gilch

As of June 2024, I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.

Sequences

An Apprentice Experiment in Python Programming
Inefficient Markets

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gilch177

I feel like this has come up before, but I'm not finding the post. You don't need the stick-on mirrors to eliminate the blind spot. I don't know why pointing side mirrors straight back is still so popular, but that's not the only way it's taught. I have since learned to set mine much wider.

This article explains the technique. (See the video.)

In a nutshell, while in the diver's seat, tilt your head to the left until it's almost touching your window, then from that perspective point it straight back so you can just see the side of your car. (You might need a similar adjustment for the passenger's side, but those are often already wide-angle.) Now from normal position, you can see your former "blind spot". When you need to see straight back in your side mirror (like when backing out), just tilt your head again. Remember that you also have a center mirror. You should be able to see passing cars in your center mirror, and then in your side mirror, then in your peripheral vision without ever turning your head or completely losing sight of them.

gilch227
  • It's not enough for a hypothesis to be consistent with the evidence; to count in favor, it must be more consistent with the hypothesis than its converse. How much more is how strong. (Likelihood ratios.)
  • Knowledge is probabilistic/uncertain (priors) and is updated based on the strength of the evidence. A lot of weak evidence can add up (or multiply, actually, unless you're using logarithms).
  • Your level of knowledge is usually not literally zero, even when uncertainty is very high, and you can start from there. (Upper/Lower bounds, Fermi estimates.) Don't say, "I don't know." You know a little.
  • A hypothesis can be made more ad-hoc to fit the evidence better, but this must lower its prior. (Occam's razor.)
    • The reverse of this also holds. Cutting out burdensome details makes the prior higher. Disjunctive claims get a higher prior, conjunctive claims lower.
    • Solomonoff's Lightsaber is the right way to think about this.
  • More direct evidence can "screen off" indirect evidence. If it's along the same causal chain, you're not allowed to count it twice.
  • Many so-called "logical fallacies" are correct Bayesian inferences.
gilch270

French, but because my teacher tried to teach all of the days of the week at the same time, they still give me trouble.

They're named as the planets: Sun-day, Moon-day, Mars-day, Mercury-day, Jupiter-day, Venus-day, and Saturn-day.

It's easy to remember when you realize that the English names are just the equivalent Norse gods: Saturday, Sunday and Monday are obvious. Tyr's-day (god of combat, like Mars), Odin's-day (eloquent traveler god, like Mercury), Thor's-day (god of thunder and lightning, like Jupiter), and Freyja's-day (goddess of love, like Venus) are how we get the names Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

gilch210

Why is Google the biggest search engine even though it wasn't the first? It's because Google has a better signal-to-noise ratio than most search engines. PageRank cut through all the affiliate cruft when other search engines couldn't, and they've only continued to refine their algorithms.

But still, haven't you noticed that when Wikipedia comes up in a Google search, you click that first? Even when it's not the top result? I do. Sometimes it's not even the article I'm after, but its external links. And then I think to myself, "Why didn't I just search Wikipedia in the first place?". Why do we do that? Because we expect to find what we're looking for there. We've learned from experience that Wikipedia has a better signal-to-noise ratio than a Google search.

If LessWrong and Wikipedia came up in the first page of a Google search, I'd click LessWrong first. Wouldn't you? Not from any sense of community obligation (I'm a lurker), but because I expect a higher probability of good information here. LessWrong has a better signal-to-noise ratio than Wikipedia.

LessWrong doesn't specialize in recipes or maps. Likewise, there's a lot you can find through Google that's not on Wikipedia (and good luck finding it if Google can't!), but we still choose Wikipedia over Google's top hit when available. What is on LessWrong is insightful, especially in normally noisy areas of inquiry.

gilch30

I don't know of any officially sanctioned way. But, hypothetically, meeting a publicly-known real human person in person and giving them your public pgp key might work. Said real human could vouch for you and your public key, and no one else could fake a message signed by you, assuming you protect your private key. It's probably sufficient to sign and post one message proving this is your account (profile bio, probably), and then we just have to trust you to keep your account password secure.

gilch20

Would it help if we wore helmets?

gilch30

Hissp v0.5.0 is up.

python -m pip install hissp

If you always wanted to learn about Lisp macros, but only know Python, try the Hissp macro tutorials.

gilch52

That seems to be getting into Game Theory territory. One can model agents (players) with different strategies, even suboptimal ones. A lot of the insight from Game Theory isn't just about how to play a better strategy, but how changing the rules affects the game.

gilch40

Not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Universe seems to follow relatively simple deterministic laws. That doesn't mean you can use quantum field theory to predict the weather. But chaotic systems can be modeled as statistical ensembles. Temperature is a meaningful measurement even if we can't calculate the motion of all the individual gas molecules.

If you're referring to human irrationality in particular, we can study cognitive bias, which is how human reasoning diverges from that of idealized agents in certain systematic ways. This is a topic of interest at both the individual level of psychology, and at the level of statistical ensembles in economics.

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