All of zaph's Comments + Replies

I'm working on adding elements to a report at work that does data visualization on a large scale (the data set is about 1 million data points; it's really not all that impressive of a subject matter, but I can't be terribly specific). The report has all of the "easy" elements I need in it, but now I'm trying to add in the harder elements. My ultimate end goal would be to add in the more complicated data along with system parameters, so I can get a handle on how parameter changes affect the output. I'd love to see Bayes nets and the like make a triumphant entrance at some point. But near as I can tell, I'd be the local expert on all of that, and anything I know about that subject matter I mostly picked up from here.

I believe the article the OP points to is actually more about how system 2 is being engaged in these systems, and is therefore not "blind obedience", i.e. a simple heuristic being engaged. From the conclusion:

On the other hand, it ignores the evidence that those who do heed authority in doing evil do so knowingly not blindly, >actively not passively, creatively not automatically. They do so out of belief not by nature, out of choice not by necessity. >In short, they should be seen—and judged—as engaged followers not as blind conformists

Eq

... (read more)

I'm leery of organizations providing their own statistics on how effective they are, which may just be another form of lobbying and propaganda. I'd lean towards carving out from the budget a group that independently assesses effectiveness of each of the organizations. It's admittedly imperfect, but it would be more impartial than what seems to be in place now, and agencies wouldn't necessarily be at a disadvantage for lacking their own internal measurement tools. That still leaves the problem of choosing the right metrics. Something simple like budget perc... (read more)

3Viliam_Bur
At least we could compare organizations within the same category. Splitting the budget across categories would remain a political decision, but within a category, inefficient organizations should be ignored. Even in absence of measurements, it would be good if all organizations would have to make and publish their reports, which would have to approved by a person who could point at different places in the report and say "be more specific". For example if the first approximation is "Our organization supports world peace", the 20th approximation would be "We have spent $1,000,000 on salaries of our employees; $500,000 on our building; $100,000 on food; and $100 on printing 200 flyers with big colored letters 'World Peace is a Great Thing'. Then we used volunteers to distribute those flyers on the university campus. Also, we paid $10,000 for design." And then the Chief Specificity Officer would say: "OK, this is specific enough, you may publish it online."

Moreover, no woman is ever going to be drawn to that, at least that I've ever heard. So it doesn't make sense as a grossly misguided pick-up strategy. Thinking about it and reading the thread, the more I think something along the lines of the Berne Games People Play dynamic is at work. It's the most charitable reading you can give to the behavior at least; the jerks taking part in this are getting some kind of attention from the woman they're targeting, even though it's negative attention. Still extremely hurtful behavior, but I can believe (or at least ki... (read more)

My theory is that there are behaviors which build alliances within one sex to the detriment of individual relationships with the other sex.

I have no strong opinion about whether this contributes to individual reproductive chances, though I can make up some theories about why it might.

People don't just need to produce babies, they need to support themselves and their children-- alliances within one's own gender can quite useful. It's also conceivable that intra gender alliances are good tools for limiting the mating opportunities of low-status competitors... (read more)

3Tripitaka
In feminist circles, its called Street Harassment, there are movements to stop it, and for those males like me who never experienced it personally, there are videos- but what worked best for me was talking to female friends. Street Harassment happens a lot less to women in mixed groups, so I was unaware of the consistency with which it happened to females without male companionship.

"Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them."

From Berne: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him."

So, you can debate ... (read more)

I think this explanation from Wiblin* is most likely: "Nonetheless, I think this is more likely tha[t] a broad pool of Intrade participants [were] being enthusiastic about Romney against all the evidence, and [were] unaware that they could get better odds elsewhere." Is there enough evidence to investigate whether something more sinister is at work? I certainly don't know the details on Intrade and other similar markets, but perhaps there should be more stringent transparency rules to prevent potential manipulations.

Implications: What has always ... (read more)

7Kaj_Sotala
That post was authored by Robert Wiblin.

As an InTrade bettor, I think a lot of the mispricing is just driven by wrong beliefs. In the primary season, I could usually get good prices to short Ron Paul and I thought it was likely to be because American InTrade bettors (internet savvy, ok with questionably legal things involving money, nerdy) overrepresent Paulites. No manipulation, just sampling problems.

I've been enjoying this series so far, and I found this article to be particularly helpful. I did have a minor suggestion. The turnstile and the logical negation symbols were called out, and I thought it might be useful to explicitly breakdown the probability distribution equation. The current Less Wrong audience had little problem with it, certainly, but if you were showing it to someone new to this for the first time, they might not be acquainted with it. I was thinking something along the lines of this from stattrek:

"Generally, statisticians use a ... (read more)

That's true, my original statement is too broad. To your point, that people are skeptical of cryonics in general, I am in complete agreement, and that's what I was trying to get at in my final point.

I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don't think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it's an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don't talk or even think realistically about it at all. The quotes you listed above sound like people were speaking hypothetically; if they were in an actual situation where their life was medically threatened but an intervention would likely save them I'm sure they would take the intervention without much consideration (barring... (read more)

0jhuffman
I'm not so sure about that. I mean, a LOT more people have an insurance plan than have a cryonics plan. I would agree that the truth of death is so terrible that people develop a complex set of thoughts and behaviors to insulate themselves from this terror. Naturally, they do not want to re-decision this over and over and suffer that pain, so we may even be resentful of the idea that someone thinks that they are not going to die. I think this is part of whats happening in cryonics. But to a larger extent I think people are skeptical of cryonics working, on a number of different levels.
2Rubix
It would be pleasant to me if this were true, but the talk I hear from some sources is actively pro-death. (Specifically, the "But fading into darkness will be so nice" and "I look forward to the Next Thing" camps of thought.) That is to say, when I bring up cryonics, the thought is actively abhorrent to these people. They profess quite strongly to prefer dying to cryonic preservation because having a frozen, inactive brain will stop their Soul from Departing. So... I can't tell if this is just really, really powerful belief in self-deception. The sentiment feels believed to me, which is what's so concerning. I agree strongly with your last point, and am having trouble with how to express that agreement, so we'll leave it there. (Augh, words!)

That's an interesting link to Rorty; I'll have to read it again in some more detail. I really appreciated this quote:

We have come to see that the only lesson of either history or anthropology is our extraordinary malleability. We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, protean, self-shaping, animal rather than as the rational animal or the cruel animal.

That really seems to hit it for me. That flexibility, the sense that we can step beyond being warlike, or even calculating, seems to be critical to what morals are all about. I don't want to ma... (read more)

This isn't so much a critique against consequentialism as the attempt at creating objective moral systems in general. I would love for the world to follow a particular moral order (namely mine). But there are people who, for what I would see as being completely sane reasons, disagree with me. On the edges, I have no problem writing mass murderers off as being insane. Beyond that, though, in the murky middle, there are a number of moral issues (and how is that dividing line drawn? Is it moral to have anything above a sustenance level meal if others are star... (read more)

3fubarobfusco
What would it mean for the PETA member to be right? Does it just mean that the PETA member has sympathy for chickens, whereas you and I do not? Or is there something testable going on here? It doesn't seem to me that the differences between the PETA members, us, and the Romans, are at all unclear. They are differences in the parties' moral universe, so to speak: the PETA member sees a chicken as morally significant; you and I see a Scythian, Judean, or Gaul as morally significant; and the Roman sees only another Roman as morally significant. (I exaggerate slightly.) A great deal of moral progress has been made through the expansion of the morally significant; through recognition of other tribes (and kinds of beings) as relevant objects of moral concern. Richard Rorty has argued that it is this sympathy or moral sentiment — and not the knowledge of moral facts — which makes the practical difference in causing a person to act morally; and that this in turn depends on living in a world where you can expect the same from others. This is an empirical prediction: Rorty claims that expanding people's moral sympathies to include more others, and giving them a world in which they can expect others to do the same in turn, is a more effective way of producing good moral consequences, than moral philosophizing is. I wonder what sort of experiment would provide evidence one way or the other.

Couldn't that just be due to a higher number of total votes (both up an down) for the OP? I would assume fewer people read each comment, and downvoters may have decided to only weigh in on the OP. A hypothetical controversial post could have a karma of 8, with 10 downvotes negating 10 upvotes, and a supportive comment could have 9 upvotes due to half of the upvotes of the first post giving it their vote. The comment has higher karma, but lower volatility, so to speak.

0wedrifid
Good explanation.

I won't be attending*, but just out of curiosity, what did you have in mind for the social effectiveness curriculum? Any particular authors that you recommend for things like body language, communication, etc.?

*Due to life constraints, but it sounds very interesting!

2lukeprog
I'll be able to give more detailed recommendations after the mini-camp has finished.

Prior to reading that one study, I would be in complete agreement. After, though, I'm not so sure. Really for any job where routine judgements are being made, I would have just naturally assume that habit would take over. That's why the study was jarring for me; it really does seem to demonstrate that at different times, supposedly expert decision makers came to different conclusions based on their physiology. Now, it could be that legal issues are more based on personal opinion and biases, and really don't rely on making decisions based on rational standards. My thinking, though, is that these are two domains (medicine and law) that share the common element of making a decision based on certain pre-established criteria.

Thirded, especially because I have daughter on the way!

But you have to take a Scientologist class to join? You couldn't just join a Toastmasters somewhere else and then show up, for instance?

6lukeprog
Right. Not all Toastmasters clubs have 'open membership.' For example, corporations can have their own clubs and only admit people who work for the corporation. In this case, the requirements for getting into this club were that you take a Scientology class or two and not say nasty things about L. Ron Hubbard or Scientology.

I guess the only quibble I would have, and I don't know that it really changes your critique much, is that I wrote that neurons would be some sort of gate equivalent. I wouldn't say that neurons have a simple gate model (that they're simply an AND or an XOR, for instance). But I do see them as being in some sense Boolean. Anyway, I would just try to clarify my fairly short answer to say that I believe that computation can always be broken down into smaller Boolean steps, and these steps could be rendered in many different media.

Computationality in any fas... (read more)

0dfranke
I'm not trying to hold you to any Platonic claim that there's any unique set of computational primitives that are more ontologically privileged than others. It's of course perfectly equivalent to say that it's NOR gates that are primitive, or that you should be using gates with three-state rather than two state inputs, or whatever. But whatever set of primitives you settle on, you need to settle on something, and I don't think there's any such something which invalidates my claim about K-complexity when expressed in formal language familiar to physics.

The sales pitchiness is another complaint I've heard. So let me ask you this; what authors do you feel approximate the training? I heard Heidegger was a big part.

Point taken. And Zimbardo's potential agenda can be questioned as well. Here's an instruction from the wiki page:

"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."

That seems l... (read more)

Zimbardo discusses the members of the experiment in his book the Lucifer Principle. They were from very different backgrounds than criminals, though they seemed to be very countercultural as well, which still makes the end result surprising. Regarding Zimbardo's take on the whole thing (ethics & impact), I think he does cop to the experiment being unethical, and his behavior being unethical as well. I don't know if it's a case of being localized to Stanford, but I do completely agree that it's a case of guessing the password; in fact, that's pretty muc... (read more)

1Costanza
Maybe not so much. If the Stanford undergraduate "guards" were part of the counterculture of 1971, their preexisting views of how a "prison guard" was supposed to behave would have been...unfavorable. When Zimbardo told them to role play a "prison guard," the obvious interpretation would be "act like a fascist pig." A non-countercultural blue collar kid from the same era, maybe one proud of his dad's service in World War II, might have interpreted the instructions differently.

I appreciated the candor Zimbardo put into his book, but that candor underscores your criticisms. Milgram was far more rigorous in his controls, and in his ethics. If one were to "duplicate" Zimbardo, it would need to be done with confederates in the fashion of Milgram's experiments, and would likely boil down to being an extension of Milgram.

I would describe myself as a computationalist by default, in that I can't come up with an ironclad argument against it. So, here are my stabs:

1) I'm not sure what you mean by an abstract machine (and please excuse me if that's a formal term). Is that a potential or theoretical machine? That's how I'm reading it. If that's the case, I would say that CIRJC means both a and b. It's a computation of an extremely sophisticated algorithm, the way 2 + 2 = 4 is the computation of a "simple" one (that still needs something really big like math to execute)... (read more)

0dfranke
Searle, to a zeroth approximation. His claims need some surgical repair, but you can do that surgery without killing the patient. See my original post for some "first aid".
0dfranke
I'd certainly regard anything defined within the framework of automata theory as an abstract machine. I'd probably accept substitution of a broader definition.

My understanding that the est of the 70's employed a fairly confrontational format. Do you feel that helped the learning process by making it more personal? I have talked to folks who drew a lot out of the training but weren't fans of the est organization (the group, that is, not the format of the training).

0suecochran
I think that the more confrontational style of the original est training brought people's resistance up, and created a more emotional rather than just a cognitive or didactic interaction with the trainer. I'm sure each style worked better for some people than others. I have the impression that as the format evolved, it got less confrontational, more "est-light". Some of that was no doubt in response to some of the media attention. I heard Werner Erhard speak a few times in person, and I read a number of articles and books about him and the training. The early television reports about the est training focused a lot on the "restrictions" on participants leaving the training room to go to the restrooms, equating that to a technique used in cult indoctrination. Werner Erhard said he was amused by that, because as he said, "I didn't call a break because I didn't have to pee." I liked the training a great deal, but I might have been more prepared for the "in-your-face" style because I had read several books before doing the training. I also took several of the follow-up courses, I "assisted" at a couple or so trainings including the one my sister took, and I enjoyed being included in the group for a few years after my initial training. I got turned off to the organization and the courses around 1987. I felt that they shot themselves in the foot by making SO much of every session of the post-training seminar programs on bringing in more people. I believe that if they had just focused more on the content, which was powerful and valuable, the people would have brought guests in all on their own. I think there must have been pressure coming from the upper management, and I felt that it was really a shame, because I would definitely have kept going if not for that.

I think you should read up on the conjunction fallacy. Your example does not address the observations made in research by Kahneman and Tversky. The questions posed in the research do not assume causal relationships, they are just two independent probabilities. I won't rewrite the whole wiki article, but the upshot of the conjunction fallacy is that people using representativeness heuristic to asses odds, instead of using the correct procedures they would have used if that heuristic isn't cued. People who would never say "Joe rolled a six and a two&quo... (read more)

I'll be happy to take a cut if the RP folks are so inclined :) But I think emotional management in poker and games in general is important to succeed in those arenas, and underscores the need for this component in rationality training.

There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn't fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn't be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don't advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised... (read more)

That strikes me as a low bar. Would you disastrously subvert someone else's utility function to majorly increase yours?

-2nazgulnarsil
depends. no hard and fast rule. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiFKm6l5-vE
-1khafra
"Subversion" seems unspecific. Does that mean, would I go back in time and use my amazing NLP powers or whatever to convince Hitler to try art school again instead of starting a world war and putting millions into death camps? Or is this "subversion" more active and violent?

Well stated. And I would further add that there are issues with significant minority interests that staunchly disagree with majority opinion. Take the debates on homosexual marriage or abortion. The various sides have such different viewpoints that there isn't a common ground where any agreeably objective position can be reached. The "we all agree mass murder is wrong" is a cop out, because it implies all moral questions are that black and white. And even then, if it's such a universal moral, why does it happen in the first place? In the brain ba... (read more)

I've done the core sequences and the quantum physics one. I'd probably be up for something like this. I'm a bit on the time challenged side though. What type of schedule were you thinking of?

0jwhendy
You are in Group B; please post HERE to coordinate with the others in your "virtual meetup."
0jwhendy
Planning discussion thread on g-groups is now HERE
0jwhendy
Hadn't thought that far ahead. I'm thinking somewhere between every 2-4 weeks. I think that'd be enough time to let [other time challenged] people read through a decent amount of material. Re. duration, perhaps 1.5-2hrs? Not really sure, though. Maybe that's way too long, or perhaps we could go on for a lot longer! Definitely evenings if a weekday; otherwise weekends. I work full time.

"or an Aaron from Less Wrong who figured it'd be silly to have a conversation about being personal while using a pseudonym?"

That one :)

I read Donne at my dad's funeral. I don't know how many countless times he quoted "For whom the bell tolls" (Meditaiton 17), but everyone recognized it when I read it. That actually isn't the line that stands out for me now, though. "Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind" carries a lot of impact for me. My dad's death just made me more aware in general, I think, of just how big of an impact an individual's life has on the people around them.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page with people getting to know each other in groups. I was actually surprised and humbled by seeing how much my friends truly cared about me.

I'm not the filking Aaron, just the lurking one :) We haven't met, it's just that I didn't feel like just using my nickname when the conversation got more serious.

1Raemon
(wait, to clarify: you're an Aaron from the NYC group [because we have a lot of them], or an Aaron from Less Wrong who figured it'd be silly to have a conversation about being personal while using a pseudonym? I'm Raymond, in any case. ["Raemon" is pronounced just line Raymond if you leave off the D. Most people pronounce it "Ray-o-mon" like I'm some kind of pokemon, which I suppose I have no one to blame but myself for]) Edit: Wow, I totally did not need those parenthesis at all, but I thought I did when I started and I kinda like them now that I'm done.

I don't know how to put it exactly, but the Christian funeral seems to be about a direct denial of what is obviously an emotionally devastating event. I grew up Catholic, and served as an altar boy at funerals, and it was just the same formula repeated over and over. I'm sure you're not the only one who was there who didn't believe the story, you were just being honest about your emotions. That's why I think communities really help. Sorry I don't have any recommendations on putting one together with a busy schedule.

I'd like to thank you for sharing your story as well. It was one of the things that prompted me to post (I was concerned this subject might be too off topic for LW). I do hope you find success in finding a community you can be yourself in.

0jwhendy
Thanks!

Thanks. And I did read that post from EY. I found it pretty enlightening about who he is a person. It was a very moving piece.

That's something I really learned from my dad's life. He was an electron microscopist, and I believe he did some great, if unheralded, work in his lifetime. I believe doing good work in general, in any number of different fields, can add to the general good in the world. Add to that loving people you have in your life, anyone has tremendous potential for adding to the good of the world.

Raemon,

The quote you gave was very insightful, and to me underscores why you need communities. You need to take time getting to know people; no one normally just bares their soul the first time they meet someone new. The whole group doesn't have to be ready for that, or even intend it. The bonds just form naturally (hugging can help that).

I think that death and mourning is like everything else, in that religious language and viewpoints have been the only game in town for the longest time. Like that essay you mentioned (do you have a link), some of it can ... (read more)

0Raemon
Oddly enough I hadn't thought of it that way - I think the NYC community is successful because people are encouraged to share things about themselves sooner rather than after they've become "comfortable" (or, I guess, just tries to make them comfortable sooner). Maybe that's what you meant. I think both are valid (communities give you time to feel comfortable with large groups of people, and good communities make you feel comfortable sooner). There is not commonly used music that I know of. I do have a particular tune I sing it to. (Are you Filk Aaron or a different one? There were a lot of Aarons) I've been looking for the dog essay online, but haven't found it. It's possible it was actually written by our neighbor, who was in the process of becoming a pastor.

Thanks Isparrish. It was pretty hard to get all of that out. Your grandmother's funeral sermon sounds like so many other funerals that I've attended. The need to pretend death out of existence just seems so central to what religious approaches to death are all about. The other side of it, saying that death is exactly what it seems, feels so daunting. The fact that their memories lives on can feel flimsy, even if it is absolutely true. I don't have a neat and clean method of dealing with grief, but preserving those memories for yourself I believe is integral, or at least it was for me.

1NancyLebovitz
Memory is flimsy, but the good that people do can have effects which last for quite a while, even if it isn't connected to their names.

I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.

8DanielLC
I think he would have been better off taking the money and donating it to a good charity.

Was the buyer sane enough to realise that it probably wasn't a power crystal, or just sane enough to realise that if he pretended it wasn't a power crystal he'd save $135?

Is that amount of raising-the-sanity waterline worth $135 to Tony?

I would guess it's guilt-avoidance at work here.

(EDIT: your thanks to Tony are still valid though!)

Shokwave's read on this is my take away from experiments like Milgram's: the situational context is not truly separable from character. Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect really drove this point home to me. He argued strongly against the idea that the abuses at Abu Ghriab were the result of "bad apples" (i.e. result of people with poor character), but that the situation itself led to the abuses, and further (and more controversially), the situation itself was created in order to bring about those behaviors. I don't mean to say that there is neces... (read more)

Sounds like there should just be a Bethesda meetup for the people that can't make the Baltimore one :)

The Shady Grove station is the end of the Red Line, one stop past the Rockville station going north. Union Station is on the Red Line as well, if you were going into town to meet Benquo for a ride, or take the train. Going south, its two stops past the Gallery Place - Chinatown stop.

This area is really difficult to arrange meetups, it seems, despite the close proximity mileage wise. The DC and Baltimore gravity wells really slow down travel times. I've been idly thinking of suggesting Terrapin Adventures as an outing ( http://www.terrapinadventures.com/ ,... (read more)

This is my viewpoint as a philosophical laymen. I've liked a lot of the philosophy I've read, but I'm thinking about what the counter-proposal to what your post might be, and I don't know that it wouldn't result in a better state of affairs. I don't believe we'd have to stop reading writers from prior eras, or keep reinventing the wheel for "philosophical" questions. But why not just say, from here on out, the useful bits of philosophy can be categorized into other disciplines, and the general catch all term is no longer warranted? Philosophy cov... (read more)

2mytyde
The decision of what disciplines belong to "science" or "humanitees", "art" or "engineering" is significantly a political decision. Indeed, it is a political question which disciplines exist in which organization and how they fit together. Rationalist philosophers just need to call themselves "Psychologists of Quantitative Reasoning" in order to get funding. In the current political era, it is fashionable to claim 'objectivity' in one's profession despite frequently inquiring into non-empirical matters. This claim of objectivity often serves to hide one's personal biases which, if made explicit, might otherwise be useful in interpretation of research. The drive to be unconcerned with the political implications of one's work is the ideal paradigm for economic exploitation of a class of highly-educated scientists by institutions and people who control how funding is utilized to enables, disables, or actualize research and engineering. Fox News is a perfect example of brutally skewing scientific evidence towards political ends "How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory" http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525 (For those of you who would: instead of voting me down because you dislike these ideas, how about trying to engage with them?)

The RomCom version of Kick Ass would probably do very well at the box office.

Considering the source was Nature, I doubt your analysis is correct. The researchers are from Ludwig-Maximilians-University and ETH Zürich, which appear to be respectable institutions. I found a write-up at Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100727082652.htm) that provides some more details on the research. From that link:

"The teams at LMU and the ETH Zurich have now shown that the result of a measurement on a quantum particle can be predicted with greater accuracy if information about the particle is available in a quantum me... (read more)

4RobinZ
The discussion of quantum mechanics Eliezer Yudkowsky did was not because quantum mechanics is relevant to the interests of this community, but because the counterintuitive nature of quantum mechanics offered good case studies to use in discussing rationality.
-6Vladimir_Nesov

I came across a blurb on Ars Technica about "quantum memory" with the headline proclaiming that it may "topple Heisenberg's uncertainty principle". Here's the link: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/quantum-memory-may-topple-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

They didn't source the specific article, but it seems to be this one, published in Nature Physics. Here's that link: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys1734.html

This is all well above my pay... (read more)

1Vladimir_Nesov
I don't want this kind of items to be discussed on LW. It's either off-topic or crackpottery, irrelevant whatever the case.

Sounds good to me (that's what I get for typing quickly at work).

That's a good point, Dan. I guess we'd have to check what the number of base 10 systems were vs. overall systems. Though I would continue to see that as again demonstrating an evolution of complex number theory, as multiple strands joined together as systems interacted with one another. There were probably plenty of historical accidents at work, like you mention, to help bring about the current system of natural numbers.

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