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Somewhere I missed something, is there something wrong with bounded utilities? Every usable solution to these manipulations of infinity get dismissed because they are bounded, if they work what is the problem?
What if torture is your low end? Think masochists.
But we aren't wrong about the observable universe, does it really matter to us what happens outside our interaction range?
The article in question from slate.com found via the cogsci subreddit
Read the first chapter of your novella. Were it not for the delineation I probably would still be reading and hiding from sleep. Work tomorrow, I expect I'll come back to it after.
Feedback phenomena and human intuition are uncomfortable bedfellows. When people dislike where an equilibrium argument takes them, it is therefore unsurprising that they invent simpler arguments that lead to more palatable conclusions. However, the first principle of rational thought is never to allow your preferences to influence your beliefs.
Ken Binmore
XKCD comes to mind.
I'm pretty sure it was intended to indicate the quality of the comment.
They are sunk costs to the jobseeker in that he cannot do anything about them and they have a negative value. If he were to take them into account, he would no doubt throw up his hands and shout "but who would hire ME?" So he must ignore them as he would any sunk cost when deciding what to do; namely, where to apply for a job.
At least that is how I understand it.
Although I wouldn't go so far as to assert that I speak for the majority of the community (although I hope I do), my view is that so long as you are making a good faith effort to contribute and grow along with the community you are okay. After looking over your comment/post history I will say that I have no doubts that you are making such an effort.
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There has been some calling for applications of rationality; how can this help me win? This combined with the popularity and discussion surrounding "Stuck in the middle with Bruce" gave me an idea for a potential series of posts relating to LWers pastimes of choice. I have a feeling most people here have a pastime, and if rationalists should win there should be some way to map the game to rational choices.
Perhaps articles discussing "how rational play can help you win at x" and "how x can help you think more rationally" would be worthwhile. I'm sure there are games or hobbies that multiple people share (as was discovered relating to Magic) and even if no one has played a certain game the knowledge gained from it should be generalizable and used elsewhere (as was the concept of a Bruce).
I might be able to do a piece on Counter-Strike (perhaps generalized to FPS style games) although I haven't played in several years.
I know I would be interested in more discussion of how Magic and rationality work together. In fact I almost went out an picked up a deck to try it out again (haven't played since Ice Age when I was but a child) but remembered I don't know anyone I could play with right now anyway, which is probably why I don't.
I would say it is certainly something worth studying, the understanding of how it works would be invaluable. We can decide if we want to use it to further our goals or not once we understand it (hopefully not before, using something you don't understand is generally a bad thing imho). If we decide not to use it, the knowledge would help us educate others and perhaps prevent the 'dark ones' from using it.
Perhaps something a la James Randi, create an ad whose first half uses some of the techniques and whose second half explains the mechanisms used to control inattentive viewers with a link to somewhere with more information on understanding how its done and why people should care.
If you don't think you could convince him to cooperate then you still defect because he will, and if you cooperate 0 people are saved. Cooperating generates either 0 or 2 billion saved, defecting generates either 1 or 3 billion saved. Defect is clearly the better option.
If you were going to play 100 rounds for 10 or 20 million lives each, cooperate by all means. But in a single round PD defect is the winning choice (assuming the payout is all that matters to you; if your utility function cares about the other persons feelings towards you after the choice, cooperate can become the highest utility)
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it does.
Only piece of information we're missing is how many people started in the tournament which would allow us to find out how many points he would need to get top8.
You sound like you know what a Magic tournament is about way more than I do (don't know what counts as a draw, or if there even is such a thing) and have revised my estimates accordingly.
(1) .1 (2) .35 (3) .35 (4).18 (5).02
5 is low due to pjeby's comment, the .02 is my probability that he would slash my tires or is wrong.
I'm going with number 3, battletoads was hard! :(
My five:
1) I have the complete Feynman Lecture Series
2) I have beaten professional Counter-Strike players while never having played in any tournaments or leagues.
3) I am a smoker (cigarettes).
4) I never finished Half-Life.
5) My watch has Mickey Mouse on it (his hands point to the time!).
Something like reddit commentroversy would be nice as a feature of the site. Sadly it doesn't work on LW, maybe I'll try to look at it and figure out if there is a possible hack to getting working until (if) the feature is implemented here.
A random comment I selected to show what it looks like [Username Changed]:
username 70 points(+184/-116) 7 hours ago[-]
If anyone uses reddit and doesn't have this get the greasemonkey add-on then go back to the commentroversy and click install.
Should those of us that know we are in the first 45 responses retake the survey? It looks like a number of things have changed since I took it. My default assumption is no as I don't want to duplicate, but I thought I'd ask.
For me it began as a bored student picking up a book on probability (specifically Randomness by Deborah Bennet) and discovering my understanding of probability was seriously wrong. Following that discovery and armed with my improved understanding I began to look at what other ideas and beliefs might be flawed. I started with those beliefs that were most likely to be based on probabilities and found that nearly everything I thought was true was affected by a single inaccuracy. My mind has burned with a single question ever since: "What else is polluting my mind?"
As for how I found OB; if I recall correctly I was reading up on AI and happened upon one of Eli's posts. Fascinated, I jumped from post to post and found myself deep in rationalist territory. I found home.
Sugar Land (Houston area), not exactly day trip material but with sufficient notice I could make something.
I've lurked OB/LW for quite some time now (about a year) and haven't posted much for many of the same reasons as divia (intimidated by the quality, felt like I wasn't familiar enough, etc) and have tried to get a few people that are interested in this kind of thing to follow along with me to little success. This post made me wonder why people I was so sure would care about rationality didn't care to join the community here and further why I sit on the sidelines.
My first thoughts were that this group feels "cliquey". There are a lot of in-phrases and technical jargon floating around, which to an outsider can be very intimidating.
On top of that every incorrect comment is completely and utterly destroyed by multiple people. I know and you know we're dismantling ideas in an attempt to kick out biases and fallacies every time they appear, but to an outsider it looks/feels like an attack on all fronts. I think this stems from the separation of ideas from the self, which is really the first step on the road to rationality. Anyone who hasn't made that step feels like they are being personally attacked, and it isn't an easy step to make. Dislodging your ideas from your self-image is already required by the sciences, which may be part of the reason science-types are so well represented, but there are many fields where it isn't necessary (or even beneficial). Consider business where defending your ideas like they were your life will get you ahead most of the time.
I know of no "fix" for any of these, but perhaps a section for beginners would be beneficial. Perhaps something similar to simple.wikipedia.com would work. The OB backlogs are useful, but there is something to be said for being able to discuss new topics and it just isn't available for the older posts. How to implement such a thing without creating in/out groups I don't know. Maybe just flagging submissions as beginner->advanced would be helpful (along with actually posting things for beginners). In any case, some more "back to basics" posts couldn't hurt.
Later we can do a test that will determine how "rational" you are more or less, the problem is we don't really have a good experimental definition of rationality. This survey will help see correlations and underlying characteristics of rational people (or at least people striving for rationality).
We don't really know what to look for right now, so a broad set of questions will help us find out what is worth looking at in more depth. Which also means we can't really know what we will get out of this, but hopefully we can find some strong indicator type questions for rational action.