Peter DeBlanc: check your email
burger_flipper2
Karma: 26
Dawes gives a very similar 2-gamble example of a money pump on pg 105 of Rational Choice.
Mamet: “The stoics wrote that the excellent king can walk through the streets unguarded. Our contemporary Secret Service spends tens of millions of dollars every time the president and his retinue venture forth.
Mythologically, the money and the effort are spent not to protect the president’s life—all our lives are fragile—but to protect the body politic against the perception that his job is ceremonial, and that for all our attempts to invest it with real power—the Monroe Doctrine, the war powers act, the “button”—there’s no one there but us.”
This coming Monday at burger-flipping centrail (Norman, OK) there is going to be a bi/non-partisan pep rally convened by David Boren and some other cheerleaders. They’ve invited each R and D presidential canidate (so far only magic undies has agreed to come) along with Bloomberg. They plan to elicit pledges for some tangible plan for bipartisanship, or create a justification for Bloomberg to go 3rd party (my understanding is he is fiscally conservative and socially liberal). I’m going to have to shut down the q’ing ovens, dig the heat lamps out of the dumpster, premake about 700 Mac’s, and play hookie to be there. Some of us more discriminating politicos don’t cheer for blue or green. We wanna see the clown juggle at half time.
“I briefly thought to myself: ‘I bet most people would be experiencing ‘stage fright’ about now. But that wouldn’t be helpful, so I’m not going to go there.’”
This is part of E’s history? Both this and his reaction to 9/11, ticking off a series of thoughts in robotic fashion, strike me as unlikely, given my experience being a human and viewing others.
I don’t know what to label this, whether it is an attempt to establish authority by seeming exceedingly rational, remembering events in a way that pleases him, something close to the truth, or something else completely different.
But it does strike me as both odd and unlikely.
Relatively new to the forum and just watched the 2 1⁄2 hour Yudkowsky video on Google. Excellent talk that really helped frame some of the posts here for me, though the audience questions were generally a distraction.
My biggest disappointment was the one question that popped up in my mind while watching and was actually posed wasn’t answered because it would take about 5 minutes. The man who asked was told to pose it again at the end of the talk, but did not.
This was the question about the friendly AI: “Why are you assuming it knows the outcome of its modifications?”
Any pointer to the answer would be much appreciated.
I’m with McCabe—what was the epiphany?
So is the propensity to say, “I knew it instantaneously” a kissing cousin of the hindsight bias?
p=.02 the first 3 conscious thoughts were, sequentially: “I guess I really am living in the Future. Thank goodness it wasn’t nuclear. and then The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.”
I can see the utility in starting off the post with such a narrative (grabbing attention and establishing svengali authority), and don’t doubt those 3 thoughts popped up fairly quickly, in one form or another.
I know it’s effective, but I expect a little better.
I’ve always used motorcycle fatalites as the yardstick to put it in perspective; 9-11 came up just short.
I suspected we might be in trouble when they floated the story that Bush didn’t return to Washington because of a credible threat to Air Force One, a threat in which, the supposed terrorists were more concerned with establishing credibility than carrying out their attach and thus used some sort of code word that only someone with inside knowledge would have.
It was perfectly reasonable for Bush to put a half dozen states between himself and the most likely nuclear target (no one knew what might happen). But they were worried it looked bad, un-leaderlike, cowardly, when it was quite pragmatic. The fact they were willing to lie instead of telling even moderately tough truths did not bode well.
Consider all the loco 9/11 theories. There is one that almost doesn’t sound loco. What if it had been necessary to shoot down a passenger jet to save some unknown target, but afterwards it was discovered that some on board had been mounting an assault on the cabin, and had called loved ones as well?
Adanthar, a poker pro who helped break the Absolute scandal and developed a “robotic” small-stakes algorithm on a lark that supposedly returned approximately 20% before it became well known put down 10k and has been updating his Intrade progress here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=88375 I’m interested to see how he’ll do today.