LessWrong 2.0 Reader

 If this was true, then we could not observe the event „any other coin sequence“ as well since this event is by definition not being tracked. 

When you are tracking event A you are automatically tracking its complement. 

In fact, in order to detect a correspondence between a coin sequence that we have in mind and the actual sequence, our brain has to compare them to decide if there is a match. I can hardly imagine how this comparison could work without observing the specific actual sequence in the first place. That we classify and perceive a specific sequence as „any other sequence“ can be the result of the comparison, but is not its starting point.

Oh sure, you are of course completely correct here. But this doesn't contradict what I'm saying. 

The thing is, we observe a particular outcome and then we see which event(s) it corresponds to. Let's take an example: a series of 3 coin tosses. 

So, in the beginning you have sample space which consist of all the elementary outcomes:

$\{HHH,TTT,HHT,TTH,HTH,THT,THH,HTT\}$

And an event space, some sigma-algebra of the sample space, which depends on your precommitments. Normally, it would look something like this:

$\{\varnothing ,\{HHH,TTT\},\{HHT,TTH,HTH,THT,THH,HTT\},\{HHH,TTT,HHT,TTH,HTH,THT,THH,HTT\left\}\right\}$

Because you are intuitively paying attention to whether there all Heads/Tails in a row. So your event space groups individual outcomes in this particular way, separating the event you are tracking and it's complement.

When a particular combination, say $THH$ is realized in a iteration of the experiment, your mind works like this:

• Outcome $THH$ is realized
• Therefore every event from the event space which includes $THH$ is realized.
• Events $\{HHT,TTH,HTH,THT,THH,HTT\}$ and $\{HHH,TTT,HHT,TTH,HTH,THT,THH,HTT\}$ are realized.
• $P\left(HHTorTTHorHTHorTHTorTHHorHTT\right)=2/3$
• This isn't a rare event and so you are not particularly surprised

So, as you see, you do indeed observe an actual sequence, it's just that observing this sequence isn't necessary an event in itself.

This is really good! Thank you for sharing ^_ competition drive and wanting to achieve certain things are great motivations, and I think in any learning process the motivation one can tap into is at least as important as the actual learning technique. I'm glad you had access to that.

I tend to feel a little confused about the concept of "intelligence", as I guess my post already illustrated, haha. I think the word as we use it is very imprecise for cases like this. I'd roughly expect people with higher general intelligence to be much faster and successful at finding workarounds for their language processing issues, but I'd also expect the variance in this to be so high as to make plotting your general intelligence against "how quickly did you tame your dyslexia" to not make super much sense.

Then again, I do agree with a comment somewhere else here that Typical Minding is a thing, and my intuitions here may be wrong cause I'm failing to understand what it's like for other minds and I might have overcorrected due to 25 years of incorrectly concluding I was kind of dumb. Lol.

I like this framework.

Often when thinking about a fictional setting (reading a book, or worldbuilding) there will be aspects that stand out as not feeling like they make sense [1]. I think you have a good point that extrapolating out a lot of trends might give you something that at first glance seems like a good prediction, but if you tried to write that world as a setting, without any reference to how it got there, just writing it how you think it ends up, then the weirdness jumps out.

[1] eg. In Dune lasers and shields have an interaction that produces an unpredictably large nuclear explosion. To which the setting posits the equilibrium "no one uses lasers, it could set off an explosion". With only the facts we are given, and that fact that the setting is swarming with honourless killers and martyrdom-loving religious warriors, it seems like an implausible equilibrium. Obviously it could be explained with further details.

a worthy platitude(?)

Sure, I don‘t deny that. What I am saying is, that your probability model don‘t tell you which probability you have to base on a certain decision

It says which probability you have, based on what you've observed. If you observed that it's Monday - you are supposed to use probability conditionally on the fact that it's Monday, if you didn't observe that it's Monday you can't lawfully use the probability conditionally on the fact that it's Monday. Simple as that.

There is a possible confusion where people may think that they have observed "this specific thing happened" while actually they observed "any thing from some group of things happened", which is the technicolor and rare event cases are about.

Suppose a simple experiment where the experimenter flips a fair coin and you have to guess if Tails or Heads, but you are only rewarded for the correct decision if the coin comes up Tails. Then, of course, you should still entertain unconditional probabilities P(Heads)=P(Tails)=1/2. But this uncertainty is completely irrelevant to your decision. 

Here you are confusing probability and utility. The fact that P(Heads)=P(Tails)=1/2 is very much relevant to our decision making! The correct reasoning goes like this:

P(Heads) = 1/2

P(Tails) = 1/2

U(Heads) = 0

U(Tails) = X,

E(Tails) = P(Tails)U(Tails) - P(Heads)U(Heads) = 1/2X - 0

Solving E(Tails) = 0 for X:

X = 0

Which means that you shouldn't bet on Heads at any odds

What is relevant, however, is P(Tails/Tails)=1 and P(Heads/Tails)=0, concluding you should follow the strategy always guessing Tails. 

And why did you happen to decide that it's P(Tails|Tails) = 1 and P(Heads|Tails) = 0 instead of

P(Heads|Heads) = 1 and P(Tails|Tails) = 0 which are "relevant" for you decision making? 

You seem to just decide the "relevance" of probabilities post hoc, after you've already calculated the correct answer the proper way. I don't think you can formalize this line of thinking, so that you had a way to systematically correctly solve decision theory problems, which you do not yet know the answer to. Otherwise, we wouldn't need utilities as a concept. 

Another way to arrive at this strategy is to calculate expected utilities setting U(Heads)=0 as you would propose. But this is not the only reasonable solution. It’s just a different route of reasoning to take into account the experimental condition that your decision counts only if the coin lands Tails.

This is not "another way". This is the right way. It has the proper formalization and actually allows us to arrive to the correct answer even if we do not yet know it.

If the optimal betting sheme requires you to rely on P(Heads/Red or Blue)=1/2 when receiving evidence Blue, then the betting sheme demands you to ignore your total evidence.

You do not "ignore your total evidence" - you are never supposed to do that. It's just that you didn't actually receive the evidence in the first place. You can observe the fact that the room is blue in the experiment only if you put your mind in a state where you distinguish blue in particular. Until then your event space doesn't even include "Blue" only "Blue or Red".

But I suppose it's better to go to the comment section Another Non-Anthropic Paradox for this particular crux.

FWIW, from glancing at your LinkedIn profile, you seem very dateable :)

I said die, not kill. Let the predators continue to use the dating platforms if they want. It will keep them away from other more wholesome places.

This seems valuable! I'd be curious to hear more !!

I think it would be correct to say that therapy was effective for my reading. By the end of primary school I could read at a normal level. However, my reading out loud ability seems not to have improved too much since then. I hadn’t realised until just now. But I still have to memorise how to say new words. I can, with a small effort, look at a simple word I have never encountered and pronounce it. Though, the word has to be quite simple. I host trivia as a side gig, and any question with a name that isn’t spelled traditionally trips me up badly. It can be pretty embarrassing trying to say “Sarrah” and not realising it’s just pronounced “Sarah”.

That’s the thing that leads me to think, at least with reading out loud, I have to explicitly memorise a words pronunciation before I can say it. Instead of what I assume others can do, and just look at a word and know how to say it.

In writing, it was necessity and cultural pressure. By the time I was reading out loud alright I was still writing like “i fond how to Mack a YouTube account” “ken i”. That’s a real quote my mother sent me a few weeks ago. When I realised I wasn’t getting what I wanted, (Winning MC battles, Reddit upvotes, winning Facebook wars, girls would comment on my spelling and I didn’t want them to) I would look around at the way others were writing things and cargo cult type copy whatever they were doing. Actually, that’s still what I do.

I don’t think it was high intelligence that caused me to notice these fixes. It took far too long to be intelligence. Instead, I think I’m really competitive and like showing off. Eventually I found methods that got the results I was going for.

I also watched a lot of JacksFilms YGS https://youtu.be/NARxgXEdlzs?si=1rGyQMAnMxQo0x-2

Interesting! Thank you for sharing! I'd love to know the answer as well.

Anecdotally, I can say that I did try to learn Japanese a little, and I found Kanji far easier to learn than words in hiragana or katakana, cause relating a "picture" to a word seemed far easier for me to parse and remember than to remember "random phonetic encodings". I'm using quotation marks to indicate my internal experience, cause I'm a little mistrustful by now if I'm even understanding how other people parse words and language.

Either way, that anecdote would point to my pictoral->meaning wiring being stronger than my phoneme-encoding->meaning wiring. Which might explain why processing language as drawings helped me. I really have no idea how much this would generalize. But I agree people must run in to this when learning new alphabets.