All of Robin_Powell's Comments + Replies

You still don't answer the question. All those links are is an argument that if all times are treated as equal, actions now will be the same regardless of the final goal. You don't say what goals you want to move to.

As for that book... Wow.

First sentences of Chapter 8 of that book: We are going whence we came. We are evolving toward the Moral Society, Teilhard's Point Omega, Spinoza's Intellectual Love of God, the Judaeo-Christian concept of union with God. Each of us is a holographic reflection of the creativity of God.

I don't even know where to start, on either topic, so I won't.

-Robin

I don't know if this story has ever been written, but you can imagine a Devil who follows someone around, making their life miserable, solely by offering them options which are never actually taken - a "deal with the Devil" story that only requires the Devil to have the capacity to grant wishes, rather than ever granting a single one.

FWIW (very little), this is exactly how I experience shows like "Ah My Goddess!". The main character routinely refuses to take advantage of a situation that I most certainly would. I can't watch stuff like that.

-Robin

Richard: You didn't actually answer the question. You explained(erm, sort of) why you think Fun isn't important, but you haven't said what you think is. All you've done is use the word "important" as though it answered the question: "In the present day, a human having fun is probably more useful toward the kinds of ends I expect to be important than a human in pain.". Great: what kinds of ends do you expect to be important?

-Robin

Side comment: Subitizing (the not-counting thing; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing_and_counting ) has been rather extensively studied. I can't find good references, but it is apparently quite amenable to expertise. I have a friend who worked in inventory auditing (i.e. counting stuff in warehouses). He got into the 7-8 range. ISTR hearing of factory workings in my psych classes that got as high as 20 in their (hyper-specialized) domains.

I'm signed up, and I consider it one of my better decisions.

I use ACS, for what it's worth, which hasn't been mentioned here that I've seen.

-Robin

I'm totally missing the "N independent statements" part of the discussion; that seems like a total non-sequitur to me. Can someone point me at some kind of explanation?

-Robin

1pnrjulius
It's an oddly frequentist approach to Bayesianism.

My apologies for the horrific formatting; I wrote that huge diatribe in w3m before discovering the captcha needed javascript, and then pasted it here. If an admin can fix it, please do so.

-Robin

Before I get going, please let me make clear that I do not
understand the math here (even Eliezer's intuitive bayesian paper
defeated me on the first pass, and I haven't yet had the courage to
take a second pass), so if I'm Missing The Point(tm), please tell
me.

It seems to me that what's missing is talking about the probability
of given level of resourcefulness of the mugger. Let me 'splain.

If I ask the mugger for more detail, there are a wide variety of
different variables that determine how resourceful the mugger claims
to be. The mugger could, upon fu... (read more)

The experimental evidence for a purely genetic component of 0.6-0.8 is overwhelming

Erm. 0.6-0.8 what?

-Robin

7Celer
I assume he means an R or an R^2 of 0.6-0.8. Both are measures of correlation. R^2 would be the percent in the variation of one twins intelligence predicted by the intelligence of the other twin.
1tut
Probably 60-80% heredity. But that is also meaningless, because I have no idea which population it refers to.