Elithrion

Karma: 740

Elithrion Mar 30, 2013, 1:34 AM
1 point
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
That’s fair. I guess adopting exponential discounting is also good enough to rule out Christianity. Not about trying to live infinitely long, though—it would depend on how much believing in Christianity would hinder you in achieving that. (Same for other religions that don’t promise sufficiently amazing bliss.)

Elithrion Mar 30, 2013, 1:02 AM
4 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
Sure, but it doesn’t matter how much probability mass atheism gets, because the religions are the only ones offering infinities*, and we’re probably interested in best expected payoff, not highest probability. If religions have 1/10^50 residual probability mass and atheism has all the rest, you’d still probably have to choose one of them if at least one is offering immense payoffs and you haven’t solved Pascal’s Mugging.

*I guess one could argue that a Solomonoff prior assigns a zero probability to truly infinite things, but I’m not sure that’s an argument I’d want to rely on (also I know Buddhism offers some merely vast numbers, although I’m not sure they’re vast enough, and some other religions do too, I’d imagine).

Elithrion Mar 29, 2013, 9:50 PM
1 point
in reply to: JQuinton’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
No, it’s not (at least if we take the generous view and consider the Wager as an argument for belief in some type of deity, rather than the Christian one for which it was intended), because after considering all the hypotheses, you will still have to choose one (or more, I guess) of them, and it almost certainly won’t be atheism. I also feel like you completely missed the point of my previous comment, but I’m not sure why, and am consequently at a loss as to how to clarify.

Elithrion Mar 29, 2013, 8:36 PM
2 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
I suppose I should have said “reasonably inhabited land”.

Elithrion Mar 29, 2013, 5:27 PM
6 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss this, not only because it may give people ideas, but also because there is only one possible side to the argument that can really be mentioned.

Elithrion Mar 29, 2013, 5:02 PM
3 points
in reply to: MinibearRex’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
I am not. The problem with Pascal’s Wager is sort of that it fails to consider other hypotheses, but not in the conventional sense that most arguments use. Invoking an atheist god, as is often done, really does not counterbalance the Christian god, because the existence of Christianity gives a few bits of evidence in favour of it being true, just like being mugged gives a few bits of probability in favour of the mugger telling the truth. So, using conventional gods and heavens and hells like that won’t balance to them cancelling out, and you will end up having to believe one of these gods. On the other hand, the actual problem is that you can keep invoking new gods with fancier and more amazing heavens and hells, so that what you really end up believing is super-ultra-expanded-time-bliss-heaven and then you do whatever you think is required to go there. Which is isomorphic to Pascal’s (self-)Mugging.

(I should try practising explaining things in fewer words...)

Elithrion Mar 29, 2013, 12:47 AM
10 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
No, we would not. The Southern hemisphere is just generally warmer (at least on land).

Elithrion Mar 28, 2013, 8:12 PM
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Solved Problems Repository
I think it depends on the reading. If you read it in a sort of snooty dismissive voice, yes, certainly. But if you read it in a genuinely perplexed kind of voice, it mostly sounds confused.

Elithrion Mar 28, 2013, 7:57 PM
3 points
in reply to: maia’s comment on: Solved Problems Repository
I was looking up the Marines’ fitness requirements at some point randomly, and for females the pull-up requirement is apparently replaced with a flexed-arm hang (wiki about.com), so you could maybe try doing that.

Elithrion Mar 28, 2013, 7:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: Thrasymachus’s comment on: Upgrading moral theories to include complex values
By the way, 3^^3 = 3^27 is “only” 7625597484987, which is less than a quadrillion. If you want a really big number, you should add a third arrow (or use a higher number than three).

Elithrion Mar 28, 2013, 7:27 PM
3 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
I feel like this post is dated by the fact that it came before Pascal’s Mugging discussions to the point of being fairly wrong. The problem with Pascal’s Wager actually is that the payoffs are really high, so they overwhelm an unbounded utility function (and they don’t precisely cancel out, since we do have a little evidence). On the other hand, I suppose the core point that you shouldn’t dismiss things out of hand if they have a low (but not tiny) probability and a large payoff is sound.

Elithrion Mar 28, 2013, 7:03 PM
12 points
on: Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
I’m really sceptical that this is as big a factor as some of the others, but I can see how it might be a significant factor. I’ve also lived in cold places most of my life, so I’m not in a very good position to judge. I feel like the biggest factor will ultimately turn out to be “that’s how history played out”, though. Looking back, it’s not clear that the hypothetical dominance of the North was really noticeable until maybe the 17th century (I’m not entirely confident on this, so correct me if I’m wrong), so I’d be more inclined to attribute it to cultural, geological, and geopolitical factors. As an example, Greece and then Rome led the world in many things for a while, and they’re pretty warm. So did China and many of its core areas are fairly warm as well.

Elithrion Mar 23, 2013, 10:49 PM
12 points
in reply to: Xachariah’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
What if the house merely floated the thing over there with reaction (pushing back on the floors/walls), and its floor rotted slightly (accumulating entropy, losing chemical energy) in proportion to the necessary force? In that case, he’s only discovered ghostly energy transfer at small distances, which may be completely impractical (only one or two Nobels).

Elithrion Mar 23, 2013, 4:21 PM
4 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong help desk—free paper downloads and more
This appears to be all that exists for 3 (page 2): http://jech.bmj.com/content/suppl/2003/09/23/57.9.DC1/Abstracts.pdf

It was so small that after finding it I kept looking for a good 15 minutes, but I’m pretty sure the abstract is all there is and the full article was never published (the first author doesn’t list it on his personal page, and all the references seem to be to the abstract).

Elithrion Mar 23, 2013, 3:35 AM
4 points
on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
This idea reminds me of some things in mechanism design, where it turns out you can actually prove a lot more for weak dominance than for strong dominance, even though one might naïvely suppose that the two should be equivalent when dealing with a continuum of possible actions/responses. (I’m moderately out of my depth with this post, but the comparison might be interesting for some.)

Elithrion Mar 23, 2013, 2:18 AM
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
I think there are non-anthropic problems with even rational!humans communicating evidence.

One is that it’s difficult to communicate that you’re not lying, and it is also difficult to communicate that you’re competent at assessing evidence. A rational agent may have priors saying that OrphanWilde is an average LW member, including the associated wide distribution in propensity to lie and competence at judging evidence. On the other hand, rational!OrphanWilde would (hopefully) have a high confidence assessment of himself (herself?) along both dimensions. However, this assessment is difficult to communicate, since there are strong incentives to lie about these assessments (and also a lot of potential for someone to turn out to not be entirely rational and just get these assessments wrong). So, the rational agent may read this post and update to believing it’s much more likely that OrphanWilde either lies to people for fun (just look at all those improbable details!) or is incompetent at assessing evidence and falls prey to apophenia a lot.

This might not be an issue were it not for the second problem, which is that communication is costly. If communication were free, OrphanWilde could just tell us every single little detail about his life (including in this house and in other houses), and we could then ignore the problem of him potentially being a poor judge of evidence. Alternatively, he could probably perform some very large volume evidence-assessment test to prove that he is, in fact, competent. However, since communication is costly, this seems to be impractical in reality. (The lying issue is slightly different, but could perhaps be overcome with some sort of strong precommitment or an assumption constraining possible motivations combined with a lot of evidence.)

This doesn’t invalidate Aumann agreement as such, but certainly seems to limit its practical applications even for rational agents.

Elithrion Mar 23, 2013, 12:41 AM
4 points
in reply to: ModusPonies’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
I meant “someone close to him” in a relationship, not a spatial, sense (so, “other family member or friend he knows about”). Which I guess is still kind of just a different connotation, but I think one worth noticing separately from the “crazy lurker who’s been around for a while” hypothesis.

Elithrion Mar 22, 2013, 7:14 PM
26 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
Either that or maybe either OrphanWilde or his sister or someone else close to him really enjoys messing with everyone and making it seem that the house is haunted.

Elithrion Mar 22, 2013, 12:43 AM
8 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: LessWrong help desk—free paper downloads and more
Here you go.

Elithrion Mar 22, 2013, 12:38 AM
4 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: [LINK] Transcendence (2014) -- A movie about “technological singularity”
Imdb lists Wally Pfister as director. The shooting date is also from its Q&A thing.