That's a great idea, I would definitely love to participate!
That is exactly the problem I am trying to address. On one hand, I can't figure out how to estimate the likelihood of a situation. On the other hand, it's quite evident that some people would fake a picture as mentioned above since many people find it of some importance. I just can't figure out how to try and evaluate the likelihood of one versus the other. When should I be confused?
But how can I apply this sort of logic to the problems I've described above? It still seems to me like I need in theory to sum over all of the probabilities in some set A that contains all these improbable events but I just don't understand how to even properly define A, as its boundaries seem fuzzy and various thing "kinda fit" or "doesn't quite fit, but maybe?" instead of plain true and false.
My main point I think, is that this is a more general problem. Some configurations of observations can seem extremely unlikely, yet the sum over all of these configurations might be fairly probable. Like if an airplane has an engine failure above your home town, and is about to crash unto it. The probability of it crashing right near your house is small (if you live in a big town), but it has to crash near someone's house. And that person that had the airplane crash right on his front lawn would go and say "What do you know, what are the odds? So unlikely!".
So while the above example is simple to... (read more)
Today someone shared a picture on Facebook showing four d20 dies (d20 is a 20-sided die), supposedly all landed on 20. He was saying how cool it was that he and his friends were playing a tabletop role-playing game and they all got a 20 on their spot check at the same time.
My first reaction was "Huh, neat!"
My second reaction was "p = (1/20)^4 = 160,000. In Israel's small role-playing community this seems just very unlikely. This picture is probably a fake."
1st me: "Well, this just happened to be exactly 4 dies. If that happened to be 5 dies, 6 dies, etc ... we would still consider this as an exceptional event... (read more)
I think it's worth dividing blackmail into two distinct types:
1. Blackmailing on information that is harmful to society.
2. Blackmailing on information that is not harmful to society, but which the victim feels private about.
Your arguments stand somewhat well for the first type. For example, if one is stealing money from the cash register where he works on a weekly basis, then we would not want such behavior to persist. But for the latter type, for example, if someone is secretly a homosexual and is afraid of what his family would say or do if they knew, I don't think we'd like to force him 'out of the closet'.
A possibly more serious problem... (read more)
Sounds really cool, too bad the 'more details document' is all in Russian. I suppose it's not like I would go to Russia just for an RPG, but it sounds like fun and I would love hearing more details about it.
I think the title is a little bit misleading, and perhaps he didn't put much emphasis on this, but it seems he isn't claiming correct models are generally bad, just that there are also possible downsides to holding correct models and it's probably a good idea to be aware to these flaws when applying these models to reality.
Also, it seems to me as he is defining 'correct model' as a model in which the reasoning is sound and can be used for some applications, however does not necessarily fully describe every aspect of the problem.
What word do you mean? Friendly AI? It's a term (I'm hardly an expert, but I guess wikipedia should be okay for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendlyartificial intelligence )
Finally the true face of the LessWrong admins is revealed. I would do the sensible thing and go back to using myspace.