Misha, you are spectacularly awesome. =D

I mean, it's aggravating to see things you wrote and go, "But I SAID that! Was everyone just skimming over that part or what?", but as the aphorism runs in the DI world, "If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught", eh? :P

[And until one sees that aphorism as perfectly consistent with "logically faultless communication", one must know that one still hasn't understood the meaning of the technical term.]

I knew I'd make terribly stupid mistakes in miscommunicating this stuff when I started, so I figured it was time to let go of my fear of not having it be perfect in the first place and just start trying.

I should also make sure, when you say it was 1982, do you mean original publication, or that of the copy you got? The second (and most recent) edition is 1991.

Dunno offhand what's different. Never saw the older one myself.

:The German text of the taped police examination, each page corrected and approved by EIchmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist - provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann's heroic fight with the Germna language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of "winged words" (geflugelte Worte, a Gemran colloquialism of famous quotes from the classics) when we means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte....

Dimly aware of a defect that much have plagued him even in school, he apologized, saying "Officialese [Amtssprache] is my own language. But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche...

Eichmann's mind was filled to the brim with such statements.....his memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happen; the [reason], of course, was that Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but they did not necessarily correspond to the turning points in the Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with a lot of the turning points in the history....

But the point of the matter is that he had not forgotten a single one of his sentences that at one time or another had served to give him 'elation'. Hence, whenever, during the cross-examination, the judged tried to appeal to his conscience, they were met with 'elation,' and they were outrage and disconcerted when they learned that at his disposal he had a different elating cliche for each period of his life and each of his activities..." (Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, Chapter III)

Interesting. Very vivid insight into how the hacking was accomplished. A question I have from the outside looking in is about motivation, what makes people want to be poly in the first place?

Alicorn, you said that your primary motivation was MBlume. (Or generalized, 'a specific person.') MBlume, what was your primary motivation?

Other poly people please feel free to reply also.

Are you looking for Bayesian statistics in general or these specifics examples? My Bayesian statistics textbook recommendation is here.

Alan Turing used it to decode the German Enigma cipher and arguably save the Allies from losing the Second World War; the U.S. Navy used it to search for a missing H-bomb and to locate Soviet subs; RAND Corporation used it to assess the likelihood of a nuclear accident; and Harvard and Chicago researchers used it to verify the authorship of the Federalist Papers.

I haven't seen any explanation of how these kinds of things were done, including calculations. Eliezer's Intuitive Explanation is good, of course, but the examples are very basic. Anything that is notable, even if it's just a published paper, would (I presume) involve data sets and more complex calculations. Does anyone have any good links to complex examples where they actually go through the math and make it easy to follow?

(I would like to understand this better; plus my father, a molecular biologist, asked me to explain Bayes' Theorem and how to use it to him.)

Thank you. Is the style ok?

What specific concerns make you disagree with its feasibility?

Not feasible. Let's aim for a more modest goal, say, better PR and functional communities.

Moreover, not this community's comparative advantage. Why do we think we'd be any better than anyone else at running the world? And why wouldn't we be subject to free-riders, power-seekers, and rationalists-of-fortune if we started winning?

I discuss this in greater depth in this reply. I hope this clarifies my position! I don't believe that LW-majority-position is misogynistic, self-serving nihilism (probably something more along the lines of happy-fun-times-nihilism). I do think that some of these topics can be dangerous-like-politics, and that this danger manifests as I describe in the other post.

You are certainly correct as far as LDS is concerned, but I was thinking more along the lines of reformed religious communities whose social expectations are little more than "attend church every once and a while" and "send your kids to religious school."