... the history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

-- Freeman Dyson, "Birds and Frogs"

Did you mean for this post to have a writing style similar to that of Peter Watts' Blindsight (which explores the notion of non-sentient optimizers), or was that an unintentional thing?

(The above isn't intended as a meta-level question, by the way. But I'd also be interested to know if the George Clooney in your head wanted the team to signal approval of the ideas presented in Blindsight. Because that would be kind of ironic.)

I actually voted this up because the instrumental value of growing our offline/in-person community seems to outweigh the slight noise contributed by top-level posts of the "SIAI is calling for visiting fellows / volunteers / donations" or "Meetup at location X" variety.

Does anybody know what is depicted in the little image named "mini-landscape.gif" at the bottom of each top level post, or why it appears there?

I have begun a design for a general computer tool to calculate utilities. To give a concrete example, you give it a sentence like

I would prefer X2 amount of money in Y1 months, to X2 in Y2 months. Then, give it reasonable bounds for X and Y, simple additional information (i.e. you always prefer more money to less), and let it interview some people. It'll plot a utility function for each person, and you can check the fit of various models (i.e. exponential discounting, no discounting, hyperbolic discounting).

My original goals were to * Emperically check the hyperbolic discounting claim. * Determine the best-priced value meal at Arby's.

However, I lost interest without further motivation. Given that this is of presumed interest to Less Wrong, I propose the following: If someone offers to sponsor me (give money to me on completion of the computer program), I'll work on the project. Or, if enough people bug me, I'll probably due it for no money. I would prefer only one of these two methods, to see which works better. Anybody who wants to bug me / pay me money, please respond in a comment.

Another reference request: Eliezer made a post about how it's ultimately incoherent to talk about how "A causes B" in the physical world because at root, everything is caused by the physical laws and initial conditions of the universe. But I don't remember what it is called. Does anybody else remember?

I don't think we should go into details on this. It's creepy enough that lifesaving stasis now involves having your head cut off. I don't think it will reassure people to learn that the ideal it to then drop it into a giant jar of heads. i know it would be a giant frost metal ball, but in my mind's eye it's transparent and the heads are shrunken.

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

-- Philip Gourevitch

I did not go through the 9 remaining cases, but I did think about one...

Suppose (AB|C) = F[(A|BC) , (B|AC)]. Compare A=B=C with (A = B) AND (C -> ~A).

Re 2-7: Yep, chain rule gets it done. By the way, took me a few minutes to realize that your citation "2-7" refers to a line in the pdf manuscript of the text. The numbering is different in the hardcopy version. In particular, it uses periods (e.g. equation 2.7) instead of dashes (e.g. equation 2-7), so as long as we're all consistent with that, I don't suppose there will be much confusion.

CSUs and UCs do this (or at least where I've been they do); while these evals might be less biased they are more than proportionately less accessible.

Also ratemyprofessors.com has different ratings for "easiness" "enthusiasm" etc., so instead of looking at "highest rated" professors looking at the actual reviews would be a bit more informative.