All of Xece's Comments + Replies

Thanks for doing this once again Yvain.

Edit: survey taken.

Is this more or less the same thing as Cached Thoughts?

2Nighteyes5678
It's certainly related. Cached Thoughts have always suggested repeating a meme, to me, which is different than supplying a ready-made answer. For example: Cached Thoughts rely on the conclusion coming from outside of your mind, and merely accepted as truth without any analysis. Canned Answers can be your own conclusions from earlier, thoughtlessly applied to a situation they might not be relevant to, or just used as an escape so new thought doesn't have to be done. But yeah, quite similar. Good to know I originally came up with someone found here. Go ego boost. ^_^

To be honest, I didn't. I let them talk it out and the issue of free will never came up.

They just accepted the "god" used to phrase the problem as a perfect predictor. Most of the debate/discussion was centred around the fact whether or not it was more "logical" to choose both boxes (no debate on its definition, thankfully). The one-boxer's main argument was that given the god is a perfect predictor, the best choice was to one-box, as it would be impossible for two-boxing to yield $1,001,000.

3Shmi
"But the million is either there or not, might as well go for it!" -- how do you reconcile this with the "impossible for two-boxing to yield $1,001,000" without discussing free will?

Knowing is always better than not knowing

--Gregory House, M.D. - S02E11 "Need to Know"

-1Grognor
Thought it was a duplicate of this superior quote, but it wasn't.
1CharlesR
The Center for Better Thinking

Option to sort by judged/unjudged predictions.

I remember back in elementary school, all the teachers would so "there's no such thing as a stupid question. They even had posters of that on the doors.

Ironically, most of my class (IIRC) never bothered to ask questions or clear up confusion during class. They preferred to ask peers. If they went to ask the teacher during some other time, I wouldn't know. I was a frequent go-to person for math and science; this covered my other poor grades (social studies, art) via Halo Effect and made me appear "smart".

I took to Google for Social Studies.

S... (read more)

5roystgnr
I've always thought that that was a bad way of framing that advice. Of course there's such a thing as a stupid question! "But isn't two plus two five?": stupid question. What kids need to understand instead is that stupid questions are the ones that most greatly need to be asked! That's how you fix the stupid! Asking the teacher after class is an acceptable face-saving alternative to speaking out in front of everybody, but in the long run it may not be necessary. I suspect I'm not the only one who remembers "that guy who always asked stupid questions in our engineering classes" but mostly what I remember about him a decade later is that he kept acing those classes too: it turned out that nobody understood all the material; he was just the only one who was really dedicated to fixing his misunderstandings before getting tested on them.

Can Gifto gift better versions of Gifto?

0windmil
I automatically assumed that the boxes contained more Giftos, if the kid said that one Gifto made it the best Christmas ever.

The link to the Chess Question solution is the same as that of the Space Complexity Question Solution video.

1[anonymous]
Thank you! Fixed. Sorry to everyone for the errors so far, I was doing the links by hand, and it was multitasking at the time since it was such a boring thing to do.

Thanks Yvain. Just took the survey, can't wait for the results!

I believe the problem with this, is that you have given actual values (pain units), and equated the two levels of "torture" outlined in the original thought experiment. Specifically, equating one trillion humans with dust speck in eye and Alice being tortured.

1DanielLC
So, what's the problem? Is a dust speck incomparable to torture? A dust speck is comparable to something slightly worse than a dust speck, which is comparable to something slightly worse than that, etc. At some point, you'll compare dust specks to torture. You may not live long enough to follow that out explicitly, just like you could never start with one grain of sand and keep adding them one at a time to get a beach, but the comparison still exists.

Requesting some help... I've just installed Python 2.7, however I am having trouble getting the ncurses library. When I try to run bsweep.py it just shows a command prompt that disappears.

I personally define mistakes as "faults". By this I mean that if a child has understanding of the maths subject in question, he or she should be able to do the question correctly. Thus, the mistake can be attributed to things such as sloppiness, inattentiveness, and so on.

On the other hand, errors, deviations from the correct answer, can happen for other reasons. Intuition, for one. A specific example is how humans perceive numbers logarithmically, that is, larger numbers spaced closer together. (eg: "million" and "billion" are both very large, but to the brain there is little difference).

Hello there,

I am a 16-year-old high school student in Vancouver, Canada. I discovered Less Wrong several months ago through HP:MoR, which deeply captured my interest. After finishing the then released chapters, I knew I wanted to learn more. Upon reading the sequences, I felt enlightened. I discovered a new way of thinking, of making decisions that would benefit myself and others more. I delved through articles and eventually started to use Anki, learning fallacies and cognitive biases. As a result, I am more mentally organized, I am doing better in school... (read more)

5Vladimir_Nesov
Just make sure to focus your effort on setting up opinions to reflect facts, not on making opinions appear convincing or on your side. In particular, lots of things are confusing, uncertain and unstable under potential evidence; or offending, or supporting policies you believe wrong, or "improper" for your "identity". Reality doesn't care, so you shouldn't either.
1lessdazed
Welcome! Careful now. Excellent. Tangentially relevant. I think I used to overestimate the importance of this.