Comment by Firionel on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA · 2010-09-11T12:02:25.048Z · LW · GW

I'm sorry if somebody else remarked upon that, but wouldn't the obviuos area of study for people on lw not be how to influence others (supposedly without their knowing), but how to avoid such influences or recognize the associated techniques?

I'll readily admit there is a certain overlap, but still.

Comment by Firionel on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA · 2010-09-11T11:57:47.511Z · LW · GW

Am I the only one instincively thinking of Bourdieu's 'Cultural Capital' theory here?

Comment by Firionel on The prior of a hypothesis does not depend on its complexity · 2010-08-27T08:49:30.722Z · LW · GW

I'm new here, so maybe I'm just being stupid, but I'm massively confused by this (and previous discussion hasn't cleared it up for me):

The complexity of "A and B and C and D" is roughly equal to the complexity of "A or B or C or D"

That to me seems to be an utterly unfounded assertion. Of course the complexity of the two statements is more or less the same, but the the complexity of the state of the world given by A&B&C&D would be the length of the shortest description of a state of the world satisfying A and B and C and D, whereas the complexity of A|B|C|D would be the length of the shortest description of a state of the world satisfying at least one of the conditions. The latter one is potentially much smaller than the former, is it not?