BlackNoise

• BlackNoiseApr 5, 2012, 8:39 AM

  13 points

  on: Cry­on­ics with­out freez­ers: re­s­ur­rec­tion pos­si­bil­ities in a Big World

  It should be mentioned that when considering things like Cryonics in the Big World, you can’t just treat all the other “you” instances as making independent decisions, they’ll be thinking similarly enough to you that whatever conclusion you reach, this is what most “you” instances will end up doing. (unless you randomize, and assuming ‘most’ even means anything)

  Seriously, I’d expect people to at least mention the superrational view when dealing with clones of themselves in decide-or-die coordination games.

• BlackNoiseMar 28, 2012, 10:24 PM

  17 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  I meant it as Bayesian evidence. (updating P(Arbitrage works) down on Bester regretting means updating up on him not Regretting)

  Plus, this is stronger evidence for us than for Harry due to Conservation of Details and the recent disclaimer by EY that there are no red herrings, and that simple solutions != bad solutions (and in fact, the opposite is usually true).

  ETA: Also, Bester probably thought about it more more than a few seconds, at least the first time he saw it in Harry’s mind—Remember that he didn’t just see those Ideas/​secrets, he’s also seen key moments of his previous conversations.

• BlackNoiseMar 28, 2012, 8:13 PM

  14 points

  in reply to: Xachariah’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  Some counter-evidence for getting gold being difficult: In chapter 27, Mister Bester (the Legilimens who trained Harry) said:

  Though I do wish I could remember that trick with the gold and silver.

  Implying that it was at least somewhat practical as a means for getting rich quickly.

• BlackNoiseMar 28, 2012, 6:29 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ajuc’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  Just trade on forex and use time turner to go back and choose the deal.

  You sir, are a genius.

• BlackNoiseMar 28, 2012, 6:02 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Congratulations on correctly guessing (most of) the solution.

• BlackNoiseMar 25, 2012, 2:12 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Actually, if you can loop yourself more than six times at any small stretch of wall-time then you can get more than 30 subjective hours in one 24 wall-time day.

  But it’s implied you can’t actually do that, which is why I think no more than 6 copies at any given time. Plus, if it were possible you could basically use any one day as a stopping point groundhog-day style in which you can (for example) brute-force read the entire Hogwarts library.

  At any rate, the general limiting principle is that information cannot travel more than 6 hours backwards, Which I think means that when you draw a graph of a person using time-turners where you represent her using an arrow (going right for positive time, and left in 1h jumps for time-turner use), Then you can’t have more than 6 hours of left-arrow in any given 24h wall-time section.

• BlackNoiseMar 25, 2012, 2:13 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Didn’t Harry ask Dumbledore if it’s possible to get more than 30 hours in a day using multiple time-turners and getting a negative answer?

• BlackNoiseMar 25, 2012, 2:02 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  I think he meant the note that came with the Cloak that said to not trust Dumbledore since he’ll take the Cloak from Harry. which he didn’t, and then said:

  But you and I are both gamepieces of the same color, I think. The boy who finally defeated Voldemort, and the old man who held him off long enough for you to save the day. I will not hold your caution against you, Harry, we must all do our best to be wise. I will only ask that you think twice and ponder three times again, the next time someone tells you to distrust me.

  And considering that he wrote the note, and set up the mistrust in the first place...

  Hence, Magnificent Bastard.

• BlackNoiseMar 25, 2012, 1:48 AM

  9 points

  in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  I don’t think you can have more than 6 versions of yourself present at any given time, since any more than that and information is traveling more than 6 hours back. (at least from the perspectives of the earliest and latest self-clone)

  But still, 6 x Dumbledore+Fawkes is quite the army.

  Edit: Also,

  Many resstrictionss. Locked to your usse only, cannot be sstolen. Cannot transsport other humanss.

  You don’t actually need to go through animagus+pouch to transport more than one person on an unrestricted Time-Turner. (Canon also agrees on this if I recall correctly)

• BlackNoiseMar 24, 2012, 6:17 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Alsadius’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  I think my problem is with this “Judge Retrospectively” thing. Here’s what I think:

  Decisions are what’s to be judged, not outcomes. And decisions should be judged relative to the information you had at the time of making them.

  In the lottery example, assuming you didn’t know what number would win, the decision to buy a ticket is Bad regardless of whether you won or not.

  What I got from this:

  you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought

  Is that you think that if you had a (presumably random) number in mind, but did not buy a ticket, and that number ended up winning, then your decision of not buying the ticket was Wrong and that you should Regret it.

  My problem is that this doesn’t make sense: We agree that playing a lottery is Bad (Negative sum game and all that), and we don’t seem to regret not heaving played with the specific number that happened to have won. Which is good, since (to me at least) Regretting decisions made in full knowledge you had at the time of decision seems Wrong.

  If this is not what you meant and I’m just bashing a Straw Man, please tell me.

• BlackNoiseMar 24, 2012, 3:58 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Alsadius’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought

  Not really; Before you know the outcome, saying “my numbers will be 5, 11, 17, 33, 36, and 42” is privileging the hypothesis. (unless you had other information which allowed you to select that specific combination)

  And even if those numbers, by pure chance, were correct, there is still a reason it was a bad decision (in the ‘maximizing expected utility’ sense) to buy a ticket. Which is what I meant when I said that you can’t have expected to win.

• BlackNoiseMar 23, 2012, 9:57 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Alsadius’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  I agree with the principle, but lottery is a really poor example of this, since it implies ignorance.

• BlackNoiseMar 23, 2012, 5:46 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Maybe what matters isn’t the proximity of the caster but of the patronus itself. Though Harry might still not be able to send his 2.0 on a search&destroy mission while staying at Hogwarts.

  His wand stayed in his hand, and a slight, sustainable flow from him replaced the slight losses from his Patronus.

  There seems to be a need for constant energy transfer into the patronus, and I doubt this transfusion line can go through hyperspace.

• BlackNoiseMar 23, 2012, 5:23 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Alsadius’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Actually, its a bad decision with respect to the information you had when you made it, unlike one-boxing instead of two-boxing, you can’t have expected to win the lottery.

• BlackNoiseMar 23, 2012, 4:36 PM

  7 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Sorry if this was mentioned before, but I just noticed something (not related to the latest cliffhanger):

  It’s implied that some people break into Azkaban to give some prisoners normal sleep/​Patronus time, but why go to all the trouble when you can just tell a Patronus to go there for a few hours by itself. And we already know that a Patronus can travel into Azkaban (McGonagalls’ in TSPE arc)

  So, plothole?

• BlackNoiseMar 23, 2012, 3:54 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  Technically, the numbers don’t have to work out—Lucius is the one on who’s request the trial be held, If his debt can make him withdraw charges or clear Hermione’s debt, that alone should suffice.

  Still, while this is a clever idea, it doesn’t sound very “Taboo Trade-off” or “Think of the Wizengamot as individuals instead of wallpaper”.

• BlackNoiseJan 29, 2012, 4:47 PM

  0 points

  on: Faus­tian bar­gains and discounting

  Why the hell would you want to doom the vast majority of future-you’s to an eternity of torture?

• BlackNoiseJan 22, 2012, 2:29 AM

  0 points

  on: The hun­dred-room problem

  This problem has a neat symmetry in that the players are copies of you; so all copies finding themselves in blue rooms will assign p(tails | blue)=x, and conversely all copies finding themselves in red rooms will assign p(tails | red)=1-x. This way (outside view), the problem reduces to finding what x gives the best sum log-score for all observers. Running the numbers gets x=99/​100, but this problem has way too much symmetry to attribute this to any particular explanation. Basically, this is faul_sname’s reasoning with more math.

• BlackNoiseNov 15, 2011, 5:18 PM

  0 points

  on: Spaced Rep­e­ti­tion Database for the Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers to Mys­te­ri­ous Ques­tions Sequence

  I’ve thought about an alternative (or complimentary) answer for the question ” Sequences + Spaced Repetition = ? “: Instead of this approach (which is basically distilling the posts into flashcards as per Incremental reading), how about a deck of cards with one linked post per card with further cards for particularly interesting/​important points. When a card comes up for review, you read the linked post and send it to re-reading in the future. This can also be scaled to books, though that may be pushing it.

  The Pro is that its easier to implement, while still being better than just one read-through of the sequences. One big con is that there’s no active recall; no questions to answer, so it probably won’t be as much a part of you.

  The point about this being a complementary solution is that you can slowly convert links to posts into proper Q&A flashcards, which basically makes this an intermediate stage between “read once” and “make an anki deck for a whole sequence at once”.

  Now I didn’t actually implement this yet (I only found out about spaced repetition a few weeks ago), and I’d like a second opinion from someone who’s used SRS for a while on whether this idea will work or not.

• BlackNoiseSep 30, 2011, 11:38 AM

  15 points

  on: Stanis­lav Petrov Day

  Anyone else get hit with a sense of sheer terror as they figured the connection between this story and the anthropic principle?