*yudkowskily

A lot of math and physics definitions feel like they have weird dross. Examples:

• The Gamma function has this -1 I don't understand
• The Riemann Zeta function ζ(s) negates s for reasons beyond me
• cosine seems more primitive than sine
• The gravitational constant looks like off by a factor of 4π
• π seems like half the size it should be

After years of confusion, I was finally vindicated about π. That π is not 6.2831853071... is mostly a historical accident. Am I "right" about these other definitions being "wrong"? What are other mathematical entities are defined in ugly ways for historical reasons?

Avoiding trivial inconveniences that effectively discourage wider participation?

I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.

I meant Wikipedia. I've actually never heard the phrase applied to any other wiki. It's certainly not original to me.

While an appealing hypothesis, if that were the case I would expect roughly the same percentage for the general public. The wiki of a million lies suggests the actual rate for the general public is in the low single digits.

I think the computer games result has to do with it being a bad question. There are many legitimate answers depending on how you interpret the question, including my answer that Minesweeper sells as a bundle with Windows and thus has probably sold more copies than anything else.

Yayy! I was having a shitty day, and seeing these results posted lifted my spirits. Thank you for that! Below are my assorted thoughts:

I'm a little disappointed that the correlation between height and P(supernatural)-and-similar didn't hold up this year, because it was really fun trying to come up with explanations for that that weren't prima facie moronic. Maybe that should have been a sign it wasn't a real thing.

The digit ratio thing is indeed delicious. I love that stuff. I'm surprised there wasn't a correlation to sexual orientation, though, since I seem to recall reading that that was relatively well-supported. Oh well.

WTF was going on with the computer games question? Could there have been some kind of widespread misunderstanding of the question? In any case, it's pretty clearly poorly-calibrated Georg, but the results from the other questions are horrendous enough on their own.

On that subject, I have to say that even more amusing than the people who gave 100% and got it wrong are the people who put down 0% and then got it right -- aka, really lucky guessers :P

Congrats to the Snicket fan!

This was a good survey and a good year. Cheers!

From what I understand, there is a debate in epistemology / philosophy of science regarding the concept of simplicity ("Occam's Razor"). Some hold that there is a justifiable basis for the concept in the sense that it is an indicator of which of a set of possible theories is more likely to be true. Others dispute this and say that there is no justified basis for simplicity arguments in this sense.

In a recent conversation I made the following assertion (more or less):

Those who say that simplicity arguments are unjustified are actually saying that we can never really know the truth about any theory at all, since there are always an infinite number of alternative and more complex theories that account equally for the data. The best we can do is to falsify a theory (as Karl Popper proposed), but beyond that we can never say anything about whether a theory is true.

So (I said), we have only one of two choices. We can either allow for simplicity arguments, or we can give up on ever saying anything positive about the truth (beyond falsifying a few of the infinite possible theories).

Is this correct?

Do we have a catalog of Not Less Wrong rationality guides?

I know we have the list of rationality blogs, but I'm asking about a collection of material that educates at an entry level of formalized rationality but sits at lower inferential distances that the sequences.