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Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
- Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
- Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
- If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
- Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
- Somewhere deep in the microtubules inside an out-of-the-way neuron somewhere in the basal ganglia of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain, there is a little XML tag that says awesome.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is the Muhammad Ali of one-boxing.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is a 1400 year old avatar of the Aztec god Aixitl.
- The game of "Go" was abbreviated from "Go Home, For You Cannot Defeat Eliezer Yudkowsky".
- When Eliezer Yudkowsky gets bored, he pinches his mouth shut at the 1/3 and 2/3 points and pretends to be a General Systems Vehicle holding a conversation among itselves. On several occasions he has managed to fool bystanders.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky has a swiss army knife that has folded into it a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, an instance of AIXI which Eliezer once beat at tic tac toe, an identical swiss army knife, and Douglas Hofstadter.
- If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is not a fact about the phenomenon; it just means I am not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for induction or deduction. He has perfected the undiluted master art of duction.
- There was no ice age. Eliezer Yudkowsky just persuaded the planet to sign up for cryonics.
- There is no spacetime symmetry. Eliezer Yudkowsky just sometimes holds the territory upside down, and he doesn't care.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for doctors. He has implemented a Universal Curing Machine in a system made out of five marbles, three pieces of plastic, and some of MacGyver's fingernail clippings.
- Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
If you know more Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, post them in the comments.
The Wrath of Kahneman
Cass Sunstein, David Schkade, and Daniel Kahneman, in a 1999 paper named Do People Want Optimal Deterrence, write:
Previous research suggests that people’s judgments about punitive damage awards are a reflection of outrage at the defendant’s actions rather than of deterrence. This is not to say that people do not care about deterrence; of course they do. Our hypothesis here is that they do not attempt to promote optimal deterrence; for this reason they do not make the kinds of distinctions that are obvious, even secondnature, for those who study deterrence questions. Above all, they may not believe that in order to ensure optimal deterrence, the amount that a given defendant is required to pay should be increased or decreased depending on the probability of detection, a central claim in the economic analysis of law.
If we're after optimal deterrence, we should punish potentially harmful actions more if they're hard to detect, or else the expected disutility of the punishment is too small. But apparently this does not accord with people's sense of justice.
Does this mean we should change our sense of justice? And should we apply optimal deterrence theory to informal social rewards and punishments, such as by getting angrier at antisocial behaviors that we learned of by (what the wrongdoer thought was) a freak coincidence?
Lies and Secrets
My intuition says presenting bad facts or pieces of reasoning is wrong, but withholding good facts or pieces of reasoning is less wrong. I assume most of you agree.
This is a puzzle, because on the face of it, the effect is the same.
Suppose the Walrus and the Carpenter are talking of whether pigs have wings.
Scenario 1: The Carpenter is 80% sure that pigs have wings, but the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus claims that it's a deep principle of evolution theory that no animal can have wings, and the Carpenter updates to 60%.
Scenario 2: The Carpenter is 60% sure that pigs have wings, and the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus neglects to mention that he once saw a picture of a winged pig in a book. Learning this would cause the Carpenter to update to 80%, but he doesn't learn this, so he stays at 60%.
In both scenarios, the Walrus chose for the Carpenter's probability to be 60% when he could have chosen for it to be 80%. So what's the difference?
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