I look forward to reading your thoughts. Ants looked like a fun problem.
malthrin
Karma: 496
The main reason is that it requires your recipient to take an extra step. If you send an encrypted email to someone else, and they haven’t configured their mail client for encryption, then they won’t be able to read it. For most people, that negative outweighs the privacy gain.
There’s a similar guideline in the software world:
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
Is this the one you meant?
P(A & B) = P(B | A) P(A) = P(A | B) P(B)
Hold the second two statements equal and divide by P(A):
P(B | A) = P(A | B) * P(B) / P(A)
That was interesting, thanks. Here’s another take—specific to the field of language modeling, but addresses the same question of statistical versus formal models: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
[Link] Opacity as a defense against bias?
It’s a hack. Computation isn’t free.
This reminds me of Explain/Worship/Ignore. Am I getting the right idea?
As Kahneman points out in his new book, failures of reasoning are much easier to recognize in others than in ourselves. His book is framed around introducing the language of heuristics and biases to office water-cooler gossip. Practicing on the hardest level (self-analysis) doesn’t seem like the best way to grow stronger.
Voted you down. This is deontologist thought in transhumanist wrapping paper.
Ignoring the debate concerning the merits of eternal paradise itself and the question of Heaven’s existence, I would like to question the assumption that every soul is worth preserving for posterity.
Consider those who have demonstrated through their actions that they are best kept excluded from society at large. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer would be prime examples. Many people write these villains off as evil and give their condition not a second thought. But it is quite possible that they actually suffer from some sort of Satanic corruption and are thus not fully responsible for their crimes. In fact, there is evidence that the souls of serial killers are measurably different from those of normal people. Far enough in the future, it might be possible to “cure” them. However, they will still possess toxic memories and thoughts that would greatly distress them now that they are normal. To truly save them, they would likely need to have many or all of their memories erased. At that point, with an amnesic brain and a cloned body, are they even really the same person, and if not, what was the point of saving them?
Forming a robust theory of mind and realizing that not everyone thinks or sees the world the same way you do is actually quite difficult. Consider the immense complexity of the world we live in and the staggering scope of thoughts that can possibly be thought as a result. If eternal salvation means first and foremost soul preservation, maybe there are some souls that just shouldn’t be saved. Maybe Heaven would be a better, happier place without certain thoughts, feelings and memories—and without the minds that harbor them.
Make sure you know which “SOPA” you’re referring to. This piece of legislation has undergone significant change from the version that sparked popular outrage.
Added after reading some other comments: if you’ve made cynical predictions about SOPA’s progress through Congress or its effects in the real world, don’t forget to update your beliefs on the eventual outcome. Write this prediction down somewhere.
Regarding “convincing” children of things: this AI koan is relevant.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Alcohol.
So, I missed my goal of scoring 100% in the Stanford AI class. Time to do better—to do what others can’t, or just haven’t thought of yet.
Sure. S results from HH or from TT, so we’ll calculate those independently and add them together at the end. We’ll do that by this equation: P(p=x|S) = P(p=x|HH) P(H) + P(p=x|TT) P(T).
We start out with a uniform prior: P(p=x) = 1. After observing one H, by Bayes’ rule, P(p=x|H) = P(H|p=x) P(p=x) / P(H). P(H|p=x) is just x. Our prior is 1. P(H) is our prior, multiplied by x, integrated from 0 to 1. That’s 1⁄2. So P(p=x|H) = x1/(1/2) = 2x.
Apply the same process again for the second H. Bayes’ rule: P(p=x|HH) = P(H|p=x,H) P(p=x|H) / P(H|H). The first term is still just x. The second term is our updated belief, 2x. The denominator is our updated belief, multiplied by x, integrated from 0 to 1. That’s 2⁄3 this time. So P(p=x|HH) = x2x/(2/3) = 3x^2.
Calculating tails is similar, except we update with 1-x instead of x. So our belief goes from 1, to 2-2x, to 3x^2-6x+3. Then substitute both of these into the original equation: (3/2)(x^2) + (3/2)(x^2 − 2x + 1). From there it’s just a bit of algebra to get it into the form I linked to.
Why is your name Miley Cyrus?
Whoops, fixed.
[LINK] Fermi Paradox paper touching on FAI
There’s a Stanford online course next semester called Probabilistic Graphical Models that will cover different ways of representing this sort of problem. I’m enrolled.
Right. Encryption is a lever; it permits you to use the secrecy of a small piece of data (the key) to secure a larger piece of data (the message). The security isn’t in the encryption math. It’s in the key storage and exchange mechanism.
*I stole this analogy from something I read recently, probably on HN.