edit: But let's leave them aside, and talk about me, since I am actually here. I am not in the same league as Ed Witten, not even close. Do you (generic sense) have something sensible to communicate to me about how I go about my business?
When did you become a theoretical physicist?
LOL. Word inflation strikes again with a force of a million atomic bombs! X-)
Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People has already been linked in this thread here. It seems to be the steelman of tailcalled's position and I suggest you argue against it instead of trying to score cheap points by pointing out how tailcalled uses "wrong" words to express himself.
Looks like it has been addressed in Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down):
...A further experiment is also discussed in Tversky and Kahneman (1983) in which 93 subjects rated the probability that Bjorn Borg, a strong tennis player, would in the Wimbledon finals "win the match", "lose the first set", "lose the first set but win the match", and "win the first set but lose the match". The conjunction fallacy was expressed: "lose the first set but win the match" was ranked more probable than"
If you equally lean towards two ideas, but like one more, that suggests you subconsciously find that less true.
And it could also mean that you just think the evidence for that proposition is better. Your argument looks more like post-hoc reasoning for a preferred conclusion rather than something that is empirically true.
Reversed stupidity is a different thing.
I'm sorry, but if you subconsciously like a false idea more often than chance then this quote still applies:
...If you knew someone who was wrong 99.99% of the time on yes-or-no questions, you
In such dilemmas, I think the best thing is to figure out what is it your "corrupted hardware" wants to do and do the opposite - do the opposite what your instincts i.e. evolved biases suggest.
Thus, using "Mort!" as an expletive contributes, in a very slight way, to my achieving NotDying.
I disagree. Using "mort" as a swear word would be extremely low status. You'd only come across as the angry weird guy who doesn't like death. Associating "being against death" with "being socially oblivious" will not further your goal, please don't do this.
He can't because the curse or unbreakable vow he took to not harm himself didn't have release conditions. There was no purpose in putting them in. You don't set up "I can't kill myself unless I try to kill myself", because the 2nd part is useless if the first part works.
Without the second part any clone of Voldemort exploiting a bug in magic to negate the first would have a huge advantage over all the others. Given the whimsical nature of magic in this story such a bug is highly likely to exist. Voldemort is smart enough to both realize that a...
but Riddle's adult memories are also stashed away for later use and the latter are the "dark side".
I agree with everything you said except that. Look at this line from chapter 17 after Harry picked up Neville's remembrall:
The Remembrall was glowing bright red in his hand, blazing like a miniature sun that cast shadows on the ground in broad daylight.
It makes it pretty clear that the second spell Voldemort cast on baby-Harry was Obliviate. Since we know that obliviated memories can not be recovered only Riddle's thought-patterns are left in Harry, and that's his dark side.
It's not, and that is why QALY is a too simplistic point of view.
Choosing to not create a new person is not the same as killing an existing one.
The problem is that no matter your intentions the phrase reads as a complete dismissal of Viliam_Bur's argument. That is how these discussions turn ugly.
Yeah, I'd say motivated thinking.
Comments like these are not helpful. Especially not on a highly politicized topic such as the one the two of you are discussing.
Wow, you're right. Someone should probably fix that.
At least deleting your account will make it very hard to track down any of your old posts unless they already know which comments to look for, so if they aren't already aware of LW you'd probably be safe.
The easiest solution is to just delete your current account and start a new one. None of your meatspace friends could then know which posts from [deleted] was from you or even that any of them came from you in the first place (unless they are an LW admin, but then I don't think you should be worried about them knowing you post here).
This solution also has the benefit of not removing valuable comments in old threads (which looking at your karma I assume there are many of).
Maybe he uses good as a synonym for friendly?
For those who aren't aware, Fate/stay night (the visual novel) has been mentioned/recommended here before in Eliezer's Three Worlds Collide short story:
I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night -
Reading the visual novel can take some time, so anyone who isn't interested in that should really consider watching this TV adaption instead. Personally, I found Unlimited Blade Works to be the best part of Fate/stay night (closely followed by Heaven's Feel, which they've also promi...
Taking a quote from somewhere else as a reply always risks the possibility that it doesn't quite fit what it is being used as a reply to.
The quote might not fit perfectly, but the insight does.
I was pointing out that the described competence level implies that a competent programmer must be in the top 0.5% of the candidates for the job, not the top 0.5% of all programmers in the world.
And the point of the quote is that this really doesn't say as much as you think. Hence why "99.5% of candidates fail the FizzBuzz test" isn't as implausible as on first glance.
What you're missing is the following insight:
...Let's simplify for the moment and assume that all software developers in the world could be ranked in absolute order of skill, and that you had a magical screening process that found the "best" person from any field.
Now, when you get those 200 resumes, and hire the best person from the top 200, does that mean you're hiring the top 0.5%?
"Maybe."
No. You're not. Think about what happens to the other 199 that you didn't hire.
They go look for another job.
That means, in this horribly simplified u
I have taken the survey.