I'm struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't grasp it. Even starting at the very beginning of the sequences I quickly get lost because there are references to programming and cognitive science which I simply do not understand.
Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).
So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).
You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!
I was reading Eliezer's cartoon proof of Lob's theorem the other day and I didn't get it. My assumption was that in order to understand it, I would need a decent background in mathematical logic, e.g. actually know what Peano Arithmetic is as opposed to abstracting it away as a talking head that tells us things. (I know vector calculus, linear algebra, programming, and basic logic but that's about as far as I go.) If Lob's theorem is something that I should be able to understand the proof of given that background, I'd be interested to know that.
If you already understand Gödel's first and second incompleteness theorems, then you can find a much simpler proof of Löb's theorem in this pdf, pages 6-7.