= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Result spoilers: Fb sne, yvxvat nypbuby nccrnef gb or yvaxrq gb yvxvat pbssrr be pnssrvar, naq gb yvxvat ovggre naq fbhe gnfgrf. (Fbzr artngvir pbeeryngvba orgjrra yvxvat nypbuby naq yvxvat gb qevax ybgf bs jngre.)
I haven't done the responsible thing and plotted these (or, indeed, done anything else besides take whatever correlation coefficient my software has seen fit to provide me with), so take with a grain of salt.
Fruit juice is twinned. Can you edit these polls?
I believe editing polls resets them, so there's no reason to do it if it's just an aesthetically unpleasant mistake that doesn't hurt the accuracy of the results.
Obviously. Just important to remember that extremity of suffering is something we frequently fail to think well about.
Absolutely. We're bad at anything that we can't easily imagine. Probably, for many people, intuition for "torture vs. dust specks" imagines a guy with a broken arm on one side, and a hundred people saying 'ow' on the other.
The consequences of our poor imagination for large numbers of people (i.e. scope insensitivity) are well-studied. We have trouble doing charity effectively because our intuition doesn't take the number of people saved by an intervention into account; we just picture the typical effect on a single person.
What, I wonder, are the consequence of our poor imagination for extremity of suffering? For me, the prison system comes to mind: I don't know how bad being in prison is, but it probably becomes much worse than I imagine if you're there for 50 years, and we don't think about that at all when arguing (or voting) about prison sentences.
"Statisticians think everything is normally distributed" seems to be one of those weirdly enduring myths. I'd love to know how it gets propagated.
Given that I remember spending a year of AP statistics only doing calculations with things we assumed to be normally distributed, it's not an unreasonable objection to at least some forms of teaching statistics.
Hopefully people with statistics degrees move beyond that stage, though.
This is interesting, because it's almost crazy to me that you'd call a strawberry sour - almost as crazy as calling it bitter! Strawberries are really really sweet in my experience. (Unless it was a very unripe one, I suppose?) Although, I'm not hugely keen on them because of texture issues, so possibly I just haven't picked up on sourness...? Sometimes I think I don't taste foods as well when I'm nervous about potential texture variations (for some reason I can get a strong "yuck" reaction from this).
There are varieties of strawberries that are not sour at all, so I suppose it's possible that you simply have limited experience with strawberries. (Well, you probably must, since you don't like them, but maybe that's the reason you don't think they're sour, as opposed to some fundamental difference in how you taste things.)
I actually don't like the taste of purely-sweet strawberries; the slightly-sour ones are better. A very unripe strawberry would taste very sour, but not at all sweet, and its flesh would also be very hard.
Do you have access to the memory wiping mechanism prior to getting your memory wiped tomorrow?
If so, wipe your memory, leaving yourself a note: "Think of the most unlikely place where you can hide a message, and leave this envelope there." The envelope contains the information you want to pass on.
Then, before your memory is wiped tomorrow, leave yourself a note: "Think of the most unlikely place where you can hide a message, and open the envelope hidden there."
Hopefully, your two memory-wiped selves should be sufficiently similar that the unlikely places they think of will coincide. At the same time, the fact that there is an envelope in the unlikely place you just thought of should be evidence that it came from you.
Time-travel password that you invented years ago and have never spoken aloud, written down, or even hinted at the contents of outside your own head. Don't leave home without one.
And remember: 1 and 0 are not probabilities, so in the real world, the best you can do is arrange for the maximum amount of convincing evidence that's feasible, not any sort of logically perfect system of absolute certainty.
Wouldn't you forget the password once your memories are wiped?
To follow up the Albert, Bernard, Cheryl puzzle, I saw the following puzzle today, which I found much harder.
Two numbers a and b are between 2 and 99, inclusive. They aren't necessarily unique. Peter is given the product of the numbers, a * b. Sarah is given the sum, a + b.
Peter says, “I don’t know the numbers.”
Sarah says, “I knew you didn’t know the numbers.”
Peter then says, “I know the numbers now.”
Sarah then says, “Ah ha! I know the numbers now.”
What are the numbers?
Please rot13 any solutions.
In an alternate universe, Peter and Sarah could have had the following conversation instead:
P: I don't know the numbers.
S: I knew you didn't know the numbers.
P: I knew that you knew that I didn't know the numbers.
S: I still don't know the numbers.
P: Now I know the numbers.
S: Now I also know the numbers.
But I'm worried that my version of the puzzle can no longer be solved without brute force.
In keeping with the "puzzle" theme:
You are given a rectangular piece of paper (such as the placemat at a fast-food restaurant). Without using any measuring tools (such as a ruler, a tape measure, some clever length-measuring app on your smartphone, etc.), divide the paper into five equal parts.
I believe I have it. rot13:
Sbyq naq hasbyq gur cncre ubevmbagnyyl, gura qb gur fnzr iregvpnyyl, gb znex gur zvqcbvag bs rnpu fvqr. Arkg, sbyq naq hasbyq gb znex sbhe yvarf: vs gur pbearef bs n cncre ner N, O, P, Q va beqre nebhaq gur crevzrgre, gura gur yvarf tb sebz N gb gur zvqcbvag bs O naq P, sebz O gb gur zvqcbvag bs P naq Q, sebz P gb gur zvqcbvag bs N naq Q, naq sebz Q gb gur zvqcbvag bs N naq O.
Gurfr cnegvgvba gur erpgnatyr vagb avar cvrprf: sbhe gevnatyrf, sbhe gencrmbvqf, naq bar cnenyyrybtenz. Yrg gur cnenyyrybtenz or bar cneg, naq tebhc rnpu gencrmbvq jvgu vgf bja nqwnprag gevnatyr gb znxr gur sbhe bgure cnegf.
Obahf: vs jr phg bhg nyy avar cvrprf, n gencrmbvq naq n gevnatyr pna or chg onpx gbtrgure va gur rknpg funcr bs gur cnenyyrybtenz.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
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That's great to say, but much harder to actually do.
For example, if Omega pays $1,000 to people or asks them to commit suicide. But it only asks people it knows100% will not do it, otherwise it gives them the money.
The best strategy is to precommit to suicide if Omega asks. But if Omega does ask, I doubt most lesswrongers would actually go through with it.
So the standard formulation of a Newcomb-like paradox continues to work if you assume that Omega has a merely 99% accuracy.
Your formulation, however, doesn't work that way. If you precommit to suicide when Omega asks, but Omega is sometimes wrong, then you commit suicide with 1% probability (in exchange for having $990 expected winnings). If you don't precommit, then with a 1% chance you might get $1000 for free. In most cases, the second option is better.
Thus, the suicide strategy requires very strong faith in Omega, which is hard to imagine in practice. Even if Omega actually is infallible, it's hard to imagine evidence extraordinary enough to convince us that Omega is sufficiently infallible.
(I think I am willing to bite the suicide bullet as long as we're clear that I would require truly extraordinary evidence.)