(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: “It seems incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size up to almost 100… oh. Nevermind.”)
That does (did?) seem improbable to me. I’d have expected n needed to be far larger than 100 before the overhead became negligible enough for ‘almost n’ to fit (ie. size 10,000 gives almost 10,000 would have seemed a lot more likely than size 100 gives almost 100). Do I need to update in the direction of optimal Turing machine code requiring very few bits?
You mentally threw away relevant information. ie. You merely made yourself incapable of thinking about what is claimed about the size of c relative to 100. That’s fine but ought to indicate to you that you have little useful information to add in response to a comment that amounts to an expression of curious surprise that (c << 100).
(and interpreted “almost N” in the obvious-in-the-context way).
Where the context suggests it can be interpreted as an example of the Eliezer’s-edits bug?
That does (did?) seem improbable to me. I’d have expected n needed to be far larger than 100 before the overhead became negligible enough for ‘almost n’ to fit (ie. size 10,000 gives almost 10,000 would have seemed a lot more likely than size 100 gives almost 100). Do I need to update in the direction of optimal Turing machine code requiring very few bits?
In general, probably yes. Have you checked out the known parts of the Busy Beaver sequence? Be sure to guess what you expect to see before you look.
In specific, I don’t know the size of the constant c.
I mentally replaced “100” with “N” anyway (and interpreted “almost N” in the obvious-in-the-context way).
You mentally threw away relevant information. ie. You merely made yourself incapable of thinking about what is claimed about the size of c relative to 100. That’s fine but ought to indicate to you that you have little useful information to add in response to a comment that amounts to an expression of curious surprise that (c << 100).
Where the context suggests it can be interpreted as an example of the Eliezer’s-edits bug?
I hadn’t read the before-the-edit version of the comment.