All of machrider's Comments + Replies

"UFO" has a colloquial sense that does, in fact, mean aliens (or trans-dimensional beings or what have you). I would posit that this is the sense of the word Eliezer used in the quoted text.

I read a lot of C&H growing up, and looking back at it, I'm surprised at how many interesting ideas it contains. I wonder how much of my present self was shaped by having these ideas implanted at age 8 or 9...

Steven Strogatz did a series of blog posts at NY Times going through a variety of math concepts from elementary school to higher levels. (They are presented in descending date order, so you may want to start at the end of page 2 and work your way backwards.) Much of the information will be old hat to LWers, but it is often presented in novel ways (to me, at least).

Specifically related to this post, the visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem appears in the post Square Dancing.

The fact is that there are many battles worth fighting, and strong skeptics are fighting one (or perhaps a few) of them. (As I was disgusted to see recently, human sacrifice apparently still happens.) However, I also think it's ok to say that battle is not the one that interests you. You don't have the capacity to be a champion for all possible good causes, so it's good that there is diversity of interest among people trying to improve the human condition.

Thanks for the clarification, I see what you mean. The distinction between repetitive, droning thoughts and actively reasoning about the problem makes sense.

I think eugman is more referring to negative thoughts that cycle through a depressed person's head on a regular basis. They're messages that remind you that you're a failure, you let people down, you're not going anywhere, and they play through your brain almost all your waking hours.

The negative thoughts you described are the ones that healthy people encounter in real, negative situations that must be dealt with. In that case, rumination is appropriate and finding rational solutions is desirable. But when your brain is essentially buggy and constantly ... (read more)

Are there any good examples of the long strategy working? Ron Paul seemed like a potential case of exactly that, and in 2008 he was rallying support on the internet and raking in serious political campaign contributions. He got a small chunk of the popular vote and raised the profile of libertarianism a little. However, a few years later the media have still apparently decided that he is unelectable and give him far less coverage than the "mainstream" candidates. (I'm not a Ron Paul fan myself, but he should appeal to the fiscal conservative base and he seems to be a man of integrity.)

i read it, and I disagree. I think it's irrational to expect everyone to do what he suggests, and it only works if everyone does it.

Edit: Using the word "strategic" is probably misleading. Eliezer proposes a particular strategy - vote for someone you actually like, regardless of popularity or perceived likelihood of winning. It's still a strategy, and voting is still a game. So the argument isn't really about whether or not to vote "strategically", it's about which strategy one should use.

In my original comment I argue for the meta-s... (read more)

What percentage of educated Westerners would you guess are to the right (as operationalized below) of you on economic questions?

Sorry, I find this survey terrible. I don't know how to answer most of the questions. Questions like the above require me to have more knowledge than I personally have (about the internal state of billions of educated Westerners). You are supposed to do this work for us by asking 5 to 10 representative questions with which we can strongly agree/strongly disagree, etc, and then use that information to categorize responders.

Th... (read more)

This is the subtext implied in the saying, "A Lannister always pays his debts," from A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Margin. It is frequently applied in the context of compensating someone for helping one of the Lannisters, but it also functions as a warning against misdeeds.

This is a good summary, but a post like this is greatly strengthened by links to external resources to justify or expand upon the claims it makes. If I didn't know anything about the topic, some of the text would be unclear to me, and I would want the ability to click around and learn more. For example:

• What is the sunk cost fallacy? (Link to wikipedia/LWwiki)
• There is some recent evidence about rationality as a treatment for depression

Also, I think one of the first reactions a typical person will have is, "Rationality? Of course I'm rational.&q... (read more)

The link to the post is incorrect; it points to the previous rerun, should point here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/li/unbounded_scales_huge_jury_awards_futurism/

Edit: It has been fixed. Thanks. :)

Doesn't that depend on heart attacks being a function of age rather than a function of time? Anti-aging doesn't necessarily mean anti-arterial-plaque-buildup. I do agree that entire classes of problems might go away though, which would be amazing.

I don't believe so, but maybe someone smarter than me can explain this. The magic 4% of a million = 40k value indeed should factor in, but it shouldn't dominate the expected value to the degree that you're making it.

Let's try a different angle:

Then, with 4% interest on my $160k yearly, it would take me about 5.5 years to accumulate that million dollars, or 11000 hours.

So over 5.5 years, you theoretically earned $1,220,000. A million in savings plus $40k living expenses for 5.5 years. Effective hourly wage is $110.90.

At an effective hourly wage of $110 your expected lottery ticket return is 1.0 hours, not 1.1

I believe you left out the opportunity cost of spending the $100 on a ticket instead of letting it accrue 4% interest. That is, you compared $100 in today's dollars to $100 in 2017 dollars, but it should've been $124 in 2017 dollars.

Thanks so much for the detailed response.

Wow, that OkCupid result is surprising. It has not been my experience. What are you doing that causes people to reach out to you in a friendly (rather than romantic) way on there? (Or are you the one reaching out?)

And I agree with regard to the intellectual standard, especially if you consider your intelligence a defining characteristic. Reading the discussion here (and not having much to contribute) has... recontextualized my own self-image.

Still it seems reasonable to point out the opportunity cost of spending a couple trillion dollars on a misguided war effort. It is true that the economy would be in better shape without those expenditures, and it's also probably true that US federal budget constraints would be different as a result. (However it may still have been spent elsewhere instead of scientific research.)

100 years is nothing in the evolution of a civilization though. The time between agricultural revolution and the discovery of evolution is not a typical period in the history of humanity.

Perhaps a better word would have been 'elegant'.

Suicide hotline operators will sometimes call the police on you...

I haven't been able to get to any of the east bay meetups yet, so I'm excited to see this in SF. I'll do my best to be available for it. With all the talk about the NYC group, I keep thinking "What could SF do?"

Pursuing this stupidity to its logical conclusion, I just did an elimination match with 16 rounds. Start with all combinations and cull the weakest member every round. Here's the result: http://pastie.org/1217255

Note the culling is sometimes arbitrary if there's a tie for last place. By pass 14, we have a 3-way tie between blue/blue, blue/green, and green/yellow. Those may very well be the best three combinations, or close to it.

Final version of program here: http://pastie.org/1217284

(Removed randomness and just factored in the probability of evasion i... (read more)

Agreed, re: the limitations of my method. As you suggested, I ran another pass using only the top 7 candidates (wins >= 19 in my previous comment). Here are the results:

3: blue/red
5: blue/green
7: blue/blue
7: green/green
7: green/red
9: green/blue
11: green/yellow

Choosing the top 10 (wins >= 17 from before):

7: blue/red
7: red/green
9: green/green
9: green/red
11: blue/blue
11: blue/green
11: blue/yellow
11: green/blue
11: yellow/yellow
13: green/yellow

Yellow/yellow pops up as a surprise member of the 5-way tie for second place. The green swo... (read more)

I'm thinking iterations just confuses things. With a high enough HP value we should be able to eliminate "luck". So here's a pass with 1 iteration and 20 million initial HP:

2: red/blue
8: red/red
13: yellow/blue
13: yellow/red
15: red/yellow
15: yellow/green
17: blue/yellow
17: red/green
17: yellow/yellow
19: blue/red
19: green/blue
19: green/green
19: green/red
19: green/yellow
21: blue/blue
23: blue/green

Deleted earlier comment due to a bug in the code.

Here's the result of a naive brute force program that assumes a random distribution of opponents (i.e. any combo is equally likely), sorted by number of wins:

185: red/blue
269: red/red
397: yellow/blue
407: yellow/red
438: red/yellow
464: red/green
471: yellow/green
483: yellow/yellow
512: blue/yellow
528: green/green
539: green/red
561: green/blue
567: green/yellow
578: blue/red
635: blue/green
646: blue/blue

The program is here: http://pastie.org/1217024 (pipe through sort -n)

It performs 30 iterations of ... (read more)