I'm sorry, I want to be with someone more interesting, someone who just does something wild and lets the chips fall where they may!

I plan to never take any action toward fulfilling any of my hopes and dreams. What could possibly be riskier than that?

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel § 413; via "Fable of The Born-Blind-People"

(Gb rkcerff guvf va zber YJl wnetba: vs lbh qvq abg nyernql xabj gur jbeq be pbaprcg snvel, jung bofreingvbaf jbhyq cevivyrtr gur fcrpvsvp ulcbgurfvf bs 'snvevrf' gb gur cbvag jurer vg jbhyq orpbzr n frevbhf cbffvovyvgl? Ubj znal ovgf jbhyq gung gnxr naq jurer jbhyq lbh trg gurz, nfvqr sebz gur zrqvn naq bgure crbcyr'f cebqhpgf?)

For example, a liberal Christian complained that her (honest!) Christian answer did very poorly, because people associated liberalism with atheism. This suggests that the best strategy isn't necessarily to honestly list what you believe, but to list what you think a typical member of the group involved believes.

It depends how you define poorly. Her answer demostrated something useful about inaccurate stereotypes of Christianity. If the goal of the whole exercise is to convince others that Christianity is right, then her answer might be good because it teaches people about their misconceptions about Christianity.

The authors claim that all uncertainty is quantum. A machine that flips heads 100% of the time doesn't falsify their claim (no uncertainty), and neither does a machine that flips heads 99% of the time (they'd claim it's quantum uncertainty). As for a machine that follows a pseudorandom bit sequence, I believe they would argue that a quantum process (like human thought) produced the seed. Indeed, they argue that our uncertainty about the n-th digit of pi is quantum uncertainty because if you want to bet on the n-th digit of pi, you have to randomly choose n somehow.

I'm sure that's just a phygment of your imagination.

"Wanna see something cool?"

The absurdity of the conclusion tells us rather forcefully that the rule is not always valid, even when the separate data values are causally independent; it requires them to be logically independent. In this case, we know that the vast majority of the inhabitants of China have never seen the Emperor; yet they have been discussing the Emperor among themselves and some kind of mental image of him has evolved as folklore. Then knowledge of the answer given by one does tell us something about the answer likely to be given by another, so they are not logically independent

Maybe it's just that it's late, but what he's saying in this quote isn't making sense to me.

To demonstrate the validity of the italicized comment, he should give an example where the data values are causally independent, but not logically independent. But the example he gives, of shared conversations and folklore, strike me as not causally independent at all, so while it supports the basic point about systematic error, it doesn't support this particular comment.

"Please, please, please tell me! I must know"

Perhaps too dramatic for your taste, but it should get the job done.

I'm always curious about this phenomenon where person A goes "I can't do it!", person B says "there is a solution", and person A then goes "ah!"

Yes, I noticed this back when I was doing math competitions: it was often much easier for me to find a solution to a problem if someone told me that they had found a solution, especially if they had found it quickly. The obvious corollary is that you should first approach problems as if you knew someone who had found a solution quickly, but I never successfully internalized this.

The map is not the territory, but if you keep paying attention and checking, you can improve the map.