I desperately want something like this, so long as it is anywhere other than the bay area. god help me, I will avoid living there if it means being as socially isolated as I currently am forever
OpenThreadGuy
Karma: 434
As there are a number of podcasts by LWers now, I’ve made a wiki page for them
Meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part E, Overly Convenient Excuses
Meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part D, Mysterious Answers
Meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part C, Noticing Confusion
Meetup : West LA—R:AZ Part B, Fake Beliefs
Meetup : West LA—Sphexishness and Meta-Sphexishness
Meetup : West LA—Keep Your Identity Small
Meetup : West LA—What Is FAI?
Meetup : West LA—DUMP STAT
Meetup : West LA—The Relativity of Wrong
I agree that it makes sense there.
The reason I put it where it is, is: belief-edifice-memeplex-paradigm-framework-system-movement-whatevers have members who say different things. Some members say things that are more like a motte and others say things that are more like a bailey. Even if the individual members consistently claim one or the other, this looks suspiciously like a group responding to incentives by committing the fallacy.
Meetup : West LA—The Worst Argument in the World
Meetup : West LA—Inflation of Terminology
Meetup : West LA—The Hierarchy of Requests
Meetup : West LA—Behold Moloch! Beware of Moloch!
I was there.
“but most of our time was spent thinking about probability distributions on consistent theories” seems incorrect to me, unless I’m a lot more confused than I thought I was. What I saw was that we spent an equal amount of time on essentially three topics:
Trying to manufacture a truth-predicate weaker than provability but still able to do work, for getting around Löb’s theorem;
Binary logical versions/formulations of Solomonoff Induction (Abram’s prior);
What to do if you have an inconsistent set of probabilities over sentences / how to turn inconsistent probabilities into a prior (probability distributions on consistent theories).
(The hosts then talked about #3 for seven more hours after the official end of the mini-workshop. Scott apparently spent n hours after that writing down what he had talked and thought about. And then it was a dead end. Таких математике!)
Despite my lack of math knowledge, I enjoyed attending. I am even told that I did not distract everyone with my stupid questions and uninteresting ideas, so I will go to future ones as well.
The other participants were madmen. They didn’t take any breaks at all, only furiously bashed brains against unsolvable problems, demanding solutions from the aether and holding their ideas hostage until some otherworldly god, some invisible champion of mathematics relented to give them what they want. They did not succeed, nor did they fail, for they have not given up. To tell the truth, it was a little bit frightening.
I got all excited about math because of this, which may or may not be a positive effect, and hopefully next time I’ll have read some of the relevant papers, and understood more than a modicum.
As there were some podcasts on the List of Blogs page, I’ve removed them from that page.
It goes without saying that if you disagree with my decision to make this page, or what I wrote in it, you can make your own edits.