In reading the Sequences, I feel weird about replying to comments because most of them are from seven years ago. Is it frowned upon to respond to something crazy old and possibly obsolete?
wafflepudding
Karma: 20
I love this series. Except, I have very particularly been in an argument where I said the phrase, “Hinduism is, by definition, a religion.” Isn’t agreement on common usage useful if you want to communicate efficiently? Maybe Wiggin shouldn’t be used commonly, but one person defining Wiggin in a manner that contradicts the dictionary definition certainly doesn’t do anyone any favors. And I think it’s fine for common usage to define humans as mortal, as long as it consistently assumes that Socrates is inhuman when he goes on living forever.
I disagree. Agreeing on term definitions beforehand would solve all of these problems: The definition of religion is not “something that answers theological questions,” therefore the By Definition argument is ineffective for proving that atheism is a religion. (Incidentally, if that were the definition of religion, then atheism would be a religion.) For Hinduism, if someone tried to tell me that it was not a religion, I would necessarily use the definition of religion to prove them wrong. If Hinduism did not fit the definition of religion, it would not be a religion.
This hurts my image of Freud. Of course, after I have a dream about skyscrapers, he can explain that it’s connected to my love of my phallus, but could he predict my love of my phallus based on a dream about skyscrapers?
I believe that the vast majority of people in the dust speck thought experiment would be very willing to endure the collision of the dust speck, if only to play a small role in saving a man from 50 years of torture. I would choose the dust specks on the behalf of those hurt by the dust specks, as I can be very close to certain that most of them would consent to it.
A counterargument might be that, since 3^^^3 is such a vast number, the collective pain of the small fraction of people who would not consent to the dust speck still multiplies to be far larger than the pain that the man being tortured would endure. Thus, I would most likely be making a nonconsensual tradeoff in favor of pain. However, I do not value the comfort of those that would condemn a man to 50 years of torture in order to alleviate a moment’s mild discomfort, so 100% of the people whose lack of pain I value would willingly trade it over.
If someone can sour that argument for my mind, I’ll concede that I prefer the torture.
This post is my first experience learning about noise in algorithms, so forgive me if I seem underinformed. Two points occurred to me while reading this comment, some clarification would be great:
First, while it was intriguing to read that input just below the perceptual threshold would half the time be perceived by bumping it above the threshold, it seems to me that input just above the threshold would half the time be knocked below it. So wouldn’t noise lead to no gain? Just a loss in acuity?
Second, I’m confused how input below the perceptual threshold is actually input. If a chair moves in front of a camera so slightly that the camera doesn’t register a change in position, the input seems to me like zero, and noise loud enough to move zero past the perceptual threshold would not distinguish between movement and stillness, but go off half the time and half the time be silent. If that doesn’t make sense, assume that the threshold is .1 meters, and the camera doesn’t notice any movement less than that. Let’s say your noise is a random number between .01 meters and -.01 meters. The chair moves .09 meters, and your noise lands on .01 meters. I wouldn’t think that would cross the threshold, because the camera can’t actually detect that .09 meters if it’s threshold is .1. So, wouldn’t the input just be 0 motion detected + .01 meters of noise = .01 meters of motion? Maybe I’m misunderstanding.