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It's absurd to die.
It's bs to die.
In response to
CFAR website launched
The "FAR" keeps pushing me into far mode and then the red color keeps pulling me back into near mode. It's like a Stroop task!
Bayesian reformulations welcome.
Apologies — I should have taken reinforcement into account and noted that the new algorithm is probably still a lot better than the previous one.
In response to
New "Best" comment sorting system
How do the "Best", "Popular", and "Top" algorithms work?
Ironically, it appears the new algorithm is frequentist.
In response to
Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers
The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere. Granted, this is very specialized knowledge available only to professional musicologists like myself and I doubt Beck's publisher can afford my consulting fees.
(I can just imagine the English scientists standing around wondering why this lunatic is inflicting this cacophony on them and looking at them so expectantly.)
I see it as being like the Chuck Berry scene in Back to the Future.
Similarly. My previous beliefs about Glen Beck points towards a devout Christian fundamentalist. I would not have considered the fact that he would support the singularity, much less take it seriously. It seems I have to update my beliefs quite a bit.
Beck is a Mormon, and Mormons generally seem a lot friendlier to transhumanist-type ideas than standard Christians.
In response to
Open Thread, June 1-15, 2012
Post some insightful, LW-relevant image macros.
Yes, if we have large populations of "all-in bettors" and Kelly bettors, then as the number of bets increase the all-in bettors lead in total wealth increases exponentially, while the probability of an all-in bettor being ahead of a Kelly bettor falls exponentially. And as you go to infinity the wealth multiplier of the all-in bettors goes to infinity, while the probability of an all-in bettor leading a Kelly bettor goes to zero. And that was the originally cited reasoning.
Now, one might be confused by the "beats any other constant bankroll allocation (but see the bottom paragraph) with probability 1" and think that it implies "bettors with this strategy will make more money on average than those using other strategies," as it would in a finite case if every bettor using one strategy did better than any bettor using any other strategy.
But absent that confusion, why favor probability of being ahead over wealth unless one has an appropriate utility function? One route is log utility (for which Kelly is optimal), and I argued against it as psychologically unrealistic, but I agree there are others. Bounded utility functions would also prefer the Kelly outcome to the all-in outcome in the infinite limit, and are more plausible than log utility.
Also, consider strategies that don't allocate a constant proportion in every bet, e.g. first do an all-in bet, then switch to Kelly. If the first bet has a 60% chance of tripling wealth and a 40% chance of losing everything, then the average, total, and median wealth of these mixed-strategy bettors will beat the Kelly bettors for any number of bets in a big population. These don't necessarily come to mind when people hear loose descriptions of Kelly.
Sure, I don't see anything here to disagree with.
Well, the goal is to predict your personal observations, in MWI you have huge wavefunction on which you need to somehow select the subjective you. The predictor will need code for this, whenever you call it mechanism or not. Furthermore, you need to actually derive Born probabilities from some first principles somehow if you want to make a case for MWI. Deriving those, that's what would be interesting, actually making it more compact (if the stuff you're adding as extra 'first principles' is smaller than collapse). Also, btw, CI doesn't have any actual mechanism for collapse, it's strictly a very un-physical trick.
Much more interestingly, Solomonoff probability hints that one should try really to search for something that would predict beyond probability distributions. I.e. search for objective collapse of some kind. Other issue: QM actually has problem at macroscopic scale, it doesn't add up to general relativity (without nasty hacks), so we are matter of factly missing something, and this whole issue is really silly argument over nothing as what we have is just a calculation rule that happens to work but we know is wrong somewhere anyway. I think that's the majority opinion on the issue. Postulating a zillion worlds based on known broken model would be tad silly. I think basically most physicists believe neither in collapse as in CI (beyond believing its a trick that works) nor believe in many worlds, because forming either belief would be wrong.
The problem of locating "the subjective you" seems to me to have two parts: first, to locate a world, and second, to locate an observer in that world. For the first part, see the grandparent; the second part seems to me to be the same across interpretations.
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POST IDEA- Feedback Wanted
When these gender discussions come up, I am often tempted to write in with my own experiences and desires. But I generally don't because I don't want to generalize from one example, or claim to be the Voice of Women, etc. However, according to the last survey, I actually AM over 1% of the females on here, and so is every other woman. (i.e. there are less than 100 of us).
My idea is to put out a call for women on LessWrong to write openly about their experiences and desires in this community, and send them to me. I will anonymize them all, and put them all up under one post.
This would have a couple of benefits, including:
Anonymity allows for open expression- When you are in the vast minority, speaking out can feel like "swimming upstream," and so may not happen very much.
Putting all the women's responses in one posts helps figure out what is/is not a problem- Because of the gender ratio, most discussions on the topic are Men Talking About what Women Want, it can be hard to figure out what women are saying on the issues, versus what men are saying women say.
The plural of anecdote is data- If one woman says X, it is an anecdote, and very weak evidence. If 10% of women say X, it is much stronger evidence.
Note that with a lot of the above issues, one of the biggest problems in figuring out what is going on isn't purposeful misogyny or anything. Just the fact that the gender ratio is so skewed can make it difficult to hear women (think picking out one voice amongst ten). The idea I'm proposing is an attempt to work around this, not an attempt to marginalize men, who may also have important things to say, but would not be the focus of this investigation.
Even with a sample size of 10 responses (approximately the amount I would say is needed for this to be useful), according to the last survey, that is 10% of the women on this site. A sizable proportion, indeed.
Please give feedback, if you think this is a good or bad idea, and if you are a woman (or transgendered person, or female-identifying, or...etc), if you would participate. I will only run this experiment if a) people want it, and b) women will respond.
There's already the option of doing this through alternate accounts.