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 haven't seen any good attempts. If someone else was asking, I'd refer them to you, but since it's you who's asking, I'll just say that I don't know :-)
I have heard a claim that UDT is a kind of "sane precomputed EDT" (?). Why are "you" (they?) basing UDT on EDT? Is this because you are using the level of abstraction where causality somehow goes away, like it goes away if you look at the universal wave function (???). Maybe I just don't understand UDT? Can you explain UDT? :)
I am trying very very hard to be charitable to the EDT camp, because I am sure there are very smart people in that camp (Savage? Although I think he was aware of confounding issues and tried to rule them out before licensing an action. The trouble is you cannot do it with just conditional independence, that way lie dragons). This is why I keep asking about EDT.