paragonal

 Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.

Shouldn't this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there's value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.

 I'm not sure anybody "just" innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured.

My first thought here aren't autists but psychopaths.

Specifically, I would love to see a better argument for it being ahead of Helion (if it is actually ahead, which would be a surprise and a major update for me).

I agree with Jeffrey Heninger's response to your comment. Here is a (somewhat polemical) video which illustrates the challenges for Helion's unusual D-He3 approach compared to the standard D-T approach which CFS follows. It illustrates some of Jeffrey's points and makes other claims like Helion's current operational poc reactor Trenta being far from adequate for scaling to a productive reactor when ... (read more)

For example, the way scientific experiments work, your p-value either passes the (arbitrary) threshold, or it doesn't, so you either reject the null, or fail to reject the null, a binary outcome.

Ritualistic hypothesis testing with significance thresholds is mostly used in the social sciences, psychology and medicine and not so much in the hard sciences (although arbitrary thresholds like 5 sigma are used in physics to claim the discovery of new elementary particles they rarely show up in physics papers). Since it requires deliberate effort to get into the ... (read more)

Unfortunately, what I would call the bailey is quite common on Lesswrong. It doesn't take much digging to find quotes like this in the Sequences and beyond:

This is a shocking notion; it implies that all our twins in the other worlds— all the different versions of ourselves that are constantly split off, [...]

Thanks, I see we already had a similar argument in the past.

I think there's a bit of motte and bailey going on with the MWI. The controversy and philosophical questions are about multiple branches / worlds / versions of persons being ontological units. When we try to make things rigorous, only the wave function of the universe remains as a coherent ontological concept. But if we don't have a clear way from the latter to the former, we can't really say clear things about the parts which are philosophically interesting.

I’m reluctant to engage with extraordinarily contrived scenarios in which magical 2nd-law-of-thermodynamics-violating contraptions cause “branches” to interfere.

Agreed. Roland Omnes tries to calculate how big the measurement apparatus of Wigner needs to be in order to measure his friend and gets 10 to the power of 10E18 degrees of freedom ("The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", section 7.8).

But if we are going to engage with those scenarios anyway, then we should never have referred to them as “branches” in the first place, ...

Well, that's one of the p... (read more)

Rick Beato has a video about people losing their absolute pitch with age (it seems to happen to everyone eventually). There are a lot of anecdata by people who have experienced this both in the video and in the comments.

Some report that after experiencing a shift in their absolute pitch, all music sounds wrong. Some of them adapted somehow (it's unclear to me how much development of relative abilities was involved) and others report not having noticed that their absolute pitch has shifted. Some report that only after they've lost their absolute pitch compl... (read more)

I am quite skeptical that hearing like a person with absolute pitch can be learned because it seems to be somewhat incompatible with relative pitch.

People with absolute pitch report that if a piece of music is played with a slightly lower or higher pitch, it sounds out of tune. If this feeling stays throughout the piece this means that the person doesn't hear relatively. So even if a relative pitch person would learn to name played notes absolutely, I don't think the hearing experience would be the same.

So I think you can't have both absolute pitch and relative pitch in the full sense. (I do think that you can improve at naming played notes, singing notes correctly without a reference note from outside your body, etc.)

Thanks for this pointer. I might check it out when their website is up again.

Many characteristics have been proposed as significant, for example:

• It's better if fingers have less traveling to do.
• It's better if consecutive taps are done with different fingers or, better yet, different hands.
• It's better if common keys are near the fingers' natural resting places.
• It's better to avoid stretching and overusing the pinky finger, which is the weakest of the five.

Just an anecdotal experience: I, too, have wrist problems. I have tried touch typing with 10 fingers a couple of times and my problems got worse each time. My experience agre... (read more)

You might be also be interested in "General Bayesian Theories and the Emergence of the Exclusivity Principle" by Chiribella et al. which claims that quantum theory is the most general theory which satisfies Bayesian consistency conditions.

By now, there are actually quite a few attempts to reconstruct quantum theory from more "reasonable" axioms besides Hardy's. You can track the refrences in the paper above to find some more of them.

As you learn more about most systems, the likelihood ratio should likely go down for each additional point of evidence.

I'd be interested to see the assumptions which go into this. As Stuart has pointed out, it's  got to do with how correlated the evidence is. And for fat-tailed distributions we probably should expect to be surprised at a constant rate.

Note you can still get massive updates if B' is pretty independent of B. So if someone brings in camera footage of the crime, that has no connection with the previous witness's trustworthiness, and can throw the odds strongly in one direction or another (in equation, independence means that P(B'|H,B)/P(B'|¬H,B) = P(B'|H)/P(B'|¬H)).

Thanks, I think this is the crucial point for me. I was implicitly operating under the assumption that the evidence is uncorrelated which is of course not warranted in most cases.

So if we have already updated on a lot of evidence... (read more)

From the article:

At this point, I think I am somewhat below Nate Silver’s 60% odds that the virus escaped from the lab, and put myself at about 40%, but I haven’t looked carefully and this probability is weakly held.

Quite off-topic: what does it mean from a Bayesian perspective to hold a probability weakly vs. confidently? Likelihood ratios for updating are independent of the prior so a weakly-held probability should update exactly as a confidently-held one. Is there a way to quantifiy the "strongness" with which one holds a probability?

Thanks for your answer. Part of the problem might have been that I wasn't that proficient with vim. When I reconfigured the clashing key bindings of the IDE I sometimes unknowingly overwrote a vim command which turned out to be useful later on. So I had to reconfigure numerous times which annoyed me so much that I abandoned the approach at the time.

A question for the people who use vim keybindings in IDEs: how do you deal with keybindings for IDE tasks which are not part of vim (like using the debugger, refactoring, code completion, etc.)? The last time I tried to use vim bindings in an IDE there were quite some overlaps with these so I found myself coming up with compromise systems which didn't work that well because they weren't coherent.

At least for me, I think the question of whether I'm buying too much for myself in a situation of limited supplies was more important for the decision than the fear of being perceived as weird. This depends of course on how limited the supplies actually were at the time of buying but I think it is generally important to distinguish between the shame because one might profit at the expense of others, and the "pure" weirdness of the action.

We have reason to believe that peptide vaccines will work particularly well here, because we're targeting a respiratory infection, and the peptide vaccine delivery mechanism targets respiratory tissue instead of blood.

Just a minor point: by delivery mechanism, are you talking about inserting the peptides through the nose à la RadVac? If I understand correctly, Werner Stöcker injects his peptide-based vaccine.

You could also turn around this question. If you find it somewhat plausible that that self-adjoint operators represent physical quantities, eigenvalues represent measurement outcomes and eigenvectors represent states associated with these outcomes (per the arguments I have given in my other post) one could picture a situation where systems hop from eigenvector to eigenvector through time. From this point of view, continuous evolution between states is the strange thing.

The paper by Hardy I cited in another answer to you tries to make QM as similar to a cla... (read more)