jjaredsimpson

Randomness doesn't give you free will.

If you substitute direct choice of a particular next state and instead are only allowed to sample a state space, you still aren't free to choose.

Said another way: flipping a coin cant't make Harvey Dent free.

Battles over being "technically correct" are the most fierce, because the stakes are so low.

The IPCC has already done the work of summarizing climate science.

The role of government is to respond to those truths with estimates of the negative impacts and estimates of the cost of mitigation and then come to a consensus around actions.

This is just obfuscation designed to drive a wedge between accepted science and policymakers. Obfuscaters just want to avoid making the hard arguments over their desires to have either zero mitigation or to actively accelerate human caused climate change.

It's a perfectly fine position to hold that climate change is happening but that you don't care. It's not fine to lie about it happening purposefully create and spread lies in the public space.

Just make the argument that the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Index funds mean we all own a lot of amzn.

The sets of dice which have equal sums will often have different constituent values.

The dimensions are the dice.

Does this article say anything more profound than, "If you roll 10 dice, you'll expect a score of 35, however any pair of rolls which sum to 35 are unlikely to be similar."

All the worst students will be very similar and all the best students will be very similar because the number of available states is low. Average students are all unique in their average-ness.

Am I missing some subtle statistical understanding that the toy example doesn't capture?

You have to embrace the ambiguity in natural languages. Life and death can be simply considered opposites. In this mode of thinking any risky behavior is trading in death at the peril of life.

However you can also imagine a justification along these lines: There are certain things we humans can do which give us access to unique highly desirable mental states. Some of these are familiar things like falling in love or having children. These are risks but usually perceived as having obvious upsides. There are also other behaviors like drug use or underground fight clubs which also give access to unique mental states but are usually perceived as too risky to encourage. It's easy to put judge free soloing climbing as something like drug use or bareknuckle boxing. But try to imagine that when done correctly and carefully that it could be something much like having a child or working on a math proof for years.

Gauss and Riemann may have been selective publishers, but they produced and thought about topics constantly. We can see this in their correspondence and private notes.

They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and getting stuck not even starting.

I don't even think it's a choice. Trump and co don't really have a coherent vision, so each policy decision doesn't build on the next. There is no unified Trump doctrine only kneejerk spasms.

The problem is the structure of American govt and institutions themselves. Trump has no incentive to get good at the game of politics as it was played for the last 200 years.

Actions aren't justified, motivations aren't explained, and there is no attempt at persuasion. It's all my team, your team, zero sum foolishness.

>if I could somehow unbelieve some science and be guaranteed my family would be happier I might consider it

I don't see how this can be defended. It commits you potentially dangerous and unethical behavior.

Suppose you were to unbelieve, "africans are humans." By not holding this belief you might be quite able to happily own and mistreat slaves.

This example is extreme, but the point I'm making still stands. If ones happiness is contingent on holding false beliefs then what value is the happiness. How can self-deception through pleasure seeking mental states be elevated in opposition to engaging with objective reality?

Seeking pleasure certainly does not ensure ethical behavior and in many cases explicitly conflicts with acting ethically.

>Our common goal is to interpret our existence in a way that provides the best life possible for us

I'm very wary of interpretation motivated for pleasure as opposed to clarity and truth.

You can't really define Free Will as something different and then claim it exists. Free Will has an agreed upon definition.

Free Will is the capacity to have done differently given the same situation.

Free Will is completely absent in a enormous number of circumstances. Are you free to stop understanding English? Are you free to not be persuaded by a logical argument you comprehend? When presented with a donut while on a diet are you free to determine your level of will power to resist?

Free will conditioned on chaos theory is just jargon and ventures into "not even wrong" territory. If free will is sensitive to initial conditions then actors evolving in time are not free to choose their trajectories.

If your happiness is conditioned on incorrect beliefs about your essential nature and capacities then you should reconcile your beliefs with reality, not argue that the understanding of essential nature is incomplete or wrong.

How you come up with way short?

326e6*12000/18e12 = .21

Which is inline with the size of

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

With the limited reading I've done on UBI, it seems like a land value tax could be a good candidate system. We should tax things we want to remove like pollution and congestion, not income and investment.

What's the difference between having a limited potential and being inferior?

Humans should just use more power. But they can't which is why machines are superior.

a≈b means (a,b) is in the equivalence relation ≈

This isn't true.

>Sorts and function symbols are just symbols. Something is a sort if it is in the collection of sorts. Nothing else is required.

If you gave up before reading this, then you didn't even read the 4th paragraph.

This simply isn't true. You seem to have read the abstract and made assumptions about the arguments of the paper.

Tegmark doesn't focus on the how; he spends the paper building an argument about what properties an observer must have.

It's very easy to call something you don't understand, or reject a priori, nonsense. But at least try to grapple with the argument and a make criticism with substance.

I don't think it's quite clear at all. What distinguishes observer from observed?

All experience is the working of consciousness. The feeling of subject-object distinction is no more real than the distinction between hot-cold sensation.

re: magic systems

Although a lot of good magic writing involves a training phase where the trainee is parroting the words of the master, yet casts no spell. The words are correct, but the trainee is lacking some internal state. The magic comes from that internal place. The words are a side effect.

Words really do have power when spoken correctly and received openly. If you and I are arguing about something and I persuade you to my side, in some sense you had no power to resist. The ways in which you might resist would be logical errors. Things like status quo bias, or motivated misunderstanding.

What does this even mean?

This is not what they did. You should read the preprint not the pop-sci summary if you want to make a criticism.

The narratives were "discovered" through the analysis not the other way around.

At first I thought it seemed like the kind of language machines will invent to communicate with each other.

But then I realized it's main features aren't clarity and precision. But instead it's a just another way of mapping human mental models to encoders and decoders. Speech and script on to ears and mouths and eyes.

Machines will have fundentally different mental models of meaning and also be able to create any encoder decoder pair to suit any range of sensors and actuators​.

Machines could have a language in light, 3d printed objects could be scripts. A sculpture could literally be art and treatise at the same time.

People keep saying it's particularly prevalent in tech. Which I don't believe at all.

I found twitter incredibly useless and had many fits and starts. Now I'm at the point where I use the mobile app everyday multiple times per day.

I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text messaging replacement for me.

I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought and get feedback from people I know.

I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and media outlets.

I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers.

Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech links from other like minded people who are keeping up.

The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.

How did you learn to trust other humans?

I think you are substituting reasoning with deduction.

Reasoning is the human process of deciding what one ought do. Deduction is a mechanical process of discovering what follows from axioms.

Human reasoning is often fails by not being perfectly deductive.

I'll grant that you might think I'm nitpicking on definitions.

I really find I like it best when I've done stews, pork shoulder, red sauces, and stocks.

It pretty much works the same for all of them. I get all my aromatics roughly chopped, saute for a couple minutes just to brown them up, then I put them in the blender and transfer to the IP for an hour or so. I just submerge the meat and guess at a time that matches a stove top pressure cooker.

So I get what you mean about the hassle of multiple steps. I feel like I save time on the prep and stove managing. I only chop roughly and I'm not obsessing over doneness on the stove.

I mostly do it, because the results are just better. Stews really are better under pressure imo.

So is Administrator of NASA. I don't think being appointed AG makes you a politician.

I'm not a gamer but I bought an Acer gaming laptop. It's ugly, but powerful, and it was on sale. I've gotten used to the lights and angular features. Only annoying thing I can't remove is the logo which is some aggressive looking face thing.

I'm happy with it but I get it that someone people just can't stand the aesthetics of gaming laptops. But they do have great perf metrics.