I'd love to redirect everyone in my blast radius who's ever mentioned suicide to a hotline, but somehow I think that's the first thing just about anyone says when someone mentions suicide... to the point when "get professional help" is synonymous with "I don't want to deal with this personally."
In a similar vein, do suicide hotlines actually work? I'm reading up on them right now, and found this alarming article, that basically says that sometimes the call centers screw up, but overall they work sort of well, and that lapses need to be ...
“If I agree, why should I bother saying it? Doesn’t my silence signal agreement enough?”
That’s been my non-verbal reasoning for years now! Not just here: everywhere. People have been telling me, with various degrees of success, that I never even speak except to argue. To those who have been successful in getting through to me, I would respond with, “Maybe it sounds like I’m arguing, but you’re WRONG. I’m not arguing!”
Until I read this post, I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it. Yikes!
Gotcha. I wasn't aware that there had been more discussion about sequence reruns than that one thread.
If those teacher's students were absolutely not expecting a lie, then another out-of-the-box question based on physics they should understand wouldn't trick them. The trust has been broken. On the other hand, if the problem is their inability to be creative enough, they won’t become creative just because they learned not to trust the teacher.
My high school physics teacher in high school who liked tricking us. Demonstrating his point about reflections off of light/dark surfaces, he covered up the laser pointer while shining it at a black binder. He put a co...
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This comment by alexflint doesn't look like it's gotten much exposure back when sequence reruns were first discussed.
Maybe the template shouldn't be instructing people to leave comments here?
So, magic is easy. Then, everyone else is doing it, too. (And you're spending a good portion of your learning curve struggling with the magical equivalent of flipping a light switch). It's even more mundane than difficult magic.
By comparison, how many times today have you thought, "Wow! I'm really glad I have eyesight!" Well, now you have. But it's not something you go around thinking all the time. Why do you expect that you'd think "Wow! I'm really glad I have easy magic!" any more frequently?
The problem with routine discoveries, like my most recent discovery of how a magic trick works or the QED-euphoria I get after getting a proof down, is that it doesn't last long. I can't output 5 proofs/solutions an hour.
Subjects thought that accidents caused about as many deaths as disease.
Lichtenstein et aliōrum research subjects were 1) college students and 2) members of a chapter of the League of Women Voters. Students thought that accidents are 1.62 times more likely than diseases, and league members thought they were 11.6 times more likely (geometric mean). Sadly, no standard deviation was given. The true value is 15.4. Note that only 57% and 79% of students and league members respectively got the direction right, which further biased the geometric average down.
Th...
Seconded.
At this point, [SEQ RERUNS] get very few responses. Barely any discussions happen in [SEQ RERUNS]. Might as well post comments in the original post and hope someone will respond in a couple months.
"Huh, if I didn't spot this flaw at first sight, then I may have accepted some flawed congruent evidence too. What other mistaken proofs do I have in my head, whose absurdity is not at first apparent?"
Has this question ever been answered? It is one of those things I go around worrying about.
Bwahahahahahaha! I'll admit I kinda freaked out at first.
Subjects thought that accidents caused about as many deaths as disease.
Lichtenstein et aliōrum research subjects were 1) college students and 2) members of a chapter of the League of Women Voters. Students thought that accidents are 1.62 times more likely than diseases, and league members thought they were 11.6 times more likely (geometric mean). Sadly, no standard deviation was given. The true value is 15.4. Note that only 57% and 79% of students and league members respectively got the direction right, which further biased the geometric average down.
Th...
People have been gambling for millennia. Most of the people who have lost bets have done so without killing themselves. Much can be learned from this. For example, that killing yourself is worse than not killing yourself. This intuition is one that should follow over to ‘quantum’ gambles rather straightforwardly.
You weren't one of those people.
That non-ancestor of yours who played Quantum Russian Roulette with fifteen others is dead from your perspective, his alleles slightly underrepresented in the gene pool. In fact, if there was an allele for "...
Reality wouldn't be mean to you on purpose.
Of course there would be worlds where something would have gone horribly wrong if you won the lottery. But there's no reason for you to expect that you'd wake up in one of those worlds because you won the lottery. The difference between your "horribly wrong" worlds (don't care about money/ inflation / no money) and wedrifid's (lost the lottery and became crippled) is that waking up in wedrifid's is caused by one's participation in the lottery.
A Toilet Flush Monster climbed out of my toilet whenever I used to flush at night. If I could get back into bed completely covered by a blanket before it fully climbed out (i.e. the tank filled in with water and stopped making noises), then I was safe. All lights had to be off the whole time, or else the monster could see me.
Don't laugh.
In one of my childhood's flashes of clarity, I must have wondered how I knew about the monster if I'd never actually seen it. So one day I watched the toilet flush, and no monster came out. I checked with the lights off, an...
Taboo'ed. See edit.
Although I have a bone to pick with the whole "belief in belief" business, right now I'll concede that people actually do carry beliefs around that don't lead to anticipated experiences. Wulky Wilkinsen being a "post-utopian" (as interpreted from my current state of knowing 0 about Wulky Wilkinsen and post-utopians) is a belief that doesn't pay any rent at all, not even a paper that says "moneeez."
The fact that I haven't noticed the same thing in casual conversations either speaks volumes for my conversation skills (lack thereof), or suggests that maybe not all people are as trigger-happy on the ignore button as you suggest.
Two people have semantically different beliefs.
Both beliefs lead them to anticipate the same experience.
EDIT: In other words, two people might think they have different beliefs, but when it comes to anticipated experiences, they have similar enough beliefs about the properties of sound waves and the properties of falling trees and recorders and etc etc that they anticipate the same experience.
That said, I don't actually know anyone for whom this is true.
I don't know too many theist janitors, either. Doesn't mean they don't exist.
From my perspective, it sucks to be them. But once you're them, all you can do is minimize your misery by finding some local utility maximum and staying there.
If my tenants paid rent with a piece of paper that said "moneeez" on it, I wouldn't call it paying rent.
In your view, don't all beliefs pay rent in some anticipated experience, no matter how bad that rent is?
"Smart and beautiful" Joe is being Pascal's-mugged by his own beliefs. His anticipated experiences lead to exorbitantly high utility. When failure costs (relatively) little, it subtracts little utility by comparison.
I suppose you could use the same argument for the lottery-playing Joe. And you would realize that people like Joe, on average, are worse off. You wouldn't want to be Joe. But once you are Joe, his irrationality looks different from the inside.
But why do beliefs need to pay rent in anticipated experiences? Why can’t they pay rent in utility?
If some average Joe believes he’s smart and beautiful, and that gives him utility, is that necessarily a bad thing? Joe approaches a girl in a bar, dips his sweaty fingers in her iced drink, cracks a piece of ice in his teeth, pulls it out of his mouth, shoves it in her face for demonstration, and says, “Now that I’d broken the ice—”
She thinks: “What a butt-ugly idiot!” and gets the hell away from him.
Joe goes on happily believing that he’s smart and beautifu...
More generally you cannot rigorously prove that for all integers n > 0, P(n) -> P(n+1) if it is not true, and in particular if P(1) does not imply P(2).
Sorry, I can't figure out what you mean here. Of course you can't rigorously prove something that's not true.
I have a feeling that our conversation boils down to the following:
Me: There exists a case where induction fails at n=2.
You: For all cases, if induction doesn’t fail at n=2, doesn’t mean induction doesn’t fail. Conversely, if induction fails, it doesn’t mean it fails at n=2. You have to care...
"I refuse to cede you the role of instructor by letting you define the hypothetical."
You know, come think of it, that's actually a very good description of the second person... who is, by the way, my dad.
I am a lot more successful if I adopt the stance of "I am thinking about a problem that interests me," and if they express interest, explaining the problem as something I am presenting to myself, rather than to them. Or, if they don't, talking about something else.
This hasn't ever occurred to me, but I'll try it the next time a similar situation arises.
But why can you take a horse from the overlap? You can if the overlap is non-empty. Is the overlap non-empty? It has n-1 horses, so it is non-empty if n-1 > 0. Is n-1 > 0? It is if n > 1. Is n > 1? No, we want the proof to cover the case where n=1.
That's exactly what I was trying to get them to understand.
Do you think that they couldn't, and that's why they started arguing with me on irrelevant grounds?
And the point that I am trying to get you to understand, is that you do not need special rule to always check P(2) when making a proof by induction, in this case where the induction fails at P(1) -> P(2), carefully trying to prove the induction step will cause you to realize this. More generally you cannot rigorously prove that for all integers n > 0, P(n) -> P(n+1) if it is not true, and in particular if P(1) does not imply P(2).
.... The first n horses and the second n horses have an overlap of n-1 horses that are all the same color. So first and the last horse have to be the same color. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.
I see your point, though. This time, I was trying to reduce the word count because the audience is clearly intelligent enough to make that leap of logic. I can say the same for both of my "opponents" described above, because both of them are well above average intellectually. I honestly don't remember if I took that extra step in real life. If I haven't,...
I suspect that I lost the second person way before horses even became an issue. When he started picking on my words, "horses" and "different world" and "hypothetical person" didn't really matter anymore. He was just angry. What he was saying didn't make sense from that point on. For whatever reason, he stopped responding to logic.
But I don't know what I said to make him this angry in the first place.
Leaving aside the actual argument, I can tell you that there exist people (my husband is one of them, and come to think of it so is my ex-girlfriend, which makes me suspect that I bear some responsibility here, but I digress) whose immediate emotional reaction to "here, let me walk you through this illustrative hypothetical case" is strongly negative.
The reasons given vary, and may well be confabulatory.
I've heard the position summarized as "I don't believe in hypothetical questions," which I mostly unpack to mean that they understand ...
I don't think I ever got to my "ultimate" conclusion (that all of the operations that appear in step n must appear in the basis step).
I was trying to use this example where the proof failed at n=2 to show that it's possible in principle for a (specific other) proof to fail at n=2. Higher-order basis steps would be necessary only if there were even more operations.
Induction based on n=1 works sometimes, but not always. That was my point.
The problem with the horses of one color problem is that you are using sloppy verbal reasoning that hides an unjustified assumption that n > 1.
I'm not sure what you mean. I thought I stated it each time I was assuming n=1 and n=2.
Most of the comments in this discussion focused on topics that are emotionally significant for your "opponent." But here's something that happened to me twice.
I was trying to explain to two intelligent people (separately) that mathematical induction should start with the second step, not the first. In my particular case, a homework assignment had us do induction on the rows of a lower triangular matrix as it was being multiplied by various vectors; the first row only had multiplication, the second row both multiplication and addition. I figured i...
So what you're basically saying is that EDT is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox?
But then, aren't all conclusions drawn from incomplete sets of data potentially at risk from unobserved causations? And complete sets of data are ridiculously hard (if not impossible) to obtain anyway.
I'm sure that you're absolutely technically correct when saying what you'd said, but I had to reread it 5 times just to figure out what you meant, and I'm still not sure.
Are you saying that the strategy to indiscriminately like whatever's popular will lead to worse outcomes because of random effects, as in this experiment that showed that popularity is largely random? Then you're right--because what are the chances that your preferences exactly match the popular choice?
On the other hand, if it so happens that you end up liking something that's popular and ...
"I wish that the genie could understand a programming language."
Then I could program it unambiguously. I obviously wouldn't be able to program my mother out of the burning building on the spot, but at least there would be a host of other wishes I could make that the genie won't be able to screw up.
I think alexflint's point is something along the lines of "it's okay to like popular things just because they're popular."
No, it is not okay (in the sense of being non-detrimental to one's terminal values) to like popular things simply on the basis that they are popular. Decision theories following this heuristic are vulnerable to numerous low-complexity attack vectors, leading them to (for example) perpetuate, generate, and incorrectly update on information cascades.
It would be more accurate to say that "Giving in to social pressure to have aesthetic preference on the basis of the popularity of such preferences has non-obvious and immodular benefits to one's terminal values, which are likely to outweigh their decision-theoretic vulnerabilities within human cultures."
Thanks for bringing this up. Now that you've said it, I think I'd observed something similar about myself. Like you, I find it far easier to solve internal problems than external. In SCUBA class, I could sketch the inner mechanism of the 2nd stage, but I'd be the last to put my equipment together by the side of the pool.
Your description maps really well onto introversion and extroversion. I searched for psychology articles on extraversion, introversion and learning styles. A lot of research has been done in that area. For example:
Through the use of EPQ vs....
Well in that case Earth doesn't really go around the sun, it just goes around the center of this galaxy on this weird wiggly orbit and the sun happens to always be in a certain position with respect to...... ouch! See what I did? I babbled myself into ineptness by trying to be "absolutely technically correct." I just can't. Even if I finished that "absolutely technically correct" sentence, I'd probably be wrong in some other way I haven't even imagined yet.
So let's accept the fact that not everything that is said which is true is "...
You're right, of course.
I'd written the above before I read this defense of researchers, before I knew to watch myself when I'm defending research subjects. Maybe I was far too in shock to actually believe that people would honestly think that.
Try answering this without any rationalization:
In my middle school science lab, a thermometer showed me that water boiled at 99.5 degrees C and not 100. Why?
I suspect you have a point that I'm missing.
My take is: either the reading was wrong (experimental error of some kind), or it wasn't wrong. If it wasn't wrong, then your water was boiling at a 99.5 degrees. There are a number of plausible explanations for the latter; the one that I assign the highest prior to is that you were at an elevation higher than sea level.
So, my answer is in the form of a probability distribution. Give me more evidence, and I will refine it, or demand and answer now, and I will tell you "altitude", my current most plausi...
Why would you expect someone who has a high correct contrarian factor in one area to have it in another?
Bad beliefs do seem to travel in packs (according to Penn and Teller, and Eliezer, anyhow). Lots of alien conspiracy nuts are government conspiracy nuts as well. That's not surprising, because bad beliefs are easy to pick up and they seem to be tribally maintained by the same tribe that maintains other bad beliefs.
But good beliefs? Really good ones? They're difficult. They take years. If you don't know of Less Wrong (or similar) as a source of good beli...
The bigger something is, the more predetermined it gets.
But I assume that whenever a classical coin is flipped, there was an earlier quantum, world-splitting event which resulted in two worlds
Then your classical coin is a quantum coin that simply made its decision before you observed it. The outcome of a toss of a real classical coin would be the result of so many quantum events that you might as well consider the toss predetermined (my post above elaborates).
Are there thermodynamic coin flips too?
The exact same goes for a thermodynamic coin flip, ...
I apologize. That's not how I meant it. All events are quantum, and they add up to reality. What I meant was, is free will lost in the addition?
This intuition is difficult like hell to describe, but the authors of Quantum Russian Roulette and this post on Quantum Immortality seemed to have it, as well as half the people I’d ever heard mentioning Schrödinger's cat. It’s the reason why the life of a person/cat in question is tied to a single quantum event, as opposed to a roll of a classical die that’s determined by a whole lot of quantum events.
Our decision...
My free will is in choosing which world my consciousness would observe. If I have that choice, I have free will.
There’re instances when I don’t have free will. Sprouting wings is physically improbable. If I estimate the chance of it happening at epsilon, within the constraints of physics, and even then as a result of random chance, this option wouldn’t really figure in my tree diagram of choices. Likewise, if quantum immortality is correct, then observing myself dying is physically impossible. (But what if the only way not to die would be to sprout wings?...
No, I haven’t. I’ve derived my views entirely from this post, plus the article above.
Since you mentioned “The Fabric Of Reality,” I tried looking it up on Less Wrong, and failing that, found its Wikipedia entry. I know not to judge a book by its Wikipedia page, but I still fail to see the similarity. Please enlighten me if you don't mind.
The following are statements about my mind-state, not about what is:
I don’t see why my view would be incapable of distinguishing free decisions from randomly determined ones. I’d go with naïve intuition: if I chose X and n...
Zombie-me's are the replicas of me in alternate worlds. They aren't under my conscious control, thus they're "zombies" from my perspective.
Except, in my understanding, they are created every time I make a choice, in proportion to the probability and I would choose Y over X. That is, if there's a 91% chance that I'd choose X, then in 91% of the worlds the zombie-me's have chosen X and in the remaining 9% they'd chosen Y.
Again, caveat: I don't think physics and probability were meant to be interpreted this way.
4) Eliezer: just curious about how you deal with paradoxes about infinity in your utility function. If for each n, on day n you are offered to sacrifice one unit of utility that day to gain one unit of utility on day 2n and one unit on day 2n+1 what do you do? Each time you do it you seem to gain a unit of utility, but if you do it every day you end up worse than you started.
dankane, Eliezer answered your question in this comment, and maybe somewhere else, too, that I don't yet know of.
At the risk of drawing wrong conclusions from physics I don't understand, I propose this model of free will within a lawful universe:
As I stand there thinking whether or not I should eat a banana, I can be confident that there's a world where a zombie-me is already eating a banana, and another world where a zombie-me has walked away from a banana.
As I stand near the edge of the cliff, there's a world where a zombie-me has jumped off the cliff to test quantum immortality, and Inspector Darwin has penciled in a slightly lower frequency of my alleles. But the...
scientific inquiry with the choice of subject matter motivated by theism is of lower quality than science done without that motivation.
Absolutely. Hence, the warning flag. A scientist expecting to find the evidence of God doesn't just have freeloading beliefs, but beliefs that pay rent in wrong expectations. That's akin to a gambling economist.
best scientists ... tend to be less theistic.
I'd say it's good evidence in favor of P ( good science | scientist is theist ) < P ( good science ) . Of course, your point about correlation not causation is ...
Fixed. Thanks. I didn't realize that my statement read, "A priori reasoning can only be justified if it's a posteriori."
Edit: so what about my actual statement? Or, are we done having this discussion?
I am firmly atheist right now, lounging in my mom's warm living room in a comfy armchair, tipity-typing on my keyboard. But when I go out to sea, alone, and the weather turns, a storm picks up, and I'm caught out after dark, and thanks to a rusty socket only one bow light works... well, then, I pray to every god I know starting with Poseidon, and sell my soul to the devil while at it.
I'm not sure why I do it.
Maybe that's what my brain does to occupy the excess processing time? In high school, when I still remembered it, I used to recite the litany against... (read more)