NickRetallack
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NickRetallack has not written any posts yet.
Oh. I can imagine a distribution that looks like that. It would have been helpful if he had given us all the numbers. Perhaps he does in this blog post, but I got confused part way through and couldn't make it to the end.
There must be something I'm missing here. The previous post pretty definitively proved to me that the no communication clause must be false.
Consider the latter two experiments in the last post:
A transmitted 20°, B transmitted 40°: 5.8%
A transmitted 0°, B transmitted 40°: 20.7%
Lets say I'm on Planet A and my friend is on Planet B, and we are both constantly receiving entangled pairs of photons from some satellite stationed between us. I'm filtering my photons on planet A at 20°, and my friend on planet B is filtering his at 40°. He observes a 5.8% chance that his photons are transmitted, in accordance with the experiment.... (read more)
There is so much wrong with this example that I don't know where to start.
You make up a hypothetical person who dies because she doesn't heed an explicit warning that says "if you do this, you will die". Then you make several ridiculous claims about this hypothetical person:
1) You claim this event will happen, with absolute certainty. 2) You claim this event occurs because this individual has low intelligence, and that it is unfair because a person does not choose to be born intelligent. 3) You claim this event is a tragedy.
I disagree with all of these, and I will challenge them individually. But first, the meta-claim of this argument is that... (read 769 more words →)
Debates can easily appear one-sided, for each side. For example, some people believe that if you follow a particular conduct in life, you will go to heaven. To these people, any policy decision that results in sending less people to heaven is a tragedy. But to people who don't believe in heaven, this downside does not exist.
This is not just an arbitrary example. This shows up all the time in US politics. Until people can agree on whether or not heaven exists, how can any of these debates not seem one-sided?
I think it's a good thing to do this. It is analogous to science.
If you're a good reasoner and you encounter evidence that conflicts with one of your beliefs, you update that belief.
Likewise, if you want to update someone else's belief, you can present evidence that conflicts with it in hopes they will be a good reasoner and update their belief.
This would not be so effective if you just told them your conclusion flat out, because that would look like just another belief you are trying to force upon them.
What's this "the Matrix" everyone in this thread is talking about? The movie? The idea that we're all in a computer simulation?
Btw, as for causality loops, Feynman describes antimatter as "just like regular matter, only traveling backwards in time", which means if we allow for time travel, we've just reduced the number of types of particles in our description of reality by half =].
Anthropomorphizing animals is justified based on the degree of similarity between their brains and ours. For example, we know that the parts of our brain we have found are responsible for strong emotions are also present in reptiles, so we might assume that reptiles also have strong emotions. Mammals are more similar to us, so we feel more moral obligation to them.
I'm with you. You have to look at the outcomes, otherwise you end up running into the same logical blinders that make Quantum Mechanics hard to accept.
After reading some of the Quantum Mechanics sequence, I am more willing to believe in Omega's omniscience. Quantum mechanics allows for multiple timelines leading to the same outcome to interfere and simply never happen, even if they would have been probable in classical mechanics. Perhaps all timelines leading to the outcome where one-boxing does not yield money happen to interfere. Even if you take a more literal interpretation of the problem statement, where it is your own mind that determines the box's content, your mind is made of particles which could conceivably affect the universe's configuration.
Are you implying that the presence of a detector instead of an obstacle changes what the other detectors detect, or not?
The text is unclear here:
Detector 1 goes off half the time and Detector 2 goes off half the time.
Does "half the time" mean "half the time that any detector goes off", or "half the time you shoot a photon"? I would expect that, with the obstacle in place, half the time you shoot a photon no detector would go off, because the first mirror would deflect it into an obstacle. Seeing no detector go off is distinct and observable, so I don't see any way it could be eliminated as a possibility like the other case described here where two possible timelines that lead to the same world interfere and cancel out. So I would assume Eliezer means "half the time that any detector goes off". If so, I'd like to see the text updated to be more clear about this.
Did you notice that the year listed is 2014? I think that's a mistake.