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Kindly refrain from using rot13 for comments that do not fit the rule given in Will's comment above. The rule is there for a reason, and you are reducing its reliability as a tool for avoiding spoilers.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
In response to
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
Okay, fixed. IMHO it would make more sense to rot13 hereditarily.
In response to
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Oh, I guess I can post this then: V jnf ng n jrqqvat cnegl guvat n srj lrnef onpx jurer Ryvrmre pbasvezrq gung lbh pna'g yvr va Cnefrygbathr; gur engvbanyr tvira jnf gung Fnynmne jvfurq gb sbfgre pbbeqvangvba orgjrra uvf urvef. V'z abg 100% fher V'z erzrzorevat pbeerpgyl ohg V'z cerggl fher.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
I'm wondering what Salazar would make of Bane's Rule of Two
In response to
Open thread, July 28 - August 3, 2014
Does anyone know why Stephen Bond's website is down? It's been so for something like a month.
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Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild"
For what it's worth my fanfic was gonna draw a lot of inspiration from Worm and Pact. Wildbow at least explicitly puts forth metaphysics to partially explain the narrative causality. Maybe Eliezer will get around to it too when the mechanics of Prophecy are explained. His Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover is great in that regard.
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Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild"
Wildbow at least explicitly puts forth metaphysics to partially explain the narrative causality.
And that was the final piece of the puzzle in getting me to read Worm. Off I go!
This post is a good example of why LW is dying. Specifically, that it was posted as a comment to a garbage-collector thread in the second-class area. Something is horribly wrong with the selection mechanism for what gets on the front page.
Which of the 3 would you recommend? Does someone know why MIRI recommends Chang and Keisler if it is somewhat outdated?
Marker is the closest to the state of the art. Hodges is a bit verbose and for beginners. Poizat is a little idiosyncratic (just look at the Introduction!).
I am also interested in the basis of MIRI's recommendation. Perhaps they are not too connected to actual mathematicians studying it, as model theory is pretty much a fringe topic.
You can do a lot of good with money.
I don't deny that, I just say that maybe the specific environment doesn't suit everyone.
In response to
Why don't more rationalists start startups?
Well, some rationalists aren't so capitalism-oriented.
There's this in mathematics. Also, this website might be a good place to look, though most of its examples seem less advanced than what you are looking for.
Thanks! Given that that site lists Egan (and other works that I knew about) and it strives to be complete, it seems it's what I had been looking for.
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What sophisticated ideas did you come up with independently before encountering them in a more formal context?
I'm pretty sure that in my youth I independently came up with rudimentary versions of the anthropic principle and the Problem of Evil. Looking over my Livejournal archive, I was clearly not a fearsome philosophical mind in my late teens, (or now, frankly), so it seems safe to say that these ideas aren't difficult to stumble across.
While discussing this at the most recent London Less Wrong meetup, another attendee claimed to have independently arrived at Pascal's Wager. I've seen a couple of different people speculate that cultural and ideological artefacts are subject to selection and evolutionary pressures without ever themselves having come across memetics as a concept.
I'm still thinking about ideas we come up with that stand to reason. Rather than prime you all with the hazy ideas I have about the sorts of ideas people converge on while armchair-theorising, I'd like to solicit some more examples. What ideas of this sort did you come up with independently, only to discover they were already "a thing"?
This happened when I was 12 years old. I was trying to solve a problem at a mathematical contest which involved proving some identity with the nth powers of 5 and 7. I recall thinking vaguely "if you go to n+1 what is added in the left hand side is also in the right hand side" and so I discovered mathematical induction. In ten minutes I had a rigorous proof. Though, I didn't find it so convincing, so I ended with an unsure-of-myself comment "Hence, it is also valid for 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on..."
When I was in high school, creationism seemed unsatisfying in the sense of a Deus Ex Machina narrative (I often wonder how theists reconcile the contradiction between the feeling of religious wonder and the feeling of disappointment when facing Deus Ex Machina endings). The evolution "story" fascinated me with its slow and semi-random progression over billions of years. I guess this was my first taste of reductionism. (This is also an example of how optimizing for interestingness instead of truth has led me to the correct answer.)