yli comments on Rationality Quotes May 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 03 May 2013 08:02PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2013 11:25:14PM 14 points [-]

This debate brings to mind one of the more interesting differences between the hard sciences and other fields. This occurs when you firmly believe A, someone makes a compelling argument, and within a few seconds you firmly believe not-A, to the point of arguing for not-A with even more vigor that you used for A just a few seconds ago.

-- Lou Scheffer

(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: "It seems incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size up to almost 100... oh. Nevermind.")

Comment author: yli 09 May 2013 11:49:36PM *  8 points [-]

So what's the program? Is it the one that runs every turing machine up to length 100 for BusyBeaver(100) steps, and gets the number BusyBeaver(100) by running the BusyBeaver_100 program whose source code is hardcoded into it? That would be of length 100+c for some constant c, but maybe you didn't think the constant was worth mentioning.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2013 11:55:11PM 3 points [-]

Well, it's still encoded. But I actually meant to say "almost 100" in the original. And yes, that's the answer.

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