= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Just so you know, there are two columns of Y subscript 3s in the first joint distribution.
In response to
Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
other people were near-perfect "eidetic" imagers
I read a report in the Scientific American a few years ago in which they were doing experiments with rend0m-dot stereograms -- the kind of thing where if you just look at one image or the other you just see random dots, but if you look at one with one eye and the other with the other eye you see a square full of random dots floating above a background with random dots.
Some people could be shown one image one week, and the other the next week, each by itself, and suddenly get it. Evidently they had remembered the entire first-week image in memory to scompare with the second a week later.
I was impressed. This seemed eidetic enough for me.
I heard about this study in the book Moonwalking with Einstien: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer. Apparently there was only one test subject who seemed to have eidetic memory, and instead of doing more tests after the one that you described, the experimenter married the subject.
When John Merritt put a similar test in newspapers, nobody who wrote in with the correct answer could do the test "with scientists looking over their shoulders."
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Presumably the capital investment everyone frozen gives to the Cryonics Institute would pay for their revival, or perhaps just for the revival and re-education of some of the more interesting people, who would then, hopefully feeling some empathy for the remaining popsicles, pay to have them reanimated later.
I'll just try to be interesting, and somewhat self-sacrificing so someone who reads any of my work might feel guilty enough to have me reanimated.
Or we might just be reanimated to serve as soldiers in a future war as our coping mechanisms leave us just the right type of crazy to stay mostly sane in harsh environments. Who knows?
Now cryonics are starting to sound like a religion; if you are an interesting person, and have a good enough reputation, then someone will bother to reanimate you and you will live forever. I like it.
You have posted this several times; please delete the excess.
Sorry, I didn't mean to do that, and I don't know how it happened.
In response to
New Improved Lottery
This isn't entirely relevant, but it's a good story, so... I recently heard from one of my mom's friends that my fifth grade teacher won the lottery, and continued teaching afterward. This makes me very happy, because he's a fantastic teacher (he has a reputation, actually, for making his classes really fun, like using remote-control cars for an Oregon Trail activity), and, as has been mentioned on this site, a lot of people don't end up being very happy once they've one the lottery. I'm glad Mr. Lesh was smart enough to keep teaching his class, which he obviously loved doing.
In response to
Fake Optimization Criteria
The mention of music and evolution sent me off on a tangent, which was to wonder why human brains have a sense of music. A lot of music theory makes mathematical sense (the overtone series), but it seems odd from an evolution standpoint that musicianship was a good allele to have.
In response to
A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
I think, based on everyone's level of discomfort with this problem, that if there were an experiment wherein people in one group were asked a question like this, but on a much smaller scale, say, "torture one person for an hour or put a speck of dust into the eyes of (3^^^3)/438300," or even one second of torture vs (3^^^3)/1577880000 (Obviously in decimal notation in the experiment) specks of dust, and in the second group, people were told the original question with the big numbers, people in the first group would choose the torture more often and much more quickly and confidently.
I say this because people are quite uncomfortable having to choose to torture someone for 50 years, even if it isn't necessarily as bad as the other option.
In response to
A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
"I guess if you really feel the question is so confused as to be answerless, I'll accept that. I would still challenge you to fill in plausible assumptions and state a preference."
Remember the story, "The Lady and the Tiger"? The question was carefully formulated to be evenly balanced, to eliminate any reason to choose one over the other. Anything that got used to say one choice was better, implied that the story wasn't balanced quite right.
We could do that with your story too. If 3^^^3 people is enough to say it's better to torture one person, we could replace it with a smaller number, perhaps a googleplex. And if that's still too many we could try just a google. If people choose the specks we could increase the number of people, or maybe increase the number of specks.
At some point we get just the right number of specks to balance the torture for a modal number of people, and we're set. The maximum number of people will be unable to choose, because you designed it that way.
You did not say what happens if I don't choose. This is a glaring omission.
OK, let me tell one. You and your whole family have been captured by the Gestapo, and before they get down to the serious torture they decide to have some fun with you. They tell you that you have to choose, either they rape your daughter or your wife. If you don't choose which one then they'll rape them both. And you too.
Do you choose? If you refuse to choose then that's choosing for both of them to be raped. And you too.
But then, if you do choose, they rape them both anyway. And you too.
What should you do?
In the end, the crime is committed not by the person who has to choose between two presented evils, but by the person who sets up the choice. Choose the lesser of the evils, preferably with math, and then don't feel responsible.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
From my perspective, the main goal that Santa-ism serves is giving children a trial run at atheism - teaching them to be skeptical of supernatural propositions fed them by adults and believed by their peers, especially the part about being rewarded for belief. If I had children I'd let their peers tell them about Santa Claus, without contradiction from me, just to make sure the kids got experience in skepticism - you lose out on a fundamental life trial and very valuable experience if your parents happen to be atheists.
But even this can be improved upon, if you're willing to tell your own lies instead of letting others do it for you. Just tell the children in a very stern voice that if they doubt the existence of Santa Claus he won't bring them any presents; but if they believe as hard as they can, they'll get lots of presents. Also, remove the part about Santa Claus rewarding children for being good - being good should be its own reward to be internalized appropriately; if the children believe they are being bribed, it may interfere with their internalization of morality. Santa Claus should reward children only for believing in him. Why is that good? Well, just because.
When the child first questions Santa Claus, he should be given a vaguely plausible set of physical and moral rationalizations - i.e., the reindeer actually travel through the nineteenth dimension, and rich kids get better presents because they have a higher hedonic baseline, etc. This will give the child experience with vague philosophical-sounding rationalizations, not just blatantly obvious lies.
Need I go on? Why would the present myth be optimal unto any purpose, even a Noble Lie, if it was not designed that way?
I think I wrote an essay for a middle-school english teacher to the effect that any belief that I had in [the belief in] Santa Claus dragged my belief in [my belief in] God along as it went away (Which would have been around... when I was three or five; my parents didn't really try very hard to convince my siblings or me that Santa actually existed).
I don't remember a time when I believed in more than a belief in Santa, or, though my parents tried a little harder on this front, in God. My mother read to me from a kid's bible (with stories like Noah's Ark (the one with all the incest in it, for anyone who doesn't know) set as poems), but I could tell she didn't believe the stories (she probably figured she ought to make an effort, just 'cause).
Nonetheless, my father only recently began to imply outright that Santa Claus wasn't real.