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Comment by Magnap on A Medical Mystery: Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia · 2016-02-14T14:29:01.559Z · LW · GW

Both the paper and an update to it can be found quite easily on Library Genesis.

Comment by Magnap on Monthly Bragging Thread January 2016 · 2016-02-14T02:04:19.595Z · LW · GW

I won the Danish National Biology Olympiad semifinal (as 1/15), and thus I qualify for the final, where I will have the chance to be 1 of 4 Danes participating in the International Biology Olympiad.

Comment by Magnap on Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015 · 2015-10-18T16:48:19.759Z · LW · GW

That's a pretty good heuristic. OTOH, up until this week, my karma in the last 30 days was 0. Now that I'm starting the sequences soon (in the form of "Rationality: From AI to Zombies"), I suspect I'll involve myself in the community some more. Then again, my account didn't functionally exist until recently, mainly being there for the purpose of reserving the name.

Comment by Magnap on Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015 · 2015-10-12T23:11:47.024Z · LW · GW

Hi! Semi-new lurker here. What is the current etiquette on necroing? I didn't find any official ettiquette guide.

Comment by Magnap on Mundane Magic · 2015-10-11T23:43:36.405Z · LW · GW

I see (hah!) now. Thank you, and even more so for providing it rot13.

Comment by Magnap on Mundane Magic · 2015-10-11T18:38:40.235Z · LW · GW

I still don't get it. Could you (or someone else) please explain it?

Comment by Magnap on Innate Mathematical Ability · 2015-05-07T17:28:23.211Z · LW · GW

I got the same answer in a third way.
Gur ynfg vgrz va n ebj vf znqr sebz rirelguvat va gur svefg gjb cynprf, rkprcg gung juvpu gurl unir va pbzzba.
EDIT: There's a simpler name for what I did: KBE, ubevmbagnyyl.

Comment by Magnap on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You · 2015-04-11T15:17:28.619Z · LW · GW

That seems pretty plausible. I have a hard enough time already preventing myself from anthropomorphizing my dog. Ascribing human emotions to animals is easy to accidentally do.

Comment by Magnap on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You · 2015-04-11T14:53:11.652Z · LW · GW

It is a power of the witches in Lyra's world in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials".

Comment by Magnap on Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points · 2015-04-08T11:06:37.034Z · LW · GW

So, I consider the "go back in time" aspect of this unnecessarily confusing... the important part from my perspective is what events my timeline contains, not where I am on that timeline.

Indeed, that is my mistake. I am not always the best at choosing metaphors or expressing myself cleanly.

regretting an improperly made decision whose consequences were undesirable, vs. regretting a properly made decision whose consequences were undesirable

That is a very nice way of expressing what I meant. I will be using this from now on to explain what I mean. Thank you.

Your comment helped me to understand what I myself meant much better than before. Thank you for that.

Comment by Magnap on Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points · 2015-04-05T16:34:42.345Z · LW · GW

Sorry to bring up such an old thread, but I have a question related to this. Consider a situation in which you have to make a choice between a number of actions, then you receive some additional information regarding the consequences of these actions. In this case there are two ways of regretting your decision, one of which would not occur for a perfectly rational agent. The first one is "wishing you could have gone back in time with the information and chosen differently". The other one (which a perfectly rational agent wouldn't experience) is "wishing you could go back in time, even without the information, and choose differently", that is, discovering afterwards (e.g. by additional thinking or sudden insight) that your decision was the wrong one even with the information you had at the time, and that if you were put in the same situation again (with the same knowledge you had at the beginning), you should act differently.

Does English have a way to distinguish these two forms of regret (one stemming from lack of information, the other from insufficent consideration)? If not, does some other language have words for this we could conveniently borrow? It might be an important difference to bear in mind when considering and discussing akrasia.

Comment by Magnap on LW's take on nutrition? · 2015-04-04T23:43:35.453Z · LW · GW

I'm not the OP. I guess they meant that by feeding plants to animals instead of eating the plants themselves, you are letting the animal waste a lot of energy.