All of arromdee's Comments + Replies

Whenever there is some kind of a "league against monsters", it is probably a safe bet that there is a monster somewhere at the top. (I am sure there is a TV Tropes page or two about this.)

https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hired_to_Hunt_Yourself

I wrote what could best be described as a proto-rationalist Sailor Moon fanfic. Bear in mind that it's really old--I last worked on it around 2000 and it predates even HPMOR. It doesn't try to sell rationalism, but it has Sailor Moon do things that make sense. I never finished it but I got to the Doom Tree story. http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/fanfic.html

They would not have pages about works that were primarily sexual, because the advertisers prohibited it.

https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Troper_Tales

The fork decided not to bring the troper tales back, for just that reason.

It was suggested I post here, but there's a TV Tropes fork at https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki . It uses mediawiki software and gets rid of the censorship at TV Tropes. (I suspect this one will never get rid of the strikeout tag for dubious reasons.)

1Shmi
What do you mean by censorship here? Can you give examples?

Since you invoked TV Tropes, there's a TV Tropes fork at https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/ . It gets rid of the censorship at TV Tropes and also uses mediawiki, which makes things work better--you have real categories, it is possible to edit sections, etc.

1Nornagest
So one of these finally got some traction, huh? That's mildly encouraging, although a straight fork without the censorship might have long-term problems distinguishing itself -- even with the better wiki software. Regardless, probably better suited to the open thread.

Given that many people here are anime fans, I have an example, sort of. Back when Media Blasters had manufacturing errors that caused many of their disks to have mono audio, fans complained and Media Blasters claimed that their experts analyzed the disks and found nothing wrong with them.

Needless to say, the disks did have mono audio.

Of course, that's only sort of an example because it's just as likely that the company was simply lying about having consulted experts.

2brazil84
Or perhaps the company shopped around for some expert opinions it liked. In another thread, I mentioned that there are three threshold criteria for trusting expert opinion: In the situation you describe, (3) does not appear to be satisfied.

The point is not that free software programmers specifically refuse to accept wrongly indented code, the point is that they often refuse to accept code based on wholly arbitrary reasons. Arguing that indentation really isn't an arbitrary reason is fighting the hypothetical; replace it in your mind with something that is.

There's also the "we won't accept this bug report unless it fits this list of arbitrary requirements" gambit (if you actually do manage to submit the bug report following all the requirements, it will still get ignored anyway, but doing it this way they can artificially deflate the number of unfixed bugs and blame things on the user for not following the directions)

The patched version requires three questions. In fact it requires asking three people--if you only ask two people any number of questions, Random could pretend that he is the other person and the other person is Random.

First of all, you need a question which lets you determine who any person B is, when asked of Truth.

You want to ask "if B is Truth, then yes, else if B is False, then no, else don't answer". Presumably, you can't directly ask someone not to answer--they can only refuse to answer if they are Random or if yes/no would violate const... (read more)

your two-question solution doesn't work given the constraints imposed by Boolos

If the above is quoted correctly, the constraints imposed by Boolos are contradictory. It is not possible that 1) Random always answers truthfully or falsely and 2) Random always answers "da" or "ja". So the fact that I had to throw out the latter constraint is of no import--since the constraints are contradictory, I had no choice but to throw one out.

3pragmatist
Well, you don't have to throw one out. You could interpret the constraints (which are quoted correctly, btw) as narrowing the set of legitimate questions to those which Random can answer both truthfully and falsely with "da" or "ja". I'm not sure why Boolos would have that constraint in there unless it was to rule out the kind of solution you're proposing. Still, I agree the problem is clumsily phrased. Maybe the question could be patched by adding the possibility that the gods (including Random) don't respond at all, but also changing Random's behavior from "randomly answers truthfully or falsely" to "randomly says either 'da', 'ja' or nothing". If you patch it in this way, I'm pretty sure a two-question solution isn't possible. ETA: Also, I don't want to downplay the cleverness of your two-question solution. Whether or not it perfectly fulfills the constraints of the problem, it is still very nice.

Lurker, but I just had to post here. A version of this was posted on The Big Questions in July. Here is my answer, pasted from there (but modified to use the different names), which beats the given answer because it uses two questions.

Let Y be “is the answer to X ‘da’”. If they respond ‘da’, that’s equivalent to saying ‘yes’ to X, and if they respond ‘ja’, that’s the equivalent of saying ‘no’ to X. This is the case even if they said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because they lied.

“Tell me whether the correct answer to Y is the truthfulness of your answer to this que

... (read more)
1pragmatist
Nice! Although, as you mention, your two-question solution doesn't work given the constraints imposed by Boolos (or Smullyan). Still, very clever.

To say that something is conserved means that it is the same at one time as it is at another time.

If you cannot time travel, and you have a set of objects at 1 PM, then you can compare them to the same set of objects at another time, such as an hour later.

If you can time travel, you can do the same--but terms such as "at another time" and "an hour later" become tricky.

With time travel, the time as measured in the setting is not the same as the time as measured by the objects themselves. If some of those objects time travel from 2:30 ba... (read more)

-1Shmi
None of what you wrote makes any sense to me, sorry.