Comment on Mindfulness Meditation Thread

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:32:56 GMT

Until very recently I thought it might be just me and that you people can calculate what you should do. But then I learnt that even important SI donors have similar problems. And other people as well.

The problem is that all the talk about approximations is complete handwaving and that you really can't calculate shit. And even if you could, there doesn't seem to be anything medium-probable that you could do about it.

‘Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, “You’re one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility.” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Come on, Sandy, this is serious.”’

— Persi Diaconis, in The Problem of Thinking Too Much

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