LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I would have appreciated an intuitive explanation of the paradox something which I got from the comments.

An interesting thing is that Laplace’s rule gives almost the same result as Gott’s equation from Doomsday argument, which have much simpler derivation.

Somewhat pedantic correction: they don’t say “one should update”. They say they update (plus something caveats).

I thought of the reason independently: it's that if the number before 66 is not odd, but even instead, it must be either 2 or 4, since if it was 6 then the sequence would have had a double 6 one digit earlier.

I guess in real life, the reason (for leaving out the important variables) is a combination of:

• ignorance
• technical difficulties with measuring something
• people not caring deeply (just doing their job in the easiest possible way)
• legal reasons (it is not allowed to measure something)

To use an example of software developers being evaluated on how many lines of code they write:

• the manager has often zero programming skills, they couldn't tell good code from bad even if they tried, so they try to measure something they can understand
• what is a "good code" actually? ask five programmers in your team, you will get five different opinions
• the manager doesn't really care about the quality of code, just tries to make their boss happy by making some kind of report
• it would be really bad if it turned out that your diversity hire actually sucks at coding, so this way you at least provide them a chance to get good results on paper

There is an important nuance that makes it ~n+4/5 for large n (instead of n+1), but I'd have to think a bit to remember what it was and give a nice little explanation. If you can decipher this comment thread, it's somewhat explained there: https://old.reddit.com/r/mathriddles/comments/17kuong/you_roll_a_die_until_you_get_n_1s_in_a_row/k7edj6l/

For me, "enjoying life" means "enjoying good things that happen in life", while everything in-between is neutral at best. Many people seem to put positive value on "in-between" space.

If I try to point out, some people enjoy just the fact of being embodied.

What I think will happen is things keep getting worse for at least a decade. At some point a critical mass of people will know at least one person whose life was ruined by gambling and then we get a (way over the top) backlash.

Gambling bans in general, strong regulation of even non-monetary video game gambling mechanics.

You see rumblings of this among gamers, who got exposed to gamba trash earlier than the general population.

Or we just embrace the darwinism aspect of it and it becomes one more cause of permanent cultural inequality.

150 or 151? I don't have a strong intuition. I'm inclined to trust your 150, but my intuition says that maybe 151 is right because 100+99/2+almost1 rounds up to 151. Would have to think about it.

(By the way, I'm not very good at math. (Edit: Ok, fair. Poorly written. What I meant is that I have not obtained certain understandings of mathematical things that those with formal educations in math have widely come to understand, and this leads me to being lower skilled at solving certain math problems than those who have already understood certain math ideas, despite my possibly having equal or even superior natural propensity for understanding math ideas.). I know high school math plus I took differential equations and linear algebra while studying mechanical engineering. But I don't remember any of it well and don't do engineering now or use math in my work. (I do like forecasting as a hobby and think about statistics and probability in that context a lot.) I wouldn't be able to follow your math in your post without a lot of effort, so I didn't try.)

Re the almost1 and a confusion I noticed when writing my previous comment:

Re my:

E.g. For four 100s: Ctrl+f "100,100,100,100" in your mind. Half the time it will be proceeded by an odd number for length 4, a quarter of the time it will be length 5, etc.

Since 1/2+1/4+1/8...=1, the above would seem to suggest that for four 100s in a row (or two 6s in a row) the expected number of rolls conditional on all even is 5 (or 3). But I saw from your post that it was more like 2.72, not 3, so what is wrong with the suggestion?

It doesn't matter whether you call your multiplier "probability" or "value" if it results in your decision to not care about low-measure branch. The only difference is that probability is supposed to be about knowledge, and Wallace's argument involving arbitrary assumption, not only physics, means it's not probability, but value - there is no reason to value knowledge of your low-measure instances less.

this makes decision theory and probably consequentialist ethics impossible in your framework

It doesn't? Nothing stops you from making decisions in a world where you are constantly splitting. You can try to maximize splits of good experiences or something. It just wouldn't be the same decisions you would make without knowledge of splits, but why new physical knowledge shouldn't change your decisions?