So how did it go?
dvasya
Karma: 445
Common sense quantum mechanics
Can’t make it this Saturday but will try next time!
Alexander or Axler?
I’d say that all points are too long by themselves, so if you split the post into several they will still be too long.
The point can be formulated even stronger: An additive random walk will go negative.
Several people already pointed out that what is most frequently used as a model for prices is precisely the log random walk. This should have been obvious since no asset can have a negative price, and it is known that the long-term probability of the one-dimensional random walk reaching any specified point (such as zero) is 1 (same for 2D, not so in 3+ D) - this part of how casinos make money.
It is very easy to spot why the random walk model doesn’t make sense for prices, just take the sentence that says “If today’s Bitcoin price is $1000, then tomorrow’s price is as likely to be $900 as it is to be $1100.” Now if the normal random walk model were true, then you could also have said that the price is as likely to deviate by +X as it is by -X for any X. Now take X=1000: is it as likely to cost $0 as it is to cost $2000?
tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds
...and they probably won’t do it when the time comes to act.
The history of cryonics teaches us that, while people often contact cryonics companies to freeze their already or soon-to-be dead relatives on their own incentive, it is a much more common situation that the relatives of a person who has already completed all the paperwork and paid for the cryopreservation with their own money try to actively prevent the preservation.
Note also that the non-signed-up people’s relatives come from a population many orders of magnitude larger than signed-up people’s relatives.
(Speaking as someone who works for a US educational institution without having ever attended a US educational institution, barring MOOC,) I don’t think taking a molecular biology class in high school would make much difference even in college, not to mention after that—in grad school or at a job. Maybe it would make the first unit of the first college MolBio class somewhat easier, and I’m not even sure if that would be a good thing since it may develop a laid-back attitude. (And even college classes won’t really prepare you for real research/job.) Moreover, it would be totally useless if the student then realized they wanted to go for some other major after all. Maybe another way to phrase it is “high school is time for exploration, not exploitation”.
It’s not that simple to get water that deep into your ears.
Indeed anosognosia is mentioned multiple times in the paper, perhaps serving as the motivation.
Maybe if somebody came up with a nice self-experiment protocol...
To become more rational, rinse your left ear with cold water
A PhD is only as good as the reputation of your advisor. If everybody knows your advisor then you won’t have a problem finding a job in academia. If your PhD is not backed by a prominent professor with a name, you’re going to have a very difficult time finding a good position. It may be a bit easier in CS, where universities have to compete with industry, compared to my field (physics/chemistry/materials science), but generally this is how academia works.
An easily obtainable PhD is generally not the right kind of signal.
Congratulations! I also received it (thanks not the least to your posts). I wonder how many other LWers participate and who else (if anybody) got their invitations.
There are no intinifesimals in Zeno’s paradox. Each step has a strictly finite length.
There are also no infinitesimals on the line segment. Each point has a size of exactly 0.
Of course, you cannot calculate the length of the segment based on this as L = point size number of points = 0 infinity, because infinity is not a number. You can’t pass to the limit of infinity before doing the multiplication unless you know that all multipliers are finite, which is not the case here. What you can do here is calculate N * (L/N) and pass to the limit N → infinity, in which case both your multipliers are always finite.
Always do the calculation first and then pass to the limit (unless you know that in your specific case it doesn’t matter—there are theorems for that, of course).
I wonder how this bias manifests in us lesswrongians. How has your rationality changed over the last 5 years? How do you expect it to change in the coming 5?
In both your problems, the seeming paradox comes from failure to recognize that the two agents (one that Omega has simulated and one making the decision) are facing entirely different prior information. Then, nothing requires them to make identical decisions. The second agent can simulate itself having prior information I1 (that the simulated agent has been facing), then infer Omega’s actions, and arrive at the new prior information I2 that is relevant for the decision. And I2 now is independent of which decision the agent would make given I2.
Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. “Intelligence” is our name for whichever of those processes we don’t yet understand.
Some people dislike this “definition” because its meaning is doomed to keep changing as we learn more about psychology. But in my view that’s exactly how it ought to be, because the very concept of intelligence is like a stage magician’s trick. Like the concept of “the unexplored regions of Africa,” it disappears as soon as we discover it.
-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
Hm. So no time travelers here. (I’m pretty sure it used to say the 3rd before though...)
I’ll try to make it.