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Possibly stupid question: Is being a student at ASU a prerequisite for showing up?
Meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
We'll meet at the usual location, the entrance to the Hayden Library at ASU at 6:30 PM. Last time, we stayed until around 9:30 PM IIRC, and this meeting will probably be similar. There probably won't be food, so eat before showing up.
The plan is: free discussion. If there are any newcomers, introductions could happen. If we have the patience for it, meta.
Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
Meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
We are meeting at the entrance to Hayden Library at ASU. Tentative discussion topics include: wrap up How To Measure Anything; planning / meta; belated New Year's resolutions andor goals in general
Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
In response to
My daily reflection routine
How do you determine what it is that you are grateful for?
I've tried a few things like this before, but every time I find myself being held back by not having a good definition of "gratitude" that can appeal to both my logical half and my intuitive half.
If I got a pony, I'd get an emotional reaction in the moment, but at the end of the day when I go to write it down, my logical side wouldn't think "hey, ponies are great", I'd think, "If I got a unicorn, that would have been better, and if I got shot in the face, that would have been worse. There is nothing more to say here." Any "zero goodness point" that I compare my life situation to is going to be arbitrary, so I don't think it could be meaningful.
It all seems as silly to me as being told to eat my vegetables because someone somewhere else is starving to death. I would still like to get the benefits of a gratitude journal, I'm just not sure how to justify the idea to my inner Spock. What am I missing?
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
Updating incrementally is useful, but only if you keep in perspective how little you know and how unreliable your information is based on a single trial. If you forget that, then you end up like the guy who says "Well, I drove drunk once, and I didn't crash my car, so therefore driving drunk isn't dangerous". Sometimes "I don't know" is a better first approximation then anything else.
Of course, it would be accurate to say that we can get some information from this. I mentioned "anything from 10% to 90%", but on the other hand, I would say that the our experience so far makes the hypothesis "99% intelligent species blow themselves up within 50 years of creating a nuclear bomb" pretty unlikely.
However, any hypothesis from "10% of the time, MAD works at preventing a nuclear war" to "99% of the time, MAD works at preventing a nuclear war" or anything in between seems like it's still quite plausible. Based on a sample size of 1, I would say that any hypothesis that fits the observed data at least 10% of the time would have to be considered a plausible hypothesis.
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
Um... yes. I guess we're on the same page then. :)
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
Take those 100 coins, and add 100 fair coins. Select one at random and flip it. It comes up heads. What are the odds that it is one of the biased coins?
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
Okay, I think I get it. I was initially thinking that the probabilities of the relationship between MAD and reducing risk being negative, nothing, weak, strong, whatever, would all be similar. If you assume that the probability that we all die without MAD is 50%, and each coin represents a possible probability of death with MAD, then I would have put in one 1% coin, one 2% coin, and so on up to 100. That would give us a distribution just like gwern's given graph.
You're saying that it is very likely that there is no relationship at all, and while surviving provides evidence of a positive relationship over a negative one (if we ignore anthropic stuff, and we probably shouldn't), it doesn't change the probability that there is no relationship. So you'd have significantly more 50% coins than 64% coins or 37% coins to draw from. The updates would look the same, but with only one data point, your best guess is that there is no relationship. Is that what you're saying?
So then the difference is all about prior probabilities, yes? If you have two variables that coorelated one time, and that's all the experimenting that you get to do, how likely is it that they have a positive relationship, and how likely is it that it was a coincidence? I... don't know. I'd have to think about it more.
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
The first throw being heads is evidence for the proposition that the coin is biased towards heads, evidence against the proposition that the coin is biased towards tails, and neutral towards the union of the two propositions.
If showing heads for the first throw was evidence for or against the coin being fair, not showing heads for the first row would have to be evidence against or for.
That we survived is evidence for "MAD reduces risk" and evidence against "MAD increases risk", but is neutral for "MAD changes risk".
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
Thought experiment: Get 100 coins, with 50 designed to land on heads 90% of the time and 50 designed to land on tails 90% of the time. If you flipped each coin once, and put all the coins that happened to land on heads (50ish) in one pile, on average, 45 of them will be coins biased towards heads, and only 5 will be biased towards tails.
If you only got the chance to flip one randomly selected coin, and it came up heads, you should say it has a 90% probability of being a heads-biased coin, because it will be 45 out of 50 times.
That's how I'm seeing this situation, anyway. I'm not really understanding what you're trying to say here.
I don't think you need to invoke the anthropomorphic principle here.
The fact that we survived the cold war without a nuclear war doesn't really tell us that much about the odds of doing so. It is basically impossible to estimate the probability of something with a sample size of 1. It could be that we had a 90% chance of getting through the cold war without a nuclear war, or it could be that we only had a 10% chance and just got lucky; based on our current data, either seems quite plausible.
So, for your question "did MAD work"; well, in some sense, either it worked or we got lucky or some combination of the two. But we don't really have enough information to know if it's a good policy to follow or not.
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Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked?
That doesn't sound right to me. Sure, with a sample size of 1, your estimate won't be very accurate, but that one data point is still going to be giving you some information, even if it isn't very much. You gotta update incrementally, right?
What will you do now that you can't form a movement of rationalists? Take over world? Become a superhero? Invent the best recipe for cookies? MAINTAIN AND INCREASE DIVERSITY?
For example, I am going to post a recipe for a bacon trilobite and my experiences and thoughts about paperclipping among humans. Any interesting things you be thinkin' of postin'? ^^
What will I do? I don't really know. Luminosity skills seem like an important requisite for answering that question, but while the luminosity sequence was nice, I feel like it didn't go far enough. Maybe that would be something worth postin' about.
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I liked this post overall. Minor nitpick: I found the use of "guy who VERBs" to be a little jarring. Saying "person who VERBs" would be more inclusive.