Visual Information Theory. I was already comfortable with information theory and this was still informative. This blogger’s other posts are similarly high-quality.
spxtr
Karma: 502
In the end, it is just another Abrams movie: slick, SFX-heavy, and as substantial & satisfying as movie theater popcorn.
Yep.
You might want to add a spoiler note at the top, though.
It might be wishful thinking, but I feel like my smash experience improved my meatspace-agency as well.
Story time! Shortly after Brawl came out, I got pretty good at it. I could beat all my friends without much effort, so I decided to enter in a local tournament. In my first round I went up against the best player in my state, and I managed to hit him once, lightly, over the course of two games. I later became pretty good friends and practiced with him regularly.
At some point I completely eclipsed my non-competitive friends, to the extent that playing with them felt like a chore. All I had to do was put them in certain situations where I knew how they would react and then punish. It became a simple algorithm. Get behind them in shield, wait for the roll, punish. Put them in the air, jump after them, wait for the airdodge, punish. Throw them off the ledge, wait for the jump, punish. It felt like I was playing a CPU.
Meanwhile, I still couldn’t reliably beat the best player from my state. One day, after he took off a particularly gruesome stock, I paused and, exasperated, asked for advice. We watched a replay and he showed me how I responded to certain situations in the same way every time, leading to a punish. My habits were less obvious than those of my friends, but they were still habits. He said, “you play like a robot, in a bad way.”
So yeah. In that context, I’ve downgraded friends to CPUs because of their predictability, and been downgraded to a CPU by omega, because of my predictability.
An exact copy of me may be “me” from an identity perspective, but it is a separate entity from a utilitarian perspective. The death of one is still a tragedy, even if the other survives.
You should know this intuitively. If a rogue trolley is careening toward an unsuspecting birthday cake, you’ll snatch it out of the way. You won’t just say, “eh, in another time that cake will survive,” and then watch it squish. Unless you’re some sort of monster.
I am impressed. The production quality on this is excellent, and the new introduction by Rob Bensinger is approachable for new readers. I will definitely be recommending this over the version on this site.
I didn’t want to tell it to you before because I thought it might prejudice your decision unfairly.
If Draco has has the last half-hour of his memory sealed off, then why does Harry say these words to him? Shouldn’t Draco respond, “What decision?”
Unless it’s a more nuanced memory charm, such that he only subconsciously remembers the conversation.
If you have a different version of QM (perhaps what Ted Bunn has called a “disappearing-world” interpretation), it must somehow differ from MWI, presumably by either changing the above postulates or adding to them. And in that case, if your theory is well-posed, we can very readily test those proposed changes. In a dynamical-collapse theory, for example, the wave function does not simply evolve according to the Schrödinger equation; it occasionally collapses (duh) in a nonlinear and possibly stochastic fashion. And we can absolutely look for experimental signatures of that deviation, thereby testing the relative adequacy of MWI vs. your collapse theory.
He asserts that such an experiment exists. I would love it if he were to expand on this assertion.
I recommend reading the sequences, if you haven’t already. In particular, the fun theory sequence discusses exactly these issues.
Welcome! LessWrong is generally anti-Death. See HPMoR or The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.
This is a little misleading. Feynman diagrams are simple, sure, but they represent difficult calculations that weren’t understood at the time he invented them. There was certainly genius involved, not just perseverance.
Much more likely his IQ result was unreliable, as gwern thinks.
Feynman was younger than 15 when he took it, and very near this factoid in Gleick’s bio, he recounts Feynman asking about very basic algebra (2^x=4) and wondering why anything found it hard—the IQ is mentioned immediately before the section on ‘grammar school’, or middle school, implying that the ‘school IQ test’ was done well before he entered high school, putting him at much younger than 15. (15 is important because Feynman had mastered calculus by age 15, Gleick says, so he wouldn’t be asking his father why algebra is useful at age >15.) - Given that Feynman was born in 1918, this implies the IQ test was done around 1930 or earlier. Given that it was done by the New York City school district, this implies also that it was one of the ‘ratio’ based IQ tests—utterly outdated and incorrect by modern standards. - Finally, it’s well known that IQ tests are very unreliable in childhood; kids can easily bounce around compared to their stable adult scores.
So, it was a bad test, which even under ideal circumstances is unreliable & prone to error, and administered in a mass fashion and likely not by a genuine psychometrician.
-- gwern
The idea is that it’s not specifically for quotes related to rationality or other LessWrong topics.
Then you put the tea and the water in thermal contact. Now, for every possible microstate of the glass of water, the combined system evolves to a single final microstate (only one, because you know the exact state of the tea).
After you put the glass of water in contact with the cup of tea, you will quickly become uncertain about the state of the tea. In order to still know the microstate, you need to be fed more information.
That’s probably it. When fitting a line using MCMC you’ll get an anticorrelated blob of probabilities for slope and intercept, and if you plot one deviation in the fit parameters you get something that looks like this. I’d guess this is a non-parametric analogue of that. Notice how both grow significantly at the edges of the plots.
Quantum mysticism written on a well-known and terrible MRA blog? −8 seems high. See the quantum sequence if you haven’t already. It looks like advancedatheist and ZankerH got some buddies to upvote all of their comments, though. They all jumped by ~12 in the last couple hours.
For real, though, this is actually useless and deserves a very low score.
Super-resolution microscopy is an interesting recent development that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year. Here’s another article on the subject. It has been used to image mouse brains, but only near the surface. It won’t be able to view the interior of any brain, but still interesting.
What’s the shaded area in the very first plot? Usually this area is one deviation around the fit line, but here it’s clearly way too small to be that.
You probably know this, but average energy per molecule is not temperature at low temperatures. Quantum kicks in and that definition fails. dS/dE never lets you down.
I suspect my experience is somewhat similar to shminux’s.
I simply can’t follow these posts, and the experience of reading them feels odd, and even off-putting at times (in an uncanny valley sort of way). At the same time, I can see that a number of people in the comments are saying that they find great value in them.
My first guess as to why I had trouble with them was that there are basically no concrete examples given, but now I don’t think that’s the reason. Personally, I get a strong sense of “I must be making some sort of typical mind fallacy” here. Something about our world views, or internal models of cognition, or something along those lines must be dramatically different. It’s hard to communicate just how difficult it is for me to make sense of these posts without being rude.
Thanks for the interesting read, and I love the watercolors.