Stupid Questions September 2017

I don't remember if the Sequences cover it. But if you haven't already, you might check out SEP's section on Replies to the Chinese Room Argument.

What about it seems worth refuting?

The Zombie sequence) may be related. (We'll see if I can actually link it here.) As far as the Chinese Room goes:

• I think a necessary condition for consciousness is approximating a Bayesian update. So in the (ridiculous) version where the rules for speaking Chinese have no ability to learn, they also can't be conscious.
• Searle talks about "understanding" Chinese. Now, the way I would interpret this word depends on context - that's how language works - but normally I'd incline towards a Bayesian interpretation of "understanding" as well. So this again might depend on something Searle left out of his scenario, though the question might not have a fixed meaning.
• Some versions of the "Chinese Gym" have many people working together to implement the algorithm. Now, your neurons are all technically alive in one sense. I genuinely feel unsure how much consciousness a single neuron can have. If I decide to claim it's comparable to a man blindly following rules in a room, I don't think Searle could refute this. (I also don't think it makes sense to say one neuron alone can understand Chinese; neurologists, feel free to correct me.) So what is his argument supposed to be?

"Every" doesn't need an order.

"For every x, property(x) holds" means "it is not the case that for any x, property(x) does not hold."

"For any x, property(x) holds" means "it is not the case that for every x, property(x) does not hold."

In Russian, quantifier adjectives are often implicit, which could be a part of the problem here. Native Russian speakers (like me) often have problems with this, also with definite vs indefinite articles in English.

edit: not only implicit but ambiguous when explicit, too!

Person below is right, "every" is sort of like an infinite "AND" and "any" is sort of like an infinite "OR."

(this may not help). It is the difference between, "each of..." and, "all of...".

"if we go through each of the set, one at a time..." "if we go through all of the set"

They can be made to mean the same.

Write your assumptions about the alternatives career paths that you see down.

Talk to other people. If you have multiple options talk with your friends about those and get their feedback. If your friends don't include people who are in those careers reach out for people inside those careers. Cold approaching people over LinkedIn is one way you can get in contact with people and there are likely also networking events.

I don't know what the best algorithm is, but what I did was something like the following.

Step 1. Make a list of the things you enjoy doing. Attempt to be specific where possible- you want to get at the activity that's actually enjoyable, so "making up stories" is more accurate for me than "writing" is, since it's the storytelling part that's fun for me instead of the sitting down and typing specifically. Sort the list in the order that you most enjoy doing the thing, with an eye towards things you can do a lot of. (I do like chocolate, but there's a sharp limit in the amount of chocolate I can eat before it stops being fun.) There's no exact length you need, but 10~15 seems to be the sweet spot.

Step 2. Line up the things you enjoy doing with jobs that do them a lot. Make a list of those jobs, putting under each job the different things you would like about them along with things you know you'd dislike about doing the job. Talking to people in that field, reading interviews with them, and good old fashioned googling are good steps here. Sort the jobs by how many of your favourite things to do are in them and how few things you don't want to do are in them.

Step 3. Take the list of jobs, and look up how much money each job makes, along with how much demand there is for that job and how many qualifications you'd need to earn to reasonably expect to get the job. Hours worked per week and health risks are also good things to think about. (Note: Sitting at a computer for nine hours straight should really count as a health risk. I'm not joking.)

Step 4. You now have a good notion of enjoyment vs practicality. If there's a standout winner in both of them, do that. If not, then consider your tradeoffs carefully. You will probably enjoy things less when you have to wake up every morning and do them, but it also caught me by surprise how little time it feels like I have to work on personal projects after eight or nine hours plus commuting.

Step 5. Think about UBI and cry a little, then dedicate a side project towards ushering in the glorious post-scarcity future.

There is a reason people say 80k. And it's because they did the research already.

If not 80k. Read deep work, so good they can't ignore you and maybe others booms that suggest a "strategy" for employment. (short version - get a job in an area on purpose. Ie if you are a vampire, a job in a factory making garlic free whole foods.)

Ask people around you. Maybe 10. Why they chose their career, and if they like it. Ignore their answers and double check by observing them work.

Figure out what satisfies the three criteria:

• You like doing this
• You are good at doing this
• Other people value this (aka will pay you money for doing this)

By Solomonoff induction, the hypothesis that governs the universe under the assumption that induction works has less complexity penalty than one that counts to a number on the order of 10^80 to 10^18000 steps while the universe is running and then starts working differently by a factor of about 10^17 (since that's how many turing machines with 6 states there are, which is the number of states you need to count to that sort of number of steps), so the probability that induction works can be given an upper bound of about 1-10^-17.

Shouldn't a particular method of inductive reasoning be specified in order to give the question substance?