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Johnicholas comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong
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Twice in this article, there are tables of numbers. They're clearly made-up, not measured from experiment, but I don't really understand exactly how made-up they are - are they carefully or casually cooked?
Could people instead use letters (variables), with relations like 'a > b', 'a >> b', 'a/b > c' and so on in the future? Then I could understand better what properties of the table are intentional.
In my experience, using variables instead of numbers when it's not absolutely necessary makes things ridiculously harder to understand for someone not comfortable with abstract math.
we are talking about the mathematics of causality. I would expect people to be familiar with free variables and algebra.
I for one would find explicit algebraic expessions much clearer than a bunch of meaningless numbers.
Depends what you mean by "familiar". I'd imagine anyone reading the essay can do algebra, but that they're still likely to be more comfortable when presented with specific numbers. People are weird like that - we can learn general principles from examples more easily than from having the general principles explained to us explicitly.
Exceptions abound, obviously.
There's nothing about the tables that was not explained in the previous installment of this series; click the links if you're still confused. I came to this knowing nothing about that type of notation, but the tables told me even more than the bubble diagrams--and here's the secret. Looking at the table tells you next to nothing. It's only when you think about the situations that the probabilities quantify, then they make sense. Although, as an additional step, he could have explained each of the situations in sentence form in a paragraph, but probably felt the table spoke for itself.
The second table, for instance, (if I am interpreting correctly) can be paraphrased as:
I believe that my partner loves me, and that the universe knows it, and I can get this answer from the universe. I would also know that if my partner didn't love me, because the universe would know it and I would hear that. It's probably one of those two. Of course it could be that I don't hear the universe, or the universe is lying to me, or that the universe doesn't magically pick up our thoughts (how unromantic!), but I really don't believe that to be true, I only admit that it's possible. I am rational, after all.
I agree that if you don't look at the numbers, but at the surrounding text, you get the sense that the numbers could be paraphrased in that way.
So does h, labeled "I hear universe" mean "I hear the universe tell me something at all", or "I hear the universe tell me that they love me" or "I hear the universe tell me what it knows, which (tacitly according to the meaning of knows) is accurate"?
I thought it meant "I have a sensation as if the universe were telling me that they love me", but the highest probability scenarios are p&u&h, and -p&u&h, which would suggest that regardless of their love, I'm likely to experience a sensation as if the universe were telling me that they love me. That seems reasonable from a skeptical viewpoint, but not from a believer's viewpoint.
Congratulations, you've cleared the hidden test of making sure that this isn't all just a password in your head!
IMO, which one it was intended to be is irrelevant as long as you understand both cases. Understanding these things enough to be able to untangle them like this sounds like it's really the whole point of the article.
I took h to mean "I accurately receive the information that the universe conveys", which in this case regarding the state of my partner loving me or not, I would still accurately hear the universe, otherwise it would be not-h. Since I am considering possible states, partner-not-loving-me/universe-tells-me/me-hearing-that would be the second most likely possibility, because the other two variables are less in doubt (for the person in the example).
If this person were in real life, they probably are frustrated, wondering why on earth it feels like their partner is trying to drive a wedge in the relationship, when obviously they are in love, because the universe can magically read their minds and the crystal auras never lie.