= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I'm enjoying these posts.
you do get to decide whether or not to perceive it as a complement or an insult.
compliment
dieties
believed
In response to
Ephemeral correspondence
In response to
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113
Re-reading the story, this made me smirk in light of recent revelations:
Harry scowled at her. "Fine, I won't bite anyone who doesn't bite me first."
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113
Harry should trick Voldemort into biting him, and then use his new freedom to bite him back.
(I think sphexish is Dawkins, not Hofstadter.)
Hofstadter uses it heavily in Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1979 as the metaphor for things that are unable to Jump Out Of The System. Dawkins only had The Selfish Gene out by then, and The Selfish Gene wasn't really about algorithmic rigidity.
In response to
[Link] Algorithm aversion
Real world example.
Years ago, I worked at a company which made a machine to screen pap smear slides. Granted, that much of the insanity in health care is about regulatory power, law, and money, but even so, people were just weird about algorithmic screening.
The machine was much more accurate than the great mass of labs in the country.
But no matter how accurate automated screening was when compared to manual screening, there was always such a tizzy about any algorithmic faults. The fact that manual screening produces many more such faults was simply glossed over. Human faults were invisible and accepted, machine faults were a catastrophe.
From that Future of Life conference: if self-driving cars take over and cut the death rate from car accidents from 32000 to 16000 per year, the makers won't get 16000 thank-you cards -- they'll get 16000 lawsuits.
In response to
[Link] Algorithm aversion
Like other commenters already pointed out, algorithms are scary because they always fail hard. Humans fail, but can recover. Hofstadter's terms seem useful here. Humans can notice or be made to notice that something isn't right and jump out of the system of the basic diagnostic procedure. All the algorithms we currently have are sphexish and will forever remain in their initial framework even when things go wrong.
Yes, that's the point.
(I think sphexish is Dawkins, not Hofstadter.)
In response to
In memory of Leonard Nimoy, most famous for playing the (straw) rationalist Spock, what are your top 3 ST:TOS episodes with him?
I hate to spoil the mood for nerd grieving and geek hermeneutics, but Star Trek made a certain kind of sense in the late 1960's (nearly 50 years ago!) when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had real space programs which tried to do new things, one after another. But because astronautics has regressed since then, despite all accelerationist propaganda you hear from transhumanists, this genre of mythological framework for thinking about "the future" makes less and less sense. Given the failure of the "space age," would people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality, bother to watch these ancient shows and obsess over the characters?
In response to
comment
by
on
In memory of Leonard Nimoy, most famous for playing the (straw) rationalist Spock, what are your top 3 ST:TOS episodes with him?
I think it's a bit of a leap to go from NASA being under-funded and unambitious in recent years to "people 50 years from now, in a permanently Earth-bound reality".
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103
This Pythagorean theorem hypothesis is the best I have, but it's not all that likely. I'd expect some foreshadowing about right triangles if it were true, but I see none. Does anyone have alternative hypotheses as to why Harry said "I'm not having anyone Obliviate everything I know about calculus"?
In response to
comment
by
on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103
Not sure if it's in HPMOR but the symbol for the deadly hallows contains two right triangles.
EDIT err, deathly, I guess. I don't seem to be a trufan.
Maybe tell me why I should? My time is valuable.
I'm afraid I won't have time to give you more help. There's a short summary of each sequence under the link at the top of the page, so it won't take you forever to see the relevance.
EDIT: you're wondering elsewhere in the thread why you're not being well received. It's because your post doesn't make contact with what other people have thought on the topic.
View more: Next
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
After reading the story at the beginning, I thought "huh, this teacher seems rather low-level for a teacher". I also thought that back when I was first getting into LW, a depiction of that level as the highest level would not have encouraged me to explore further.
I was more pleased with the bit at the end.
At some point, it might be worth making a few versions of this story which illustrate some of the trickier techniques, with the urn lady trying exploit specific biases. If a short story like that illustrated a bias well enough to trick the reader right up until the reveal, and the reveal were written so that the reader could believably learn to think in such a way as to catch it, I think that would really help convince newcomers that there's material here worth studying.
Also "the teacher smiled"? Damn your smugness, teacher!