George_Weinberg2

Karma: 91

George_Weinberg2 Jul 3, 2008, 10:39 PM
1 point
on: The Bedrock of Fairness
I see no reason to believe there is such a thing as an objective definition of “fair” in this case. The idea that an equal division is “fair” is based on the assumption that none of the three has a good argument as to why he should receive more than either of the others. If one has a reasonable argument as to why he should receive more, the fairness argument breaks down. In fact, none of the three really have a good argument as to why he is entitled to any of it, and I can’t see why it would be wrong for any of the first one to grab it to claim the whole pie under “right of capture”.

what’s the standard reply to someone who says, “Friendly to who?” or “So you get to decide what’s Friendly”?

This is an important question. I don’t believe there is such a thing as an objective definition of friendliness, I’d doubt that “reasonable” people can come to an agreement as to what friendliness means. But I’m eager to be proven wrong, keep writing.

George_Weinberg2 May 17, 2008, 5:31 PM
0 points
on: Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?
Well, I remember wondering as a graduate student how how one was supposed to go about deciding what problems to work on, and not coming up with a good answer . A fellow student suggested that your project is worth working on if you can get it funded, but I think he was kidding. Or maybe not.

Most experimentalists really aren’t in the business of supporting or refuting hypotheses as such. It’s more a matter of making a measurement, and yes they will be comparing their results to theoretical predictions, but ideally experimentalists should be disinterested in the result, that is, they care about making as accurate a measurement as possible but don’t have any a priori preference of one value over another.

George_Weinberg2 Apr 2, 2008, 12:43 AM
2 points
on: Heat vs. Motion
There’s a way you could make the heat=motion concept much clearer to Carnot. When one studies kinematics, one generally makes the approximation that macroscopic bodies are rigid, and the motions of the body refer to center of mass motion, or perhaps rotation about some axis. If you explain that “heat” refers to the motion of the constituent particles relative to each other, I think a scientist of Carnot’s day would understand the idea pretty quickly.

I think this sort of thing might be what people mean when they talk about a “bridging theory”.

George_Weinberg2 Mar 16, 2008, 8:42 PM
2 points
on: Reductionism
The essential idea behind reductionism, that if you have reliable rules for how the pieces behave then in principle you can apply them to determine how the whole behaves, has to be true. To say otherwise is to argue that the airplane can be flying while all its constituent pieces are still on the ground.

But if you can’t do a calculation in practice, does it matter whether or not it would give you the right answer if you could?

George_Weinberg2 Feb 13, 2008, 7:08 PM
6 points
0
on: Feel the Meaning
It would certainly facilitate communication, though, if people could agree on what words mean rather than having personal definitions. No doubt it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to agree on precisely where the boundary between yellow and orange lies, but tigers aren’t even a yellowish orange.

George_Weinberg2 Feb 1, 2008, 1:02 AM
1 point
on: Something to Protect
For some reason this post reminds me of the Buddhist parable asceticsim now, nymphs later.

I don’t think it’s all that uncommon to begin cultivating an art for some specific purpose, proceed to cultivate it largely for its own sake, and eventually to abandon the original purpose.

George_Weinberg2 Jan 19, 2008, 6:08 PM
1 point
on: The Allais Paradox
It seems to me that your argument relies on the utility of having a probability p of gaining x being equal to p times the utility of gaining x. It’s not clear to me that this should be true.

The trouble with the “money pump” argument is that the choice one makes may well depend on how one got into the situation of having the choice in the first place. For example, let’s assume someone prefer 2B over 2A. It could be that if he were offered choice 1 “out of the blue” he would prefer 1A over 1B, yet if it were announced in advance that he would have a ²⁄₃ chance of getting nothing and a ¹⁄₃ chance of being offered choice 1, he would decide beforehand that B is the better choice, and he would stick with that choice even if allowed to switch. This may seem odd, but I don’t see why it’s logically inconsistent.

George_Weinberg2 Jan 11, 2008, 3:13 AM
1 point
on: Beautiful Math
Martin Gardner has a chapter on these “look-see” proofs in Knotted Donuts.

George_Weinberg2 Dec 21, 2007, 10:49 PM
2 points
on: Two Cult Koans
Ni no Tachi figured out how to use the hammer, but Bouzo only sold them without understanding their value.

“A bird in the hand is worth what you can get for it.”—Ambrose Bierce

Fiction is fiction, but it seems to me that that if student objects to wearing silly clothes and his master responds by ordering him to wear yet sillier clothes, it’s a lot more plausible that the student will conclude his master is a quack and drop out than that he’ll decide to extend his master’s teaching by taking silly clothes to a whole new level.

Maybe the whole point of this exercise is to remind us that one can’t come to reliable conclusions from fictional evidence? If so, well, maybe I haven’t learned anything… but at least I’ve learned I haven’t learned anything.

George_Weinberg2 Dec 21, 2007, 7:09 PM
13 points
0
on: Two Cult Koans
“Since you are so concerned about the interactions of clothing with probability theory,” Ougi said, “it should not surprise you that you must wear a special hat to understand.”

But isn’t this almost the exact opposite of what the student was saying? Questioning the robes indicates to me that the student felt there was not any interaction between learning probability theory and clothing, and that therefore it served some other purpose, presumably differentiating between an in group and an out group.

Or am I just nuts for trying to argue with you about the internal thoughts of your own fictional characters?

George_Weinberg2 Dec 12, 2007, 8:49 PM
4 points
on: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult
Or at least invent a cultometer, so we can check our cultempature?

It’s a bad sign if we develop identifiable cliques. Because of general attitudes it stands to reason agreements and disagreements won’t be randomly distributed, but ideally we shouldn’t “agree” or “disagree” with others because we agreed or disagreed with them in the past. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to develop some sort of voting software that measured cliquishness if there’s a demand for it.

Of course, the real disaster would be if people start saying things like “Eliezer is always right”. Nobody is always right.

George_Weinberg2 Dec 5, 2007, 9:14 PM
3 points
on: Uncritical Supercriticality
If you met John Barnes and he argued that he’s doing the right thing, would it be appropriate to sock him in the jaw?

No, because the statement that “the only appropriate response to some arguments is a good swift sock in the jaw” is not itself one of the arguments whose appropriate response is a sock in the jaw. There may or may not be any such arguments, but socking him in the jaw is admitting that he is fundamentally right. Of course, it might be appropriate to sock him for some other reason :-)

One can argue that Buzz Aldrin had a special right to sock the guy that you or I would not. To me, claiming the moon landing was faked is just an absurd statement. Saying it in front of Buzz is unjustifiably calling the man a fraud and a liar. Buzz shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of crap.

George_Weinberg2 Dec 5, 2007, 8:59 PM
0 points
on: Uncritical Supercriticality
It seems to me that normative statements like “let us go and serve other gods” aren’t really something you can have a rational debate about. The question comes down to “which do you love more, your god or me”, and the answer should always be “God”… according to God.

Similarly, one could have a rational debate about whether a command economy will outperform a market economy or vice versa (although the empirical evidence seems pretty one-sided), but a statement like “all people ought to be socially and economically equal” seems like something that just has to be accepted or rejected.

George_Weinberg2 Nov 19, 2007, 1:10 AM
0 points
on: No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
Maybe I should have said something more like “conceivably could be” rather than “is likely to be”. Certainly I didn’t mean to imply that every firm in an industry will immediately copy somebody else’s good idea. There isn’t even a guarantee that a good idea will be recognized as one in the company in which it originates.

But the point is that ideas can be copied without anything like biological reproduction taking place. Why they so seldom are is an interesting question, I’ve added Deming to my “to read” list.

George_Weinberg2 Nov 18, 2007, 9:09 PM
1 point
on: No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
What corporations do is very different from biological evolution, but if a corporation develops a successful idea then it is likely to be copied by other corporations without anything like biological reproduction entering the picture.

George_Weinberg2 Nov 15, 2007, 8:09 PM
2 points
on: Terminal Values and Instrumental Values
I have a question about this picture.

Imagine you have something like a chess playing program. It’s got some sort of basic position evaluation function, then uses some sort of look ahead to assign values to the instrumental nodes based on the terminal nodes you anticipate along the path. But unless the game actually ends at the terminal node, it’s only “terminal” in the sense that that’s where you choose to stop calculating. There’s nothing really special about them.

Human beings are different from the chess program in that for us the game never ends, there are no “true” terminal nodes. As you point out, we care what happens after we are dead. So wouldn’t it be true that in a sense there’s nothing but instrumental values, that a “terminal value” just means that a point at which we’ve chosen to stop calculating, rather than saying something about the situation itself?