Comment author: meanerelk 19 October 2011 05:43:14AM 3 points [-]

I am looking forward to the API. I am much more likely to continually use Beeminder if it can be automatically updated or, failing that, updated easily from a mobile device. The site is actually OK (not great) to navigate with a phone, but typing updates is not that easy.

Thanks for the hard work. Beeminder looks like a great tool.

Comment author: Constant2 23 October 2007 01:40:08AM 9 points [-]

The young seem especially vulnerable to accepting whatever they are told. Santa Claus and all that, but also any nonsense fed to them by their schools. Schools for the young are particularly effective instruments for indoctrinating a population. In contrast, the old tend to be quite a bit more resistant to new claims - for better and for worse.

An evolutionary explanation for this is fairly easy to come up with, I think. Children have a survival need to learn as much as they can as quickly as they can, and adults have a vital role as their teachers. In their respective roles, it is best for adults to be unreceptive to new claims, so that their store of knowledge remains a reliable archive of lessons from the past, and it is best for the young to accept whatever they are told without wasting a lot of time questioning it.

Comment author: meanerelk 02 March 2010 02:08:38AM *  18 points [-]

It is too easy to come up with a just so story like this. How would you rephrase it to make it testable?

Here is a counterstory:

Children have a survival need to learn only well-tested knowledge; they cannot afford to waste their precious developmental years believing wrong ideas. Adults, however, have already survived their juvenile years, and so they are presumably more fit. Furthermore, once an adult successfully reproduces, natural selection no longer cares about them; neither senescence nor gullibility affect an adult's fitness. Therefore, we should expect children to be skeptical and adults to be gullible.

In response to Why Quantum?
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 June 2008 07:41:50PM 5 points [-]

Yes, I know and knew perfectly well that a linear operator separates out the eigenvectors, multiplies each one by a scalar eigenvalue, and puts them back together again. But I thought that was supposed to be physically happening to the wavefunction. Not that it was a math trick developed for extracting the average of the eigenvalues when you took the operated-on wavefunction's dot-product with the pre-operated-on wavefunction.

The quantum physics textbooks I read were happy to define linear operator-ness in great gory detail, but they never actually came out and said, "This is not something physically happening to the wavefunction. We are just using this math trick to extract an average value."

Why would they say it? After all, quantum physics is meaningless. The wavefunction doesn't really exist. All you can do is memorize certain math tricks that make predictions. All the math tricks are on an equal footing; it's not that some are physical and some aren't.

So I would stare at the operators and their definitions, trying to figure out what was physically happening, until finally - I think while looking at the "position operator" - I realized it was a math trick, not an event description.

I haven't felt so indignant since I realized why the area under the curve was the antiderivative, and realized that at least two different calculus textbooks neglected to mention this in favor of elaborate formal definitions.

Comment author: meanerelk 27 October 2009 01:51:01AM 10 points [-]

The quantum physics textbooks I read were happy to define linear operator-ness in great gory detail, but they never actually came out and said, "This is not something physically happening to the wavefunction. We are just using this math trick to extract an average value."

I think is is a common problem for many mathematical conventions in physics.

The same thing happened be me in high school physics. I was confused by the torque vector, and I spent an entire year thinking that somehow rotation causes a force perpendicular to the plane of motion. I just could not visualize what the heck was going on.

Finally I realized the direction of the torque vector is an arbitrary convenience. My teacher and textbook both neglected to explain why it works like that.

The "why's" are important!

Comment author: ellenjanuary 22 October 2009 09:38:28PM 0 points [-]

Don't mind me. I just found "Less Wrong" recently, and I'm here to learn things. I say that this is a great post as it makes me think. I've yet to find the directions to this place to know if any "higher purpose" is idealized, or if conducting electricity into thought is its own reward.

I'm an artist, and believe that any two given individuals will not share an identical color perception. For that reason, I have argued in the past that color did not exist until the widespread use of the computer. Rather than debate teal, blue, or green, I could just use a hexadecimal.

I'm also a mathematician. (Not necessarily a very good nor learned one, but since it is oft defined that mathematics is what mathematicians are doing, I qualify. :) ) I was looking into the Continuum Hypothesis because I've always had issues with infinity and transcendental numbers. For instance, pi is said to be transcendental as it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers; yet, in a sense, is the ratio of two numbers - the circumference over the diameter. This got me to thinking about numbers as mere concepts. Numbers that we count on our fingers and toes have a greater "reality" than such oddballs as radical two and i, yet those oddballs seem to me much more useful.

Is conception so very cluttered? I think so. I imagined creating a set of numbers (the stupid number set) that were just one, two, three - got to thinking of forming axiom and method - and lo and behold! How much geometry did they sneak into my pure mathematics?

I'm currently waiting to get the funding for a complete collection of graduate-level mathematics textbooks to informally "finish my degree" as it were (because I'm not supposed to be a "mathematical theorist" as a forty-one year old former construction worker, but the whole world may be wrong and I may be right ;) ) and I mention this here because I believe this very post set me off a week ago. What I know of QM I could probably fit in a spoon, but from here to a single night of learning stuff; to drawing a picture the next day - and now I know I must learn a whole bunch of math. Because now I "believe" in quantum decoherence.

So! Even if I'm not helping you, you've helped me. Thank you.

Comment author: meanerelk 23 October 2009 04:26:23AM 6 points [-]

I'm an artist, and believe that any two given individuals will not share an identical color perception.

Being an artist has nothing to do with the accuracy of this belief.

I've always had issues with infinity and transcendental numbers. For instance, pi is said to be transcendental as it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers; yet, in a sense, is the ratio of two numbers - the circumference over the diameter.

There are two problems here. First, irrational numbers are the ones that cannot be expressed as a fraction of integers. Transendentals are defined as numbers that are not algebraic. All transcendental numbers are irrational, but the converse does not hold.

Second, pi is defined as the ratio of circumference to diameter, true. This would only be a contradiction if both the circumference and diameter could be integers at the same time, which is impossible.

This got me to thinking about numbers as mere concepts. Numbers that we count on our fingers and toes have a greater "reality" than such oddballs as radical two and i, yet those oddballs seem to me much more useful.

You are confused about what numbers actually are. Some classes of numbers are useful for certain tasks, but there is no sense in which one class is more 'real' than another. I recommend Mathematics, Queen & Servant of Science by Eric Temple Bell for a wonderful overview of mathematics. Chapter 2, "Mathematical Truth", is relevent to this discussion. Also, see Godel, Escher, Bach, Chapter 11: "Meaning and Form in Mathematics".