Very interesting list, thanks Louie!
I just randomly clicked on a few links for online courses, and it seems there’s at least one issue: The “Probability and Computing” part points to “Analytic Combinatorics, Part I” coursera course, which is not about probability at all. The MIT and CMU links for this part seem wrong too. Someone should carefully go through all the links and fix them.
Awesome summary, thanks!
The funny thing is, that the rationalist Clippy would endorse this article. (He would probably put more emphasis on clippyflurphsness rather than this unclipperiffic notion of “justness”, though. :))
You just say: ‘For every relation R that works exactly like addition, the following statement S is true about that relation.’ It would look like, ‘∀ relations R: (∀x∀y∀z: R(x, 0, x) ∧ (R(x, y, z)→R(x, Sy, Sz))) → S)’, where S says whatever you meant to say about +, using the token R.
I would change the statement to be something other than ‘S’, say ‘Q’, as S is already used for ‘successor’.
In Hungary this (model theory and co.) is part of the standard curriculum for Mathematics BSc. Or at least was in my time.
(Audiatur et altera pars is the impressive Latin name of the principle that you should clearly state your premises.)
That’s not what I thought it means. My understanding was that it’s something like: “all parties should be heard”, and it’s more of a legal thing…
I’m really itching to try this out! ;)
(Consider this as a word of encouragement. I’ll to think about my predictions and will post them here if I come up with anything useful. But, in the time being I wanted to say at least this much.)
Who is the intended audience for this?
If someone has a good grasp of Bayes, it’s not that informative. (Though I liked the original idea and the story. :)) But, if one doesn’t already understand the math behind this, then it’s just a bunch of magic numbers, I am afraid. The second half of it for sure.
The link to the “Hamlet” is broken. Not that it’s hard to find, but you might still want to fix it.
I would be interested in a sequence like that. Of course, if it only touches rationality tangentially then maybe LessWrong is not the best place for it. But again, I personally would be very interested in it.
Yes, this should work. With (hard) sciency stuff I actually do this. For example, after finishing the Quantum Physics sequence (and some reading of my own afterwards) I did a series of lectures about “the Intuitive Quantum World” here in the office.
I need to find some audience, who would be interested in the more general topics that I learn here on LessWrong. And of course, I would need to read a lot to have a real deep understanding. But yes, this is a very good answer to my question!
Sorry to ask, but is this still on?
Wakefield, could you post some details here if it is? (I’ve sent you a private message, but maybe you didn’t notice it.)
I didn’t downvote that comment, but might have, if I followed the conversation live. My thinking when I read it was: “He can’t possibly really think that it is a homonym! So, for the sake of the argument he arrogantly (because that all caps spelling does show off some arrogancy) distorts reality and expects us to accept it?!”
But, now I see that this is too much of a correspondence bias. You probably just wanted to show that “explanation” has two different meanings, but in the head of the discussion just found a very bad example for your argument. Because “explanation” does have two slightly different meanings and this is relevant here. But let’s be clear, these two meanings are close and in no way homonyms (as opposed to what you stated and what you clearly tried to present with the “fluke” example).
So, I think this comment of yours is bad and the downvotings were valid.
Edit: I didn’t read the wikipedia article you linked when I wrote the above. I only ever heard/saw “homonym” being used in the sense of “two identically spelled and pronounced words with different meanings and of unrelated origin”; what Wikipedia calls “true homonym”. In the more general sense the two “explanations” might qualify as homonyms (I am definitely not a linguist). But, your “fluke” example strongly indicated the more narrow (and, I think, more common) meaning. So, my reasons still stand.
Thanks!
I think, first and foremost these psychological needs were “to understand how things are”. And that’s in short why I am here now. :)
Yes, I think this is a pretty good reading of my post. And it makes the issue seem less pressing and more manageable.
Now, this is a much better question! And yes, I am thinking a lot on these. But, in some sense this kind of thing bothers me much less: because it is so clear that the issue is unclear, my mind doesn’t try to unconditionally commit it to the belief pool just because I read something exciting about it. And then I know I have to think about it, and look for independent sources etc. (For these two specific problems, I am in a different state of confusion. Cryonics: quite confused; AGI: a bit better, at least I know what my next steps are.)
How do you deal with this?
Yes, I saw it coming. :) Thanks! It does matter to me.
This sounds like a very good piece of advice. A slight problem is that some of the jargon is very useful for expressing things that otherwise would be hard to express. But, I’ll try to be conscious about it.
No, it’s not too dark, it is useful to see an even stronger expression of caution. But, it misses the point a bit. It’s not very helpful to know that Eliezer is probably wrong on some things. Neither is finding a mistake here or there. It just doesn’t help.
You see, my goal is to accept and learn fully that which is accurate, and reject (and maybe fix and improve) that which is wrong. Neither one is enough by itself.
Wow, this is amazing! Both, the idea and your presentation of it.
Very insightful and though-provoking. And, my mind was completely blown by the fact that you have converted. It so doesn’t fit into my models that I am quite confused. I would be very curious what’s behind it and what would you answer to your own questions (before and after). But, I guess you wrote about it a lot, so I’ll just go and read it.
And yes, this definitely deserves a discussion post!