AI seems to be pretty good at board games relative to us. Does this tell us anything interesting? For instance, about the difficulty of automating other kinds of tasks? How about the task of AI research? Some thoughts here.

The Pentium FDIV bug was actually discovered by someone writing code to compute prime numbers.

Suggestions for Slytherin: Sun Tzu's Art of War and some Nietzsche, maybe The Will to Power?

Suggestion for Ravenclaw: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume.

The post seems to confuse the law of non-contradiction with the principle of explosion. To understand this point, it helps to know about minimal logic which is like intuitionistic logic but even weaker, as it treats ((false)) the same way as any other primitive predicate. Minimal logic rejects the principle of explosion as well as the law of the excluded middle (LEM, which the main post called TND).

The law of non-contradiction (LNC) is just . (In the main post this is called ECQ, which I believe is erroneous; ECQ should refer to the principle of explosion (especially the second form).) The principle of explosion is either or . These two forms are equivalent in minimal logic (due to the law of non-contradiction). As mentioned above, minimal logic has the law of non-contradiction, but not the principle of explosion, so this shows that they're not equivalent in every circumstance. Rejecting the principle of explosion (especially the second form) is the defining feature of paraconsistent logics (a class into which many logics fall). Some of these still have the validity of the law of non-contradiction. Anti-intuitionistic logic does not, because LNC is dual to LEM, which is invalid intuitionistically.

Ok, so I ended up taking a lot of time researching that nitpick so I could say it correctly. Anyway, I'm curious to see where this is going.

I feel like there's nothing I can say that will do justice to this tragedy, but it seems worse to say nothing.

Aaron was a hero, and the world will be a darker place without him.

I feel sad. I almost always cry when I feel death in near mode. I didn't know Aaron except for his glorious deeds and LW posts, but it still feels awful.

I feel guilty because there are many more people I can't cry for. Aaron was a cool guy, but so are all the other people who die every day.

I feel angry at the world for being so terrible and destroying one of us forever. Death is unacceptable. Let's stop this, OK?

I can attest by spot-checking for small N that even most mathematicians have not been exposed to this idea. It's the standard concept in mathematical logic, but for some odd reason, the knowledge seems constrained to the study of "mathematical logic" as a separate field, which not all mathematicians are interested in (many just want to do Diophantine analysis or whatever).

I'm surprised by this claim. Most mathematicians have at least some understanding of mathematical logic. What you may be encountering are people who simply haven't had to think about these issues in a while. But your use of Diophantine analysis, a subbranch of number theory, as your other example is a bit strange because number theory and algebra have become quite adept in the last few years at using model theory to show the existence of proofs even when one can't point to the proof in question. The classical example is the Ax-Grothendieck theorem, Terry Tao discusses this and some related issues here. Similarly , Mochizuki's attempted proof of the ABC conjecture (as I very roughly understand it) requires delicate work with models.

The explanation "number of partners" question is problematic right now. It reads "0 for single, 1 for monogamous relationship, >1 for polyamorous relationship" which makes it sound like you must be monogamous if you happen to have 1 partner. I am polyamorous, have one partner and am looking for more.

In fact, I started wondering if it really meant "ideal number of partners", in which case I'd be tempted to put the name of a large cardinal.

I continue to be surprised (I believe I commented on this last year) that under "Academic fields" pure mathematics is not listed on its own; it is also not clear to me that pure mathematics is a hard science; relatedly, are non-computer science engineering folk expected to write in answers?

There is no option for Associate's under degree earned, or even high school diploma. If we're not interested in the dropout rate that might be forgivable but at the least an Associate's or Trade degree is certainly not "none."

I'm fairly sure my family background qualifies as "nonreligious," this may be worth having as an option. (I don't even have weird religious uncles or anything like that.)

TYPO: Under "liberal," "moire redistribution."

I wonder how it would be if you asked instead "When should we say a statement is true?" instead of "What is truth?" and whether your classmates would think them the same (or at least closely related) questions.

I think the best esplanation for this behavior is that cryonics is essentially a religious funeral ritual.

Most people who get cryopreserved don't really expect, at a deep level, that it will extend their life, much like most believers in traditional religions don't really expect an afterlife in the otherworld or reincarnation (that's why they all fear death and generally try to postpone it as much as possible).

Professing belief in the religious tenets and performing the required rituals may provide some emotional solace as long as willing suspension of disbelief (self-deception, if you prefer) can be maintained. That might explain the lackluster interest in a potentially falsifying experiment: should it turn out that preserved brains are manifestly damaged, maintaing suspension of disbelief would become much more difficult.

Another typical function of religious beliefs and rituals is social signalling: they are a way for a community (transhumanists, in the case of cryonics) to and maintain and reinforce social cohesion.