Prismattic

This is the public group rationality diary for May 24th - June 13th, 2015. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like: * Established a useful new habit * Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about...

I was reading the discussion here of how truels with unlimited shots and symmetric complete information favor the weakest truelist. This set me to wondering about somewhat more complicated situations. Suppose you are in a world where there are daily truels for some substantial period of time, say 30 days....

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I found this [retrospective](http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2011/julaug/features/spe.html) interesting. What really caught my eye is that, to some degree, it contradicts the main lesson of the experiment -- that context more than character determines behavior. If David Eschelman is accurately/truthfully recalling his role,...

Suppose that your current estimate for possibility of an AI takeoff coming in the next 10 years is some probability x. As technology is constantly becoming more sophisticated, presumably your probability estimate 10 years from now will be some y > x. And 10 years after that, it will be...

I have been trying to absorb the Lesswrong near-consensus on cryonics/quantum mechanics/uploading, and I confess to being unpersuaded by it. I'm not hostile to cryonics; just indifferent, and having a bit of trouble articulating why the insights on identity that I have been picking up from the quantum mechanics sequence...