All of Tynam's Comments + Replies

Tynam70

It seems to me - and I'm a depressive - that even if depressed people really do have more accurate self-assessment, your third option is still the most likely.

One recurrent theme on this site is that humans are prone to indulge cognitive biases which _make them happy_. We try to avoid the immediate hedonic penalty of admitting errors, forseeing mistakes, and so on. We judge by the availability heuristic, not by probability, when we imagine a happy result like winning the lottery.

When I'm in a depressed state, I literally _can't_ imagine a ... (read more)

Tynam60

Exactly. Note that the writers intended to give them the extra feature "behaves logically", and failed completely. They managed "behaves like a human, then complains that it's not logical", which is very far from being the same thing.

Tynam160

Only until you build a self-modifying super-intelligent bull. Because the first thing it will do is become smart enough to persuade you to give the ring to someone else, who it's calculated it can con into taking the ring off.

Human minds are really badly adapted for defence against con artists operating on the same level; how on earth would we defend ourselves against an exponentially smarter one?

Tynam100

As I was taught, that's also a little unfair, or at least oversimplified. That everyone confesses to everything is not just primitive anonymisation, it's a declaration of communal responsibility. It's supposed to be deliberate encouragement to take responsibility for the actions of your community as a whole, not just your own.

3Mass_Driver
I've always wondered what "communal responsibility" really means. It's one thing to ask people to encourage their friends to act morally, or to go on the record now and then as opposing a perceived injustice. But your community could be flawed despite your best efforts to fix it -- it doesn't really seem fair to expect someone with finite resources to answer for a hundred other people's behavior.
Tynam70

Zendo is my go-to exercise for explaining just about any idea in inductive investigation. (But it's even more useful as a tool for reminding myself to do better. After years, the number of Zendo games I lose due to positive bias is still far higher than I'd like... even when I think I've taken steps to avoid that.)

4nupanick
As my group's usual Zendo Master, I have a lot of players fall into this trap. I like to train new players with one easy property like "A Koan Has The Buddah Nature If (and only if) it contains a red piece." Once they understand the rules, I jump to something like "A Koan Has The Buddah Nature Unless It contains exactly two pieces." Switching from a positively-marked property (there is a simple feature which all these things have) to a negatively-marked property (there is a simple feature which all these things lack) can be pretty eye-opening. I showed Zendo to a math professor once who fell smack into the 2-4-6 trap and tried to build as many white-marked koans as possible. He even asked why the game didn't punish people for just making the same koan over and over again, since it would be guaranteed to "follow the rule." I eventually managed to convey that the object of the game is to be able to tell me, in words, what you think the rule is. Since then I've been more explicit that "part of the game involves literally just saying, out loud, what you think defines the property." People always seem to think that the zendo is a sort of a silent lecture, when really it's more of a laboratory class.
Tynam180

Yes they do. If the world is controlled by an intelligent entity, then statistical proofs tell you about the behaviour of that entity, rather than impersonal laws of physics, but they still tell you what's likely to happen.

3AnthonyC
Yes, however, it is conceivable that the intelligent entity is sufficiently complicated that no amount of evidence gathered within the universe could allow us to uniquely identify its nature. This is of course implausible based on prior probability, solomonov induction, etc., though.