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One thing I have noticed relating to this in school is that on tests sometimes I put down an answer on a quiz that I know is wrong because the teacher will give me points if I put that. For example, on a Physical Education quiz the teacher briefly talked about how sugar affects the human body. One of the questions was multiple choice and it said "Sugar is a..." and I selected carbohydrate even though I knew it was wrong because that is what we were taught.
I certainly agree. Most of those I instantly believed, and I had a bit of doubt for the one about southern blacks preferring southern to northern white officers (or maybe that is belief as attire, or hindsight bias) but as you said it is crazy that the opposite of what is true is believable when told it is correct.
So is there ever a time where you can use absence of evidence alone to disprove a theory, or do you always need other evidence as well? Because is some cases absence of evidence clearly does not disprove a theory, such as when quantum physics was first being discovered, there was not a lot of evidence for it, but can the inverse ever be true will lack of evidence alone proves the theory is false?
What is a Fermi Estimate? If you could provide a link to an article talking about that I would be thankful.
I agree. It is bad to do what scams say, even if you think that you can trick the scammer. Plus, they will put you on a "vulnerable" list and you will get more scams.
I'm not sure how effective this is considering most people who would see this are rationalists and people like to think good of themselves.
I am not so sure that rationalists don't win, but rather that "winning"(ie. starting a company, being a celebrity, etc.) is rare enough and that few people are rationalists that people that win tend not to be rationalists because being a rationalist is rare enough that very few people that win are rationalists, even if each rationalist has a better chance of winning.
I think this is a really good idea. I have wished I could "blink" and then be in the future but still have been doing work during that time, and this is just the way to do that. I am trying to to this because it is a really great idea.
If all of those asteroids are owned by one company, then they can sell the metal of the asteroids for as much as it was before because they would be the only people with that much metal, having something similar to a monopoly. They would have the choice of lowering the value of the metals, because if they only made $10/ton. of metal and they sold 1 million tons, then they make ten million dollars. However, if a different company with ten tons of metal making $10/ton. of metal would make one hundred dollars, perhaps not be able to pay their workers, and go out of business. That would reduce competition for the company that caught the asteroid. However, if the company sold them for the same prices long-term they could make trillions of dollars.
This is my blurb.
Asteroids pose a risk towards life on earth. An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. They pose enough threat that [U.S. and Russia are working together to hunt down asteroids](https://newsela.com/articles/asteroid-crowdsource/id/3960/). In fact, [an asteroid landed in Russia in February 2013 and was 65-feet wide with the force of 500,000 tons of TNT](https://newsela.com/articles/asteroid-crowdsource/id/3960/). However, asteroids could be very valuable to us.If caught, asteroids could be worth one-trillion dollars! They contain more metals than we have ever mined ever! In space, the value of asteroids could be more because of one substance: water. We could potentially separate the water into hydrogen and then use the hydrogen as fuel. This is very money saving because it takes a lot of fuel to move places because if you take fuel to move farther that fuel adds weight so you have to add fuel to carry that fuel and add fuel to carry that fuel… If we make more fuel in space then we get out of that loop. Asteroids pose a potential value to earn lots of money and send space ships farther out than we have before but also a threat of killing thousands.
I don't know the exact numbers, nor how carefully that was found out. The point is that asteroids contain mor metals than we ever mined ever and that adds up to be a lot of money.
No. In this case, game theory says that if both people are using the same logic and they know that, then what I showed above is correct: cooperating is the best choice. However, that is not always the case in reality.
Also, can I write in my asteroid essay the potential helpfullness of asteroids? We belive that one asteroid(just one!) could be worth $1,000,000,000,000. In other words, catching one asteroid could be worth one-trillion dollars. Could I mention that in my hundred word blurb?
I will do asteroids.
I would say... defect! If all the computer cares about is sorting pebbles, then they will cooperate, because both results under cooperate have more paperclips. This gives an oppurtunity to defect and get a result of (d,c) which is our favorite result.
Just wondering, where will the donated money actually go? An important thing to think about.
I can probably write one of the hundred word descriptions. I also could probably make an image as well.
I see your point. According to game theory you should cooperate( as I stated above). However, I will show what my thinking would be in reality...
If I cooperate, they could to, and if that happened we would at up at a payoff of 12,12. However, if they defect then I will loose points.
If I defect, I would have a chance of getting a payoff of 5,0 or a payoff of 2,2. This is the only way to get more than 12 points, and the only way to be give at least two points every time.
Then, you defect every time. If your oppponent also defects every time, you end up at the pareato boundry with a total payoff of 8,8.
Both people who are identical and know they are identical cooperate.
I see your point, but according to game theory in this scenario you assume that your opponent will make the same move as you will, because if both of you are in the same situation then assuming you both are using "perfect" logic then you will reach the same decision.
I would say that according to rationality and game theory cooperating is the best choice. I will show my logic as if both people were thing the same thing.
If I defect, than they will too, and that will give a result of 2,2
If I cooperate, than they will too, and that will give a result of 3,3
I could defect and hope they use the logic above and get a gain of 5,0 but if they use this logic too, then we end up back at the nash equilibrium of getting a result of 2,2.
If I cooperate then I am giving the opponent an oppurtunity to defect but if both people are using this logic than I should cooperate and will end up at the pareto boundry and end up with a result of 3,3 but it is unrealistic to try to achieve a better score so I should just cooperate
And so, both people cooperate.
Suppose an airport must decide whether to spend money to purchase some new equipment, while critics argue that the money should be spent on other aspects of airport safety. Slovic et. al. (2002) presented two groups of subjects with the arguments for and against purchasing the equipment, with a response scale ranging from 0 (would not support at all) to 20 (very strong support). One group saw the measure described as saving 150 lives. The other group saw the measure described as saving 98% of 150 lives. The hypothesis motivating the experiment was that saving 150 lives sounds vaguely good—is that a lot? a little?—while saving 98% of something is clearly very good because 98% is so close to the upper bound of the percentage scale. Lo and behold, saving 150 lives had mean support of 10.4, while saving 98% of 150 lives had mean support of 13.6.
I find this very interesting, but I think if people would both work hard enough to multiply 98% by 150 and would be educated about biases of the human brain than people would support the right things more often.
This is another problem with school. School(at lower levels especially) teaches things that is unimportant but doesn't teach useful stuff. For example, states and capitals of the U.S. can be googled in less than thirty seconds but bayes thereom and overcoming biases can't.
It also is less reliable when you cite only one source because what that source says could be false(either intentionally or accidentally).
That works for some purposes but it is not truly random so it would be better to use a dice or other more random number if available. Of course, be realistic with getting random numbers. If the situation calls for a quickly thought decision, that works. If you have dice in your pocket go ahead and pull them out.
Why would you want to choose defect? If both criminals are rationalists that use the same logic than if you chose defect to hope to get a result of (d,c) than the result ends up being (d,d). However if you used the logic of lets choose c because if the other person is using this logic than we won't end up having the result of (d,d).
I am a new user, what did I get voted down for?
13% of subjects finished their project by the time they had assigned a 50% probability level; 19% finished by the time assigned a 75% probability level; and only 45% (less than half!) finished by the time of their 99% probability level. As Buehler et. al. (2002) wrote, "The results for the 99% probability level are especially striking: Even when asked to make a highly conservative forecast, a prediction that they felt virtually certain that they would fulfill, students' confidence in their time estimates far exceeded their accomplishments."
I do agree that it is good to have a pessimistic view on projects over an optimistic view because then you will finishi sooner but if you have in mind that at best I will finish two weeks before the deadline and at worst the deadline day then you might be happier working on the project because you think to yourself that the project could be almost done. What is most important is to be honest about when you can be done because if you say that you might be done at a time that you for sure won't be done then you work on the project thinking inside your head that I will be finished later than I said. Optimistic vs. Pessimistic view is a balance between being happier and finishing sooner.
But you want to be purely unpredictable or the opponent( if they are a super ai) would gradually figure out your strategy and have a slightly better chance. A human(without tools) can't actully generate a random number. If your opponent was guessing a non-completely random number/ a "random" number in their head, then you want your choice to be random. I should have said if the opponent chooses a non-completely random number then you should randomly determine your number.
Going into game theory, if an opponent makes a truly random decision between two numbers, and you win if you guess which number they guessed, that would be a time that you should fight randomness with randomness. There aren't a lot of other situations where randomness should be fought with randomness but in situations similar to that situation that is the right move.
I joined lesswrong because my friends suggested it to me. I really like all the articles and the fact that the comments on the articles are useful and don't have lots of bad language. This really surprised me.
I can see that, and I realize that there are advantages to having a store that can sell illegal things. I would now say that such a store would be benificial. There would have to be some restrictions to what that type of store could sell. Explosives like fireworks still could be for use by a licensed person, and nukes would not be sold at all.
There is two problems with making stores that can sell banned things-hurting the public and people that are uneducated. I could go into one of these stores and buy poison and fill my brother's glass with it. That would be a drawback because it would affect my brother who did not go into a store and ignore a safety warning and pick up a bottle of poison and drink it. This would be a problem. An uneducated mother of five children that drinks poison doesn't deserve to die, her children don't deserve to be orphans, and that is asumming that she drinks it herself and doesn't give it to her children. Libertarians that say that making stores that can sell illegal goods is completely good and not bad at all is completely wrong. Very little if anything is gained by illegal goods being available to the public while the reasons I wrote above show that there is a drawback- someone who buys and drinks a can of poison does not deserve to die- the person could have been bullied, been driven insane buy a disease or by a drug that someone else tricked him into drinking or forced down his throat. In fact, such a drug might only be able to be purchased at such store.
This article might answer that questionDiseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease
I think that this shows not just that splitting people into groups makes the people in one group like themselves and hate the people in the other group, but also that when people figure problems out together that they like eachother more.