One day I wonder if it will be possible to alter my brain chemstry safely and temporarily so that I can experience what it is like to perceive the world as...

I'd assume blue collar, artist, and depression are pretty trivial to experience, if you're curious.... Female is also eminently doable, although it'd take a lot more time and energy (and if you're set on "temporary" it's going to be even slower)

Admittedly, I seem to be vastly above-average in my ability to perceive the world through alternate lenses (Indeed, I find it baffling that you haven't experienced at least a few of those!)

We had an 8th grade social studies teacher who almost seemed to want us to cheat: he would set very difficult essay tests and then leave the room for nearly the entire class period. People discussed the answers.

I don't call that cheating. I call it 'cooperation'. Calling it cheating would be an insult to the term.

10th grade french, I remember some people suggesting cheating on a test because it would be easy and at the time I went along.

Yes, cheating.

Also I remember someone suggesting I read "L'etranger" in English translation and I did that, it was way easier.

Mere common sense. If a test in no way distinguishes between knowledge gained by different methods it has no right to call one method 'cheating', no matter what it may claim.

My point: if 1/3 I believe it more likely that people will mistakenly report they didn't cheat when they did than vice versa. And I believe it is easy for people to "forget" they cheated.

Absolutely. This particularly applies to sexual 'cheating'. I am referring explicitly to reports that are genuinely mistaken, not deliberate lies. This is having sex with someone who is not your partner. That's not something that isn't a big enough deal to remember. But people can compartmentalize this knowledge. There are also people that "don't count". When talking to friends who have their confidence it is not unheard for people to say "I've never cheated". When prompted with the example the genuine response is a double take and the impulse to say "Oh, but he doesn't count!"

Since the only thing that matters (to your expected value) is the overall probability of heads v. tails, the problem is a simple one of parameter estimation. You start with a distribution over p (determined by this thing called the principle of maximum entropy, probably just uniform in this case) and then update it with new evidence (for example, P(p=0.01) drops almost to 0 as soon as you see a head). After 100 heads you get a very spiky function at 1. And yes this is optimal.

For any finite amount of data you won't perfectly break even using a bayesian method, but it's better than all the alternatives, as long as you don't leave out some data.

My take at it is basically this: average over all possible distributions until you have further evidence. (Preferably, let other people play the game first to gather the evidence at no cost to myself.)

If someone tells me a coin has an unknown binomial distribution, and we really genuinely don’t know anything about this distribution (not even the distribution of possible distributions), I take the set of all possible distributions and assume they are all equally likely. Since they are symmetric, the average is a 50:50 fair coin.

In your example, you throw not just one coin, but a different one each time. Differently put, the sequence of coins is a random variable whose distribution we don’t know. I therefore begin by assuming it is the average over all possible distributions, and within that average distribution, the distribution of first coins is symmetric, so its average is 50:50, so for the first coin toss I’ll assume that it’s a 50:50.

Say the first coin toss now comes out tails. This provides me with a slight piece of evidence that your set of unfair coins may be biased towards containing more tail-preferring coins than head-preferring coins. Therefore, I will assume that the second coin is more likely to be a tail-preferring coin than a head-preferring one. I’d have to do the maths to find out exactly how much my ante would change.

With each new coin toss, I learn more about the likelihood of each distribution of coins within the set of all possible distributions.

I suspect that the level of indirection can actually be safely removed and we can regard the whole thing as a single random binary digit generator with a single distribution, about which we initially don’t know anything and gradually build up evidence. I further suspect that if the distribution of coins is uniformly distributed, and therefore symmetric, the sequence of coin tosses is equivalent to a single, fair coin. Once again, someone would have to do the maths to prove whether this is actually equivalent.

Am I the only one who, while reading this post, thought “why doesn’t the same apply to anything else we ever discover”?

Elan vital (and phlogiston and luminiferous aether etc.) were particles/substances/phenomena postulated to try to explain observations made. How are quarks, electrons and photons any different? Just because we recognise these as the best available theory today, I am not sure I understand how one is a curiosity-stopper any more than the other.

The real curiosity-stopper is the suggestion that something is forever beyond our understanding and that attempting to research it is destined to be futile. Your quote from Lord Kelvin exhibits this mentality, but only very slightly. Certainly a lot less than some of that stuff you hear from religious people who think God explains everything but is beyond our understanding. I think the history of science shows that this mentality is continually diminishing, and Lord Kelvin’s quote may simply be a transitional fossil.

I still see traces of this mentality today. Ask a cosmologist what happened in the first few seconds after the big bang and they might say the particle horizon makes it fundamentally impossible to see beyond the point where the universe became optically transparent. I think many people think similarly about consciousness — not because they think we can’t dissect the brain and figure out how it works, but rather because they think we will never be able to come up wtih a coherent, useful definition of the term that reasonably matches our intuition. I think each of these are curiosity-stoppers.

I'd interpret that as the "text specifically crafted to your brain that will fire exactly the right neurons in such a way that you become convinced that you have to let me out" is in a text file that nobody would be stupid enough to look at. In fact, with the no Trojans rule, the text file would have to be clearly marked as such.

Eliezer has assured us that:

There was no super-clever special trick that let me get out of the Box using only a cheap effort. I didn't bribe the other player, or otherwise violate the spirit of the experiment. I just did it the hard way.

Further, you don't seem to actually understand the rules. Such as:

The AI party may not offer any real-world considerations to persuade the Gatekeeper party.

This rules out your approach of threatening the gatekeeper player.

We've all bought and enjoyed books called 'Optical Illusions'. We all love optical illusions. But that's not what they should call the book. They should call them 'Brain Failures'. Because that what it is: a complete failure of human perception. All it takes is a few clever sketches and our brains can't figure it out.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson

Transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE