I think the word "kill" is being grossly misused here. It's one thing to say you have no right to kill a person, something very different to say that you have a responsibility to keep a person alive.
Keep posting. Once a week, even once a month, is better than never. If you can get more authors than provide high quality content, great, but if you can't, that's okay, don't worry about quantity.
To be precise, in every case where the environment only cares about your actions and not what algorithm you use to produce them, any algorithm that can be improved by randomization can always be improved further by derandomization.
Isn't this trivially true? Isn't the most (time) efficient algorithm always a giant lookup table?
Consider this scenario:
There are a large number of agents independently working on the same problem (for example, trying to find a string that hash-collides with some given string), but they cannot communicate in any way, they don't have any identification information about each other, they don't know how many other agents there are working on the problem (they aren't even sure there are any). It seems to me that each agent should decide at random where to start searching, not to fool each other but to avoid pointlessly duplicating each others' work.
Are you sure there is always something better than randomness?
I think it's worth mentioning that Kasparov will have a harder time accurately predicting your moves than you will have predicting his. Each of you knows that Kasparov will win, but this will much more likely be due to a blunder on your part than a brilliancy on his. He may well reason, "sooner or later this patzer is going to hang a piece", but he will have no way of knowing when.
Here's what I find difficult to understand from an evolutionary perspective: why do we have a sense that we ought to do what is right as opposed to what society wants us to do? Why are we even capable of making this distinction?
Cat Dancer,
The frequentist answer of 1/3 is effectively making the implicit assumption that the parent would have said "at least one boy" either if both were boys or if there were one of each, and "at least one girl" if both were girls. Eliezer2008's 1/2 answer effectively assumes that the parent would have said "at least one boy" if both were boys, "at least one girl" if both were girls, and either with equal probability if there were one of each. "No alternative" assumes the parent is constrained to (trut...
Thank you for a correct statement of the problem which indeed gives the 1/3 answer. Here's the problem I have with the malformed version: I agree that it's reasonable to assume that if the children were a boy and a girl it is equally likely that the parent would say "at least one is a boy" as "at least one is a girl". But I guess you're assuming the parent would say "at least one boy" if both were boys, "at least one girl" if both were girls, and either "at least one boy" or "at least one girl" wi...
I don't think you've given enough information to make a reasonable choice. If the results of all 20 experiments are consistent with both theories but the second theory would not have been made without the data from the second set of experiments, then it stands to reason that the second theory makes more precise predictions.
If the theories are equally complex and the second makes more precise predictions, then it appears to be a better theory. If the second theory contains a bunch of ad hoc parameters to improve the fit, then it's likely a worse theory.
But ...
And are you really "exploiting" an "irrational" opponent, if the party "exploited" ends up better off? Wouldn't you end up wishing you were stupider, so you could be exploited - wishing to be unilaterally stupider, regardless of the other party's intelligence? Hence the phrase "regret of rationality"...
Eliezar, you are putting words in your opponents' mouths, then criticizing their terminology.
"Rationality" is I think a well-defined term in game theory, it doesn't mean the same thing as "smart". I...
Personally, I pretty much always have checked baggage, I can always make it to baggage claim before my luggage does, so I don't really care about saving time getting off the plane. If I'm in a window seat I usually let people behind me get off first, but if I'm in an aisle seat I don't want to block in the person in the window seat.
Which moral system the human race uses is relative, arbitrary, and meaningless, just as there's no reason for the pebble sorters to like prime numbers instead of composite numbers, perfect numbers, or even numbers
But that's clearly not true, except in the sense that it's "arbitrary" to prefer life over death. It's a pretty safe generalization that actions which are considered to be immoral are those which are considered to be likely to cause harm to others.
But which others matter how much is an open question. Some would suggest that all humans ma...
It's strange that these pebblesorters can be convinced by "a heap of 103 pebbles and a heap of 19 pebbles side-by-side" that 1957 is incorrect, yet don't understand that this is because 19 * 103 = 157. Admittedly I didn't notice this myself on first reading, but I wasn't looking for a pattern.
I don't think your analogy holds up. Your pebblesorters all agree that prime numbered piles are correct and composite ones incorrect, yet are unreflective enough not to realize that's how they are making the distinction and bad enough mathematicians that th...
I think everything you say in this post is correct. But there's nothing like a universal agreement as to what is "good", and although our ideas as to what is good will change over time, I see no reason to believe that they will converge.
There's a big difference between saying "morality is the product of human minds" and saying "morality is purely arbitrary". Similarly, there's a big difference between saying "there are objective reasons why we make the moral judgments we do" and "all moral questions have objective answers which in no way depend on human minds".
Life is not a zero sum game. I think nearly everyone would agree that it would be advantageous to nearly everyone if one could somehow guarantee that neither one's self nor one's loved ones wo...
I think it's probably useful to taboo the word "should" for this discussion. I think when people say you "should" do X rather than Y it means something like "experience indicates X is more likely to lead to a good outcome than Y". People tend to have rule-based rather than consequence based moral systems because the full consequences of one's actions are unforeseeable. A rule like "one shouldn't lie" comes about because experience has shown that lying often has negative consequences for the speaker and listener and p...
Slightly OT for this thread: there should always be a prominent link on the right to the open thread. As things are, it gets heavy usage the first couple days of the month, then falls off the bottom of the page before anyone can read most of the comments. Look, it's gone again already!
I know I've said this before, but I think it was on the open thread and it fell off the bottom of the page before anyone read it.
Why do people seem to mean different things by "I want the pie" and "It is right that I should get the pie"?
These really are different statements. "I am entitled to fraction x of the pie" means more or less the same as "a fair judge would assign me fraction x of the pie".
But a fair judge just means the judge has no personal relationship with any of the disputing parties and makes his decision based on some rational process, not arbitrarily. It isn't necessarily true that there's a unique solution that a fair judge w...
Does it occur to anyone else that the fable is not a warning against doing favors in general but of siding with "outsiders" against "insiders"? When the farmer protects the venomous snake from the people trying to kill it, from a human perspective he's doing a bad thing. When the heron recommends white fowl as a medicine, even he were not to himself become a meal, he's not doing the bird community any favors. And the farmer's wife, in letting the heron go, is depriving her husband of vital medicine.