Congrats, and thanks for posting this. I agree there are a lot of people, here and otherwise, at or well below your 2022 level of mathematical skills. I think a lot of people here should get value out of posts like this, which remind the community of this fact. See also: https://xkcd.com/2501/. Below are two real world examples I’d like to share from my own life.
Around 2018, I had a conversation with a friend who had never encountered LW. I told them that, in practice, in terms of how most people make decisions, they aren’t consequentialists. “This is predictably going to lead to outcomes other than what you want” is often just not a significant part of the thought process that determines actions. This was very eye-opening for this person.
Long before that, I once had a conversation with my mom, who as a kid had been in the top 5% of her high school class of almost a thousand students. She told me she didn’t know whether a million or a billion was larger, or how far apart they were. For her, they were all just words for big numbers with no referents.
Congrats, and thanks for posting this. I agree there are a lot of people, here and otherwise, at or well below your 2022 level of mathematical skills. I think a lot of people here should get value out of posts like this, which remind the community of this fact. See also: https://xkcd.com/2501/. Below are two real world examples I’d like to share from my own life.
Around 2018, I had a conversation with a friend who had never encountered LW. I told them that, in practice, in terms of how most people make decisions, they aren’t consequentialists. “This is predictably going to lead to outcomes other than what you want” is often just not a significant part of the thought process that determines actions. This was very eye-opening for this person.
Long before that, I once had a conversation with my mom, who as a kid had been in the top 5% of her high school class of almost a thousand students. She told me she didn’t know whether a million or a billion was larger, or how far apart they were. For her, they were all just words for big numbers with no referents.