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I can't tell if you are honestly trying to help or making fun of me. Although it is possible that it was the things that you mentioned, it feels like it would if I thought I saw an eagle in my backyard and you asked "are you sure it wasn't a pigeon?"
I was genuinely trying to be helpful. I apologise for lack of context/social skills. The fact that you said it was orange made me think of street lighting, and the v-shape of migrating birds.
Anyway, I googled and this explains what I meant:
"Birds
Individually and in flocks, birds can catch out the unwary. Many fuzzy, elliptical UFOs captured by chance on photographs have been attributed to birds flying unnoticed through the field of view just as the shutter was pressed.
Migrating flocks of birds can create UFO ‘formations’, particularly if lit up by streetlights at night.
As a boy, I was fooled by an orange UFO that zig-zagged over the roof of my parents’ house one night. Not until many years later did I realize that it must have been an owl lit up by sodium lighting, which was newly installed in our area at that time."
Was the sun setting? It could have been illuminating the underbellies of a flock of geese.
On second thoughts the sun would provide too much light, street lights maybe?
In response to
Undiscriminating Skepticism
I don't believe in UFOs.
To my own great embarrassment, I have experienced a "UFO sighting". It was in the late 1990s in Phoenix, Arizona. What I saw was 7 or 8 bright orbs in the shape of a triangle traveling very slowly over the Phoenix/Scottsdale area (which is why I thought it was a blimp at first). After about a minute and comparing it to a nearby mountain I decided that it couldn't possibly be a blimp. The length and width were way too large. Next, I thought that perhaps it was flares, but after watching it for about 10 more minutes was sure they they had either floated higher into the sky or stayed the same altitude and were still in the same configuration with respect to each other (an isosceles triangle).
Before my personal experience, I had assumed that the people on those ridiculous documentary shows on the Discovery Channel were simply fools or people suffering from a psychological illness. I wasn't the kind of person who believed in that stuff. The next day I started questioning if I even saw it (after all, I would probably has ridiculed someone who told me they saw such a thing the previous day). It must have been a mistake. A few months later, I rationalized it by telling myself that it had been a dream. This worked until my mother (who also saw it) reminded me about something that happened on that same day.
Was the sun setting? It could have been illuminating the underbellies of a flock of geese.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: February 2010
"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."
Steven W. Smith, The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing
In response to
Lesswrong UK planning thread
I'd come along to a meeting that took place in London centered around Less Wrong/ Overcoming Bias type topics.
To be honest, the more 'strongly' Transhumanist topics don't excite me too much, but I'd love a good conversation about rationality, ethics, the (non)meaning of life, etc...
I agree that a format based on a speaker and then discussion would lend itself to a more on-topic discussion. Alternatively, for some topics more than others, a 'book-club' type approach might work:
We could, for example, all read Mill or Bentham and then one could be designated to MC the event, get conversation going, pop the attendees out of any infinite conversational loops, provide cheesy-poofs, and other duties befitting a group of people who argue on the internet. (Perhaps the one suggesting the next topic/book could then take on the responsibility for the next meeting.)
Thoughts?
(Short-time reader, first time poster)
I think book discussions are an excellent idea, particularly for technical topics.
In response to
Lesswrong UK planning thread
Oxford is good for me, but London is fine. Anywhere with a whiteboard is going to cost money to book, so take that into account.
As far as I could tell, the multiplicity of AIs thing came from people objecting to hard takeoff scenarios, so that confusion should be soluble, given more time to explain the subject (Roko was packing a massive number of ideas into that talk.)
BTW, thanks for the reference to Hoffman. Looking at Hoffman's page about life assurance for non-US people it looks like for me cryonics is much, much more expensive than your estimates - he quotes $1500-$3000 a year. Talking to my friends reveals no cheaper options in the UK and big legal problems. I definitely will not be able to afford this barring a big change in my circumstances :(
This extrobrittania video contains some financial details about cryonics in the uk.
In response to
Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective
And they transpose the conditional! If a sample is likely given the hypothesis, it does not necessarily follow that the the hypothesis is likely given the sample. This always struck me as the most egregious failure of naive significance testing.
In response to
Open Thread: December 2009
(reposted from last month's open thread)
An interesting site I recently stumbled upon:
They have huge lists of biases, techniques, explanations, and other stuff, with short summaries and longer articles.
Here's the results from typing in "bias" into their search bar.
A quick search for "changingminds" in LW's search bar shows that noone has mentioned this site before on LW.
Is this site of any use to anyone here?
The conversion techniques page is fascinating. I'll put this to use good in further spreading the word of Bayes.
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d-CON is a brand of rat and mice killer products.
The obscurity of that rationalist pun is abayesing.