All of Martok's Comments + Replies

However: apply 1:1E6 to 260E6 million people in the US in 1994, there's probably 130 couples like them.

Far from the "still not happening even if you flip a (weighted) coin every second since the big bang"- chance in the post, but since Lloyd probably did not do the math and just ignored the actual value... yep, classical example.

All the arguments about mystery aside, the first few paragraphs seem to be from a completely different post about the Sacred Experience instead if Religious Foo.

I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; {...}

Leading up to:

Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.

Which is something I would strongly agree with. In my view, what this is saying is that the association of something being sacred is something that can only ... (read more)

However, when you read the Git manual and get to "Rewriting History", you could come to the conclusion that "this guy is nuts and I have to reevaluate everything I read previously based on that assumption". Also, cloning 2 times and moving commits between those 2 can be a lot easier than rebase/cherry-fu in one copy. I usually do that when I'm called in to fix some messed-up repo.

I would still choose Git over Hg anytime, because this happens seldom enough that the other benefits outweigh it.

A lot of people probably already know that, it's a familiar "deep wisdom", but anyway: you can use this not-changing of your mind to help you with seemingly complicated decisions that you ponder over for days. Simply assign the possible answers and flip a coin (or roll a dice, if you need more than 2). It doesn't matter what the result is, but depending on wether it matches your already-made decision you will either immediately reject the coin's "answer" or not. That tells you what your first decision was, unclouded by any attempts to j... (read more)

0DaFranker
Without knowing the terms or technical explanation for it, this is what I have always been doing automatically for as long as I can remember making decisions conciously (generously apply confidence margin and overconfidence moderation proportional to applicable biases). However, upon reading the sequences here, I realize that several problems I have identified in my thought strategies actually stem from my reliance on training my intuition and subconscious for what I now know to be simply better cached thoughts. It turns out that no matter how well you organize and train your Caches and other automatic thinking, belief-forming and decision-making processes, some structural human biases are virtually impossible to eliminate by strictly relying on this method. What's more, by having relied on this for so long, I find myself having even more difficulty training my mind to think better.

Me too, but I fear I may be primed to believing Eliezer as his previous posts contained stuff that I heard about before, granting him some advantage. Or it may be Authority...

Anyway: I find it interesting that a german newspaper mostly known for being the lowest form of journalism imaginable (but still highest-grossing) uses a similar technique in their "articles": they print more or less randomly chosen fragments in bold or italics. Could using confusing fonts really be enough to get people to "believe everything"?

Something else I noti... (read more)