All of A113's Comments + Replies

I’m in the same boat. I don’t have anything against music, but never derived pleasure from it like other people seemed to. I’ve enjoyed particular songs, e.g. stuff from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, because I can enjoy cleverness and humor and a lot of songs have content that is clever or funny. But the music itself is background at best.

What I feel when listening to Bach isn't what someone else feels about a song they dislike; more like what you feel about an overheard conversation with nothing to do with you. Or a speech on an issue you don't care about. I have tried to change this, because of utilitarianism, but it turns out it's hard.

0MrMind
In my very limited understanding of classical music, I get that Bach's music is quite difficult to follow and very rational, not very emotional. Have you tried Haydn or Mozart? You might get a better mileage...

I think the obvious solution is basically this, with a Time-Turning involved. The troll could be real, or not (probably is). The hardest part about changing the past is faking the evidence including memories, but with a False-Memory Charm that becomes trivial. Memory charm Harry and possibly Dumbledore as well, depending on whether he objects "but I remember feeling a student die." They won't do it this way because it's too finger snap-ish and not dramatic enough, but if it's not at least addressed then I will allege a holding of the Idiot Ball.

H... (read more)

I usually use the phrase "only literally."

This post, the first section especially, is likely to contribute to me intentionally changing my behavior for consequentialist reasons. Upvoted.

I heard a speaker claim that the frequency of names in the Gospels matches the list of most popular names in the time and place they are set, not the time and place they are accepted to have been written in. I hadn't heard this argument before and couldn't think of a refutation. Assuming his facts are accurate, is this a problem?

8gwern
A problem for what? It's not much evidence for a historical-realist-literalist viewpoint, because the usual mythicist or less-literal theories generally believe that the original stories would have gotten started around the time they are set in, and so could be expected to mimick the name distribution of the setting, and keep the mimicking (while warping and evolving in many other ways) until such time as they are compiled by a scribe and set down into a textual form. Few think that Gospels were made up out of whole cloth in 300 AD and hence having versimiltude (names matching 30s AD) is a surprising feature and evidence against the whole-cloth theory. Generally, both believers and mythicists think some stories and myths and sayings and parables got started in the 30s+ AD and passed down and eventually written down, possibly generations later, at various points like the 90s AD; what they disagree on is how much the oral transmission and disciples affected things and what the origin was.

Apparently selection is still ongoing: I got an email today saying they're sending me the kit. What kind of information should I expect when the results come back? I've never been genotyped before, so I don't know if this will be telling me stuff I already know, listing risk factors for diseases, declaring me genetically nonhuman, or what. I'm a step behind the rest of you on what genotyping actually does.

4erinys
Although I got the email 2/23/13 saying my results were expected in May, I haven't gotten anything yet, and the site says it is still being sequenced. The results will be encoded. You will need a program to decode it. When you log into the site, at the top one of the options is Software. Under that, they list several programs that can be used. If anyone can make sense of it, I'd love to learn how. Just because I was a mathematical idiot savant at one point doesn't mean that part of my brain didn't shrivel up and die once real life happened. On the website, it eventually updated the due date on sequencing to July. Never got an updated email. Has anyone gotten results? Is anyone else still waiting? I didn't become involved through that route, but I was a participant in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. The majority of participants are from SMPY via the samples taken earlier by Dr. Robert Plomin, another researcher. The SMPY research emphasized gender at nearly every step. I haven't heard a word about it with this. For whatever reason, the non-verbal intelligence of males exceeds that of females. That is especially true of spatial intelligence, which seems to be specifically what they (ideally) are looking for. So, any other gals here participating in this? If anyone is still following this, if you fell slightly short in one area they still wanted people to apply. Those figures were simply for guaranteed inclusion. I think there was a crappy understanding of Western thinking and a lot of people self-excluded who should not have. It seems BGI only got 500-600 people on its own, the other 1500 were via Plomin. When I first read of this almost 2 yrs ago, there was mention of getting 10k volunteers. I can't speak to the GRE, but on the SAT it is slightly unusual for people to do extremely well on both the verbal and the qualitative sections. For 2008, a GRE score of 700 was the top 4%. Those top 5% scoring 800 Math would not necessarily be top 4% Verbally

I found this very interesting because I often have the exact inverse experience. I am a theist, but when I have a close call like that my first reaction usually is "I got lucky." It's when my conscious mind kicks in that I start thinking ""Lucky" doesn't have to mean just "lucky," and God has worked in more mysterious ways before." (Which, yes, is precisely what you'd predict a theist would say if you asked one.) And then I start feeling gratitude.

I know people here would say that this must mean I don't actually believe in God and only believe I do, but if you judge real beliefs by first reactions then shminux has a point.

I said not receiving a CD from the future is the most likely because that's what usually happens. But I do have a pretty huge sampling bias of mainly talking to people who don't have time machines.

i would expect "no CD" to be the most common even if you do have one, just because I feel like a closed time loop should take some effort to start. But this is probably a generalization from fiction, since if they happen in the real universe they do "just happen" with no previous cause. So I guess I can't support it well enough to justify my intuition. I will say that if I'm wrong about this, any time traveller should be prepared for these to happen all the time on totally trivial things.

The Novikov Self-Consistency Principle can help answer that. It is one of my favorite things. I don't think it was named in the post, but the concept was there.

The idea is that contradictions have probability zero. So the first scenario, the one with the paradox, doesn't happen. It's like the Outcome Pump if you hit the Emergency Regret Button. Instead of saying "do the following," it should say "attempt the following." If it is one self-consistent timeline, then you will fail. I don't know why you'll fail, probably just whatever reason... (read more)

0Snowyowl
I wasn't reasoning under NSCP, just trying to pick holes in cousin_it's model. Though I'm interested in knowing why you think that one outcome is "more likely" than any other. What determines that?

Not just because I can. Maybe for other reasons, like the fact that I still care about the punier humans and want to make it better for them. That depends on preferences that an AI might or might not have.

It's not really about what I would do; it's the fact that we don't know what an arbitrary superintelligence will or won't decide to do.

(I'm thinking of "superintelligence" as "smart enough to do more or less whatever it wants by sheer thinkism," which I've already said I agree is possible. Is this nonstandard?)

3TheOtherDave
Sure, "because I have preferences which changing the world would more effectively maximize than leaving it as it is" is more accurate than "because I can". And, sure, maybe an arbitrary superintelligence would have no such preferences, but I'm not confident of that. (Nope, it's standard (locally).)

I agree with both you and Kelly most of the time, you more than him. I did think this part required a nitpick:

To me, at first impression, the notion that a ten million times speedup would have a negligible effect on scientific innovation or progress seems absurd. It appears obvious that it would have a world-transforming impact. To me, it appears obvious that it would be capable of having a world-transforming impact. Just because it can doesn't mean it will, though I certainly wouldn't want to assume it won't.

If I became superintelligent tomorrow, I p... (read more)

2TheOtherDave
A lot depends on what we mean by "superintelligent." But yes, there's a level of intelligence above which I'm fairly confident that I would change the world, as rapidly as practical, because I can. Why wouldn't you?

I meant in the second example. I agree that in the first one if she doesn't use the desire as evidence of the gene she'll get a result saying she should smoke. But in the second one even if she does ignore that then the probability of cancer given that she smokes is higher than the probability of cancer given that she doesn't.

If she doesn't have the gene, then she can smoke or not without any change in risk. She doesn't know if she has the gene or not, but if she then smoking makes her more likely to get cancer. So, if she sums across both possibilities, s... (read more)

0Stuart_Armstrong
That's why I said the gene was rare - presumably so rare that her pleasure from smoking overwhelms the expected disutility from cancer.

It seems to me that even under CDT, Susan smoking would make her more likely to get cancer. She gets some enjoyment out of smoking, but there is also a probability P that she gets cancer from it. Even if she isn't allowed to use her preference as evidence that she has the gene, she still might have it. The dislike of cancer dominates the equation. I suppose you could fix that by adjusting the utilities she assigns to smoking and cancer, and the probability that she gets cancer given that she smokes, but I suspect that's not the point.

What'd I miss?

0Stuart_Armstrong
The example is a bit unfortunate - in this hypothetical world, smoking doesn't cause cancer at all (at least in the first example). It refers back to the tobacco companies' lies that the correlation between smoking and cancer could be exaplained by a third factor (ie a gene).