012 10:38:54AM 1 point [-]

paper-machine is currently winning by a large margin, but the competition will continue for another day or so!

Comment author: JoachimSchipper 09 January 2012 10:20:32AM 4 points [-]

Your comment was hard to read, asserts-but-does-not-argue that days are the "natural" interpretation ("Schelling point"), tells us to "trust the augur" without any real-world or in-universe data showing that augurs are better than horoscopes, contains "I approve of your trolling" and goes against local verities and tastes. Lightning hitting the C is surprising, but there is a simpler explanation for that (see Alejandro1's reply.) There are quite a few reasons not to upvote you.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 January 2012 10:27:28AM 1 point [-]

(IDNDV)

That my comment is at +2 while its parent is at +17 is a pretty clear demonstration of the lack of local sanity, no?

No. You got two votes despite the comment rambling and hard to follow. That is indication that you couldn't be bothered taking the time to express whatever your point was clearly so that the reader doesn't have to try to piece it together.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 09 January 2012 10:42:20AM * 1 point [-]

(You should also try to explain the +17 if you want to win the competition! ETA: I meant, explain how the +17 is or isn't evidence of lack of sanity, but an explanation of the phenomenon itself would of course be instrumental in attempting such a larger explanation.)

Comment author: katydee 09 January 2012 11:00:02AM 9 points [-]

People like witty remarks and don't like to see them deflated, even when the deflation is totally warranted. This is a big problem in debates, since someone can make a totally specious but well-timed criticism or remark, provoke laughter, and get the audience on their side even if the criticism is rebuked.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 11 January 2012 10:32:45AM * 2 points [-]

(Tangent, moderate spoiler warning:) I noticed that in myself while watching the movie "Silent Hill". During the whole 'witch hunts and self-justifying faith are bad mmmkay' climactic rant it's easy to forget that even the demon admits that the only reason the entire town hasn't been mauled/raped to death by symbolic guilt-constructs is because of their "blind faith". (And "God is not here": so they could have had "blind faith" in toaster ovens and that'd have protected them from the demon too? Possible but rather unlikely.) But I guess if one is already applauding a biasedly-informed woman (she's literally getting her scant info from the deceiver himself because apparently no one taught her that dealing with transhuman intelligences with unknown preferences is an insanely stupid idea) for helping deliver vengeance to an entire dismal, desperate town's worth of people then it doesn't cost ones conscience much to let ones epistemic standards slip a little as well.

(ETA: And as long as we're being charitable, I can't really blame Christabella for having the cop lady burned to death either. Whether Sybyll knew it or not she was clearly in league with the demon/devil. Burning her is even mildly charitable, giving her a chance to repent, much better than pronouncing her anathema and casting her out into guilt-hell to have her skin ripped off by Pyramid Head. And considering that in-universe the devil clearly exists it's mildly hard to blame them for a premature demon-spawn burning now and then. (Come to think of it didn't Dahlia implicitly admit that her daughter was demon spawn, by consenting to the burning? Wasn't Christabella all 'just name the father already' and Dahlia was all 'lol no thanks I'd rather the little girl burned'? Maybe Alessa really was a witch; she certainly was in league with the devil at a later point, and had a nasty need for vengeance to boot, and the evidence of her innocence that we have we got from the freaking devil herself.) But now we're getting into politics.)

ETA2: And while I'm at it, Dagoth Ur was the good guy (not even just relatively good, actually good), Azura is clearly a manipulative bastard of epic proportions and "the Nerevarine" is just one of her pawns. Has anyone else compiled all the evidence for this already?

Comment author: wedrifid 09 January 2012 12:10:54PM 2 points [-]

You should also try to explain the +17 if you want to win the competition!

There isn't a competition.

ETA: I meant, explain how the +17 is or isn't evidence of lack of sanity, but an explanation of the phenomenon itself would of course be instrumental in attempting such a larger explanation.

No idea one way or the other. I didn't read it. The script in the context didn't pattern match to the kind of thing that would interest me - 17 votes or no. Something about Cs getting struck by lightning.

...

Just read it. It was ok. Somewhat of an insight which I can at least imagine some other people finding interesting. It's a quote and people's standards seem to go out the window when it comes to quotes. I'm only mildly surprised that it got 17.

Comment author: khafra 11 January 2012 02:16:29PM 1 point [-]

people's standards seem to go out the window when it comes to quotes.

Has anyone collected the top-rated comments dealing with math, decision theory, and other technical topics? I'd like to see a site-wide "bikeshedding index" based on the ratio between them and the top-rated quotes.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 January 2012 01:11:53PM 1 point [-]

It was ok.

I agree. I wasn't gunning for Quote of the Month, I just thought this one was good enough to post. We know that gods aren't real, and that augury doesn't work. Fabius has a moment of pseudo-clarity. That's it. I don't understand the point of further nitpicking.

people's standards seem to go out the window when it comes to quotes.

Or halfway decent quotes get more upvotes if they're posted closer to the first of the month.

Comment author: Alejandro1 03 January 2012 04:18:45AM 1 point [-]

For everyone who knows that Livia is the Magnificent Bastard of the series (which is made clear from the first episode, so no spoiler there), the highest probability mass goes to the hypothesis that was lying about having spoken to an augur or about what he told her, and that she wanted Augustus to question her and only feigned to resist. And "everyone who knows" at this stage probably includes Fabius, and every other character but Augustus.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 January 2012 08:00:49AM * 1 point [-]

So the leader of the relevant transhumanly intelligent entities is on the side of the Magnificent Bastard? If I was Augustus I'd seriously consider being nice to the Jews and asking YHWH for guidance.

(Rationality: it works even better in magical universes! (Like, ahem, the one we're in.))

Comment author: [deleted] 03 January 2012 03:12:27PM * 5 points [-]

I shall henceforth call you Robert Anton Willnewsome.

EDIT: I mean this affectionately.

Will_Newsome comments on Rationality quotes January 2012 - Less Wrong

Article Navigation

Comments (462)

Nearest Meetups

Virtual Study Room

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Recent Rationality Quotes

Recent Wiki Edits

Top Contributors, 30 Days

Recent Karma Awards

Comments (462)

Top Contributors, 30 Days

You'll need to login or register to do that

(Don't worry, it only takes a few seconds)

Create

Login