I think for me the problem is that I'm not being Bayesian. I can't make my brain assign 50% probability in a unified way. Instead, half my brain is convinced the hotel's definitely behind me, half is convinced it's ahead, they fail to cooperate on the epistemic prisoner's dilemma and instead play tug-of-war with the steering wheel. And however I decide to make up my mind, they don't stop playing tug-of-war with the steering wheel.
My brain often defaults to thinking of these situations in terms of potential loss, and I find the CFAR technique of reframing it as potential gain helpful. For example, my initial state might be "If I go ahead at full speed and the hotel is behind me, I'll lose half an hour. But if I turn around and the hotel is ahead of me, I'll also lose time." The better state is "By default, driving at half speed might get me to the hotel in 15 minutes if I'm going in the right direction, and I'll save ~8 minutes by going faster. Even if the hotel is behind me, I'll save time by driving ahead faster."
Further update for future biographers: we got married on September 21st at the UC Berkeley botanical garden, Kenzi officiated and YVain gave a toast =)
Harry frowned. "Well, I could listen to it, or the Dark Lord... oh, my parents. Those who had thrice defied him. They were also mentioned in the prophecy, so they could hear the recording?"
"If James and Lily heard anything different from what Minerva reported," Albus said evenly, "they did not say so to me."
"You took James and Lily there? " Minerva said.
"Fawkes can go to many places," Albus said. "Do not mention the fact."
Frankly, this reads like a non-answer to me.
I'm not sure what "supernatural" means. Out of the ordinary? But isn't deep rationalism out of the ordinary? What are we talking about?
In the local parlance, "supernatural" is used to describe theories that have mental thingies in them whose behavior can't be explained in terms of a bunch of interacting non-mental thingies. Pretty sure the definition originates with Richard Carrier.
This is a really good post.
If I can bother your mathematical logician for just a moment...
Hey, are you conscious in the sense of being aware of your own awareness?
Also, now that Eliezer can't ethically deinstantiate you, I've got a few more questions =)
You've given a not-isomorphic-to-numbers model for all the prefixes of the axioms. That said, I'm still not clear on why we need the second-to-last axiom ("Zero is the only number which is not the successor of any number.") -- once you've got the final axiom (recursion), I can't seem to visualize a...
I've seen some (old) arguments about the meaning of axiomatizing which did not resolve in the answer, "Because otherwise you can't talk about numbers as opposed to something else," so AFAIK it's theoretically possible that I'm the first to spell out that idea in exactly that way, but it's an obvious-enough idea and there's been enough debate by philosophically inclined mathematicians that I would be genuinely surprised to find this was the case.
If memory serves, Hofstadter uses roughly this explanation in GEB.
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...
This question seems decision-theory complete. If you can reify causal graphs in situations where you're in no state of uncertainty, then you should be able to reify them to questions like "what is the output of this computation here" and you can properly specify a wins-at-Newcomb's-problem decision theory.
Sorry, what do you mean by "pass an ideological Turing test"? The version I'm familiar with gets passed by people, not definitions.
"Sexism" is a short code. Not only that, it's a short code which has already been given a strong negative affective valence in modern society. Fights about its definition are fights about how to use that short code. They're fights over a resource.
That code doesn't even just point to a class of behaviors or institutions -- it points to an argument, an argument of the form "these institutions favor this gender and that's bad for these reasons". Some people would like it to point more specifically to an argument that goes something like &q...
I'll take a shot.
What we choose to measure affects what we choose to do. If I adopt the definition above, and I ask a wish machine to "minimize sexism", maybe it finds that the cheapest thing to do is to ensure that for every example of institutional oppression of women, there's an equal and opposite oppression of men. That's...not actually what I want.
So let's work backwards. Why do I want to reduce sexism? Well, thinking heuristically, if we accept as a given that men and women are interchangeable for many considerations, we can assume that any...
The other day Yvain was reading aloud from Feser and I said I wished Feser would read The Simple Truth. I don't think this would help quite as much.
The Simple Truth sought to convey the intuition that truth is not just a property of propositions in brains, but of any system successfully entangled with another system. Once the shepherd's leveled up a bit in his craftsmanship, the sheep can pull aside the curtain, drop a pebble into the bucket, and the level in the bucket will remain true without human intervention.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
-Antonio Machado
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road—
Only wakes upon the sea.
I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it. Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram.
--Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles
Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect
--Teller (source)
I believe Alicorn meant to claim that the larger class of electric vehicles for ~1 person -- scooters, tricycles, skateboards, ebikes, etc -- are about to take off in a big way because there are a lot more people who would buy them if they knew about them/saw their friends using them than there are using them now