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So it seems to me you're denying that the world is in any sense deterministic, and so it's perfectly possible for human beings to be anomalous agents, just because everything is potentially anomalous. Is that right?
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Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn't understand
By charitable reading, it's not what ze's saying.
From the standpoint of a person making discoveries, it is known from many observations that Bob the Particle will always Wag. Thus, "Bob Wags" is stated as a Natural Law, and assumed true in all calculations, and said with force of conviction, and if some math implies that Bob didn't Wag, the first thing to look for is errors in the math.
However, still from the same standpoint, if some day we discover in some experiment that Bob didn't Wag, and despite looking and looking they can't find any errors in the math (or the experiment, etc.), then they have to conclude that maybe "Bob Wags" is not fully true. Maybe then they'll discover that in this experiment, it just so happens that Julie the Particle was Hopping. Thus, our hypothetical discoverer rewrites the "law" as: "Bob Wags unless Julie Hops"
Maybe, in some "ultimate" computation of the universe, the "True" rule is that "Bob Wags unless someone else Leers, and no one Leers when Julie Hops". How do we know? How will we know when we've discovered the "true" rules? Right now, we don't know. As far as we know, we'll never know any "true" rules.
But it all boils down to: The universe has been following one set of (unknown) rules since the end of time and forever 'till the end of time (ha! there's probably no such thing as "time" in those rules, mind you!), and maybe those rules are such that Bob will Wink when we make John Laugh, and then we'll invent turbines and build computers and discuss the nature of natural laws on internet forums. And maybe in our "natural laws" it's impossible for Bob to Wink, and we think turbines work because we make Julie Hop and have Cody Scribble when Bob doesn't Wag to stop him. And some day, we'll stumble on some case where Cody Scribbles, Bob doesn't Wag, but Bob doesn't Wink either, and we'll figure out that, oh no!, the natural laws changed and now turbines function on Bob Winks instead of Cody Scribbles, and we have to rethink everything!
The universe doesn't care. Bob was Winking all along, and we just assumed it was the Cody Scribbles because we didn't know about Annie. And never there was a case where Bob Wagged and Winked at the same time, or where Bob failed to Wag when Julie Hopped. We just thought the wrong things.
And if in the future we'll discover other such cases, it's only because the universe has been doing those things all along, but we just don't see them yet.
And it's even possible that in the future Bob will marry Julie and then never again Wink... but all that means is that the rules were in fact "Bob Winks when Annie Nods unless Bob is Married to Julie", rather than "Bob Winks when Annie Nods", and yet our scientists will cry "The laws of physics have changed!" while everyone else panics about our precious turbines no longer working all of a sudden.
I sense there may be a contradiction between a decision theory that aims to be timeless and the mandate to ignore sunk costs because they're in the past. But I fear I may be terribly misunderstanding both concepts.
I don't see this contradiction. In a timeless decision theory, the diagram and parameters are not the same when X is in control of resource A (at "time" T) and when X is not in control of resource A (at time T+1).
The "timeless" of the decision theory doesn't mean that the decision theory ignores the effects of time and past decisions. Rather, it refers to a more technical (and definitely more confusing) abstraction about predictions and kind of subtly hints at a reference to the (also technical) concept of symmetry in physics.
Mainly, the point is to deflect naive reasoning in problems involving predictions or similar "time-defying" situations. The classic example is newcomblike problems, specifically Newcomb's Problem. In these situations, acting as if your current decision were a partial cause of the past prediction, and thus of whether or not Omega/The Predictor put a reward in a box, leads to better subjective chances of finding a reward in said box. The "timeless" aspect here is that a phenomenon (the decision you make) is almost looks like it's a cause of another (the prediction of your decision) that happened "in the past".
In fact, however, they have a common prior cause: the state of the universe and, particularly, of the brain / processor / information of the entity making the decision, prior to the prediction. Treating it as, and calling it, "timeless" helps avoid issues where this will turn into a debate about free will and determinism.
In newcomblike problems, an event B happenes where Omega predicts whether A1 or A2 will happen, based on whether C1 or C2 is true (two possible states of the brain of the player, or outcomes of a simulation). Then, either A1 or A2 happens, based on whether C1 or C2 is true, as predicted by Omega. Since the player doesn't have the same means as Omega to know C or B, he must decide as if A caused C which caused B, which could be roughly described as a decision causing the result of a prediction of this decision in the past.
So, back to the timeless VS sunk costs "contradiction": In a sunk costs situation, there is no Omega, there is no C, there is no prediction (B). At the moment of decision, the state of the game in abstract is something more like: "Decision A caused Resource B to go from 5 to 3, 1B can be paid to obtain 2 utilons by making decision C1, 2B can be paid to obtain 5 utilons by making decision C2". There's no predictions or fancy delusions of affecting events that caused the current state. A caused B(5->3) caused (NOW) caused C. C has no causal effect on (NOW), which has no causal effect on B, which has no causal effect on A. No amount of removing the timestamps and pretending that your future decision will change how it was predicted is going to change the (NOW) state.
I could go on at length and depth, but let's see how much of this makes sense first (i.e. that you understand and/or that I mis-explained).
In response to
Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014
There are plenty of internet articles that I want to read later or have read but want to preserve for rereading and reference. Because of link rot I can't trust the sites to exist for arbitrary amounts of time, so I need to save these sites somehow. How do you do that in the most comfortable way, ideally a single click?
First, the most reliable solution is to save the page manually, yourself, to a local hard drive of your preference, provided you keep good file hygiene and backups and so on. If there are multiple-page articles, you have to save each page of the article, though. You also can run into some issues with the more "interactive" websites and articles, particularly if they use flash or java apps (which means the html you save will only contain a link to some flash or java file elsewhere on their server, which means you're back to square one). You can also get all kinds of gibberish from broken links anyway if the pictures suffer link rot or the page refers to an external style sheet or any other of some large number of possible other problems.
I think the only way to avoid this in an efficient, one-click manner is to use a pre-processor that detects the relevant content and saves only that for you. I use Readability to do this for slightly different goals and purposes.
Pocket is a more popular choice usually, but I've had many negative experiences with it not syncing to the android app, not working well with certain browsers, not processing articles properly, not processing the whole article, or sometimes not processing articles at all and keeping only the link (which helps you diddly-squat since that's the whole problem you're having).
Fair warning: Readability does a complete pre-processing of the article for, well, readability. It will remove ads, sidebars, top-bars, often comments to articles, and once in a while it'll remove too much. It usually successfully detects multiple-page articles, but not always.
The reboot of Cosmos (available on Hulu if you're into two minutes of ads every ten minutes) is fairly good pop science. They're hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Pros: The show makes me happy-cry on a regular basis. There's a clip in the opening sequence where a dandelion seed floating in the wind fades in to Voyager. The show is pretty heavily against religious tomfoolery, death, and staying on Earth until the civilization collapses and/or destroys itself.
Cons: The show owes a lot of its goodness to Sagan. NGT is leaning really heavily on his Crowning Moment of Awesome with Sagan before NGT went to undergrad. The CG is atrocious when it's not based on Hubble pictures. The anti-religion bits are heavy-handed to the point of being outright trolling (which one might argue was also a feature of the original).
(available on Hulu if you're into two minutes of ads every ten minutes)
Should read:
(available on Hulu for US residents with a local ISP contract if you're into two minutes of ads every ten minutes, and for devious tricksters with access to a reliable US proxy who are too impatient to just torrent things - since both would be considered just as illegal by a completely impartial US court of law)
Too much contamination with Steam and Half-Life and Portal and...
It'll be Valve Soon™ before everyone understands that one...
My ad hominem argument of the day: the author is in the philosophy department... figures...
I've retracted my (epistemically unhealthy) previous responses about great physics discoveries. I'd say "oops" as per the LW tradition, but when I look back on what I wrote all I see is a rather shameful display of cognitive dissonance. There's no mere "oops" there, but plain old full-blown contrarian, academic-hipster biases. Sorry.
In response to
In favour of terseness
A few (concise) notes:
Being concise or verbose is a false dilemma. You can structure your post so that it can be both. (I posted about it here years ago.)
You assume that if "terseness makes posts more readable" to you, then it applies equally to everyone. It doesn't.
Crossing an inferential gap is harder in a short post, unless you are an amazing writer.
If you scan through the site carefully, there are plenty of quality short posts here.
An extra note:
Crossing an inferential gap is harder in a short post, unless you are an amazing writer.
In the quote, the qualification is unnecessary. Ceteris paribus, it's usually harder in a short post, regardless of general writing skill.
Maybe not from a Physics department, but from a research lab of IBM or similar. Do you have any examples from the reference class of Great Discoveries in Physics? If so, what fraction of them did not come from trained physicists?
My best take on the thing is that, historically, most great physics discoveries were made by generalist, wide-branching natural philosophers. Granted, "natural philosophy" is arguably the direct ancestor of physics from which spawned the bastards of "chemistry" and "biology", but even regardless, the key point is that they were generalists and that, if we were going to solve the current problem simply by throwing more specialized physicists and gamma ray guns at it, this is not the evidence I'd expect to see.
Given historical base rates of generalists vs specialists in physics, and the ratio of Great Discoveries made by the former rather than the latter, it feels as if generalists have a net advantage in "consolidating" recent research into a Great Discovery.
I do have to agree, though, that all of them came from physicists, if not necessarily formally trained, although in most cases they were. Good knowledge of physics is necessary, that I won't argue. But what I'll point out is that I've personally met many more game developers and programmers with a much better grasp of (basic) physics (i.e. first volume of Feynman's Lectures) than college physics department members, on a purely absolute count. It doesn't seem that far-fetched, to me, to assume there's a comparable difference in base rates of people within and outside physics departments with a solid enough grasp of physics for the Next Great Discovery, whatever that threshold may be (and obviously, the lower the actual threshold, the more likely it is that it will come from outside Physics Departments).
My ad hominem argument of the day: the author is in the philosophy department... figures...
On the other hand, my confidence that the ultimately correct and most useful Next Great Discovery (e.g. any method to control gravity) will not come from a physics department is above 50%.
Philosophy simply happens to be one of the more likely departments where it might come from, though still quite a ways behind "unaffiliated" and "engineering".
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So, magic?
Yes, as long as we're using the definition E.Y. shared/mentioned in his 2008 paper.