Can Gifto gift better versions of Gifto?

The link to the Chess Question solution is the same as that of the Space Complexity Question Solution video.

Thanks Yvain. Just took the survey, can't wait for the results!

Here's a good way of looking at the problem.

Presumably, there's going to be some variation with how the people are feeling. Given 3^^^3 people, this will mean that I can pretty much find someone under any given amount of pleasure/pain.

Suppose I find someone, Bob, with the same baseline happiness as the girl we're suggesting torturing, Alice. I put a speck of dust in his eye. I then find someone with this nigh infinitesimally worse baseline, Charlie, and do it again. I keep this up until I get to a guy, Zack, that, after putting the dust speck in his eye, is at the same happiness as the guy we would be torturing if he is tortured.

To put numbers on this:

Alice and Bob have a base pain of 0, Charlie has 1, Dianne has 2, ... Zack has 999,999,999,999. I then add one unit of pain to each person. Now Alice has 0, Bob has 1, Charlie has 2, ... Yaana has 999,999,999,999, Zack has 1,000,000,000,000. I could instead torture one person. Alice has 1,000,000,000,000, Bob has 0, Charlie has 1, ... Zack has 999,999,999,999. In other words, Bob has 0, Charlie has 1, Diane has 2, ... Zack has 999,999,999,999, Alice has 1,000,000,000,000.

It's the same numbers both ways -- just different people. The only way you could decide which is better is if you care more or less than average about Alice.

Of course, this is just using 1,000,000,000,000 of 3^^^3 people. Add in another trillion, and now it's like torturing two people. Add in another trillion, and it's worse still. You get the idea.

Requesting some help... I've just installed Python 2.7, however I am having trouble getting the ncurses library. When I try to run bsweep.py it just shows a command prompt that disappears.

I personally define mistakes as "faults". By this I mean that if a child has understanding of the maths subject in question, he or she should be able to do the question correctly. Thus, the mistake can be attributed to things such as sloppiness, inattentiveness, and so on.

On the other hand, errors, deviations from the correct answer, can happen for other reasons. Intuition, for one. A specific example is how humans perceive numbers logarithmically, that is, larger numbers spaced closer together. (eg: "million" and "billion" are both very large, but to the brain there is little difference).

Hello there,

I am a 16-year-old high school student in Vancouver, Canada. I discovered Less Wrong several months ago through HP:MoR, which deeply captured my interest. After finishing the then released chapters, I knew I wanted to learn more. Upon reading the sequences, I felt enlightened. I discovered a new way of thinking, of making decisions that would benefit myself and others more. I delved through articles and eventually started to use Anki, learning fallacies and cognitive biases. As a result, I am more mentally organized, I am doing better in school (especially in being able to express and back up opinions), and generally feeling that life makes more sense.

Much of my thinking has already been affected by my father, a teacher of Philosophy and Western politics (he teaches in China). By that I mean I've been introduced to quite a few well known problems of morals and paradoxes alike (Trolley Problem, Zeno, etc). I feel after discovering Less Wrong I am able to have a better view of these problems.

What I am most interested in are the subjects of math, logic, and computer programming. One of my personal goals is to help others understand rationality as well. Despite this, I occasionally dabble in the Dark Arts, but only within class debates (where you are, of course, expected to choose a side).

From Less Wrong, I hope to further develop my thinking, making better choices for myself, others, and helping others make better choices as well. From that, live a better life in general.