Posts
Comments
Thanks for doing this once again Yvain.
Edit: survey taken.
Is this more or less the same thing as Cached Thoughts?
To be honest, I didn't. I let them talk it out and the issue of free will never came up.
They just accepted the "god" used to phrase the problem as a perfect predictor. Most of the debate/discussion was centred around the fact whether or not it was more "logical" to choose both boxes (no debate on its definition, thankfully). The one-boxer's main argument was that given the god is a perfect predictor, the best choice was to one-box, as it would be impossible for two-boxing to yield $1,001,000.
Knowing is always better than not knowing
--Gregory House, M.D. - S02E11 "Need to Know"
The Center for Better Reasoning
Option to sort by judged/unjudged predictions.
I remember back in elementary school, all the teachers would so "there's no such thing as a stupid question. They even had posters of that on the doors.
Ironically, most of my class (IIRC) never bothered to ask questions or clear up confusion during class. They preferred to ask peers. If they went to ask the teacher during some other time, I wouldn't know. I was a frequent go-to person for math and science; this covered my other poor grades (social studies, art) via Halo Effect and made me appear "smart".
I took to Google for Social Studies.
Somewhere between that and now (Junior year) I figured out that nobody actually remembers when someone asks a stupid question in class. Generally, anyway; every now and then there's something ridiculously funny.
My point being is that if one is truly smart, they most likely appear to be too.
There's not much Utility in only seeming smart, anyways.
Can Gifto gift better versions of Gifto?
The link to the Chess Question solution is the same as that of the Space Complexity Question Solution video.
Thanks Yvain. Just took the survey, can't wait for the results!
I believe the problem with this, is that you have given actual values (pain units), and equated the two levels of "torture" outlined in the original thought experiment. Specifically, equating one trillion humans with dust speck in eye and Alice being tortured.
Requesting some help... I've just installed Python 2.7, however I am having trouble getting the ncurses library. When I try to run bsweep.py it just shows a command prompt that disappears.
I personally define mistakes as "faults". By this I mean that if a child has understanding of the maths subject in question, he or she should be able to do the question correctly. Thus, the mistake can be attributed to things such as sloppiness, inattentiveness, and so on.
On the other hand, errors, deviations from the correct answer, can happen for other reasons. Intuition, for one. A specific example is how humans perceive numbers logarithmically, that is, larger numbers spaced closer together. (eg: "million" and "billion" are both very large, but to the brain there is little difference).
Hello there,
I am a 16-year-old high school student in Vancouver, Canada. I discovered Less Wrong several months ago through HP:MoR, which deeply captured my interest. After finishing the then released chapters, I knew I wanted to learn more. Upon reading the sequences, I felt enlightened. I discovered a new way of thinking, of making decisions that would benefit myself and others more. I delved through articles and eventually started to use Anki, learning fallacies and cognitive biases. As a result, I am more mentally organized, I am doing better in school (especially in being able to express and back up opinions), and generally feeling that life makes more sense.
Much of my thinking has already been affected by my father, a teacher of Philosophy and Western politics (he teaches in China). By that I mean I've been introduced to quite a few well known problems of morals and paradoxes alike (Trolley Problem, Zeno, etc). I feel after discovering Less Wrong I am able to have a better view of these problems.
What I am most interested in are the subjects of math, logic, and computer programming. One of my personal goals is to help others understand rationality as well. Despite this, I occasionally dabble in the Dark Arts, but only within class debates (where you are, of course, expected to choose a side).
From Less Wrong, I hope to further develop my thinking, making better choices for myself, others, and helping others make better choices as well. From that, live a better life in general.