Rationality Quotes April 2012

Oscar_Cunningham

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Just for fun

It'd be even more fun if you replaced "1-2-3-4-5-6" with "14-17-26-51-55-36". (Whenever I play lotteries I always choose combinations like 1-2-3-4-5-6, and I love to see the shocked faces of the people I tell, tell them that it's no less likely than any other combination but it's at least easier to remember, and see their perplexed faces for the couple seconds it takes them to realize I'm right. Someone told me that if such a combination ever won they'd immediately think of me. (Now that I think about it, choosing a Schelling point does have the disadvantage that should I win, I'd have to split the jackpot with more people, but I don't think that's ever gonna happen anyway.))

more likely to happen first

Dunno how you would count the (overwhelmingly likely) case where both Mega Millions and the papacy cease to exist without either of those events happening first, but let's pretend you said "more likely to happen in the next 10 years"... Event 1 ought to happen 0.6 times per million years in average; I dunno about the probability per unit time for Event 2, but it's likely about two orders of magnitude larger.

(Now that I think about it, choosing a Schelling point does have the disadvantage that should I win, I'd have to split the jackpot with more people, but I don't think that's ever gonna happen anyway.))

With this in mind I think I would choose combinations that match the pattern /[3-9][0-9][3-9][0-9][1-6][0-9]/. Six digit numbers look too much like dates!

2Cyan14y

Aren't you choosing an anti-Schelling point? It seems to me that people avoid playing low Kolmogorov-complexity lottery numbers because of a sense that they're not random enough -- exactly the fallacious intuition that prompts the shocked faces you enjoy.