Vladimir_Nesov comments on Is That Your True Rejection? - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 December 2008 02:26PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (92)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 December 2008 06:50:31PM 1 point [-]

Compare: communicating the property of the timer that it will ring one hour in the future (that is, timer works according to certain principles that result in it ringing in the future) vs. communicating from the future the fact that timer ringed. If you can run a precise physical simulation of a coin, you can predict how it'll land. Usually, you can't do that. Not every difficult-seeming prediction requires things like simulation of physical laws, abstractions can be very powerful as well.