Great project! What will the copyright be? I'm interested in putting a few essays into a course reader.
A decent approximation to exponential population growth is to simply use the average of 700m and 50m
That approximation looks like this
It'll overestimate by a lot if you do it over longer time periods. e.g. it overestimates this average by about 50% (your estimate actually gives 375, not 325), but if you went from 1m to 700m it would overestimate by a factor of about 3.
A pretty-easy way to estimate total population under exponential growth is just current population 1/e lifetime. From your numbers, the population multiplies by e^2.5 in 300 years, so 120...
Cartman: I can try to catch it, but I'm going to need all the resources you've got. If this thing isn't contained, your Easter Egg hunt is going to be a bloodbath.
Mr. Billings: What do you think, Peters? What are the chances that this 'Jewpacabra' is real?
Peters: I'm estimating somewhere around .000000001%.
Mr. Billings: We can't afford to take that chance. Get this kid whatever he needs.
South Park, Se 16 ep 4, "Jewpacabra"
note: edited for concision. script
A bit of an aside, but for me the reference to "If" is a turn off. I read it as promoting a fairly-arbitrary code of stoicism rather than effectiveness. The main message I get is keep cool, don't complain, don't show that you're affected by the world, and now you've achieved your goal, which is apparently was to live up to Imperial Britain's ideal of masculinity.
I also see it as a recipe for disaster - don't learn how to guide and train your elephant; just push it around through brute force and your indefatigable will to hold on. It does have a ...
A bit of an aside, but for me the reference to "If" is a turn off. I read it as promoting a fairly-arbitrary code of stoicism rather than effectiveness. The main message I get is keep cool, don't complain, don't show that you're affected by the world, and now you've achieved your goal,
I agree that the poem is about stoicism, but have a very different take on what stoicism is. Real stoicism is about training the elephant to be less afraid and more stable and thereby accomplish more. For example, the standard stoic meditation technique of thin...
I'm the author - thanks for the feedback. I think you're right that a more-topical title could help. Edit: done.
I see, thanks.
I just looked this up. It seems the text has been altered, and in the original, Linus said "Are there any openings in the Lunatic Fringe?" http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1961/04/26
All of them are obviously still chances. I never said that a very small probability wasn't a chance. I said that it might rationally be treated in a different manner than larger chances due to risk-aversion.
Re: other stuff on ballot. Yes, that's right. I was just replying to the content of the post.
Sorry, I don't understand what was meant by your first sentence.
I rarely make decisions involving such low probabilities, so I don't really know how to handle risk-aversion in these cases. If I'm making a choice based on a one-in-ten-million chance, I expect that even if I make many such choices in my life, I'll never get the payoff. This is quite different than handling one-in-a-hundred chances, which are small but large enough that I can expect the law of large numbers to average things out in the long term. So even if I usually subscribe to a policy of maximizing expected utility, it could still make sense to depart...
You're right. That would be true if we did n independent tests, not one test with n-times the subjects.
e.g. probability of 60 or more heads in 100 tosses = .028
probability of 120 or more heads in 200 tosses = .0028
but .028^2 = .00081
Thanks. Sometimes I learn a lot from people saying fairly-obvious (in retrospect) things.
In case anyone is curious about this, I guess that Eliezer knew it instantly because each additional data point brings with it a constant amount of information. The log of a probability is the information it contains, so an event with probability .001 has 2.3 times the information of an event of probability .05.
If that's not intuitive, consider that p=.05 means that you have a .05 chance of seeing the effect by statistical fluke (assuming there's no real effect present...
I think I see what you mean. To clarify, though, tension doesn't have a direction. In a rope, you can assign a value to the tension at each point. This means that if you cut the rope at that point, you'd have to apply that much force to both ends of the cut to hold the rope together. It's not upward or downward, though. Instead, the net force on a section of rope depends on the change in the tension from the bottom of that piece to the top. The derivative of the tension is what tells you if the net force is upward or downward. This derivative is a force per unit length.
In general, tension is a rank-two tensor, and is just a name for when the pressure is negative.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "upward tension", sorry. Tension in one dimension is just a scalar. The very bottom of the spring is under no tension at all, and the tension increases as the square root of the height for a stationary hanging slinky.
Thanks for the tip.
The center of mass of the slinky accelerates at normal gravitational acceleration. The bottom of the slinky is stationary, so to compensate the top part goes extra-fast. I did a short calculation on the time for the slinky to collapse here http://arcsecond.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/dropping-a-slinky-calculation-12/
And clearly my children will never get any taller, because there is no statistically-significant difference in their height from one day to the next.
Andrew Vickers, What Is A P-Value, Anyway?
WolframAlpha is pretty good for calculating all this automatically - probably much faster than the spreadsheet. For example:
Why do I fantasize about being angry?
I'm breaking the rule a bit by asking about myself here.
Sometimes when I have down time and am daydreaming, especially if I'm walking somewhere or going for a run, I fantasize about someone wronging me (say with a traffic violation), then imagine myself getting angry, yelling at them, and physically beating them up. I think about knocking them down, screaming at them, challenging them to get up, and knocking them down again.
I've never acted on such a fantasy. I have no idea how to actually fight someone if I wanted to....
When I first read this, I thought "woah, that's kinda weird and worrying". Then I realised I do something similar. I sometimes rehearse violent confrontations in my imagination.
I've been involved in a few violent confrontations as an adult, and they're nothing like you imagine them to be. People like to imagine all the badass things they would have done in those situations, but when you suddenly find yourself in a brawl, your thoughts are generally "what the hell's going on here? Is this really happening?" I've heard accounts of hi...
It's called Intrusive Thoughts, and apparently most people have these:
...London psychologist Stanley Rachman presented a questionnaire to healthy college students and found that virtually all said they had these thoughts from time to time, including thoughts of sexual violence, sexual punishment, "unnatural" sex acts, painful sexual practices, blasphemous or obscene images, thoughts of harming elderly people or someone close to them, violence against animals or towards children, and impulsive or abusive outbursts or utterances.[6] Such bad thought
Asked today if the Titanic II could sink, Mr Palmer told reporters: "Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it."
http://www.smh.com.au/business/clive-palmer-plans-to-build-titanic-ii-20120430-1xtrc.html
If you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
Paul Graham “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
Atheism is an excellent excuse for skipping church.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence!
I don't think we can get much more specific without starting to be mistaken.
Paul Graham, "Is It Worth Being Wise?" http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
I like the idea. Perhaps we should start a periodic discussion thread where people post midrange goals and get feedback.
thanks for the catch
And Aubrey de Grey doesn't take any. (http://www.quora.com/What-supplements-does-Aubrey-de-Grey-take-to-stay-young-if-any/answer/Aubrey-de-Grey)
The last sentence is patronizing, and especially inappropriate in a thread about asking stupid questions.
wait, that was easier to search than I thought. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
Yes, it is Knuth's arrow notation.
What's 3^^^3?
Is this Knuth's arrow notation?
wait, that was easier to search than I thought. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
Yes, it is Knuth's arrow notation.
Okay, thanks. I have only read the first few posts. On those, the karma score was higher and there was positive feedback from readers saying it was helpful to them. I should have read further in the series before characterizing it as a whole.
Good point, thanks. Konkvistador indicates it was too verbose for him/her.
Thanks for letting me know - John's point about selection effects is well taken.
It would have been better for me to say that because many LessWrongers enjoyed the sequence, it wasn't too verbose for everyone, though clearly it was for some readers.
I'm pretty familiar with Ron Maimon, since I use Physics.Stackexchange heavily.
He seems to have other things going on in his life that prevent him from being accepted by the physics community at large, but in terms of pure knowledge of physics he's really, really good. Every time I've read an answer from him that I'm competent to judge, it's been right, or else if it has a mistake (which is rare) and someone points it out, he thanks them for noticing and corrects his answer.
When crackpots answer physics questions, they consistently steer away from the top...
The fact that many LessWrongers have read and enjoyed it indicates it's not too verbose for the target audience.
It appears to be one of the least-read of the original Sequences - I say this based on the low, zero or even negative karma scores and the few comments. This is evidence for the precise opposite of your claim.
The fact that many LessWrongers have read and enjoyed it indicates it's not too verbose for the target audience.
Or else the audience is self-selecting so that the people who read it don't find it too verbose...
Ah, thank you.
I think LessWrongers would like Victor Weisskopf's series of articles called "The Search for Simplicity", published in the American Journal of Physics in 1985 and 1986. They are The Simple Math of Everything applied to physics (specifically condensed matter).
They're accessible, using only simple algebraic calculations. Their goal is to connect different phenomena with just a few simple experiments and the right way of thinking about it. For example, the first article discusses how measuring the surface tension and energy to boil a liquid gives us...
Did you find anything useful?
Can you describe how else one would test a nursing theory for correctness?
As I understand it, a nursing theory says, "If the nurse follows procedure A, the reaction in the patient will be X. If the nurse doesn't follow procedure A, the reaction in the patient will be Y."
If the theory is accurate in those predictions, it's a correct theory, even if it sounds crazy. To tell whether it's a correct theory, we have to test it. That's what I was driving at.
Maybe I don't understand the request entirely, but wouldn't any criticism depend not on the details of the theory, but on how well it works?
The point of a nursing theory is presumably to help nurses do their job. So if you want to know if a nursing theory is good, come up with some metric to measure nurse performance, train some nurses in the theory, and measure their performance compared to a control group.
The theory could be absolutely ridiculous to people looking at it on paper, but that doesn't matter much if it turns out that it helps people be good nurses.
Thanks for letting me know you found it out so quickly.
By specificity for the review, I didn't mean that it should summarize the plot. Instead, when some general statement is made, there should be some connection to the movie that supports it. Jimmy Stewart has boyish charm? When? What scenes? What about them?
Contrast to Roger Ebert's review. An excerpt:
...Even the corniest scenes in the movie--those galaxies that wink while the heavens consult on George's fate--work because they are so disarmingly simple. A more sophisticated approach might have seemed la
Exercise: What Was That All About?
Players get samples of writing from various internet sources - randomly chosen movie reviews from IMDB, news stories from Huffington Post, blog posts from Wordpress, Wikipedia articles, etc.
Player A gets to block out 5% of the words in the sample. Player B then tries to guess the topic the sample discusses.
For example, here's a semi-randomly chosen IMDB review - the first one I grabbed off the site. It got 137 "helpful" votes out of 161 voters, so it's perceived as a good review. It's of a famous movie. I've bloc...
In the RSAnimate talk, Pink cited research that found that once people were doing the task (presumably under time pressure), higher incentives produced worse results.
That's different from using an incentive to get people to come do the task at all.
Gene Hofstadt: You people. You think money is the answer to every problem.
Don Draper: No, just this particular problem.
Mad Men, "My Old Kentucky Home"
Another good one from Don Draper:
I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.
I think my standard for a convincing parable is not just that the parable feel true, but that it feels true and would feel false if it had gone the other way.
For example, there's a parable about rowing on a lake in the fog. Another rowboat comes out of the fog and collides with yours. You get angry and start yelling, but when you notice the other rowboat is empty, you aren't angry any more.
If we reverse the conclusion of that parable - the rowboat is empty, but you remain angry anyway - it would seem false to me.
By contrast, if the low-hanging grapes had t...
That sounds better, thank you.
Thanks. I realize now I calculated those numbers I cited while leaving out the payoff from the .3 option since it wasn't changing, then forgot to add it back in. Strange what Wikipedia says when there was this counterexample. If I have some time later I'll check through the sources linked in the article.
I was interested in the context here. Chesterton was referencing Wells' original belief that the classes would differentiate until the upper class ate the lower class. Wells changed his mind to believe the classes would merge.
The entire book is free on Google Books.
At the point where those are the two hypothesises being considered there may be larger problems.
I am curious: when someone says they are happy, how do you judge the credibility of the claim?
There are certainly a lot of reasons to trust Luke's judgment. His other claims are verifiable, and given the nature of his message and the community he's delivering it to, he probably feels a strong desire both to tell the truth and to understand the truth about himself.
Nonetheless, I suspect there are far more people who claim to be happy than who really are, essentially due to belief in belief. What are some tests? For example, are there people known to have hi...
This story is not true. Bannister broke 4:00 in May of 1954. The next person to do it was John Landy 46 days later. Bannister's training partner Chris Chataway did it the next year, as did another British runner. However, I think Bannister and Landy were the only two to do it in 1954. The first American to do it was Don Bowden in 1957.
I found a list for the US here Also a master list of many runners, but difficult to parse.
There were three runners close to the sub-four mile in the early 50's. The other two were Wes Santee and John Landy. They didn't...
I have learned today not to fluff my posts with phrases like "a dozen more runners" and "ancient Greece" unless it makes sense to do so. Upon further reflection it's also possible that Zig said "Roger Bannister was a flea trainer" in a metaphorical sense--though he most definitely used that kind of words.
The "impossible 4-minute mile" myth, also upon reflection, seems like a similar myth that I stopped believing in, that some boxers, fighters and martial artists were required by law to register their hands as lethal...
The contest asks for "A recommendation list that tells people what they should do based on their situation, without any additional information or explanation. Keep it as short as possible, but no shorter."
Are there limits on the sorts of recommendations that are considered acceptable? For example, could one recommend no mineral supplementation? Alternatively, instead of recommending mineral quantities, could the paper recommend a procedure of personal experimentation saying, "take mineral A and monitor the results with process A', then adjust according to criteria A*, then take mineral B and monitor the results using criteria B'..."
thanks
GRE quantitative scores are not useful for high-IQ estimates because 6% of people get perfect scores.
A perfect GRE verbal score is roughly the 99.8th percentile, as can be inferred from the charts in this pdf: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/994994.pdf It shows that the percent of people with a perfect scores varies between less than 0.1% and 1.5%, depending on field, but it is usually 0.1% or 0.2%. (The 1.5% field was philosophy.) Because many non-native English speakers take the test, it's likely that one ought to adjust that percentile a bit...
Thanks!