Here’s a collection of videos by the researchers on what exactly this thing does. I’m impressed, excited, and worried all at once.
Kingoftheinternet
Karma: 376
Let it be known that I’ve upvoted all of your things to counteract whichever person downvoted all of your things, and nobody else should do that.
On individual comments and posts, the karma system is valuable for telling you if you’re being stupid or not, and I appreciate it for that. The total karma score is (how long you’ve been on LW) (how often you post) (how much people like what you say); it says something like “how much you contribute to this site”, which I find much less interesting, and I personally don’t care if it’s accurate.
I am, in fact, accusing people who downvote all posts by one person as using their time incorrectly; there are so many other things they could be doing that would make them happier and better-off, including nothing at all, that there’s not much excuse for going through with it.
If my karma were reduced to zero, I would continue carrying on as I do now, commenting on this and that, and my karma would from then on be a positive number I don’t pay attention to. A phlegmatic disposition has its advantages.
Perhaps you could convince someone who wasn’t very interested in the discussion to blindly upvote all of your posts, to counteract it? You are right that this has an impact on ongoing discussions, but it can also be undone with the help of a kindly stranger.
Someone spending their precious time going through someone’s history to decrease their near-meaningless number as much as they possibly can is already losing. I hear about this happening so infrequently, and it’s so totally inconsequential, that I don’t think it merits thinking up/making changes to anything.
Beliefs don’t exist outside of people (and other animals). If we want to talk about beliefs, we have to point inside at least one person’s head.
In your original post, you just presented Youtube videos. People here have very low expectations for videos about aliens on Youtube. If you’d linked to just that Blue Book report first then I bet people would’ve been much more receptive to what you have to say.
You mean in the History channel documentary and other videos on Youtube, or something else? I don’t usually like consuming knowledge in documentary form because it’s 1. slower than reading and 2. much easier to make emotion-based/nonsensical arguments without your audience noticing. Perhaps you could provide us with a summary of what happened when people tested Giles’ explanations? If there’s good text-based discussion you can link to us then I’d also be interested in that.
If you want that to happen then you’re going to need to do it yourself. Nobody else here is interested enough in this subject.
This is an expected utility calculation that involves a small probability of a large payoff with large margins of error. Here’s what I take as the essence of Holden’s post: “an estimate with little enough estimate error can almost be taken literally, while an estimate with large enough estimate error ends ought to be almost ignored.” I have very little confidence in both my and Academian’s estimate of which candidates winning will actually turn out to be better overall, and what the monetary value of each winning over their alternatives would actually be. Obama may seem to align with my values slightly more than Romney, but an office as powerful as the President of the US has many small, complex effects on many people’s quality of life, and we could all easily be wrong.
A trivialist would insist that “Trivialists argue ) is false” is true. Believing that you’re arguing something isn’t quite the same as arguing something, but I wanted to point out that under trivialism, trivialists think they’re arguing for and against all propositions simultaneously.
Trivialists think “Trivialists think trivialism is false” is true.
Trivialists are!
The Internet is well-suited to this kind of question. (I assume you weren’t just being snarky.)
It seems to me like the universe could be simulated on a quantum computer without quantum mechanics in the simulation, or even in a classical computer with quantum mechanics in the simulation (though it’d take a lot longer of course). The information processing itself is the important part, not the means of processing. This doesn’t detract from your argument, which I agree with, I just wanted to point that out.
the problem with state-machine materialism is not that it models the world in terms of causal interactions between things-with-states; the problem is that it can’t go any deeper than that, yet apparently we can.
I may have missed the part where you explained why qualia can’t fit into a state machine-model of the universe. Where does the incompatibility come from? I’m aware that it looks like no human-designed mathematical objects have experienced qualia yet, which is some level of evidence for it being impossible, but not so strong that I think you’re justified in saying a materialist/mathematical platonist view of reality can never account for conscious experiences.
There’s a post from GIveWell along these lines that you’ll find very informative.
According to Thomas Bayes, the analysis isn’t quite wrong. Comment reproduced for your convenience:
Based on the census tables that he cites, here’s what I see for 2005 (in 2005 dollars):
All men: $31,725
White men: $32,179
Soltas says $31,725, which is the median for all men.
White, not hispanic men: $35,345
Conard says $35,200 for white men, which is very close to the number for white, not hispanic. The number he uses for white women is $19,600. The Census data that Soltas cited shows $19,451.
Based on this quick comparison, I’m not sure that Soltas has discredited Conard’s analysis.
My friends think science is cool. My guess for why some think science is uncool is they think people who like science are uncool, which (among other things) could be rooted in regularly being annoyed, confused, or humiliated by people smarter than themselves. Teaching the dumbest, most resentful portion of society to change their mind seems futile.
Also, is money the sole measure of status? Consider lottery winners, poetry professors, hipsters, oil rig workers, prostitutes...