Fantastic!
Well done, sir.
Gah. I don't remember the solution or the key. And I just last week had a computer crash (replaced it), so, I've got lots of nothing. Sorry.
I am sure of (1) and (2). I don't remember (3), and it's very possible it's longer than 10 (though probably not much longer.) But I don't remember clearly. That's the best I can do.
Drat.
I think it is worse than hopeless on multiple fronts.
First problem:
Let's take another good quality: Honesty. People who volunteer, "I always tell the truth," generally lie more than the average population, and should be distrusted. (Yes, yes, Sam Harris. But the skew is the wrong way.) "I am awesome at good life quality," generally fails if your audience has had, well, significant social experience.
So you want to demonstrate this claim by word and deed, and not explicitly make the claim in most cases. Here, I understand the reason for making it, and the parts where you say you want good things to happen to people are fine. (I have on... (read 361 more words →)
I agree that I made my key too long so it's a one-time pad. You're right.
"Much easier"? With or without word lengths?OK, no obligation, but I didn't make this too brutal:
Vsjfodjpfexjpipnyulfsmyvxzhvlsclqkubyuwefbvflrcxvwbnyprtrrefpxrbdymskgnryynwxzrmsgowypjivrectssbmst ipqwrcauwojmmqfeohpjgwauccrdwqfeadykgsnzwylvbdk.
(Again, no obligation to play, and no inference should be taken against gjm's hypothesis if they decline.)
I encrypt messages for a another, goofier purpose. One of the people I am encrypting from is a compsci professor.
I use a Vigenere cipher, which should beat everything short of the Secret Werewolf Police, and possibly them, too. (It is, however, more crackable than a proper salted, hashed output.)
In a Vigenere, the letters in your input are moved by the numerical equivalent of the key, and the key repeats. Example:
Secret Statement/lie: Cats are nice. Key: ABC
New, coded statement: dcwt (down 1, 2, 3, 1) cuf ildg. Now, I recommend using long keys and spacing the output in five letter blocks to prevent easier soliving.
You can do this online:
http://sharkysoft.com/vigenere/
This will transmute "It... (read more)
I did it even more simply than that: Count things. Most have four iterations. Some have three iterations. The ones with three, make four. Less than 10 seconds for me. Same answer as the rest of everyone.
Nitpick: Asimov was a member of Mensa on and off, but was highly critical of it, and didn't like Mensans. He was an honorary vice president, not president (according Asimov, anyway.) And he wasn't very happy about it.
Relevantly to this: "Furthermore, I became aware that Mensans, however high their paper IQ might be, were likely to be as irrational as anyone else." (See the book "I.Asimov," pp.379-382.) The vigor of Asimov's distaste for Mensa as a club permeates this essay/chapter.
Nitpick it is, but Asimov deserves a better fate than having a two-sentence bio associate him with Mensa.
It's almost always a good thing, agreed.
Smart people's willingness to privilege their own hypotheses on subjects outside their expertise is a chronic problem.
I have a very smart friend I met on the internet; we see each other when we are in each others (thousand-mile-away) neighborhood. We totally disagree on politics. But we have great conversations, because we can both laugh at the idiocy of our tribe. If you handle argument as a debate with a winner and a loser, no one wins and no one has any fun. I admit that it takes two people willing to treat it as an actual conversation, but you can help it along.
Oh, for pity's sake. You want to repeatedly ad hominem attack XiXiDu for being a "biased source." What of Yudkowsky? He's a biased source - but perhaps we should engage his arguments, possibly by collecting them in one place.
"Lacking context and positive examples"? This doesn't engage the issue at all. If you want to automatically say this to all of XiXiDu's comments, you're not helping.
A few years back, I sent a note to some friends and other smart people. It said, approximately:
"I am trying to raise about $42 million. I have an expected payoff of about 20% in a week. It's not guaranteed; it might be more, or there could be a loss.
"Now, you may be saying to yourself, 'Mayne's got a system to win the lottery or something.'
"Well, it's not, 'something.' I have a system to win the lottery."
At which point I explained the system.
Now, LW is not particularly fond of the lottery. From a social policy/political point of view, I'm not disagreeing.
I specifically represent to you that I do have a system, I use... (read 740 more words →)
Biases/my history: I went to a good public high school after indifferent public elementary and junior high schools. I attended an Ivy League college. My life would have been different if I had gone to academically challenging schools as a youth. I don't know if it would have been better or worse; things have worked out pretty well.
You come off as very smart and self-aware. Still, I think you underrate the risk of ending up as an other-person at the public high school; friends may not be as easy as you expect. Retreating to a public high school may also require explanation to college recruiters.
I also think your conclusion that you... (read more)