Welcome to Less Wrong! (11th thread, January 2017) (Thread B)

The person you are talking to is a university professor who teaches game theory, so it is definitely on you to prove that assertion.

Incidentally, your tone and posting behavior suggests that you are a troll and are not participating in the community in good faith.

Hi, my horizons are towards hardcore Effective Altruism, whereas to be a successful E altruist you have to figure out how your brain works, emotional intelligence, QM and how to condition yourself. I'm very concerned that rational people who have apparently mastered the Way spend their time arguing on irrelevant matters with users here rather than being in line with their utility function and purpose. So a part of my future research is how to figure out how to communicate with high-IQ individuals here to unlock their potential and improve their reasoning.

For now I have to read the Sequences, do some math, read Jaynes and other rationalist material. http://rationality.org/resources/reading-list

I have around 7017+-500 pages left to read and understand, which will take around a year. If you have any other suggestions for material to read based on my post history among others, I highly appreciate it. Thanks.

Hello, this is the user formerly known as Romashka. I work in a bookstore, read botany articles for pleasure, have a family. I do not expect to post to Discussion, and will probably comment only occasionally. Good luck to everyone.

Okay, I hear you, but the site has its own rules about presentation and dialogue. Given that you've said it's something that only you can explain correctly to people, maybe you'd actually be better off starting a blog and putting it in there? Then you could do it your own way and present your information as you see fit. Because if you explain it here people might not listen the way you want them to, and that might be very frustrating for you.

Hello, I'm a math-cs undergrad and aspiring effective altruist, but I haven't chosen a cause yet. Since that decision is probably one of the most important ones, I should probably wait until I've become stronger.

To that end, I've read the Sequences (as well as HPMOR), and I would like to attend a CFAR workshop or similar at some point in the future. I think one of my problems is that I don't actually think that much about what I read. Do you have any advice on that?

Also, there are a couple of LWers in my college with whom I have met twice, and we would like to start organising meetups regularly. Would you please give me some karma so that I can add new meetups? (I promise I will make up for it with good contributions)

Thanks!

I think the problem here is that this a place for people who accept the possibility that they could be wrong and look to others to check and maybe improve their ideas - so that we can all help each other be "Less Wrong".

You have an idea that you're certain is right, and you don't think anybody here can possibly improve it or contribute anything to it. That's why people are questioning whether this is the right place for your material.

You also haven't had time to build up credibility - not John Nash's credibility, your credibility. That's why I suggested participating in the community a bit before insisting that people listen to you.

Hello, would this be the current introduction thread?

Not sure I belong here. I haven't read through much of the site but it seems like a useful resource. I'm looking for people I can communicate with and relate to. I found the site via a search for "a sense for logic". I think of it as feeling ideas connect, and it's my current best guess as to why I'm apparently incomprehensible to most people. An example of it: I can usually tell whether I'll remember something by feel.

Does that seem relatable? And is this the wrong place to try and make friends?

Hello! I'm Ryan; some of you may know me from the Boston or NYC meetups, or from my excursions to the Bay. I'm finally getting around to really using this account; anything that I posted more than a year or so ago can be safely ignored, or laughed at if you're in the mood for a chuckle. I'm hoping to primarily focus on longevity research and how people can work together well on things in general; currently collecting info to try and make a general post about the current state of the field. I'm thoroughly a layperson in most regards--I have a BA in psych and a bit of a knack for cold reading and general Hufflepuffing, but that's about my whole skillset. Well: also meaning well and being quick to learn/update. I'm kinda proud of that. But still, I'm by no means the sharpest or most expert; I just tend to stick to things until I figure them out.

So: pleasure to (cyber) meet you, and hi again to people I already know!

I am applesauce.

Found this place through another user and quite a few concepts/topics/thoughts/content was interesting. Currently have a year left till I become licensed to start diagnosing people with the DSM-5 and on my way to be an RN as well... I am a crappy counselor so I meet all types of people...but the members of this site have peculiar thoughts and processes which is pretty fascinating.

Bottomline: I just like to listen to people.

First thing I want to say is that I do not have a mathematics or philosophy degree. I come from an engineering background. I consider myself as a hobbyist rationalist. English is not my first language, so pease forgive me when I make grammar mistakes.

The reason I've come to LW is because I believe I have something of value to contribute to the discussion of the Sleeping Beauty Problem. I tried to get some feedback by posting on reddit, however maybe due to the length of it I get few responses. I find LW through google and the discussion here is much more in depth and rigorous. So I'm hoping to get some critiques on my idea.

My main argument is that in case of the sleeping beauty problem, agents free to communicate thus having identical information can still rightfully have different credence to the same proposition. This disagreement is purely caused by the difference in their perspective. And due to this perspective disagreement, SIA and SSA are both wrong because they are answering the question from an outside "selector" perspective which is different from beauty's answer. I concluded that the correct answer should be double-halving.

Because I'm new and cannot start a new discussion thread I'm posting the first part of my argument here see if anyone is interested. Also my complete argument can be found at www.sleepingbeautyproblem.com

Consider the following experiment:

Duplicating Beauty (DB)

Beauty falls asleep as usual. The experimenter tosses a fair coin before she wakes up. If the coin landed on T then a perfect copy of beauty will be produced. The copy is precise enough that she cannot tell if herself is old or new. If the coin landed on H then no copy will be made . The beauty(ies) will then be randomly put into two identical rooms. At this point another person, let's call him the Selector, randomly chooses one of the two rooms and enters. Suppose he saw a beauty in the chosen room. What should the credence for H be for the two of them?

For the Selector this is easy to calculate. Because he is twice more likely to see a beauty in the room if T, simple bayesian updating gives us his probability for H as 1/3.

For Beauty, her room has the same chance of being chosen (1/2) regardless if the coin landed on H or T. Therefore seeing the Selector gives her no new information about the coin toss. So her answer should be the same as in the original SBP. If she is a halfer 1/2, if she is a thirder 1/3.

This means the two of them would give different answers according to halfers and would give the same answer according to thirders. Notice here the Selector and Beauty can freely communicate however they want, they have the same information regarding the coin toss. So halving would give rise to a perspective disagreement even when both parties share the same information.

This perspective disagreement is something unusual (and against Aumann's Agreement Theorem), so it could be used as an evidence against halving thus supporting Thirdrism and SIA. I would show the problems of SIA in the another thought experiment. For now I want to argue that this disagreement has a logical reason.

Let's take a frequentist's approach and see what happens if the experiment is repeated, say 1000 times. For the Selector, this simply means someone else go through the potential cloning 1000 times and each time he would chooses a random room. On average there would be 500 H and T. He would see a beauty for all 500 times after T and see a beauty 250 times after H. Meaning out of the 750 times 1/3 of which would be H. Therefore he is correct in giving 1/3 as his answer.

For beauty a repetition simply means she goes through the experiment and wake up in a random room awaiting the Selector's choice again. So by her count, taking part in 1000 repetitions means she would recall 1000 coin tosses after waking up. In those 1000 coin tosses there should be about 500 of H and T each. She would see the Selector about 500 times with equal numbers after T or H. Therefore her answer of 1/2 is also correct from her perspective.

If we call the creation of a new beauty a "branch off", here we see that from Selector's perspective experiments from all branches are considered a repetition. Where as from Beauty's perspective only experiment from her own branch is counted as a repetition. This difference leads to the disagreement.

This disagreement can also be demonstrated by betting odds. In case of T, choosing any of the two rooms leads to the same observation for the Selector: he always sees a beauty and enters another bet. However, for the two beauties the Selector's choice leads to different observations: whether or not she can see him and enters another bet. So the Selector is twice more likely to enter a bet than any Beauty in case of T, giving them different betting odds respectively.

The above reasoning can be easily applied to original SBP. Conceptually it is just an experiment where its duration is divided into two parts by a memory wipe in case of T. The exact duration of the experiment, whether it is two days or a week or five years, is irrelevant. Therefore from beauty’s perspective to repeat the experiment means her subsequent awakenings need to be shorter to fit into her current awakening. For example, if in the first experiment the two possible awakenings happen on different days, then the in the next repetition the two possible awakening can happen on morning and afternoon of the current day. Further repetitions will keep dividing the available time. Theoretically it can be repeated indefinitely in the form of a supertask. By her count half of those repetitions would be H. Comparing this with an outsider who never experiences a memory wipe: all repetitions from those two days are equally valid repetitions. The disagreement pattern remains the same as in the DB case.

PS: Due to the length of it I'm breaking this thing into several parts. The next part would be a thought experiment countering SIA and Thirdism. Which I would post in a few days if anyone's interested.

What do you do when you have a thousand questions to ask, and a thousand things to say, in a place where you do not normally do either? How do you say the first thing?

As a rationalist, what do you what to see more of in literature? I enjoyed HPMOR, and that's how I got here, a few months ago. It reminds me of textbooks, but I wasn't bored. It's one of my favorite books, and I've been recommending it to Ender's Game fans. I want to write a book or tell a story like that.

Origin story? I think of myself as an irrationalist, but I'm busy debugging. It's more difficult than debugging code (c++ atleast), but more important, and...hopefully more rewarding.

A few questions:

Can we comment here multiple times?

Is this the best place to talk about ourselves on Less Wrong, or is that our User page?

Is there a place to talk about our personal experiences and efforts 'becoming more rational', and encourage each other, or is this just a place for general scientific discussion and posts?

Is there a timeline page for this website? If not, what's important about this site's history? Any interesting simultaneous sets of events? If not, is there anyone keeping records?

Is there a max comment length?

I know politics aren't talked about on Less Wrong, but religion is. If you view irrationality, or 'that which the truth can destroy' as things which 'should be destroyed with the truth', then why not talk about a vortex of bias and irrationality and poor design? Or, as a problem, talk about solutions. If solutions are never discussed how will the problem ever be solved? By everyone joining a group that can solve the problem but doesn't talk about it, but believes it will magically be solved when everyone does? While everywhere else, whenever someone thinks they have magically solved all problems and uncovered the secret to world peace, they shout it to the heavens and don't stop ranting about it where everyone can hear, including the internet. This seems exactly like the one of the few places I'd actually want to talk, and listen to people talk, about politics. It reminds me of Be Secretly Wrong.

How can I get up to date on the latest parts of Less Wrong? If The Sequences are the introduction, where are things now?

Howdy, I've always enjoyed a good argument/debate. In 2012 I got in the middle of two friends argument about the health of being a vegetarian and decided to do my own research and settle the issue. I was disappointed that there was not an easy way to prove a point. That sent me down a rabbit hole of decision making systems and theory.

I have listened to every episode of "Rationality: From AI to Zombies". I've also researched several of the decision tools on http://lesswrong.com/lw/1qq/debate_tools_an_experience_report/

I am a software engineer and my latest experiment to build tools to help people agree is Reason Score and I would appreciate any time people have to provide feedback and debate with me on the tool.

I also work on the Pro-Truth Pledge and I am on the board of Intentional Insights which is an educational nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to promoting science-based truth-seeking, rational thinking, and wise decision-making.

I look forward to learning with you, Bentley

Hi, I'm Alexander. I'm going to university for computer science and an interdisciplinary honors program in the fall that includes formal study into logic as well as literature, physics, and philosophy. My main interests include AI's present and future states, ethics, science, and improving my rational capabilities as a method of further pursuing truth. I'd like to also find effective outlets for altruism. I look forward to dialectics to be had here and to hopefully have some beliefs changed.

Probably not banned, but I predict that your ideas will play out without a lot of impact over a few weeks. There's a core of an interesting idea - money as in indicator of values (in the CEV sense of "value"), but you don't seem to be listening to discussion, don't seem to see the gaping holes, and are mostly preaching.

Hey!

I am a Dutch Liberal Arts & Sciences student (political philosophy, law and economics). Last semester I started studying Game Theory and only very recently I discovered the world of rationalists and this site. I am an absolute newbie when it comes to the themes discussed at LW, but I am completely fascinated.

I am now reading the sequences and will probably not post too much, because I will mostly be learning.

What I am very interested in, is how LW users actually apply rationality to their own lives. In terms of habit-formation, work/life/sleep-schedule, nurishment etc. What do you guys do and why do you do it? What (online) tools do you use? What life rules do you live up to?

Hello! I've been a longtime lurker, but going off to my first year of college has given me the space to really understand what this site is trying to accomplish and decide that yeah I want to participate.

I have somehow gotten myself into an ongoing debate with a theist "rationality" group on campus (they do at least have the stated goal of seeking truth and they want people with multiple perspectives even if it is my considered opinion that the leader/only other person who contributed to our most recent discusiion abandons the truthseeking claim by saying he's "not afraid of any question"). My main problem I'm having is that it's a small group- I was the only atheist at the last meeting, and I debated the leader while the two theist students just kind of sat there and said we "both had good points," which I don't think was especially helpful input (especially as neither of them could tell me which points in particular were good). So I guess mostly I'm here because I'd like to win our future conversations a bit more effectively and to do that I'm going to need to get better to do that. I'm not sure if I don't really understand what I think or if I'm just bad at thinking on my feet, but somehow there's a disconnect here and we seem to be misunderstanding each others' arguments.

Is there a particular thread where one can ask for help for either debating in general or religious debates in particular? Because that's what I need I think and quick uses of the search feature provides a lot of semirelevant articles with comments as new as 3 years old... Alternatively, any advice here would be great.

Hi everybody!

I'm new here, so I'd like to share my rationalist origin story. (Please somebody tell me if I'm doing this in the wrong place.) I only became aware that rationality was a thing very recently. I'm getting started with the sequences and rationalist blogs, but there is a ton to read and it will take me a while. I'm familiar with many of the concepts and I have strong opinions about them, though I realize there's a lot to learn. I am going to try to express my opinions but hold onto them loosely, so PCK can work.

I was introduced to rationality by attending a CFAR workshop in early May. I'm not sure exactly why I signed up. A few people at work had raved about it, but I didn't really understand what it would help me accomplish. For the last year I've been feeling a lot of anxiety about the future of humanity and the possible collapse of society, etc. I've been coping with this anxiety by writing short stories about a moral revolution. I think one of our root problems is that people mostly talk about how things aren't working. I wanted to write about how things might be working perfectly. If there was a specific goal, I went to CFAR for help making more progress at becoming an author.

I found the workshop to be transformative in many ways I won't go into here. It helped me with my writing project as well, but not in the way I expected. My writing is concept-heavy, but I am bad at creating characters. One concept that is important to me is that humanity needs a new kind of philosophy. Something that isn't quite a religion or a scientific theory or an economic model but is something that combines all of those domains. This philosophy would strengthen individuals and give groups in different domains shared values/goals. Rationalism strikes me as this kind of philosophy. The rationalists I observed in the workshop struck me as being stronger because of what they know. Rationalism had changed them in ways I don't yet fully understand. In short, you all make me believe that a moral revolution is possible. You help me imagine the kinds of people who will address humanity's biggest challenges.

This is a really long intro I feel weird about that but I'm going to post it anyway. Rationalism is great. You're all great.

Hey! My name's Jared and I'm a senior in high school. I guess I started being a "rationalist" a couple months ago (or a bit more) when I started looking at the list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia. I've tried very hard to mitigate almost all of them as much as I can and I plan on furthering myself down this path. I've read a lot of the sequences on here and I like to read a lot of rationalwiki and I also try to get information from many different sources.

As for my views, I am first a rationalist and make sure I am open to changing my mind about ANYTHING because reality doesn't change on your ability to stomach it.

As for labels, I'm vegan (or at least strict vegetarian), anarcho-communist (something around the range of left libertarian), agnostic (not in the sense that I'm on the fence but that I'm sure that we don't know - so militant agnostic lol).

My main first question is, since you guy are rationalists, why aren't you vegetarian or vegan? The percentage that is vegetarian on sites like lesswrong and rationalwiki is hardly higher than the public (or seems so). I would think considering you are rationalists you would understand vegetarian or veganism and go for it for sure. Am I missing something because this actually blows my mind? If you oppose it, I really wanna hear some arguments because I've never heard a single even somewhat convincing argument and I've argued with oh so many people about it. Obviously goal of veganism is to lessen suffering not end it etc.

But yeah hey!

Hi, everybody, I am Yuri. I am willing to continue figuring out what is going on in my life, with me and people around me, why this all seems so wrong and how to fix it.

Are you going to [...] only attack my character? [...] Stop attacking my character

Neither of the things you are complaining about has anything to do with your character. One is attacking your prose style and the other your willingness to be explicit about your points and why we should be interested in them.

If you treat all criticism as personal attack and accordingly take it personally, you make it impossible to learn from criticism. This is an appropriate course of action only if you believe yourself immune to error. I do not know of anyone who is immune to error.

Why do you think there is nothing wrong with your delivery? Multiple people have told you that there was. Is that not evidence that there was? Especially because it's the community's opinions that count, not yours?

I'm not trying to welcome you, I'm trying to explain why your posts were moved to drafts against your will.

I'm not arguing with or talking about Nash's theory. I'm telling you that your posts are low quality and you need to fix that if you want a good response.

My point in the last paragraph is that you are treating everyone like dirt and coming across as repulsive and egotistical.

"You are incorrect" was referring to "No, you can't give me feedback.". Yes, we can. If you're not receptive to feedback, you should probably leave this site. You're also going to struggle to socialize with any human beings anywhere with that attitude. Everyone will dislike you.

Keep in mind that it's irrelevant how smart or right you are if no one wants to talk to you.

No, you can't give me feedback. It's above you.

Why do you think it's above me?

Hello, I'm just a guy that found this site by chance, I have a "system" I base my decision making on but while I wasn't able to find "problems" in my way of thinking I am sure there must be some, so I wanted to write it down for you to dissect, probably a lot of stuff you've heard of already but oh well :D

Hey there,

Just joined. My only exposure to LW has been reading about it on other websites, and reading a short story by Yudkowsky (I think) about baby eating aliens, which was a fun read. (Though I prefer the original ending to the "real" one.)

I have no idea what I plan to get out of joining the site, other than looking around. I know I do have an itch to write out my thoughts about a few topics on some public forum, but no idea if they're at all novel or interesting.

So, I do have questions about what the "prevalent view (assuming there is one)" is on LW about a couple topics, and where I can find how people have arrived at that view.

1. Qualia. I don't believe they exist. Or, equivalently, qualia being something "special" is an illusion, just like free will. Is there a consensus here about that? Or has the topic been beaten to death? Also, would the perception of having free will itself count as qualia?

2. The possibility that we're in a simulation. I believe it's basically currently not calculable, given what we know. It's a consequence of me finding no compelling reason to believe that the capabilities of technology either end shortly beyond our current capabilities, or are unimaginably limitless. It's simply not predictable where they end, but obvious that they do end somewhere. Any of that interest anyone?

I need some way to examine the core beliefs of my life and evaluate whether they are actually sensible or just what I have grown up thinking? Just thinking about these things and trying to evaluate them is not working, since what I already know seems correct (Confirmation bias), and my mind is just going around in circles.

Here are some of the things I believe strongly, that I want to examine, and proof of one should not come from an unproven point.

• Being a religious agnostic
• Believing that things should be proven using the method of "scientific enquiry and experimentation".
• Individual freedom is paramount. Society should give people freedom to practice their own religion, sexual preference, occupation, way of living etc, as long as it doesn't harm others. => This is typical liberal stuff, but what is the criteria for evaluation? What function are we trying to maximise, and how do we calculate what the return value is?
• Reading a lot of books to expose myself to new ways of thinking.
• Travel as a means of personal development. => Learning new languages, meeting new people etc to gain a varied perspective on life.

Hello to all rationalistas. (?)

I am new here, and I intend to lurk, doing the reading regularly, and catching up from a position of being far behind, until I feel more confident about contributing. I only discovered this group a few days ago.

I have unfortunately come to the conclusion that socioeconomic revolt, by any means necessary, is a moral and ethical imperative for all people, to maximise the chances of the survival of the human species.

I hope to be proven wrong, and have my bias revealed and dissected. I am perhaps rather desperate to be proven wrong, because I do not like my own conclusions.

Thanks in advance for any help I receive, and am able to reciprocate.

I started reading Ozy and SSC's blogs about a month ago, thought they were quite good, so I figured I may as well see what LW is like.

I'll be starting school quite soon, taking some classes from what used to be Shimer College (now the Shimer Great Books Program at North Central College, if I remember correctly). Are there any Shimerians on here?

Also, has anyone here read Robert Pirsig's Lila: An Inquiry into Morals? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was good, so I figured I may as well read the sequel, and Lila has a lot of neat tricks in it that help me in trying to figure out what certain concepts/institutions might have in common with other ones, what they are opposed to, etc.

There's a good division in it between static and Dynamic (I normally don't like arbitrary capitalizations, but I figure I may as well follow Pirsig's style guide, it has a good feel to it) divisions of Quality, where static is the easily recognizable forms in the manner of "This feels bad, I think the hot stove is hurting me" or "It feels good to belong to a community", whereas Dynamic quality is mostly unanalyzable due to it's nature (it's a rational kind of irrationality--we see Dynamic Quality, so we go for it. Only when backed up by static patterns of Quality does it succeed).

Pirsig hypothesizes that the universe is trying to move towards greater and greater Dynamic Quality, but can only do so with the help of static patterns of Quality, otherwise the mystical euphoria of Dynamic Quality will come upon us and we will die, unable to bring about more Dynamic Quality. There's a long history lesson to go along with this, but I'm getting quite tired and would like to just post this so that I don't forget to later.

Hi LW community, if anything I hope my experiences from here on are humbling, I'm not particularly well read though extremely opinionated, my only real interaction with Philosophy has been a collection of works by Plato, not to say they didn't teach me anything, I feel as if they merely solidified my previous beliefs, whether that's a good or bad thing I'm also not sure which I'm more afraid of, I've barely even scratched "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" hope to change that within the month though as I understand there is a wealth of suggested readings. I only stumbled across this community some 2 hours ago, I had heard the outline of what is probably the most controversial topic to have existed and followed the white rabbit down this rabbit hole, I'm not sure what the communities attitude towards that topic is whether its like Voldemort and should not be name or conversation on it is as open as any other.

I am a Theist though my beliefs differ from my religious surroundings immensely to the point of either the more accurate interpretations or complete heresy, my beliefs and path to them mostly stemmed from the idea What if there is a 'God and Reverse Engineering such an entity from the perspective of human reality, though not to say my up bringing didn't influence me but I agree very little on anything, regardless I like to think if presented with an argument that should convince me I would change my mind on the subject, I've historically mostly been your typical Hollywood Rationalist being introduced to the anime Death Note from a young impressionable age I idealized the character "L". I wouldn't exactly know how to label myself, I don't believe in labels per se, I don't believe two individuals can believe the same thing based on fundamental Nature Nurture influences, I do believe labels serve their purpose of generalizing and that our brains use this as a way of organisation though such organisation leading to bias. I believe that there must exist one inherent truth though perspective is the protagonist existing in its own reality of such truth, and that the human perspective isn't the definitive view i.e. Meaning is non existent, merely a construct of the brain, murder is not evil it just is a thing, nor is that which is good, good, I do not believe truth and reality are the same thing, I'm concerned about freewill and the implications of its existence or its non existence and experience, where is and what is color and the experience of it, what is it about science that allows for the creation of experience and where does it reside. My Apologize for what is an example albeit abstract mess of not necessarily relating views and simply the ones at the top of my head in the 5 minutes of writing of my stance future topics and places I'll be lurking.

If there is a label for me based on those I'd be interested to hear it, other than that after i get some reading done you may find me lurking about

Thank you, say hi, I wonder if there are any vices we share that we can socialize through such as games though my social life has deteriorated to non existence since I stopped playing I'd love to meet new people.

Hey, I've been an anonymous reader off and on over the years.

Seeing that there was some interest in Bostrom's simulation argument before (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hgx/paper_on_the_simulation_argument_and_selective/), I wanted to post a link to a paper I wrote on the subject, together with the following text, but I was only able to post into my (private?) Drafts section. I'm sorry I don't know better about where the appropriate place is for this kind of thing (if it's welcome here at all). The paper: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~wehr/rd/simulation_args_crit_extended_with_proofs.pdf

This is a very technical paper, which requires some (or a lot) of familiarity with Bostrom/Kulczycki's "patched" Simulation Argument (www.simulation-argument.com/patch.pdf). I'm choosing to publish it here after experiencing Analysis's depressing version of peer review (they rejected a shorter, more-professional version of the paper based on one very positive review, and one negative review that was almost certainly written by Kulczycki or Bostrom themself).

The positive review (of the earlier shorter, more-professional version of the paper) does a better job of summarizing the contribution than I did, so with the permission of the reviewer I'm including an excerpt here:

Bostrom (2003) argued that at least one of the following three claims is true: (1) the fraction of civilizations that reach a 'post-human' stage is approximately zero; (2) the fraction of post-human civilizations interested in running 'significant numbers' of simulations of their own ancestors is approximately zero; (3) the fraction of observers with human-type experiences that are simulated is approximately one.

The informal argument for this three-part disjunction is that, given what we know about the physical limits of computation, a post-human civilization would be so technologically advanced that it could run 'hugely many' simulations of observers very easily, should it choose to do so, so that the falsity of (1) and (2) implies the truth of (3). However, this informal argument falls short of a formal proof.

Bostrom himself saw that his attempt at a formal proof in the (2003) paper was sloppy, and he attempted to put it right in Bostrom and Kulczycki (2011). The take-home message of Sections 1 and 2 of the manuscript under review is that these (2011) reformulations of the argument are still rather sloppy. For example, the author points out (p. 6) that the main text of B&K inaccurately describes the mathematical argument in the appendix: the appendix uses an assumption much more favourable to B&K's desired conclusion than the assumption stated in the main text. Moreover, B&K's use of vague terms such as 'significant number' and 'astronomically large factor' creates a misleading impression. The author shows, amusingly, that the 'significant number' must be almost 1 million times greater than the 'astronomically large factor' for their argument to work (p. 9).

In Section 3, the author provides a new formulation of the simulation argument that is easily the most rigorous I have seen. This formulation deserves to be the reference point for future discussions of the argument's epistemological consequences."

I'm not 100% clear as to where the non-ambitious posts should go, so I will write my question here.

Do you know of a practical way of finding intellectual friends, so as to have challenging/interesting conversations more often? Not only is the social aspect of friendship in general invaluable (of course I wouldn't be asking here if that was the sole reason), but I assume talking about the topics I care and think about will force me to flesh them out and keep me closer to Truth, and is a great source of novelty. So, from a purely practical standpoint (although I don't deny other motives), I want to improve this part of my life.

Sporadic discourse with my normal friends often pops up in unsuitable conditions and with underequipped participants. Meeting the right type of person in real life takes a huge sample and social skills. Focused forums, like this one, contain the right type of people and are very useful, but lacking in one-to-one personal and casual conversation (neither method is superior, I'd prefer a mix of both to the current imbalance).

Fun fact about me (or a thinly vailed plea for a diagnosis): Often when I'm bothered by a problem or simply bored, my mind will conjure vivid conversations with one of my friends and have us argue this problem. I never actually aim for it to happen, it's as spontaneous as normal thinking. I have no proof, but I'd say those imaginary conversations are more productive, because my imaginary listeners will disagree or misunderstand me, raising important points or faults in my reasoning. Whereas with normal thinking, I agree with myself the wast majority of time.

So you refuse to discuss Nash's works then

Where on earth do you get that from?

and you will continue to troll me and derail attempts to discuss the actual content of ideal money?

I have done, and intend to do, neither of those things.

Probably not in a disorganized, random way, and certainly not filtered through an already-decided lens. Some people have had success (on other topics) by having a discussion topic for a specific paper or book, and a thread that's effectively a reading/study group for that paper.

Unsure if Nash's monetary ideas will fit that profile or not.

if you claim you are, I am going to show that you are not.

when I am allowed to explain what Ideal Money is then we will all see this

I'd like to bet with you on one or both of those predictions if you are open to it.

Rude refers to your method of communicating, not the content of what you said. "I mean that you do not know of the subject, and I do. I can explain it, and you might understand" is very rude, and pointlessly so.

Why do you think you know how much game theory I know?

edit: I edited out the "Is English your first language" bit. That was unnecessarily rude.

How could you possibly know what a random person knows of? Why are you so rude?

Yes exactly. And I am also asking you why you never considered 20 years of his most defining work before this? He proposes that the introduction of an international e-currency with a stable supply will incite our current fiat systems to asymptotically approach a limit he calls "ideal money".

But I don't want to introduce it like this. I want us to understand the other two threads I created that someone else linked to, because it is an incredibly difficult subject and read and I can save us the time.

I am new and a moderator already made a clearly irrational action against me and I am dumbfounded. I mean to present a very difficult subject that no one else can present, and I did so perfectly and in the only way possible and the moderator moderated the attempt out of existence.

Doesn't irrationality run counter to this site's stated mission?

To be clear, I am presenting the most important topic in the world, with the assumption that it is probably significant and correct because it's John Nash's (most significant) work.

Why is Less Wrong censoring out Nash's work and implying that it is irrational?