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This seems highly exploitable.
Anyone here want to try to use these bogus numbers to get a publisher to market their own fanfiction?
In response to
Fifty Shades of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
I wrote what could best be described as a proto-rationalist Sailor Moon fanfic. Bear in mind that it's really old--I last worked on it around 2000 and it predates even HPMOR. It doesn't try to sell rationalism, but it has Sailor Moon do things that make sense. I never finished it but I got to the Doom Tree story. http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/fanfic.html
What do you mean by censorship here? Can you give examples?
They would not have pages about works that were primarily sexual, because the advertisers prohibited it.
I recall them deleting/jettisoning the "troper tales" (specifically, troper tales:fetish fuel) section of the site some time ago because some of the content was extremely disturbing.
(youtube search for people doing dramatic readings of them, some of them are pretty funny if you have a high cringe tolerance)
https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Troper_Tales
The fork decided not to bring the troper tales back, for just that reason.
In response to
Open thread, 9-15 June 2014
It was suggested I post here, but there's a TV Tropes fork at https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki . It uses mediawiki software and gets rid of the censorship at TV Tropes. (I suspect this one will never get rid of the strikeout tag for dubious reasons.)
It looks childish to me. its looks the same as x-treme.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XMakesAnythingCool
I guess its just me, and its of no real consequence. But it seems to trivialize such a serious subject as existential risk.
Since you invoked TV Tropes, there's a TV Tropes fork at https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/ . It gets rid of the censorship at TV Tropes and also uses mediawiki, which makes things work better--you have real categories, it is possible to edit sections, etc.
In response to
Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 4: What Causes Obesity?
And I can even imagine finding a case somewhere where a non-expert rationally arrived at the correct answer when 95% of the experts are wrong—though I've been unable to actually find such a case.
That's because you only looked at contemporary examples and demanded that the experts be unambiguously wrong. This process is going to fail because even if the expert consensus is wrong, it has at least had many smart people devote a lot of energy to rationalizing it.
Given that many people here are anime fans, I have an example, sort of. Back when Media Blasters had manufacturing errors that caused many of their disks to have mono audio, fans complained and Media Blasters claimed that their experts analyzed the disks and found nothing wrong with them.
Needless to say, the disks did have mono audio.
Of course, that's only sort of an example because it's just as likely that the company was simply lying about having consulted experts.
Given that the only indenting style 99%+ of programmers agree on is "the same style that the rest of the project uses", failing to adhere to the style used is a fairly egregious faux pas and possibly indicative of a disregard for standards and/or lack of attention to context within the program, raising red flags about possible bugs introduced by the patch.
In any case, the correct response would be to reformat your code (any sane code editor can do this with one command) and resubmit the patch.
The point is not that free software programmers specifically refuse to accept wrongly indented code, the point is that they often refuse to accept code based on wholly arbitrary reasons. Arguing that indentation really isn't an arbitrary reason is fighting the hypothetical; replace it in your mind with something that is.
There's also the "we won't accept this bug report unless it fits this list of arbitrary requirements" gambit (if you actually do manage to submit the bug report following all the requirements, it will still get ignored anyway, but doing it this way they can artificially deflate the number of unfixed bugs and blame things on the user for not following the directions)
Well, you don't have to throw one out. You could interpret the constraints (which are quoted correctly, btw) as narrowing the set of legitimate questions to those which Random can answer both truthfully and falsely with "da" or "ja". I'm not sure why Boolos would have that constraint in there unless it was to rule out the kind of solution you're proposing. Still, I agree the problem is clumsily phrased.
Maybe the question could be patched by adding the possibility that the gods (including Random) don't respond at all, but also changing Random's behavior from "randomly answers truthfully or falsely" to "randomly says either 'da', 'ja' or nothing". If you patch it in this way, I'm pretty sure a two-question solution isn't possible.
ETA: Also, I don't want to downplay the cleverness of your two-question solution. Whether or not it perfectly fulfills the constraints of the problem, it is still very nice.
The patched version requires three questions. In fact it requires asking three people--if you only ask two people any number of questions, Random could pretend that he is the other person and the other person is Random.
First of all, you need a question which lets you determine who any person B is, when asked of Truth.
You want to ask "if B is Truth, then yes, else if B is False, then no, else don't answer". Presumably, you can't directly ask someone not to answer--they can only refuse to answer if they are Random or if yes/no would violate constraints, so this comes out to "if B is Truth, then yes, else if B is False, then no, else tell me if your answer to this question is 'no'."
Then you modify this question so that it can be asked either of Truth or False. As before, adding "tell me if the answer to Y is the truthfulness of your answer to this question" will produce a correct answer to a yes/no question from either True or False, so you get "tell me, in the case that B is not Random, if the answer to "if B is Truth, then yes, else no" is the truthfulness of the answer to your question, and in the case that B is Random, if your answer to this question is the negation of the truthfulness of your answer to this question'".
You now have a question that can determine who one person is, when asked of either True or False.
(The version with da and ja is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Use that question to ask person 1 who person 3 is. Then use it to ask person 2 who person 3 is.
If 1 and 2 give the same answer, then they are either Truth or False giving an informative answer or Random imitating an informative answer. Either way you know the identity of 3, and you also know one non-Random person. Ask this non-Random person the question to find the identity of a second person, which gives you all three.
If 1 and 2 give different answers, then one of them is Random. In that case, you know that 3 is not Random, and you can ask 3 who 1 is. You now know the identity of 1, and you know whether 1 or 2 is Random; the non-Random one told you who 3 was, so you have the identity of 3 as well. This again gives you the identity of two people and so you have all three.
Nice! Although, as you mention, your two-question solution doesn't work given the constraints imposed by Boolos (or Smullyan). Still, very clever.
your two-question solution doesn't work given the constraints imposed by Boolos
If the above is quoted correctly, the constraints imposed by Boolos are contradictory. It is not possible that 1) Random always answers truthfully or falsely and 2) Random always answers "da" or "ja". So the fact that I had to throw out the latter constraint is of no import--since the constraints are contradictory, I had no choice but to throw one out.
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I know; I know; I know. This is exactly what makes this topic so frustratingly difficult to explain, and so convenient to ignore.
The thing I am trying to say is that if a real monster would come to this community, sufficiently intelligent and saying the right keywords, we would spend all our energy inventing alternative explanations. That although in far mode we admit that the prior probability of a monster is nonzero (I think the base rate is somewhere around 1-4%), in near mode we would always treat it like zero, and any evidence would be explained away. We would congratulate ourselves for being nice, but in reality we are just scared to risk being wrong when we don't have convincingly sounding verbal arguments on our side. (See Geek Social Fallacy #1, but instead of "unpleasant" imagine "hurting people, but only as much as is safe in given situation".) The only way to notice the existence of the monster is probably if the monster decides to bite you personally in the foot. Then you will realize with horror that now all other people are going to invent alternative explanations why that probably didn't happen, because they don't want to risk being wrong in a way that would feel morally wrong to them.
I don't have a good solution here. I am not saying that vigilantism is a good solution, because the only thing the monster needs to draw attention away is to accuse someone else of being a monster, and it is quite likely that the monster will sound more convincing. (Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.) Actually, I believe this happens rather frequently. Whenever there is some kind of a "league against monsters", it is probably a safe bet that there is a monster somewhere at the top. (I am sure there is a TV Tropes page or two about this.)
So, we have a real danger here, but we have no good solution for it. Humans typically cope with such situations by pretending that the danger doesn't exist. I wish we had a better solution.
https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hired_to_Hunt_Yourself