All of subod_83's Comments + Replies

Next Sunday will not work for me. How about either 11th/12th of June? Requesting ssarkar, Karthik and Twig to revert on the proposed dates too...

[ TL;DR keywords in bold ] Assuming freedom of will in the first place, why should you not be able to choose to try harder? Doesn't that just mean allocating more effort to the activity at hand? Did you mean to ask "Can you choose to do better than your best?" ? That would indeed seem similar to the doubtable idea of selecting beliefs arbitrarily. By definition of "best", you can not do better than it. But that can be 'circumvented' by introducing different points in time: Let's say at t=1 your muscle capacity enables you to lift up to 10 kg. You can not actually choose to lift more. You can try, but would fail. But you can choose to do weight training, with the effect that until t=2 you have raised your lifting power to 20 kg. So you can do better (at t=2) than your best (at t=1). But Eliezer's point was a different one, to my understanding: He suggested that when you say (and more or less believe) that you "try your best", you are wrong automatically. (But only lying to the extent of your awareness of this wrongness.) Because you do better when setting out to "succeed" instead of to "try"; because these different mindsets influence your chances of success. About belief choice: Believing is not a simply choosable action like any other. But I can imagine ways to alter one's own beliefs (indirectly), at least in theory: * Influencing reality: one example is the aforementioned weightlifting: That is a device for changing the belief "I am unable to lift 20 kg" - by changing the actual state of reality over time. * Reframing a topic, concentrating on different (perspectives on) parts of the available evidence, could alter your conclusion. * Self-fulfilling prophecy effects, when you are aware of them, create cases where you may be able to select your belief. Quoting Henry Ford: If you believe this quote, then you can select whether to believe in yourself, since you know you will be right either way. * (Possibly a person who has developed a certain kind

My theory after seeing all 20 experiments is: * The first in the series will be 'A' * The second in the series will be 'B' * The third in the series will be 'C' * The fourth in the series will be 'D' * The fifth in the series will be 'E' * The sixth in the series will be 'F' * The seventh in the series will be 'G' * The eighth in the series will be 'H' * The ninth in the series will be 'I' * The tenth in the series will be 'J' * The eleventh in the series will be 'K' * The twelfth in the series will be 'L' * The thirteenth in the series will be 'M' * The fourteenth in the series will be 'N' * The fifteenth in the series will be 'O' * The sixteenth in the series will be 'P' * The eighteenth in the series will be 'Q' * The twentieth in the series will be 'R' * The twenty first in the series will be a camel. Those guys who have the theories "Each experiment will give a successive letter of the alphabet" and "Each experiment will give the next ASCII character" may be 'equally valid or invalid' but, well, they lack creativity, don't you think?