Hello,
I haven’t made up my mind yet—and if anyone’s interested, this cbs take on it looks well done:
AnlamK
Karma: 79
I actually took information theory but this is more of an issue algorithmic information theory—something I have not studied all that much. Though still, I think you are probably right since Kolgomorov complexity refers to descriptive complexity of an object. And here you can give a much shorter description of all of consecutive natural numbers.
This is very interesting to me because intuitively one would think that both are problems involving infinity and hence I lazily thought that they would both have the same complexity.
Yes, but how are you going to represent ‘n’ under the hood? You are going to need eventually infinite bits to represent it? I guess this is what you mean by storage. I should confess that I don’t know enough about alogrithmic information theory so I may be in deeper waters than I can swim. I think you are right though…
I had something more in mind like, the number of bits required to represent any natural number, which is obviously log(n) (or maybe 2loglog(n) - with some clever tricks I think) and if n can get as big as possible, then the complexity, log(n) also gets arbitrarily big.
So maybe the problem of producing every natural number consecutively has a different complexity from producing some arbitrary natural number. Interesting…
What is the notion of complexity in question? It could for instance be the (hypothetically) shortest program needed to produce a given object, i.e. Kolmogorov complexity.
In that case, the natural numbers would have a complexity of infinity, which would be much greater than any finite quantity—i.e. a human life.
I may be missing something because the discussion to my eyes seems trivial.
I disagree with your blunt formulation of intelligence as ‘IQ’. An example: Lewis Terman (yes the father of Frederick Terman who has a building named after him at Stanford) followed a bunch of kids with high IQs—average of 151. As described in the article, William Shockley (have you heard of him?) didn’t have a high enough to be one of the ’Termite’s. But, as every electrical engineer will tell you, Shockley went onto invent the bipolar junction transistor at Bell Labs. (What’s ironic is that Shockley himself adopted a static (unchangeable) view of human ability, became a racist proponent of eugenics and was shunned in the academia in his late career.)
In fact, Barry Schwartz claims that the success rate of the Termites was as good as a random sample of individuals but I can’t quite find links for this claim. (It’s in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell however.)
A discussion of IQ would take us far afield but I suggest you also check out Flynn effect for instance.
This was really funny.
I’m reminded of a Seinfeld scene in which Jerry and Elaine, annoyed at each other, are in a push fight in Jerry’s apartment when Kramer pops in, separates them and nonchalantly suggests, “Don’t you two see you are in love with each other?”. (Note that in the scene, it’s obvious Jerry and Elaine are not romantically linked and that’s why Kramer’s comment is so funny.)
I’m always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
I’m sure we’d all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart—that’s some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies—if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
Inspired by Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, I’m going to go with delayed gratification. I think the most important skill (or perhaps meta-skill, as this particular skill allows one to develop skills) is the ability to delay gratification and discipline yourself to work on something for a prolonged period of time. Without hard work and discipline, you can’t achieve much in life. I also want to link to an interview with Carol Dweck, since she is probably the psychologist who has influenced me the most in this regard.
After all, Joe is a deterministic physical system; his current state (together with the state of his future self’s past light-cone) fully determines what Joe’s future action will be. There is no Physically Irreducible Moment of Choice, where this same Joe, with his own exact actual past, “can” go one way or the other.
You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will.
“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” said Billy Pilgrim.
“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will. I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse–Five
There is a field called philosophy of language. Have you heard of it? Here are some key papers/links:
On Sense and Reference by Frege
Reference and Definite Descriptions by Donnellan
Kripke’s Naming and Necessity Lectures (Wohooo I didn’t know this was freely available… I might reread it now...)
A.P. Martinich’s Standard Philosophy of Language Anthology
Now you are an educated man…
Haha, that’s just my bizarre humor. Glad someone picked up on it!
I like irrelevant fact times. I think they are so much fun :-)
Specially circumsized men will have more trouble if ya know what I mean. (And that Sheryl Crow cover, “First Cut Is the Deepest”—that’s totally true...)
How many spurious accounts are you going to register to upvote me?
Usually, I do things like this for 3 karma points but since you look nice, I’ll give it to you for free.
It wasn’t actually Knobe but John Doris, who also works in the so-called experimental philosophy paradigm. The exact reference is:
“From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: The Moral Psychology of Atrocity.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXI: 25-55
Here is the relevant quotation:
“(i) Passersby who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than passersby who did not find a dime (88% vs. 4%).27 (ii) Passersby not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passersby in a hurry (63% vs. 10%).28 (iii) Passersby were five times more likely to help an apparently injured man who had dropped some books when ambient noise was at normal levels than they were when a power lawnmower was running nearby (80% vs. 15%).29 (iv) In Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment,” subjects role-playing in a simulated prison rapidly descended to Lord of the Flies barbarism.30 (v) In Milgram’s “obedience experiments,” subjects participating in a study purported to test the effects of punishment on learning would repeatedly punish a screaming “learner” with realistic (but simulated) electric shocks at the polite request of an experimenter.”
(I can’t use stylistic stuff like linking and quoting… Is there a guide to show how you quote?)
First of all, congratulations for not writing about gender issues. Welcome back—we missed you :-P.
Second, the effect you are talking about is a well-known one in social psychology. Here is one example from moral cognition and psychology. (I can get the references but I’m at work and hey, I’m not procrastinating… My simulation is running: http://xkcd.com/303/)
In a study on moral behavior, there was a confederate old lady that needed help. In the normal condition, only 17% of the passers-by helped the old lady. In the manipulation condition, subjects were made to find a dime on the ground before coming across the old lady. In this condition, %80 helped the old lady.
Similar effects were observed for asking for change in front of a store with a pleasant smell (i.e. a bakery) versus one with neutral smell (i.e. a shoe store). There are more examples in a paper authored by Joshua Knobe on moral cognition and blameworthiness but I’m too lazy to get the reference. (Why don’t you give ma slight impetus in that direction?)
Lastly, in an airport where men were missing the urinals and peeing to the ground, an image of a fly on the urinal substantially decreased this utterly utterly unhygienic and terrible behavior.
There is a book written about such ’nudge’s to motivate rational behavior. I haven’t read it but here is the reference: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233
And here is a NYT article about the same thing. This is the article from which I got the urinal example: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/business/08nudge.html
(I feel like what candy is to a little kid, social psychology is to me. 8-) ).
I suggest we have a poll on how many people would like PUA-related discussion and how many would prefer not to.
I have to agree! For a while, I was also puzzled by the same thing. I thought alcohol tastes gross, so why are so many people into it?
That its other effects could be such a big deal I came to realize much later.
Can we just show up? Or we we need to RSVP some place, somewhere?
Regards.
“Where do you think Less Wrong is most wrong?”
I don’t know where Less Wrong is most “wrong”—I don’t have a reliable conclusion about this and moreover I don’t think Less Wrong community accept exceptionlessly a group of statements - but I can certainly say this: some posts (and sometimes comments) introduce jargon (i.e. Kullback-Leibler distance, utility function, priors etc.) for not very substantial reasons. I think sometimes people have a little urge to show off and reveal the world how smart they are. Just relax, okay? We all know you are geniuises :-)
(I won’t actually go through the trouble of quoting.)
On the other hand, I’ve been really impressed with some of the posts I have read here. They have been very engaging and interesting.
Harry Frankfurt, who came up with the original idea, did a much better job in explaining in my opinion. (Why are you not referring to his paper?)
Here is the link for the curious: http://www.usfca.edu/philosophy/pdf%20files/Freedom%20of%20the%20Will%20and%20the%20Concept%20of%20a%20Person.pdf
Here is something that I want to try:
Whenever I want to work on something, I’m just burdened by the fact that all my efforts will be useless, that the stuff won’t be done and that I’ll toil and toil and toil without accomplishing anything. Now, this sort of thing is pretty common for me—worries about my confidence and intelligence not withstanding.
Sometimes this pressure is really discouraging and overburdening that I want to avoid work just to avoid that horrible feeling of having made no progress.
So I want to have “work” days in which I’ll specifically experiment fruitlessly—I’ll just do what I want without any pressure about productivity.
Maybe I might have an explicit rule about not being productive.
This hopefully will allow me to experiment more and enjoy my work more…
But with strict deadlines looming, it seems difficult but we’ll see…
Would anyone actually be up for discussing the specifics of the case? (I don’t know why but I find myself oddly interested in this case.)
As far as I can tell, the biggest pro-defendant evidence is that there is no major DNA evidence of Sollecito and Knox in the room where murder took place. We are told that there is a bra clasp with Sollecito’s DNA and a knife that has both Amanda’s and Kercher’s DNA—both of these DNA traces are ‘weak’ in the sense that they are not that obvious, require a hefty search and are hard to see in lab. On the other hand, there are ‘strong’ traces of Guede’s DNA in the victim’s blood and in the room.
So, the first thing that worries me is that if it were a crime committed by three people, why would you have one person’s DNA everywhere in the room and yet two others’ only faintly there?
Again, this is the strongest pro-innocent (for Knox and Sollecito) argument that I have—and the one that convinces me most likely that Sollecito and Knox haven’t done it.
I don’t know—can anyone else site cases in which there was a group murder and yet only a single person left behind ‘strong’ traces of DNA? Maybe this isn’t so unusual after all.
On the pro-guilty side, I must admit that I find Knox’s and Sollecito’s behavior the morning after the murder and during the investigation a bit strange. If ‘Meredith was [her] friend’, as Amanda Knox says in her trial, why were she doing cart-wheels during the investigation the morning after the murder? Shouldn’t she be distraught and upset like all of other Meredith Kercher’s friends? Accuse me of the mind projection fallacy but I feel like I would be distraught (and in a bad mood) even if the victim wasn’t someone I knew.
But again, strange behavior isn’t really an evidence. It’s just something that makes one suspicious and raises uncertainty.
I can’t find that many pro-guilty arguments. There are some tidbits that have a lot of uncertainty in them: i.e. Sollecito (allegedly) bought cleaning supplies the night of the murder allegedly again to clean up the murder mess, Sollecito claimed to be using the Internet at the time of the murder but his ISP records indicate otherwise, a woman claims to have heard three people running down that street that night.. etc. None of them as strong to make a case.
Besides these, a few other thoughts:
I really don’t know how Sollecito and Knox got linked to this murder. How did they get dragged into this in the first place? Is there really evidence for the fact that it was a satanic sex-orgy gone wrong as the prosecutor claims it is? I mean, this satanic sex-orgy idea seems to be the prosecutor’s imagination—there is no evidence for it.
Also, supposing Guede did it alone, would there be additional penalty or a reduction in penalty for him if he were to simply confess?
This whole thing seems to be like a backlash of conservative Italians’ against whom they deem the immoral, selfish and arrogant youth. I have a hunch that the Italian prosecutor wants to punish Sollecito and Knox for a lifestyle he considers wrong.
I don’t know what anyone else feels but the uncertainty of the case is somewhat disturbing. I wish there was a knockdown evidence and I could know the truth and be done with it instead of this restless search. Any else feeling that way?