Salutator

If the reporter estimates every node of the human's Bayes net, then it can assign a node a probability distribution different from the one that would be calculated from the distributions simultaneously assigned to its parent nodes. I don't know if there is a name for that, so for now i will pompously call it inferential inconsistency. Considering this as a boolean bright-line concept, the human simulator is clearly the only inferentially consistent reporter. But one could consider some kind of metric on how different probability distributions are and turn ... (read more)

It gets very interesting if there actually are no stocks to buy back in the market. For details on how it gets interesting google "short squeeze".

Other than that exceptional situation it's not that asymmetrical:

-Typically you have to post some collateral for shorting and there will be a well-understood maximum loss before your broker buys back the stock and seizes your collateral to cover that loss. So short (haha) of a short squeeze there actually is a maximum loss in short selling.

-You can take similar risks on the long side by buying stocks o... (read more)

Let me be a bit trollish so as to establish an actual counter-position (though I actually believe everything I say):

This is where the sequences first turn dumb.

For low-hanging fruit, we first see modern mythology misinterpreted as actual history. In reality, phlogiston was a useful theory at the time, which was rationally arrived at and rationally discarded when evidence turned against it (With some attempst at "adding epicycles", but no more than other scientific theories) . And the NOMA thing was made up by Gould when he misunderstood actual re... (read more)

You're treating looking for week points in your and the interlocutors belief as basically the same thing. That's almost the opposite of the truth, because there's a trade-off between those two things. If you're totally focused on the second thing, the first one is psychologically near impossible.

This was based on a math error, it actually is a prisoners dilemma.

I'm a bit out of my depth here. I understood an "ordered group" as a group with an order on its elements. That clearly can be finite. If it's more than that the question would be why we should assume whatever further axioms characterize it.

Two points:

1. I don't know the Holder theorem, but if it actually depends on the lattice being a group, that includes an extra assumption of the existence of a neutral element and inverse elements. The neutral element would have to be a life of exactly zero value, so that killing that person off wouldn't matter at all, either positively or negatively. The inverse elements would mean that for every happy live you can imagine an exactly opposite unhappy live, so that killing off both leaves the world exactly as good as before.

2. Proving this might be hard fo

I think it's just elliptic rather than fallacious.

Paul Graham basically argues for artistic quality as something people have a natural instinct to recognize. The sexual attractiveness of bodies might be a more obvious example of this kind of thing. If you ask 100 people to rank pictures another 100 people of the opposite sex by hotness, the ranks will correlate very highly even if the rankers don't get to communicate. So there is something they are all picking up on, but it isn't a single property. (Symmetry might come closest but not really close, i.e. i... (read more)

I think another thing to remember here is sampling bias. The actual conversion/deconversion probably mostly is the end point of a lengthy intellectual process. People far along that process probably aren't very representative of people not going through it and it would be much more interesting what gets the process started.

To add some more anecdata, my reaction to that style of argumentation was almost diametrically opposed. I suspect this is fairly common on both sides of the divide, but not being convinced by some specific argument just isn't such a catchy story, so you would hear it less.

But if you missed Twelfth Night, Candlemas would be a Schelling point for rescheduling, because it's the other "Christmas now definitely over" holiday.

Ha! That's the delightful little project, no?

I took the survey too. I can haz karma plz? Kthxbye.

The race question doesn't make much sense for Europeans. I could answer White (non-Hispanic) even though the Hispanic category doesn't exist here. But what should Spaniards answer?

The thing is that the proof for Gödel's theorem is constructive. We have an algorithm to construct Gödel sentences from Axioms. So basically the only way we can be unable to recognize our Gödel sentences is being unable to recognize our axioms.

But that sentence isn't self-contradictory like "This is a lie", it is just self-referential, like "This sentence has five words". It does have a well-defined meaning and is decidable for all hypothetical consistent people other than hypothetical consitentified Stuart Armstrong.

Yeah, probably all theories of truth are circular and the concept is simply non-tabooable. I agree your explanation doesn't make it worse, but it doesn't make it better either.

But that's only useful if you make it circular.

Taking you more strictly at your word than you mean it the program could just return true for the majority belief on empirically non-falsifiable questions. Or it could just return false on all beliefs including your belief that that is illogical. So with the right programs pretty much arbitrary beliefs pass as meaningful.

You actually want it to depend on the state of the universe in the right way, but that's just another way to say it should depend on whether the belief is true.

Let's go one step back on this, because I think our point of disagreement is earlier than I thought in that last comment.

The efficient market hypothesis does not claim that the profit on all securities has the same expectation value. EMH-believers don't deny, for example, the empirically obvious fact that this expectation value is higher for insurances than for more predictable businesses. Also, you can always increase your risk and expected profit by leverage, i.e. by investing borrowed money.

This is because markets are risk-averse, so that on the same... (read more)

No, not really. In an efficient marked risks uncorrelated with those of other securities shouldn't be compensated, so you should easily be able to screw yourself over by not diversifying.