All of printing-spoon's Comments + Replies

I wonder why addiction is common among celebrities

Are you sure this is true?

ask whether "Ma" means Mother (English) or Horse (Chinese).

"Ma" also means mother, depending on the tone. Actually, this example backfires since the word "mama" or some variation of it (ma, umma) means "mother" in almost every language in the world.

I haven't read the book but this sounds pretty good to me. Since Harris himself is the judge calling his argument "stupid" might not be the best idea.

Implying that whether his post should be censored hinges on the conclusion reached and not just the topic?

What I would do? Probably nothing. I can't vote and I've never been very interested in politics. This question does not have the same confusing unfathomable quality as the examples in the article (souls and god existing). The world looks the about the same either way. Though I admit I misremembered what a line of retreat is, just extrapolating from the name I guess.

To me this just looks like a bias-manipulating "unpacking" trick - as you divide larger categories into smaller and smaller subcategories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes up and up.

How do you know the raised estimate with this "trick" is worse than the estimate without?

I could just as easily say, "As you merge smaller categories into larger and larger categories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes down."

I'm not sure... I think the topics I find most interesting are simply used up (except for a few open questions on TDT or whatever). Also the recent focus on applied rationality / advice / CFAR stuff... this is a subject which seems to invite high numbers of low quality posts. In particular posts containing advice are generally stuffed with obvious generalizations and lack arguments or evidence beyond a simple anecdote.

Also, maybe the regular presence of EY's sequences provided a standard for quality and topic that ensured other people's posts were decent (I don't think many people read seq reruns, especially not old users who are more likely to have good ideas).

I think this site is dying because there's nothing interesting to talk about anymore. Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles, and idea threads where the highest comment has more votes than the thread itself (i.e. a crappy idea). Main is not much better. Go to archive.org and compare (date chosen randomly, aside from being a while ago). I don't think eternal september is the whole explanation here -- you only need 1 good user to write a good article.

I am 16 and I think I started reading this site 13. I think there is no need for another site. I also oppose any new forum/category of LW simply because interesting content here is getting thinner and thinner, half the discussion page is [META] ("Italics formatting is broken!") or [SEQ RERUN] and a new forum would dilute that even further.

Make sure you decide whether to give a report before you do it or else we'll be getting filtered information.

The Economist recently had an article about how sitting in wobbly furniture makes people crave "emotional stability." They also mention a study finding that people sitting in chairs that lean to the left reported more liberal opinions.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558553

The difference is not huge, but it is statistically significant. Even a small amount of environmental wobbliness seems to promote a desire for an emotional rock to cling to.

As far as I can tell they are completely serious.

It's not just a community norm, big chunks of the sequences seem to be built on small amounts of recent research.

you're not vulnerable to people ringing you up and asking what your password is for a security audit, unless they can persaude you to log on to the system for them

Easier to avoid with basic instruction.

you're not vulnerable to being kidnapped and coerced remotely, you have to be coerced wherever the log-on system is

Enemy knows the system, they can copy the login system in your cell.

Because there could still be too much of the solid part for it to have a density less than air's?

edit: i suspect it would float for a little bit before the lighter gas diffuses out

I don't care if he gets a few meaningless internet points for making a poll.

If the ants have different decision theories and/or different preferences, how can they work together?

EDIT: I should say that I realize the game works with a bot controlling the whole colony, but I don't think that changes the problems in principle, anyway.

What?

The ants are not even close to individuals. They're dots. They're dots that you move around.

The wormhole-wing-trumpet logo thing is a bit aliased.

Can you give an example for Ants?

Do you think this is his real motivation? I can't imagine what he expects to learn.

Try to reframe the problem or parts of the problem in a way that connects to generic rationality, so that non-programmers can contribute something

This is harder than it sounds.

reasonable-sounding stuff about genetics and airplanes and Bernoulli's law

What is this referring to?

I don't understand, why guilt?

The dual of this approximated i-zombie is just a sleepwalker, not a literal, atom-for-atom-identical p-zombie.

In the same sense, the Roman Empire never thought of itself as anything other than the Roman Republic.

Here's most of my problems with Moldbug condensed into one sentence: a bold assertion with no literal meaning that I can easily confirm or falsify.

I heard LW people talking about him, went to see what all the fuss was about and like you I just gave up after a while. I suspect his essays are long to keep people from thinking about them too clearly.

FYI your rank could be a lot lower in the final competition than it is now because most of the best bots only play on the TCP servers.

I agree, however I don't think "smoking is bad" is much of an applause light here. A real applause light would be if the post needlessly referenced things like map and territory.

Okay, that makes sense.

This is not De Morgan's law. There is no conjunction or disjunction involved, only quantification:

Ax:P(x) = ¬Ex:¬P(x)

I'm not sure if there's a name for this type of tautology.

Red(x) means "x is red." X = Y in this case means that X and Y are either both true or both false. All x : Bouncy(x) means that everything under consideration is bouncy. Exists x : Fluffy(x) means a fluffy thing exists. The sentence says "if everything dies, then nothing doesn't die" and vice versa. This is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic .

edit: And here are the fruits of google: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/52323/how-do-you-read-this-logical-statement-aloud-and-how-do-you-notate-it-in-symbol

Is there any research on whether curing the infection actually undoes the damage?

You implicitly have hypotheses "this random number generator is broken always returns 0" and "this random number generator works fine." You start off being pretty sure the latter is true. Your shift to the former upon seeing 0 is where the surprise comes from.

I don't think in numbers, so I would expect to do really really badly for a really really long time, and I'm shy about things I realize I'm bad at. If I were going to embark on a long-term project to log lots of predictions for my own calibration and learning-what-percentages-feel-like, a text file on my own computer would do, wouldn't it?

You can make your predictions private.

Can you see how there might be a "need" for "inter-dimensional" or "hyper-dimensional" thinking and visualization capability which may be the basis for so-called "alien" technology? Do you find this as exciting as I do?! :o)

Okay.

It's just a name.

This reminds me of Berry's Paradox: the most arbitrary hiding place you can think of is by definition not very arbitrary.

(1,.1,0,0)

I heard 5000$ and 375$...

On the other hand, religion predicts more confidently than atheism that having religion makes people happier.

What's the length of the average program for 3^^^^3? I suggest it's 3^^^^3, with every language that gives it a shorter encoding counterbalanced by a language with an exactly longer encoding.

For a sufficiently crazy set of languages you could make this true for 3^^^^3, but in general what's simple in one language is still fairly simple elsewhere. If 3+3 takes b bits to describe in language A it takes b+c bits in language B where c is the length of the shortest interpreter for language B in language A (edit: or less :P).

Yeah, and the texture in this picture makes my skin crawl. The pills look like growths or something.

The average person probably supports foreign aid because they haven't heard of James Shikwati.

I think you need to be more precise about what states and ~ are.

(this is because all Turing-complete languages can simulate each other)

-6

With margin of error 60-ish

I'm not sure we need to put more effort into making new users feel welcome. It's a priority for churches because their entire business model depends on generating warm, fuzzy feelings in their members. Responding "Welcome to LessWrong!" to a new user's first comment is fine, IMO.

group project goodness = U(project) / E(social friction),

Why is social friction an expectation, but not utility? Why division instead of subtraction? This equation should have been a sentence. I also don't see why you've singled out "social friction" as the biggest drawback for community-building projects.

LWer since 13, atheist since I can remember. I'm seriously embarrassed by my younger self's posts. I am glad there are not more of me around. LessWrong is certainly good for teens, but can teens be good for LessWrong? Keep in mind our current bunch of teens are of higher quality than what we'll get if we actually recruit some.

edit: btw i'm 15