Tim Freeman
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Tim Freeman has not written any posts yet.
Tim Freeman has not written any posts yet.
But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.
But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.
Here's an additional hypothesis to consider:
One solution... (read more)
I was trying to find the bounds of my ignorance of physics yesterday and I realized nobody has a self consistent story of how a lightbulb works. Emission of photons requires quantum electrodynamics and there is no self consistent mathematical model of QED. Apparently the required integrals diverge at very small scales, and if you can get a paper describing how to fix that math through peer review, there are people who want to give you a million dollars.
The correct link for "fiction differs from reality in systematic ways" might now be this. Robin starts that page with a link to the scribd document he is summarizing. That document has been deleted. If someone has enthusiasm and ability to find a replacement link, please reply.
In response to:
Traditional Rationality doesn’t have the ideal that thinking is an exact art in which there is only one correct probability estimate given the evidence.
The ideal process applies Bayes' rule to the evidence and the prior probabilities to get the (posterior) probability estimate. Since there is no law saying what prior probabilities to assume, thinking is not an exact art in the sense used here. You might have meant that there is value in Traditional Rationality having this ideal even if we know it to be false, but in that case I don't understand your point.
The prior isn't trivial because one can model theism as doing Bayesian inference on a contrived... (read more)
Shinzen Young's Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words "spacey" and "racy" instead of "hazy" and "crazy", but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven't read it.
Would you be willing to share the koan?
I generally don't believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn't accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.
I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.
The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some... (read more)
I care about human culture and human genetic diversity and human long term survival. In the first example, if the 500 people share a culture or are related to each other, there might be worthwhile unique ideas or genes that are either preserved with certainty if I pick the more certain option, or lost altogether if I pick the option where all die with probability 10%, so I prefer the more certain option.
Similarly, if we have been fighting this thing for a while and there are only 500 humans left, I certainly prefer having 400 left with certainty over having zero left with 10% probability. We obviously can't recover if everyone is... (read more)