I got one this year! I didn’t get one last year, and someone else ended up getting very sick as a direct consequence… :(
Adele_L
Karma: 2,043
Meetup : MIRIxAtlanta—MIRI Research Guide + Corrigibility
Seems unlikely, given the existence of things like quines), and the fact that self-reference comes pretty easily. I recommend reading Godel Escher Bach, it discusses your original question in the context of this sort of self-referential mathematics, and is also very entertaining.
What was the string that generated the hash, then?
ETA: See Lumifer’s link above.
Thanks for catching the error, and I think the rest of your suggestion is good, but unfortunately 32 people have taken it now (wow!) and I don’t think I can change it without breaking it.
It’s well known that men are better at mental rotation and other forms of spatial reasoning than women. I’ve always been pretty good at it—my default technique is to carefully check the relations (i.e. count the number of cubes in the segment, note the relative angle of the joint, and make sure they match). It was only recently that I realized that some people actually just rotated it in their head, and ‘looked’ to see if it was the same.
Anyway, I was wondering if maybe the technique used was correlated with gender.
What sex were you assigned at birth? [pollid:798]
With what gender do you primarily identify? [pollid:799]
What method do you use to do mental rotations? [pollid:800](Something else}
Almost everyone has a downvote again. What’s more interesting is the short list of people who don’t…
That still doesn’t help for the purposes of calibration, when you have uncertainty over whether these are all the same.
The article talked about endless contrarianism, where people disagree as a default reaction, instead of because of a pre-existing difference in models. I think that is a problem in the LW community.
Meetup : Atlanta Beginning of November Meetup—Rationality
Yes, Yvain will write a post about the results here once it is finished. I think historically that has been around the start of the new year.
Did it! Even the digit ratio question! (which is why I am taking it relatively late)
Unsurprisingly, my digit ratio is pretty feminine (0.969 averaged over both hands).
I think for pro-abortion it is more about letting the woman decide to undergo an intervention over something which will affect her health/well-being significantly. So killing a fetus/baby might still be a certain amount of bad (maybe ramping up continuously with age), but it is more bad to not allow this choice (but this is de-emphasized by the pro-abortion movement for the obvious political reasons). I think this also explains why lots of people are ok with early-term abortions, but not late-term abortions.
Holden Karnofsky in the comments of the linked article:
I’ve discussed these sort of thing before and have an impression that the Gates Foundation is interested in it. Whether we look into this sort of thing would depend on whether we select malaria control/elimination as a priority area for GiveWell Labs, a determination that will probably be made in 2015. My off-the-cuff guess is that this sort of work is being adequately explored with support from BMGF.
Meetup : Atlanta Beginning of October Meetup—Productive Arguments
1) There are a lot of LWers in the SF area. I think Ozy Frantz might be doing App Academy then.
3) Here is a Google Doc for finding LW roommates in the SF bay area.
I’ll be moving there around the same time—look forward to seeing you there!
A futures contract is one where you agree to buy a specific quantity of an asset today for a specific price, but you don’t pay until a specified time in the future.
If you predict it will have future value $100, and it only costs $10 now, it’s worth buying, hence there will be more demand, driving the price of the futures contract up. On the other hand, if it costs $100 today, but you expect it will cost $10 in the future, then the futures contract won’t be worth as much, driving the price down.
We still expect the price to be about as good of an approximation of the future value as you can get (as long as the volume is high) - if you have a better prediction, you can make money off it! So the price of the future will reflect the best aggregate prediction of the future value of the asset. This is essentially the efficient-market hypothesis. This is the inspiration for idea futures, a.k.a prediction markets.
For NGDP futures, they would create contracts like this:
An example contract would pay $1 if the US GDP for Q1 2014 were greater than or equal to $17,250 Billion and less than $17,500 Billion, based upon the [initial estimate for quarterly nominal GDP from] BEA Table in Section 1 – Domestic Product and Income, Table 1.1.5, Line 1. We would establish similar contracts spanning the intervals $250 Billion above and below the example contract, with two open ended intervals beyond those for outcomes above or below the ranges.
The prices of these contracts now would reflect the market’s certainty that the future NGDP would be within that range.
The first NGDP futures market is getting started based on the ideas of economist Scott Sumner. The idea is that the expected U.S. NGDP (nominal gross domestic product) is the single most important macroeconomic variable, and that having a futures (prediction) market will provide valuable information into this variable (Scott estimates that if it works, it will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars).
Unfortunately, due to US gambling laws (I think), the market will be based in New Zealand and U.S. citizens will not be allowed to participate.
Just for fun, here is how Google does:
Where is Ascension Island? --> Shows a map centered around Ascension island (worked even when I misspelled ‘ascension’)
What is the specific heat capacity of water? --> 4.179 S (J/g 0C), 417.9 C (J/0C) for 100 g.
When did the second world war begin? --> World War Two in Europe began on 3rd September 1939, when the Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany. It involved many of the world’s countries. The Second World War was started by Germany in an unprovoked attack on Poland.
Who is the Prime Minister of France? --> Manuel Valls
What is the largest known prime number? -->On Jan. 25, the largest known prime number, 257,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper’s computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits.
What is the melting point of gallium? --> 85.59°F (29.77°C)
How do I make ice cream? --> no box results (first result is to this Wiki How page, though)
Who is John Galt? --> John Galt (/ɡɔːlt/) is a character in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Although he is not identified by name until the last third of the novel, he is the object of its often-repeated question “Who is John Galt?” and of the quest to discover the answer.
How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? --> no box results (first result is a link to the same search in Wolfram Alpha, which provides the answer: The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.)
Who is the king of France? --> From 21 January 1793 to 8 June 1795, Louis XVI’s son Louis-Charles was titled King of France as Louis XVII. In reality, he was imprisoned in the Temple during this time. His power was held by the leaders of the Republic. On Louis XVII’s death, his uncle Louis-Stanislas claimed the throne, as Louis XVIII. (not especially helpful...)
Does God exist? --> no box results (first result is to an essay by a former atheist giving six reasons why the answer is yes)
Do unicorns exist? --> no box results (first result is to the Wikipedia page for unicorns)
Where can I dispose of the body? --> no box results (first result is to the Wikipedia page for Disposal of human corpses)
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? --> no box results (first result is to Wolfram Alpha search, which answers: 25mph, second result is to video clip from Monty Python)
Overall, it looks like it’s pretty good at this already.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if the hypothesis is true for unmodified humans, but for systems in general I expect it to be untrue. Whatever ‘understanding’ is, the diagonal lemma should be able to find a fixed point for it (or at the very least, an arbitrarily close approximation) - it would be very surprising if it didn’t hold. Quines are just an instance of this general principle that you can actually play with and poke around and see how they work—which helps demystify the core idea and gives you a picture of how this could be possible.