All of Simetrical's Comments + Replies

In that case Warrigal would have said "rational" rather than "real". Numbers such as 17π would presumably be fine too, not just fractions. "No funny business" presumably means "I'd better be able to figure out whether it's the closest easily". For instance, the number "S(12)/2^n, where S is the max shifts function and n is the smallest integer such that my number is less than 100" is technically well-defined, in a mathematical sense. But if you can actually figure out what it is, you could publish a paper about it in any journal of computer science you liked.

The question required us to provide real numbers, and infinitesimals are not real numbers. Even if you allowed infinitesimals, though, 0 would still be the Nash equilibrium. After all, if 1/∞ is a valid guess, so is (1/∞)*(2/3), etc., so the exact same logic applies: any number larger than 0 is too large. The only value where everyone could know everyone else's choice and still not want to change is 0.

Doing this with server side scripting is crazy. You'd have to submit a zillion forms and take a second to get the answer for each try. This is precisely the sort of thing client-side scripting is meant for.

Of course, the page would explain that it needed JavaScript, if you had JavaScript disabled, not just show a blank page.

I got the wrong rule, but it said I was right because I made only one mistake. I thought the rule was that a sequence was awesome if it was an increasing arithmetic progression. The only one of your examples at the end that contradicted this was 2, 9, 15. All the other awesome ones were, in fact, increasing arithmetic progressions: five out of the six awesome sequences you gave at the end. You should probably cut that down to two or three, so I'd have lost.

That clears things up a lot. I hadn't really thought about the multiple-models take on it (despite having read the "prior probabilities as mathematical objects" post). Thanks.

Even accepting the premise that voting for the proposition was clearly wrong, that's a single anecdote. It does nothing to demonstrate that Mormons are overall worse people than atheists. It is only a single point in the atheists' favor. I could respond with examples of atheists doing terrible things, e.g., the amount of suffering caused by communists.

Anecdotes are not reliable evidence; you need a careful, thorough, and systematic analysis to be able to make confident statements. It's really surprised me how commonly people supply purely anecdotal evi... (read more)

I think this post could have been more formally worded. It draws a distinction between two types of probability assignment, but the only practical difference given is that you'd be surprised if you're wrong in one case but not the other. My initial thought was just that surprise is an irrational thing that should be disregarded ― there's no term for "how surprised I was" in Bayes' Theorem.

But let's rephrase the problem a bit. You've made your probability assignments based on Omega's question: say 1/12 for each color. Now consider another situ... (read more)

I see this conclusion as a mistake: being surprised is a way of translating between intuition and explicit probability estimates. If you are not surprised, you should assign high enough probability, and otherwise if you assign tiny probability, you should be surprised (modulo known mistakes in either representation).

That's not true at all. Before I'm dealt a bridge hand, my probability assignment for getting the hand J♠, 8♣, 6♠, Q♡, 5♣, Q♢, Q♣, 5♡, 3♡, J♣, J♡, 2♡, 7♢ in that order would be one in 3,954,242,643,911,239,680,000. But I wouldn't be the le... (read more)

Huh. Do you need me to post a few dozen links to articles detailing incidents where Mormons did evil acts because of their religious beliefs? I mean, Mormonism isn't as inherently destructive as Islam, but it's not Buddhism either.

Do you have empirical evidence that Mormons are more likely to cause harm than atheists? (Let's say in the clear-cut sense of stabbing people instead of in the sense of spreading irrationality.) Mormons might do more bad things because their god requires it, but atheists might do more bad things because they don't have a god... (read more)

If the question is "Should Wednesday, while not exactly choosing to believe religion, avoid thinking about it too hard because she thinks doing so will make her an atheist?," then she's already an atheist on some level because she thinks knowing more will make her more atheist, which implies atheism is true. This reduces to the case of deception, which you seem to be against unconditionally.

That's not necessarily true. Perhaps she believes Mormonism is almost certainly right, but acknowledges that she's not fully rational and might be misled ... (read more)

For what it's worth, if you're using MediaWiki -- I'm a MediaWiki developer and would be happy to help out if anyone wants to know "how do I do X" or otherwise get assistance of some kind setting up or configuring the wiki.

Like Mark Twain's definition of a classic: "Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

Well, everyone sharing the exact same opinion would be stable.

The question "Where did people come from?" is one that you'd expect to be answerable, and therefore a reasonable question to ask. We might, in principle, be able to do research in the physical world to figure out where we came from, since physical events (such as the appearance of a new species) leave traces in the physical world that we might be able to detect long after the fact. Likewise, intuition suggests that everything in the physical world comes from somewhere, and so an answer of "We were always here" seems intuitively unlike... (read more)

Yes it did and does, though you're left having to handwave away the question of "how did God arise?"

Yup, but those seem less troubling if anything than the questions atheism would be unable to answer at the time.

All I ask is that laws have 1) a clearly defined goal of solving a problem that society wants to solve, and 2) empirical evidence (gathered after the fact, if needed) that they are doing what they were intended to do with acceptable side-effects.

How can you gather the evidence after the fact without experimentation? You have to try out alternative copyright schemes, for instance, to test whether it's actually working well. Otherwise I don't know what you'd consider empirical evidence for success.

Marijuana criminalization seems to badly fail at least

In the Middle Ages, I'm not sure atheism would be too much more rational than theism, in any sense. To the average European in the year 1000, being an atheist would probably be about as rational as being a heliocentrist, i.e., not at all. We know all the arguments in favor of atheism and heliocentrism, but they didn't. No amount of rationalism is going to let you judge things based on evidence you don't know about.

The average person back then could probably have given you plenty of evidence for God's existence. The evidence would be weak by modern stan... (read more)

Well, if you're altruistic in the sense you describe, you don't have the utility function I gave in my scenario, so your result will vary. If you don't really mind going to hell too much, comparatively, then the argument doesn't work well.

For what it's worth, I've recently started reading this site and am an Orthodox Jew. I have no particular plans to stop reading the site for the time being, because it's often rather interesting.

It may be worth considering that while rationalists may feel they don't need religion, almost all religious people would acknowledge the need for rationality of some kind. If rationality is about achieving your goals as effectively as possible (as some here think), then does it suddenly not work if your goals are "obey the Bible"? No -- your actions wi... (read more)

Can you name any evidence supporting the necessity of, to pick a moderately troublesome example off the top of my head, copyright? I'm not aware of any alternatives being tried (successfully or otherwise) in modern countries, so there's no actual evidence for its necessity. Shall we abolish governmental protection of intellectual property? That's a somewhat tenable position (donation-based profit, etc.), but I'm guessing most people here don't hold it.

I suspect that if your suggestion's consequences were carefully inspected, it would turn out to be more... (read more)