I almost downvoted this because when I clicked on it from my RSS reader, it appeared to have been posted on main LW instead of discussion (known bug). This might be the reason for a lot of mysterious downvoting, actually.
Bongo
Karma: 1,411
(Bug report: I was sent to this post via this link, and I see MAIN bolded above the title instead of DISCUSSION. The URL is misleading too, shouldn’t urls of discussion posts contain ”/r/discussion/” instead of ”/lw”?)
(EDIT: Grognor just told me that “every discussion post has a main-style URL that bolds MAIN”)
fraction of revenue that ultimately goes to paying staff wages
About a third in 2009, the last year for which we have handy data.
Snape says this in both MoR and the original book:
“I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death”
Isn’t this silly? Of course you can stopper death, because duh, poisons exist.
It might be just a slip-up in the original book, but I’m hoping it will somehow make sense in MoR. My first thought was that maybe a magical death potion couldn’t be stopped using magical healing, unlike non-magical poisons.
I asked this on IRC and got some interesting ideas. feep thought it might mean that you can make a Potion of Dementor, which would fit since dementors are avatars of death in MoR and stoppering death would be actually impressive if it meant that. Orionstein suggested it might be a potion made from eg. a bullet that’s killed someone, which, given what we know of how potions work from chapter 78, might also result in a potion with deathy effects above and beyond just those of poison.
This usually stops me from using myself as examples, sometimes with the result that the post stays unwritten or unpublished.
You could just tell the story with “me” replaced by “my friend” or “someone I know” or “Bob”. I’d hate to miss a W_D post because of a trivial thing like this.
I … was shocked at how downright anti-informative the field is
Explain?
shocked at how incredibly useless statistics is
Explain?
The opposite happened with the parapsychology literature
Elaborate?
algorithmic probability … does not say that naturalistic mechanistic universes are a priori more probable!
Explain?
confirmation bias … doesn’t actually exist.
Explain?
I wonder how this comment got 7 upvotes in 9 minutes.
EDIT: Probably the same way this comment got 7 upvotes in 6 minutes.
This could be an option.
(An increasing probability distribution over the natural numbers is impossible. The sequence (P(1), P(2),...) would have to 1) be increasing 2) contain a nonzero element 3) sum to 1, which is impossible.)
There’s a related problem; Humans have a tendency to once they have terms for something take for granted that something that looks at a glance to make rough syntactic sense that it actually has semantics behind it.
This sentence is so convoluted that at first I thought it was some kind of meta joke.
It’s also another far-mode picture.
73 tabs, 4 windows.
Also, I’d say both of those pictures seem to have the effect of inducing far mode.
Given any problem, one should look at it, and pick the course that maximising one’s expectation. … what if my utility is non-linear
You’re confusing expected outcome and expected utility. Nobody thinks you should maximize the utility of the expected outcome; rather you should maximize the expected utility of the outcome.
Lets now take another example: I am on Deal or No Deal, and there are three boxes left: $100000, $25000 and $.01. The banker has just given me a deal of $20000 (no doubt to much audience booing). Should I take that? Expected gains maximisation says certainly not!
Yes, and expected gains maximization, which nobody advocates, is stupid, unlike expected utility maximization, which will take into account the fact that your utility function is probably not linear on money.
Is there a video of the full lecture?
it seems that an isomorphic argument ‘proves’ that computer programs will crash—since “almost any” computer program crashes.
More obviously, an isomorphic argument ‘proves’ that books will be gibberish—since “almost any” string of characters is gibberish. An additional argument that non-gibberish books are very difficult to write and that naively attempting to write a non-gibberish book will almost certainly fail on the first try, is required. The analogous argument exists for AGI, of course, but is not given there.
It was probably that, but note that that page is not concerned with minimizing killing, but minimizing the suffering-adjusted days of life that went into your food. (Which I think is a good idea; I’ve used that page’s stats to choose my animal products for a year now.)
Harry didn’t hear Hermione’s testimony. Therefore, he can go back in time and change it to anything that would produce the audience reaction he saw, without causing paradox.