We have to ask why smallpox was a unique event, and we never used this method for any other virus. Did we even ever consider it?
There are two strains of smallpox, one of which is much less deadly than the other. People practicing variolation tended to use variolous material from a mild cases, including those successfully variolated. Some of the success of smallpox variolation was probably due to this practice and the resulting tendency for the inoculations to contain variola minor.
How about:
Specialization of Labor vs. Transaction/Communication costs: a trade off between having a task split between multiple people/organizations vs. done by a single person. Generalism vs.Specialization might be a more succinct way to put it.
Also, another pair that has a close connection is 3 and 7. Exploration is flexible strategy, since it leaves open resources to exploit better opportunities that turn up, while exploitation gains in commitment.
As someone with a Ph.D. in math, I tend to think verbally in as much as I have words attached to the concepts I'm thinking about, but I never go so far as to internally vocalize the steps of the logic I'm following until I'm at the point of actually writing something down.
I think there is another much stronger distinction in mathematical thinking, which is formal vs. informal. This isn't the same distinction as verbal vs. nonverbal, for instance, formal thinking can involve manipulation of symbols and equations in addition to definitions and theorems, and ...
Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone. People who represent big interests in these games are compensated well, because of the logic of the game: so much is at stake that you want to have the best person representing you, so these people's services are bid up. But there is still the feeling that the game is wasteful, though perhaps unavoidably so.
Also, problematically for first sentence, I don't think many people would necessarily com...
Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone.
Not nearly as much as you think, the game is in a sense locally zero sum, but it greatly benefits the wider system if the right person wins. Hint: consider what would happen if court cases or the resource allocation problems implicit in stock trading were decided by coin flips.
Also contrast with warriors, they really do engage in almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone else, and their game ...
The theme of this book, then, must be the coming to consciousness of uncertain inference. The topic may be compared to, say, the history of visual perspective. Everyone can see in perspective, but it has been a difficult and long-drawn-out effort of humankind to become aware of the principles of perspective in order to take advantage of them and imitate nature. So it is with probability. Everyone can act so as to take a rough account of risk, but understanding the principles of probability and using them to improve performance is an immense task.
James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal
Well, just because the rule doesn't by itself prevent all possible cases of inappropriate cross-rank fraternization doesn't mean it has no value. There are other norms and practices that discourage generals from hanging out with lieutenants, e.g. generals usually get fancy lodging separate from the lieutenants. I suspect that cutting off lower-ranking officers from fraternizing with enlisted men prevents what would otherwise be one of the more common problematic cases.
If the military were even more concerned with this problem, it could have three or more g...
I think that in the military, the "no fraternizing with enlisted personnel" rule might be one reason why a hard separation is useful. This kind of rule requires a cutoff and can't easily be replaced with a rule like "no fraternizing with people of a rank three or more below your own." For instance, how would you set up the housing arrangements? Also, promotions would be awkward under this system, since you would always have a group of people you previously could fraternize with but no longer can.
I think the containment of the SARS epidemic in 2003 is a under-appreciated success story. SARS spread fairly easily and had a 9% mortality rate, so it could well have killed millions, but it was contained thanks to the WHO and to the quarantine efforts of various governments. Their wasn't much coverage in the vein of "hooray! one of the worst catastrophes in human history has been averted!" afterwards.
"But the sacrifice is too great" is a relevant argument, you think that "Yeah doing Y is right" is potentially mistaken.
I think I disagree with this. On a social and political level, the tendency to rationalize is so pervasive it would sound completely absurd to say "I agree that it would be morally correct to implement your policy but I advocate not doing it, because it will only help future generations, screw those guys." In practice, when people attempt to motivate each other in the political sphere to do something, it i...
Thanks for this response. One comment about one of your main points: I agree that the tradeoff of number of humans vs. length of life is ambiguous. But to the extent our utility function favors numbers of people over total life span, that makes the second scenario more plausible, whereas if total life span is more important, the first is more plausible.
I agree with you that both the scenarios would be totally unacceptable to me personally, because of my limited altruism. I would badly want to stop it from happening, and I would oppose creating any AI that ...
I don't think that's what I'm asking. Here's an analogy. A person X comes to the conclusion fairly late in life that the morally best thing they can think of to do is to kill themselves in a way that looks like an accident and will their sizable life insurance policy to charity. This conclusion isn't a reducto ad absurdum of X's moral philosophy, even if X doesn't like it. Regardless of this particular example, it could presumably be correct for a person to sacrifice themselves in a way that doesn't feel heroic, isn't socially accepted, and doesn't save t...
Hmm, you are right. Thanks for the correction!
I think this example brings out how Pearlian causality differs from other causal theories. For instance, in a counterfactual theory of causation, since the negation of a mathematical truth is impossible, we can't meaningfully think of them as causes.
But in the Pearlian causality it seems that mathematical statements can have causal relations, since we can factor our uncertainty about them, just as we can other statements. I think endoself's comment argues this well. I would add that this is a good example of how causation can be subjective. Before 1984, ...
"Actually" isn't intended in any sense except emphasis and to express that Eliezer's view is contrary to my expectations (for instance, "I thought it was a worm, but it was actually a small snake").
Eliezer does seem to be endorsing the statement that "everything is made of causes and effects", but I am unsure of his exact position. The maximalist interpretation of this would be, "in the correct complete theory of everything, I expect that causation will be basic, one of the things to which other laws are reduced. It will ...
Imagine a universe that is made only of ideal billiard balls eternally bouncing around on a frictionless, pocketless billiard table. Essentially the same thing as selylindi's idea of a gas in thermodynamic equilibrium. Imagine yourself observing this universe as a timeless observer, or to aid the imagination, that it's "time" dimension is correlated to our space dimension, so we see the system as an infinite frozen solid, 11 by 6 by infinity, with the balls represented by solid streaks inside that go in straight lines except where they bounce o...
I am confused by these posts. On one hand, Eliezer argues for an account of causality in terms of probability, which as we know are subjective degrees of belief. So we should be able to read off whether X thinks A causes B from looking at conditional probabilities in X's map.
But on the other hand, he suggests (not completely sure this is his view from the article) that the universe is actually made of cause and effect. I would think that the former argument instead suggests causality is "subjectively objective". Just as with probability, causalit...
OK, let's say you're looking down at a full printout of a block universe. Every physical fact for all times specified. Then let's say you do Solomonoff induction on that printout -- find the shortest program that will print it out. Then for every physical fact in your printout, you can find the nearest register in your program it was printed out of. And then you can imagine causal surgery -- what happens to your program if cosmic rays change that register at that moment in the run. That gives you a way to construe counterfactuals, from which you can get ca...
For instance, how would an omniscient agent decide if A causes B according Eliezer's account of Pearl?
An omniscient agent would have no reason to decide if A causes B, since causality is a tool for predicting the outcomes of interventions, and the omniscient agent already knows what's going to happen. The concept of "causality" is only useful from a perspective of limited knowledge, much like probability. And the concept of an "intervention" only makes sense in a level of abstraction where free will is apparent.
Pearl addresses this...
Consider "Elaine is a post-utopian and the Earth is round" This statement is meaningless, at least in the case where the Earth is round, where it is equivalent to "Elaine is a post-utopian." Yet it does constrain my experience, because observing that the Earth is flat falsifies it. If something like this came to seem like a natural proposition to consider, I think it would be hard to notice it was (partly) meaningless, since I could still notice it being updated.
This seems to defeat many suggestions people have made so far. I guess we c...
Your view reminds me of Quine's "web of belief" view as expressed in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" section 6:
...The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments
No 2^alpeh0=aleph1 is the continuum hypothesis, which is independent of the standard axioms of math, and can't be proven. I think maybe you mean he was close to showing 2^aleph0 is the cardinality of the reals, but I think he knew this already and was trying to use it as the basis of the proof.
Making mistakes like Eliezer's is a big part of learning math though, if we are looking for a silver lining. When you prove something you know is wrong, usually it's because of some misunderstanding or incomplete understanding, and not because of some trivial error....
The specific problem with calling the last game a "prisoner's dilemma" is that someone learning about game theory from this article may well remember from it, "there is a cool way to coordinate on the prisoner's dilemma using coin flips based on correlated equilibria" then be seriously confused at some later point.
Against typical human opponents it is not rational to join dollar auctions either as the second player or as the first, because of the known typical behavior of humans in this game.
The equilibrium strategy however is a mixed strategy, in which you pick the maximum bid you are willing to make at random from a certain distribution that has different weights for different maximum bids. If you use a the right formula, your opponents won't have any better choice than mirroring you, and you will all have an expected payout of zero.
For the dollar auction, note that according to the wikipedia page for All-pay auction the auction does have a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium in which the players' expected payoff is zero and the auctioneer's expected revenue is $20. So this breaks the pattern of the other examples, which show how Nash equilibrium game theory can be exploited to devious ends when facing rational maximizers.
The dollar auction is an interesting counterpoint to games like the Traveler's Dilemma in which the game when played by humans reaches outcomes much better than the Nash...
Calling the last game a "Prisoner's Dilemma" is little misleading in this context as the critical difference from the standard Prisoner's Dilemma (the fact that the payoff for (C,D) is the same as for (D,D)) is exactly what makes cousin_it 's (and Nick's) solution work. A small incentive to defect if you know your opponent is defecting defeats a strategy based on committing to defect.
I think evolutionary psychology is pretty far from the crux of the theism/atheism debate.
On one hand, I don't think evolutionary psych at the moment provides very strong evidence against god. It's true that if god doesn't exist, there is probably some evolutionary explanation for widespread cross-cultural religious belief, and if god does exist, there might not be. But evolutionary psychology so far only really has educated guesses for why religious belief might be so common, without knock-down proof that any of them are the true reason. The existence of s...
It does not sound to me like you need more training in specific Christian arguments to stay sane. You have already figured things out despite being brought up in a situation that massively tilted the scales in favor of christianity. I doubt there is any chance they could now convince you if they had to fight on a level field. After all, it's not like they've been holding back their best arguments this whole time.
But you are going to be in a situation where they apply intense social pressure and reinforcement towards converting you. On top of that, I'm gues...
For abstract algebra I recommend Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra over Lang's Algebra, Hungerford's Algebra, and Herstein's Topics in Algebra. Dummit and Foote is clearly written and covers a great deal of material while being accessible to someone studying the subject for the first time. It does a good job focusing on the most important topics for modern math, giving a pretty broad overview without going too deep on any one topic. It has many good exercises at varying difficulties.
Lang is not a bad book but is not introductory. It covers a huge amoun...
In the strictest sense, "adding" sheep is a category error. Sheep are physical objects, you can put two sheep in a pen or imagine putting two sheep in a pen, but you aren't "adding" them, that's for numbers. Arithmetic is merely a map that can be fruitfully used to model (among many other things) certain aspects of sheep collection, separating sheep into groups, etc, under certain circumstances. When mathematical maps work especially well, they risk being confused with the territory, which is what I think is going on here. The "f...
We need a sense in which Bob is "just as likely to have existed" as I am, otherwise, it isn't a fair trade.
First considering the case before Omega's machine is introduced. The information necessary to create Bob contains the information necessary to create me, since Bob is specified as a person who would specifically create me, and not anyone else who might also make him. Add to that all the additional information necessary to specify Bob as a person, and surely Bob is much less likely to have existed than I am, if this phrase can be given any me...
To draw out the analogy to Godelian incompleteness, any computable decision theory is subject to the suggested attack of being given a "Godel problem'' like problem 1, just as any computable set of axioms for arithmetic has a Godel sentence. You can always make a new decision theory TDT' that is TDT+ do the right thing for the Godel problem. But TDT' has it's own Godel problem of course. You can't make a computable theory that says "do the right thing for all Godel probems", if you try to do that it would not give you something computable. I...
The model seems not far off estimating peak hospitalization date, at least for states that are currently peaking like CA and NY. The peaks in places that are close to peaking can be pretty accurately estimated just with curve fitting though, I assume that being fit to past data is why the model works OK for this.
It's clearly overly optimistic about the rate of drop-off after the peak in deaths, at least in some cases. Look at Spain and Italy. Right now here's how they look:
Italy: graph shows 610 deaths on April 9. Predicts 335 on April 10, 281 on... (read more)