Lottery income is most definitely taxed, although this likely makes little difference to your point.

the fact that I feel that my field is an unfriendly environment for the free exploration of novel or uncommon ideas ... "stereotype accuracy"

Since you are going to spend a lifetime working in this field, you... may have problems.

Ah yes, pausing ghostery seems to fix it.

Clicking the "Donate now" button under "PayPal or Credit Card" does not seem to do anything other than refresh the page.

(browser Firefox 48.0 , OS Ubuntu)

That sounds like "thesis is true" or "thesis is not true" are reasonable positions. Bayesian beliefs have probabilities attached to them.

Sometimes, even people who understand Bayesian reasoning use idiomatic phrases like "believe is true" as a convenient shorthand for "assign a high probability to"! I can see how that might be confusing!

Like I just said, modern science started with an extreme outlier.

There's a lot of history of science and it generally doesn't find that it all hinges on one event like Newton.

My favorite one: burning wood for heat. Better than fossil fuels for the GW problem, but really bad for local air quality.

Does anyone have any insight into VoI plays with Bayesian reasoning?

At a glance, it looks like the VoI is usually not considered from a Bayesian viewpoint, as it is here. For instance, wikipedia says:

""" A special case is when the decision-maker is risk neutral where VoC can be simply computed as; VoC = "value of decision situation with perfect information" - "value of current decision situation" """

From the perspective of avoiding wireheading, an agent should be incentivized to gain information even when this information decreases its (subjective) "value of decision situation". For example, consider a bernoulli 2-armed bandit:

If the agent's prior over the arms is uniform over [0,1], so its current value is .5 (playing arm1), but after many observations, it learns that (with high confidence) arm1 has reward of .1 and arm2 has reward of .2, it should be glad to know this (so it can change to the optimal policy, of playing arm2), BUT the subjective value of this decision situation is less than when it was ignorant, because .2 < .5.

Thanks for letting me know.

Here's the correct link: http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2006/07/06/stupid-feels-might-good-am-i-i/

Fortunately, I didn't need an archive, I just made a good guess about the correct title of the article and searched.

I have no idea where that php in the original link came from.

I still recommend the article-- Razib does irrational ranting for fun and offers a vivid description of how much fun it is.

Initial reaction: "That's news?".

That said, your link seems to be dead, with no archive. Do you have it saved?

Sure, that explains why the story was written with this flaw, but it doesn't remove the flaw. But I don't have a better suggestion.

Please use a page break when you post an article, so we can easily scroll past it and see the previous articles.

There is an introductory night wherein they give a tiny promo of the entire course. The participants and the volunteers convinced me to do the Forum and guaranteed 10% satisfaction. On the first and the second day I was unsure of the ability of this course, I assumed it was like any other program which resulted in nothing. After consulting one of the volunteers I realised that working on the assignments was essential which I wasn't doing with integrity. After taking all of the assignments seriously I did see instant results. The forum made a difference in my behaviour towards all situations in life. I used to over-think due to which I lost my confidence and built stage-fear. I lacked self-expression. Now I am confident and out-going. I recommend this course to the ones who want self-improvement.

I'm noticing this very late, and I'm going to be off-topic, but I still have to stop to note that there's no such thing as "IP", not in actual laws (unless they've been infected by this term very recently and I just haven't found out about it). It's a bogus name lumping together things that the law does not lump together at all, a term invented purely for use in corporate propaganda, nothing more. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

There´s a difference there though. Less & fewer mean same thing, so writer using those abnormally isn´t really an error, it´s just something people don´t usually do. They´re , there, their mean different things so correcting those really makes the world better.

I'm not sure what you mean by conflict between individuals.

If you mean actual conflict like arguing or fighting, then choosing between donating to save five hungry people in Africa vs. two hungry people in South America isn't a moral choice if nobody can observe your online purchases (let alone counterfactual ones) and develop a conflict with you. Someone who secretly invents a way cure for cancer doesn't have moral reasons to cure others because they don't know he can and are not in conflict with him.

If you mean conflict between individuals' own values, where each hungry person wants you to save them, then every single decision is moral because there are always people who'd prefer you give them your money instead of doing anything else with it, and there are probably people who want you dead as a member of a nationality, ethnicity or religion. Apart from the unpleasant implications of this variant of utilitarianism, you didn't want to label all decisions as moral.

Ingenious. However, I can easily get round it by adding the rider that morality as concerned with conflicts between individuals. As stated, that is glib, but it can be motivated. Conflicts between individuals, in the absence of rules about how to distribute resources) are destructive, leading to waste of resources. (yes, I can predict the importance of various kinds of "fairness" to morality"). Conflicts within individuals much less so. Conflicts aren't a problem because they are conflicts, they are a problem because of their possible consequences.

You're fundamentally failing to address the problem.

For one, your examples just plain omit the "Omega is a predictor" part, which is key to the situation. Since Omega is a predictor, there is no distinction between making the decision ahead of time or not.

For another, unless you can prove that your proposed alternative doesn't have pathologies just as bad as the Counterfactual Mugging, you're at best back to square one.

It's very easy to say "look, just don't do the pathological thing". It's very hard to formalize that into an actual decision theory, without creating new pathologies. I feel obnoxious to keep repeating this, but that is the entire problem in the first place.

There are a number of kinds and grades of non-realism.

Well, obviously, once you know you didn't get a measurement, its probability becomes zero

has got to be one of the most embarrassing wrong turns in the history of science.

If you take all this literally, it becomes the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics. These days, just about nobody will confess to actually believing in the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics—

It's not an inevitable slide. An interpretation that is anti-realist about collapse, will not attribute the cause of collapse to consciousness, since it does not acknowledge the reality of collapse in the first place. It nonetheless has to explain the process of disregarding unobserved possibilities. ...which it can do by saying that the observer is updating their subjective map on the basis of fresh information. Selective anti-realism about collapse is a consistent position. Sweeping anti-realism,might not be, but that is another issue. The subjective interpretation of collapse is posited on information becoming available to an observer from an external world, so it is not sweeping anti realism.

Well, fuck.