= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (482)
Empirically speaking, you are wrong.
Perhaps, although I don't see how you can know that unless you have been making measurements, or unless it has definitely been going in the direction of getting more and more sweet, or more and more bitter.
In any case, since beer does not differ an infinite amount in sweetness and bitterness, it won't be easy to stop that average from converging sooner or later.
Um, if I'm swinging from Lambics to Stouts with excursions into IPAs and Belgian Trappists, do you really think I converged on a particular bitterness?
Random walk, even if bounded, does not converge.
The random walk doesn't converge. But the average position does.
The concept of convergence does not apply to the "average position". It always exists.
You are probably thinking of statistical estimation with uncorrelated errors. That is not the case here, you are not estimating some unobserved parameter.
I mean your average position on any day taken as the average of all the values up to that day.
As days increase indefinitely, this changing average will converge (e.g. to the central value.)
But that doesn't mean my taste in beer will converge to some value. All it means is that the average of history of my beer wanderings will be somewhere around the middle of the range -- an observation which is quite useless for the free will debate.
The general point I was making is that there is nothing about free will, even if by definition it means you have more than one option in the same physical situation, which gives us a reason to expect a pattern different from determinism with the addition of some randomness. So unless someone can show how those patterns would be different, there isn't any special reason to suppose that our actions couldn't correspond entirely to the laws of physics, without that meaning we don't have free will.
That's heavily underspecified. Most everything can be fit into a pattern of "determinism with the addition of some randomness".
In any case, you started with a specific claim that the choices will converge. Outside of the toy-model setup I didn't think it was necessarily true and I still don't think so.
I meant that the changing average of the choices will converge, in the way I expect to happen in the beer case. I still think this will happen under all normal circumstances.