All of BlackHumor's Comments + Replies

The analogy doesn't work. It is unconditionally bad to point a gun at someone -- "every gun is loaded" as the saying goes -- so you still violated protocol even if it's unloaded. In contrast, propositioning someone in an elevator retroactively becomes okay merely on the basis that you're not part of the rabble.

Wait, what? The analogy works exactly; you're just assuming a priori that the bit you think doesn't fit actually doesn't fit. The analogy logically goes that if it's wrong to point a gun at someone regardless of whether you think it's lo... (read more)

A murder is a serious crime. Guede clearly had to break into the house to commit the murder, so he also committed a burglary by your definition.

Which would mean there's no evidence that the burglary was staged, because that would mean that in addition to the burglary that Guede committed, ANOTHER burglary must have been staged by someone else. Which would usually be instantly eliminated by Occam's Razor unless there's a significant amount of evidence of two separate burglaries.

I think this is it exactly. But let's be rigorous:

1. "I am trying to get you to get a doctorate by holding back marriage." Still works.
2. No goal (that I can see), therefore nothing.
3. No goal (that I can see), therefore nothing.
4. No goal, therefore nothing (assuming I interpret 5 to mean that 4 is NOT with intent).
5. "I am teasing you to get you to have sex with me." This probably will not work, but partly because it interrupts the flirting rather than because she knows that the flirting is going on. Depends on how severe the teasing is, reall

I suspect that you're vastly underestimating how similar people are.

My guess is that people's guesses will be essentially random, except possibly for the trolls (because they're trying, and so will be portraying caricatures of the opposite sex instead of actual people).

I know that I personally have never so far been able to tell men from women over a purely text channel without having been told explicitly, which I assume would be off limits. Though now I think of it that's not entirely true; I would guess from lesswrong demographics that you, Armok, are male. ('course, if you happened to be female that would prove my point nicely.)

Also, though Wikipedia is not an entirely reliable source, it contradicts your claim that "men hunt women gather" is a human universal. Though it's more common than not, there are a few hunter-gatherer tribes where women help men track animals, or where men also gather sometimes, and at least one tribe where women also kill the animals.

Not that you're likely to read this, of course, since you posted the OP years ago, but I just thought I should further point out that your theory is very improbable.

H*st*r! H*st*r! H*st*r!

1.False

1. False
2. True
3. True

Why am I giving (most of) these in boolean terms rather than probabilities? Bayesian probabilities aren't useful in cases where the most probable scenario for (AK guilty) is something like "Two of the perpetrators were secretly ninjas". There really is no rational way to convict someone for leaving no forensic evidence in a room whatsoever.

I have to admit here though that I peeked at your article before posting this. And incidentally, predicted what it would say pretty damn well. (AK not guilty with a probability that r... (read more)

I think the entire story of Exodus from Egypt is more likely to be (mostly) fiction than based on a real event.

As Eliezer himself said in that post, the Egyptians were "known for their obsessive record-keeping". If anything remotely comparable to the Ten Plagues or the Exodus happened in Egypt, they ought to have recorded it. That they didn't is very strong evidence that nothing happened.

Same general counterargument as the other people who've posted:

1) If this anecdote is all you have to base your theory on, you have essentially no more chance of being right than I would be making up random theories in quantum mechanics.

2) If you say "I think men can find jars easier because male hunter-gatherers hunted", you are likely some random crank who has just enough experience in the field to think of the idea. Once you suggest a method to test it, you prove that you are familiar enough with the idea and with the rest of the field to know what would prove it which elevates you from "some random crank" to "guy with a strange idea".

I don't see why you think that 3 extra people, no matter if they're honest or not, amount to any significant amount of evidence when you can see the diagram yourself.

Sure, maybe they're good enough if you can't see the diagram; 3 people thinking the same thing doesn't often happen when they're wrong. But when they are wrong, when you can see that they are wrong, then it doesn't matter how many of them there are.

Also: certainly the odds aren't high that you're right if we're talking totally random odds about a proposition where the evidence is totally ambig... (read more)

"(anyone here know what possible cosmological consequences "Dark Energy" or "Dark Matter" have)"

Ok, this is the point where I started to question your logic (incidentally, apology for the tangent).

I agree that Dark Matter and Dark Energy feel like epicycles and phlogiston. HOWEVER, they also feel like that or felt like that at one point to all actual physicists.

Therefore, if you claim that they do not exist, you must both know what the standard answer to that question is (for if there is no standard answer science would have ... (read more)

And even ignoring that, "English was like this" is no reason for it to continue to be like that if the alternative is perfectly understandable. Languages change all the time for all kinds of reasons; we don't use the complex system of verb tenses from Old English, or hither, thither and wither, or yon and yonder, (etc.), so why should we feel obligated to use its pronouns? (side note: which were not the same as modern English pronouns; "you" used to be a second person plural object only, it was thee and thou singular and ye and you plural.)

But yes, "man" used to be gender neutral, and for most of the history of English "they" was the gender neutral third person singular.

I have to say for myself mostly two, with criticism of the underlying assumption of one that tends to negate three as well. So, uh, all of them. Still mostly two though:

All people are so similar to each other it should be trivial to understand them with any real effort. The differences between men and women on average are tiny compared to differences between individuals, which are themselves tiny compared to the massive similarities between all human beings.

(A lot of people seem to take for granted that their mind works mostly the same as the mind of the p... (read more)

Answer to your question: Honestly, I should not have included that line about errors in there at all; it doesn't need to be special cased out because most errors are emergent. (Not always; a missing negative somewhere is not emergent. But when you get to the complexity of a video game, most errors that will make it through QA are emergent.)

But also: I actually have thought about this a bit since I wrote this, and I think I can come up with a decent general definition for emergence: (don't worry, I'll get to your question in a moment)

Something is emergent... (read more)

Most of this is specific to videogames and probably will not be applicable anywhere else:

An emergent property in the context of videogames is one the designers of the game did not intend, [more strictly: yet is not a programming error].

Excluding the possibly, since this example is ambiguous using it:

In the game Super Smash Bros, jumping is not emergent, since the designers programmed it into the game specifically.

Wavedashing [dodging into the ground so that you will be able to move while attacking] (and in fact, every single bit of strategy for every chara... (read more)