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Comment by Bayeslisk on Meetup : Ann Arbor Meetup, 2/19/16 · 2016-02-14T06:06:27.892Z · LW · GW

On the advice of a new friend, I think that i will be coming to this, but will need some help navigating, since I currently live in Chicago and have been to Ann Arbor exactly once in my life 5 years ago.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Innate Mathematical Ability · 2015-03-02T07:37:23.202Z · LW · GW

Oh, good. I got this too. With XOR. Contrary to other repliers, it seems to me like XOR is a simpler primitive than "the presence/absence of shapes forms a rectangle". It's more easily generalizable and doesn't rely on the existence of other patterns. As a cute curiosity, by the way, the XOR-ing works both vertically and horizontally.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014 · 2014-11-18T02:33:05.189Z · LW · GW

Just here to remind you to notice when you are confused. If you don't, this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BOWOMPUbvE ) WILL happen to you and everyone WILL laugh. And you wouldn't want that.

Comment by Bayeslisk on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2014-11-16T04:09:38.960Z · LW · GW

I was slightly late, unfortunately, but filled out the whole thing anyway.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) · 2014-05-24T01:36:36.528Z · LW · GW

Oh, cool. I've found the distinction to be a very useful one to make.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) · 2014-05-22T23:15:13.746Z · LW · GW

I don't think I understand what you mean by privative. Is it something like the difference between "na'e" and "to'e" in Lojban? For reference: {mi na'e djica} would mean "I other-than want", and {mi to'e djica} would mean "I opposite-of want".

Comment by Bayeslisk on Why don't you attend your local LessWrong meetup? / General meetup feedback · 2014-04-30T03:50:44.862Z · LW · GW

LW Adirondack? I'm from Albany, and would show up if the time was right. I'm away at college at the moment.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Why don't you attend your local LessWrong meetup? / General meetup feedback · 2014-04-29T03:49:28.560Z · LW · GW

I filled in the form some time ago.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup · 2014-03-24T04:05:58.158Z · LW · GW

I am unfortunately engaged all that day and thus will be unlikely to be able to show up.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Meetup : NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6 · 2014-03-13T03:41:47.155Z · LW · GW

Hi there. Princeton LWist here. Me, 20%.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-24T19:01:17.868Z · LW · GW

Thanks! I'll have a read through this.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-20T11:00:41.178Z · LW · GW

Can you give me some examples of what some people think constitutes Knightian uncertainty? Also: what do they mean by "you"? They seem to be postulating something supernatural.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-17T02:55:00.774Z · LW · GW

That seems eminently exploitable and consequently extremely dangerous. Safety and unexpected delight lie in unpredictability.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-14T10:01:30.623Z · LW · GW

These are both pretty much exactly what I'm thinking of! The feeling that someone (or you!) is/are a terrifyingly predictable black box.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-14T09:57:38.875Z · LW · GW

In mine, too, at least for the first few seconds. Otherwise, knowing I had already responded a certain way, I would probably respond differently.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-14T09:56:54.812Z · LW · GW

Sort of in the sense of human minds being more like fixed black boxes that one might like to think. What's Knightian free will, though?

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-12T04:02:33.371Z · LW · GW

Has anyone else had one of those odd moments when you've accidentally confirmed reductionism (of a sort) by unknowingly responding to a situation almost identically to the last time or times you encountered it? For my part, I once gave the same condolences to an acquaintance who was living with someone we both knew to be very unpleasant, and also just attempted to add the word for "tomato" in Lojban to my list of words after seeing the Pomodoro technique mentioned.

Comment by Bayeslisk on White Lies · 2014-02-10T08:27:49.331Z · LW · GW

The problem is that knowing how well you cook doesn't really affect who should cook past a certain basic point of competence, as far as I can tell.

Comment by Bayeslisk on White Lies · 2014-02-09T03:13:34.525Z · LW · GW

No, empty praise is still worthless, because Said's cooking and baking not perfect, and there is with near certainty some small flaw, some awkward stylistic choice that could use improvement. Best is the gentle nitpicking of these flaws with a prepended (This is amazing, but) and with the consequent inference that the bread/food/what have you is actually already REALLY GOOD.

Comment by Bayeslisk on White Lies · 2014-02-09T03:11:13.757Z · LW · GW

My downkarma stays. You really should have made this clear in your post, and you advocate for a departure from radical honesty even when that works, instead of discussing strategies for determining whether your interlocutor is ask, guess, or (gasp!) tell. This advocates an overly radical departure towards lies for anyone, and argues for defection on PD. It's one thing to say that given people will lie, you should become skilled at it and learn to detect them; quite another to advocate that it should occur from the start.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup · 2014-02-04T04:50:20.243Z · LW · GW

Also, my instinct for a scoring rule is min(estimation/true, true/estimation) for a scale of [0, 1].

Comment by Bayeslisk on Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup · 2014-02-04T04:35:42.400Z · LW · GW

I have a delightful idea for the Paranoid estimation game, and I have a scenario picked out. This should be fun. :3

Comment by Bayeslisk on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-20T19:40:07.714Z · LW · GW

So I did! Edited.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Write down your basic realizations as a matter of habit. Share this file with the world. · 2014-01-20T06:02:32.516Z · LW · GW

This seems interesting and I might contribute.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Schelling fences on slippery slopes · 2014-01-20T05:56:35.716Z · LW · GW

You don't really need to figure out who the Right Thinking People are. You just need to figure out who the Horrendously Completely Almost-Unassailably Wrong Thinking People are.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Ask and Guess · 2014-01-19T23:36:09.409Z · LW · GW

Sorry for the necromancy - I'd call Guess cultures Hint, Subtle, or Infer/Imply/Implicit cultures, and Ask cultures Blurt, Overt, or Explicit cultures, for the full range of connotation.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Ask and Guess · 2014-01-19T23:27:09.896Z · LW · GW

From field experience as a Korean-American and thus someone closer in many situations to Ask, (or even TELL!) I have found a lot of success on just pretending to be endearingly forthright: making a big show of asking all the other people whether they want the last dumpling a couple of times, asking whether they're sure, etc. The fact that my uncle, my mother, and I are similar in this and that they will often take me up on this to split/outright take the dumpling, showing clearly that I am, indeed, serious about my ask, helps too.

Comment by Bayeslisk on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-19T17:03:32.920Z · LW · GW

I know that. I was commenting that the LWer was apparently not a Communist as one might expect, which I found slightly funny.

Comment by Bayeslisk on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-19T17:02:42.661Z · LW · GW

Yes, and this was why I did not include them.

Comment by Bayeslisk on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-19T17:02:27.583Z · LW · GW

I agree. This was clearly the object of furious guessing and second-guessing. :V

Comment by Bayeslisk on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-19T04:06:21.285Z · LW · GW

I don't know if this is the LW hug or something but I'm having trouble downloading the xls. Also, will update with what the crap my passphrase actually means, because it's in Lojban and mildly entertaining IIRC.

EDIT: Felt like looking at some other entertaining passphrases. Included with comment.

sruta'ulor maftitnab {mine! scarf-fox magic-cakes!(probably that kind)}

Afgani-san Azerbai-chan {there... are no words}

DEFECTORS RULE

do mlatu {a fellow lojbanist!}

lalxu daplu {and another?}

telephone fonxa {and another! please get in contact with me. please.}

xagfu'a rodo {indeed! but where are all you people coming from, and why don't I know you?}

zifre dunda {OH COME ON WHERE ARE YOU PEOPLE]

eponymous haha_nice_try_CHEATER {clever.}

fart butt {I am twelve...}

FROGPENIS SPOOBOMB {... and so is a lot of LW.}

goat felching {good heavens}

I don't want the prize! Pick someone else please!

I dont care about the MONETARY REWARD but you shoudl know that

Irefuse myprize

No thanks

not interested

{a lot of refusers!}

I'm gay

john lampkin (note: this is not my name)

lookatme iwonmoney {nice try guy}

mencius suckedmoziwasbetter

mimsy borogoves {repeated!}

TWO WORD {repeated, and try harder next time}

octothorpe interrobang

SOYUZ NERUSHIMIY {ONWARD, COMRADE(note: person is apparently a social democrat.)}

TERRORISTS WIN

thisissuspiciouslylike askingforourpasswordmethodologies {I should think not.}

zoodlybop zimzamzoom {OH MY GODS BILL COSBY IS A LESSWRONGER.}

AND THAT'S ALL, FOLKS.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Tell Culture · 2014-01-19T03:24:22.097Z · LW · GW

This seems like a really good idea, except that defecting is easy and appealing, Guess people will (as you pointed out) lose their shit, and worst of all, people just seem to get weirded out by the making explicit of things like actually understanding other people, or honestly talking about the full set of preferences - especially socially awkward ones. That said, I'd like to be able to do this with people.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Handshakes, Hi, and What's New: What's Going On With Small Talk? · 2014-01-03T19:43:14.972Z · LW · GW

This seems interesting and mostly correct. I will think about this more and write something about it when I have thought enough.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-25T16:29:20.725Z · LW · GW

No, I know that the colon is not transplanted; the flora is. Hence the (?). Also, it hopefully doesn't get processed but rather survives to colonize the gut. Further, an enema would probably be far more effective, given its lack of strong acid and pepsin designed to kill the flora.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-24T07:52:03.496Z · LW · GW

Good point. I doubt that that extends to abandoning food altogether, though.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-24T07:50:57.434Z · LW · GW

Oh, makes sense. That's not food, though; that's a very easy organ(?) transplant.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-24T00:11:07.098Z · LW · GW

What are fecal implents?

Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-23T09:58:47.707Z · LW · GW

Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste. Sunlight and feedstock are cheap, people get squicked easily, and stuff that's stuck around for a long time is likely to continue sticking around. You may as well say we'll outgrow a need for fire, language, or tools; indeed, I'd believe any of those over the total abandonment of food.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-23T09:56:18.785Z · LW · GW

That's something a little different - I think that's already talked about here. Maybe under the Hindsight Bias? At any rate, I'm not talking about looking back; I'm talking about looking from within. The march of history is almost always too slow to see, and even with a significant speedup it'd still probably seem "normal". Only right at the end would it be clear that a Singularity is occurring.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-21T21:23:40.044Z · LW · GW

But these are not, seemingly, as different as, say, the discovery of LSD. Or psychotropics. Or the establishment of homosexuality as relatively innate. Or the invention of the car, or the very first creation of a constructed language.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 · 2013-12-21T08:13:41.486Z · LW · GW

Something's brewing in my brain lately, and I don't know what. I know that it centers around:

-People were probably born during the Crimean War/US Civil War/The Boxer Rebellion who then died of a heart attack in a skyscraper/passenger plane crash/being caught up in, say WWII.

-Accurate descriptions of people from a decade or two ago tend to seem tasteless. (Casual homophobia) Accurate descriptions of people several decades ago seem awful and bizarre. (Hitting your wife, blatant racism) Accurate descriptions of people from centuries ago seem alien in their flat-out implausible awfulness. (Royalty shitting on the floor at Versailles, the Albigensian Crusade, etc...)

-We seem no less shocked now by social changes and technological developments and no less convinced that everything major under the sun has been done and only tweaks and refinements remain than people of past eras did.

I guess what I'm saying is that the Singularity seems a lot more factually supported-ly likely than it otherwise might have been, but we won't realize we're going through it until it's well underway because our perception of such things will also wind up going faster for most of it.

Comment by Bayeslisk on an ethical puzzle about brain emulation · 2013-12-17T08:15:05.080Z · LW · GW

IMO, even E is problematic: where did the torture-information come from in the first place?

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-11T04:57:13.533Z · LW · GW

I do not feel up to defending myself against multiple relatively hostile people. My apologies for having a belief that does not correspond to the prevailing LW memeplex. Kindly leave me alone to be wrong.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-11T01:12:20.173Z · LW · GW

Yes, that was what I was getting at. Like I said elsewhere - game theory is not evil. It's just horrifyingly neutral. I am not using inhuman as bad; I am using inhuman as unfriendly.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-11T01:10:48.087Z · LW · GW

I have no idea how the Holodomor is germane to this discussion.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-10T22:01:55.879Z · LW · GW

That is actually not true at all. I was actually planning on abandoning this trainwreck of an attempt at dissent. But since you're so nice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_of_Conflict_.281960.29

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-10T16:05:18.162Z · LW · GW

OK, I think I was misunderstood and also tired and phrased things poorly. Game theory itself is not a bad thing; it is somewhat like a knife, or a nuke. It has no intrinsic morality, but the things it seems to tend to be used for, for several reasons, wind up being things that eject negative externalities like crazy.

Yes, but this seems to be most egregious when you advocate letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-10T16:02:53.459Z · LW · GW

I guess I'm mostly reacting to RAND and its ilk, having read the article about Schelling's book (which I intend to buy), and am thinking of market failures, as well.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-10T16:01:51.353Z · LW · GW

Nonhuman agents use X -> X does not necessarily and pretty likely does not preserve human values -> your overuse of X will cause you not to preserve human values. Being a jerk in a style of Cthulhu I use to mean being a jerk incidentally. Eyesight is not a means of interacting with people, and maximization is not a bad thing if you maximize for the right things, which game theory does not necessarily do.

Comment by Bayeslisk on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-10T09:49:48.520Z · LW · GW

I have a strong desire to practice speaking in Lojban, and I imagine that this is the second-best place to ask. Any takers?