Frequently to both.
For fiction that I re-read and find it not as good the second time, I suspect the newness of it was the driving force in my initial assessment. Permutation City was life-changing for me, but going back after having more transhumanism in my diet, I don't know that it is even my favorite Greg Egan book.
There are other times where I have that feeling without even needing to re-read. "Upon reflection, I enjoyed that a lot at the time, but there is not a lot of there there."
You should be very surprised if you think you have found a new counterexample to a centuries-old discipline that comes from a millennia-old example. Odds are there is an existing literature addressing exactly that question.
I concur on "do what I want" as the distinction. Magic is teleological: it produces a certain effect, whereas science is about the cause. Magic "just works." You do not need to know how the magic words produce light or fire, they just do. The great usual magical dream is about having massive power under your control, not whether you are the direct cause. Wishes are the archetypal example. You wish for something and it happens. Done. A genie is neither you nor a tool you control, just a massive source of power bound to your wishes.
Magica...
And the direction of the error was known and stated in advance by informed interpreters (538). A fair number of Trump voters would not have been considered "likely" voters based on past non-voting, and that was a systematic bias in the polling estimate rather than something that would affect a few states independently. Pollsters tended to stick with their "likely" filter rather than change it on the assumption that these voters would turn out and vote. They turned out and voted.
I seem to recall seeing Trump doing better in polls of regi...
Between Halls B and E, nearish giant Pikachu
Setting up at the blue Fantasy Flight tables, by the X-Wing Miniatures banner, in front of the HQ table, just before the banner showing the switch to Asmodee.
If you have spotted a good/better location at the con, suggestions are still open. Otherwise, I will be updating on-site when I arrive on Saturday.
Default location is in the card game area, specific location to be found at the time (and then posted here). There are always open tables. I would plan on near-ish the exhibit hall exit, but I have not seen how the layout may have changed this year.
There is also the official open gaming space, but that is $4/person.
We could also take discussion to a restaurant, or start at the Convention Center and wander off for food if we run that long.
There is some small number of people whom I trust when they say they very confident. They can explain the reasons why they came to a belief and the counterarguments. Most other highly confident statements I look upon with suspicion, and I might even take the confidence as evidence against the claim. Many very confident people seem unaware of counterarguments, are entirely dismissive of them, or wear as a badge of pride that they have explicitly refused to consider them.
There are others whose intuition I will trust with high confidence on certain topics, si...
"You can’t just decide to be happy."
"No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable."
-- Quentin and Alice in The Magicians by Lev Grossman
I only know of 1 at AADL. Folks found it somewhat uncomfortable and wanted to be able to have food and drink. Several were held at Pizza House, just a bit off south campus.
Good point, thank you. I was focusing on the top half of the distribution, when there is also a cutoff in the bottom half.
Granted. The top hires from the top. This leads to two questions:
...Moreover, universities have a strong incentive to not be corrupt in their grading - if they let people slip through without learning the work, employers will start to notice and discount qualifications from that institution This assumes that employers are using a college degree primarily as a signal for education, outweighing conformity, conscientiousness, class, deference to authority, low time preferences, habitual credentialism, or anything else a degree might signal. We note that most employers want to know that you have a degree but not, say, "m
Social desirability bias remains even in randomized, anonymous polls. But the result would be less wrong than self-selected, public polls.
The writing style is ... potentially appealing to a certain sort of nerd. But I'm the sort of person who reads here and I stopped after the first paragraph, which has a geology joke, followed by a too-self-aware pun, then ends on the explicit statement that no one really understands handshakes. The typical mind does not know what the Mohs scale is and intuitively grasps social interactions, or at least it thinks it does.
"those pesky social interactions no one seems to get the hang of" comes across (to me) as signaling a lack of social competence ...
That seems like really sloppy sockpuppetry. Wouldn't that just tell admins which other accounts are likely also the same person, so ban the lot of them?
My experience is mostly with formula grants, where the grant is mostly a formality like the EFT reimbursement. Many grants have expected recipients. Others are desperately seeking new applicants and ideas. From the outside, it is difficult to tell which is which, and from the inside grantor agencies often have trouble telling why random outsiders are applying to their intentionally exclusive grants but they have trouble finding good applicants for the ones where they want new folks.
How much do you trust economic data released by the Chinese government? I had assumed that economic indicators were manipulated, but recent discussion suggests it is just entirely fabricated, at least as bad as anything the Soviet Union reported. For example, China has reported a ~4.1% unemployment rate for over a decade. Massive global recession? 4.1% unemployment. Huge economic boom? 4.1% unemployment.
One of the largest, most important economies in the world, and I don't know that we can reliably say much about it at all.
You've stated compatibilism, and from that perspective free will tends to look trivial ("you can choose things") or like magical thinking.
Many people have wanted there to be something special about the act of choosing or making decisions. This is necessary for several moral theories, as they demand a particular sense in which you are responsible for your actions that does not obtain if all your actions have prior causes. This is often related to theories that call for a soul, some sort of you apart from your body, brain, genetics, environment, an...
What implies that only a human can do that?
Related quote from July's thread:
Most people are neurologically programmed so they cannot truly internalize the scope and import of deeply significant, long run, very good news. That means we spend too much time on small tasks and the short run. Clearing away a paper clip makes us, in relative terms, too happy in the short run, relative to the successful conclusion of World War II.
-- Tyler Cowen
Note the alt text about talking its way out of the box.
I am not saying we should discard our intuitions about relative outrage, but we ought to look at them more closely rather than just riding them to a quick conclusion.
Tyler Cowen, "Just How Guilty Is Volkswagon?"
Did you mean to reply to a different post? That doesn't seem relevant to either the quote or the source article. A better metaphor here would be not believing in linens when someone puts on a white sheet and jumps out at you.
I passed the Project Management Professional certification exam.
And, going with Viliam's comment, market power is less threatening than political power, which includes criminal justice and the military. Channel your sociopaths towards dollars, not guns.
People condition on information that isn’t true.
Andrew Gelman, "The belief was so strong that it trumped the evidence before them."
As a rule, news is a distraction from worthy intellectual pursuits.
-- Bryan Caplan, expanded here
It wanders from the original quote, but "irrationality is slow suicide" is a great connection to make. (And if you want a quote, I'm sure you can find something like that from Rand.)
New games enjoyed day one: Tesla vs. Edison and Blood Rage.
Tentative location: Hall F, the green tables just behind the CCG/TCG HQ.
Time corrected to PM. Thanks.
Additional note to #3: humans are often the weakest part of your security. If I want to get into a system, all I need to do is convince someone to give me a password, share their access, etc. That also means your system is not only as insecure as your most insecure piece of hardware/software but also as your most insecure user (with relevant privileges). One person who can be convinced that I am from their IT department, and I am in.
Additional note to #4: but if I am willing to forego those benefits in favor of the ones I just mentioned, the human element ...
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.
― J.R.R. Tolkien explains how we get problems with the availability heuristic in The Hobbit
Most people are neurologically programmed so they cannot truly internalize the scope and import of deeply significant, long run, very good news. That means we spend too much time on small tasks and the short run. Clearing away a paper clip makes us, in relative terms, too happy in the short run, relative to the successful conclusion of World War II.
-- Tyler Cowen
Yes: what we learn from trolley problems is that human moral intuitions are absolute crap (technical term). Starting with even the simplest trolley problems, you find that many people have very strong but inconsistent moral intuitions. Others immediately go to a blue screen when presented with a moral problem with any causal complexity. The answer is that trolley problems are primarily system diagnostic tools that identify corrupt software behaving inconsistently.
Back to the object level, the right answer is dependent on other assumptions. Unless someone w...
Any games you're looking forward to? I'm curious about Pathfinder card game (new stuff coming, never played original), City of Gears, and Die! I was using the BoardGameGeek Origins preview to scout new releases.
ETA: Gen Con preview live
This being Less Wrong, this might be the point where you bring up whether P=NP and that solutions are often much easier to verify than compute. Easier does not necessarily mean easy or even within human cognitive capabilities. And if it does in whatever example comes to mind, just keep pushing to harder problems until we need not only tools to solve the problem but also meta-tools to tell us what our tools are telling us. And you can keep pushing that meta. (Did I mention that Blindsight is a very Less Wrong book?)
We trust our tools because we trust the pr...
"If you could second-guess a vampire, you wouldn't need a vampire."
-- an aphorism in Blindsight by Peter Watts, page 227
In Blindsight, a "vampire" is a predatory, sociopathic genius built through genetic engineering. They have human brain mass but use it differently; take all the brain power we spend on self-awareness and channel it towards more processing power. The mission leader in Blindsight is a vampire, because he is more intelligent and able to make dispassionate decisions, but how do you check whether your vampire is right or...
...And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith —-
—- Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn't ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. ...
I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifi
To match action to word, here are some of Ken's specific examples of vague legal claims, presumed meritless until actual examples can be cited (in reverse chronological order):
Vagueness in legal threats is the hallmark of meritless thuggery.
-- Ken White from Popehat
Ken wants you to be specific because a vague claim is usually a meritless claim. Not citing a good example implies that there are no good examples.
It's accurate but not very precise, in the same way that the story about how there are wet streets and rain is true but misses the inner connections. Many people fail to get the distinctions between programmers, artists, and designers, because they want designers to fix bugs, just shift staff to design, etc. And testers are nowhere in that simplified model. So people have enough of an idea to get the wrong idea.
Many game developers have a shaky idea of how game development works once the team is larger than can work in one room. That becomes project manage...
...According to a distinction that originates with Aristotle himself, his writings are divisible into two groups: the "exoteric" and the "esoteric". Most scholars have understood this as a distinction between works Aristotle intended for the public (exoteric), and the more technical works intended for use within the Lyceum course / school (esoteric). Modern scholars commonly assume these latter to be Aristotle's own (unpolished) lecture notes (or in some cases possible notes by his students). ... Another common assumption is that none of
Stronger point: since we are at Less Wrong, think Bayes Theorem. In this case, a "true positive" would be cancer leading to death, and a "false positive" would be death from a medical mishap trying to remove a benign cyst (or even check it further). Death is very bad in either case, and very unlikely in either case.
P (death | cancer, untreated) - this is your explicit worry P (death | cancer, surgery) P (death | benign cyst, untreated) P (death | benign cyst, surgery) - this is what drethelin is encouraging you to note P (benign cyst) P...
Me, I'm comfortable having somewhat meandering discussions. One of our meetup best practices suggests that groups have more success (measured in terms of interest and retention) with a project or something specific to do rather than socialization. Maybe we cut in the middle of that with a discussion group rather than resembling a cocktail party. I am also concerned that having something that looks like a homework assignment would cut against our "all are welcome" goal.
So perhaps I could rephrase it as "what do you (general you) want from a meetup?" The link has some ideas that have worked nicely elsewhere.
And then I scroll down and find this, the perfect example of your question about books that can be initially amazing but not great upon re-read or reflection. If you are not familiar with the ideas in GEB, it can be an amazing introduction that opens new horizons. Or it can be too clever for its own good, getting in the way of delivering its own content.