At first I wanted to say, “Please do, that would be awesome!”, but then I realized it may not be within the domain of ‘refining the art of rationality’. Anyone have any rationalizations so that we could talk about quantum computing at Less Wrong? There have been posts on the singularity, after all.
Yorick_Newsome
Regarding that test, do ‘real’ IQ tests consist only of pattern recognition? I quite like the cryptographic and ‘if a is b and b is...’-type questions found in other online IQ tests, and do well on them. I scored a good 23 points below my average on the iqtest.dk , which made me feel sad.
I may be the only one of my kind here, but I know absolutely nothing about probabilistic reasoning (I am envious of all you Bayesians and assume you’re right about everything. Down with the frequentists!); thus, I think Jaynes would be too far over my head. Maybe there’s a dichotomy between philosophy / psychology / highschool Lesswrongers and computer science / physics / math Lesswrongers that make the group of people at Jaynes-level a small group.
I play a a few 3 minute blitz chess games at FICS. That way my results are quantitative, as I can see my rating going up or down. It’s also possible to play a single 3 minute blitz game and estimate how well I seem to be calculating variations and seeing simple tactics. Not the most time-efficient method, I suppose.
The main indicator of my mental state is when there are many candidate moves; if I’m tired or mentally sluggish, I will spend up to 15 precious seconds finding a strong move. When I am in good shape and am in the groove, I normally find a strong continuation in about 5 seconds.
Something tells me he won’t answer this one. But I support the question! I’m awfully curious as well.
After looking at the reasoning in that article I was about to credit myself with being unintentionally deep, but I’m pretty sure that when I posed the question I was assuming a fair coin for the sake of the problem. Doh. Thanks for the interesting link.
(It’s really kind of embarrassing asking questions about simple probability amongst all the decision theories and Dutch books and priors and posteriors and inconceivably huge numbers. Only way to become less wrong, I suppose.)
Ah, that makes a lot more sense: I was looking at the probability from the viewpoint of my guess (i.e. heads) instead of just looking at the all outcomes equally (no privileged references guesses), if you take my meaning. I also differentiated confidence in my prediction from the chance of my prediction being correct. How I managed to do that, I have no idea. Thanks for the reply.
I’d like to ask a moronic question or two that aren’t immediately obvious to me and probably should be. (Please note, my education is very limited, especially procedural knowledge of mathematics/probability.)
If I had to guess what the result of a coin flip would be, what confidence would I place in my guess? 50% because that’s the same as the probability or me being correct or 0% because I’m just randomly guessing between 2 outcomes and have no evidence to support either (well I guess there being only 2 outcomes is some kind of evidence)?
Likewise with a lottery. Would I place my confidence level (interval ? I don’t know the terminology) of winning at 0% or 1⁄6,000,000? Or some other number entirely?
If this is something I could easily have figured out with Google or Wikipedia, my apologies. Also if my question is incoherent or flawed please let me know.
This made me chuckle. I suppose that as the intelligence and amount of knowledge held by the average member of an intellectual group goes up, their lower bounds on the amount of knowledge someone must have in order for that member to have an intellectual conversation with them goes up as well.
I’m horrible at communicating clearly, so I’ll give an example.
4chan poster: You’re a scientologist!? Idiot.
RationalWiki member: You’re a creationist?! I refuse to speak to you.
Less Wrong member: You insist that there is such thing as waveform collapse in quantum mechanics?! I see you cannot be saved.