somewhere you should be missing something

Fine, but where and what? I've already gone through the math a couple of times looking for errors; the purpose of posting here was to get fresh eyes on the problem.

I don't think this works because you're submitting to the same probabilistic calculation but muddying the waters, so somewhere you should be missing something which pushes expected value in line and makes it a bad decision. There's also the issue that no lottery has proper payoffs where expected value is par.

A better argument is to note that we lose money with little utility gained all the time because we don't intuit our accounts very well unless we're close to the edge of them by some factor. In that case, buying lottery tickets is a good bet up to edge * factor because they have a higher expected value than simply losing the money altogether.

To avoid cult mode, try to avoid the local jargon.

Are there any particularly nasty bits you can think of?

Ahh. Much is explained. :)

Well, hopefully this incident will serve to reinforce this particular tidbit and prevent you from having a repeat occurrance.

To avoid cult mode, try to avoid the local jargon. That will help you keep some distance by not turning on your slogan-loyalty loop. I've avoided this because I remember when this topic space was young, none of these sites existed and this sort of thing was still the stuff of excited conversation among college students. It's nice to see it all laid out in various places, but it will never appear to me as the work of monumental genius it does to some people.

I am not jkaufman. So I don't know that I follow what you're trying to say here. This means that either you or I are confused. In either case, no successful communication is currently occurring.

Could you please clarify what it is you're trying to say?

That's a perfectly valid objection, but it contradicts your original post, which states that C. elegans is well understood neurologically.

My original post stated, "without additional effort to more finely emulate the real-time biochemical actions of neurons, it seems that emulating what we already know won't lead us to deeper insights as to what we don't."

Your assertion (in-line quoted, this comment) is false. I said what I meant the first time 'round: we don't know enough about how neurons work yet and without that understanding any models we build now won't yield us any new insights into how they do.

This, furthermore, has nothing to do with C. elegans in specific.

you've objected to the consensus that C. elegans is well understood and provided a criterion (and effective upload model of its neuroanatomy) for judging how well we understand.

Since the goal of these models is to emulate the behavior of C. elegans, and the models do not yet do this, it is clear that one of two things is true: either we do not understand C. elegans or we do not understand neurobiology sufficiently to achieve this goal.

I have made my assertion as to which this is, I have done so quite explicitly, and I have been consistent and clear in this from my first post in this thread.

So where's the confusion?

I think the problem here is that you think that each instance of a simulation is actually an "attempt".

No, the problem here is more that I don't believe that it is any longer feasible to run a simulation and attempt to extract new information without direct observation of the simulated subject-matter.

We need more attempts. We learn something different from each one.

Yes, absolutely. But I don't believe we can do anything other than repeat the past by building models based on modeled output without direct observation at this time.

Everything that fails does for a reason and in a way.

Oh, absolutely. But if they keep failing for the same reason and in the same way, re-running the simulations doesn't get you any unique or novel information. It only reinforces what you already know.

I acknowledged this as I said, "Emulations are certainly a vital part of that process, however: without them we cannot properly guage how close we are to 'knowing enough for government work'."

But if it's the latter, then we really just need more attempts,

I don't know that repeatedly doing the wrong thing will help inform us how to do the right thing. This seems counterfactual to me. Certainly it informs us what the wrong thing is, but... without additional effort to more finely emulate the real-time biochemical actions of neurons, it seems that emulating what we already know won't lead us to deeper insights as to what we don't. The question becomes: how do we discern that missing information?

Emulations are certainly a vital part of that process, however: without them we cannot properly guage how close we are to 'knowing enough for government work'.