peakok

Sure, sounds attractive !

But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different, it's not an ideology like marxism or catholicism. It's THE way. It is the only path to reason and logic and science, because when we reduce the role of the state, we reduce the part of ideology in society. Therefore it must be the less ideological system of all, the most logical, and thus the the right one.

Of course, liberatarians turn out to be just like any other political sensibility. They agree on broad things that makes them look like unite only because they are a tiny minority in the political landscape. But like any other sensibility, you reach a point in the debate where their own camp is split up in two and they will fight each other, etc. It wouldn't be the case if it wasn't an ideology, and they would all agree on core issues like the private/public fire stations, or even health wich should be considered like any other good for some, but not for some others (I can tell because I have some libertarians friends). The above comments about the protection from plagues are very interesting. It leads to the very interesting history of sewers.

Mises is the reflect of his century when we were too optimistic about science, we believed it would soon answer all the questions even in fields that looked like non-scientific, like human organization. It turned out science is indeed good for changing our lives in an indirect way, but unfortunatly not so good outside real scientific fields. It doesn't answer philosophical questions (if such a science existed, then it would be the right one to follow for organizing human societies).

I'd like you to notice that your new table of probabilities imply that I have a chance of 1/6 to guess the gender setup of a family of 2 children. I don't think that makes sense either to you.

Let's make the experiment a bit clearer :

- We gather a number of families who have 2 childs.

- For each family, we announce the gender of one of the child, but we don't know wich one.

- We are then asked to guess the sex of the other child.

At this point, you believe that the probability to guess right is 1/2, and that the 2/3 probability doesn't make any sense. My claim is that you fall in the Monty Hall problem trap, wich is very counter-intuitive and doesn't seem to make sense at first.

But here is some clarification of the problem :

- What we are really asked is to guess the _gender_ setup of the family. So we need to establish the universe of possible family setups before answering. What are they ?

Even if we don't care about the order, we must acknowledge that there are 2 childs in the family, so there must be a first child, and a second child.

Setup 1 : both childs are boys : M/M

Setup 2 : both childs are girls : F/F

Setup 3 : the first child is a boy, and second child is a girl. M/F

Setup 4 : the first child is a girl, and the second child is a boy. F/M.

Why order matters in setup 3 and 4 ? Because M does not equal F, while M=M and F=F. We investigate not the individual itself, but the property of the individual (in this case, the gender). Therefore, M/F is not equal to F/M, and in the real world there must be a first and a second child.

If you are asked to write down all the possible setups of a family of two in the real world, you would write the same table. You'd say that :

Some families have 2 boys = 1 setup

Some families have 2 girls = 1 setup

Some families have one girl and one boy = 2 possible setups (1st one is a girl OR a boy).

Your argument of F/M = M/F implies that all families have _either_ one of the 2 setups, every first child is a boy, or a girl. But it doesn't work like this in real life. That is why order matters.

Conclusion : if we agree that there are 4 possible setups in a family of 2 childs, then we have a probability of 1/4 to guess the correct setup of the family given NO information. But if we are informed of the gender of one of the child, then one solution of the setup is removed (F/F or M/M), and we have a chance of 2/3 to guess right IF we chose the opposite gender (see Monty Hall problem).

And if we are informed of the gender of one specific child (1st one or 2nd one), then it leaves us with only 2 solutions ! And here, the probability becomes 1/2.

Lacking elementary probabilities knowledge isn't as dramatic as refusing to learn it, please teach yourself now since nobody will look at this thread again.

Here is my last point, and you can ask any teacher of formal logic, probabilities or maths to verify it :

For universe [M,F], the table of possibilities is :

MM

MF

FM

FF

And that's it. I'm sorry but the table you just made up doesn't exist at all, please go ask one of your teacher about it. If you still believe you are right, and you can prove it, you just discovered a new field in mathematics and probabilities, congratulations.

7) m/f

8) f/m

You are not allowed to skip arbitrarily some of the combinations of your universe (wich is now [M, F, m, f]). Probability : 2/3 =]

In the world of mathematical conventions you learn in school, the question is understood and you're right. In the "normal" world where you can quibble with language because there is no specific agreement, Paul is right and the question should be more precise. In both cases the conclusion remains the same : what a waste of time.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with Jeff's question, and I believed that you made a distinction with the Monty Hall version. But your second algorithm isn't the same as Jeff's question, my mistake.

It is very clear that my argument specifically adresses the question the way Jeff has formulated it, so you can even forget the part about "your second formulation", what I meant was the question of Jeff and why there is nothing wrong with it.

In statistics, it is commonly accepted that we don't know what we don't state (for an obvious practical purpose). Therefore, when we say : "One of them is a girl", it is implied that we don't know wich one because we didn't specify it.

Therefore there is nothing wrong with Jeff's question (and the probability is 2/3), at least for anyone familiar with basic statistics and probabilities conventions (and I suspect you are), anything else is just quibble. I assumed your argument wasn't about nitpicking this kind of convention, but it turns out I was wrong. I guess nobody wins this one :)

I mean, it's not even my own deduction, it's what you are taught when you learn probabilities. It's a basic and core paradigm, and I'll digg it up from Wikipedia if somebody still doubts it :)

The question is : What are the odds that the person has a boy and a girl, if we already know that one of the child is a girl ? (If we agree on the question, then we must agree on the following probabilities).

Possibilities are :

1/ boy / boy

2/ boy / girl

3/ girl / boy

4/ girl / girl

Since one of them is a girl, we must remove possibility number 1. That leaves us with 3 possiblities, and 2 of them have a boy. Probability : 2/3

(edited for correction, we search the probability of having a boy, not a girl :p)

A very important thing to note is that he believes the U.S is gone as the sole superpower. What he really means by collapse is about the same fate that endured the British Empire.

Do you have some sort of nobility in your ancestorship (or in the army) ? I noted that this feeling would be more frequent among descendants of aristocrats. During the Aristocraty paradigm, work was despised more than anything else. We are now living in a bourgeois world, where work is sanctified as the alpha and omega.

I don't like work. The one thing I dislike more than work, are the people who try to make me feel guilty for it. Usually, these are the same people who do not know how to enjoy life outside their work. They are hypocrites, because work is their escape route from boredom rather than a burden, and the truth is that if you allowed them to quit, they wouldn't. Or not for long. Because the true burden to them is exactly doing nothing special. They don't understand people can be different and actually enjoys spending time doing nothing special. As your nickname suggests it, we have a word in french for the vertuous laziness : flanerie. While these people find it intolerable when they don't work, we are pretty much the opposite. The zeitgeist is certainly on their side for now.

I have a true respect for hard work, but no admiration. I am deeply unimpressed by success stories and rich people who worked hard to climb to the top of the ladder. This kind of satisfation is foreign to me. I don't ask for your admiration, only for the respect of who I am whatever might be my activity and my aspirations. I doubt I'll buy all your products, but I won't harm your family or ask for your money, and I despise the nanny state as much as you probably are.

Go in peace, my brother ;)

And you're right about the gratuitious French bashing, it's a cultural thing and it takes part on both sides of the Channel, there's nothing to be offended about, it's funny if you take the right stance.

B = You are intelligent

In logic, the argument translates to :

A <=> B (quality of sperm depends on your intelligence), B <=> A (and vice versa, intelligence depends on your quality of sperm)

<=> is a connector wich means "A is true if and only if B is true". Therefore, you have a good sperm if and only if you are intelligent, wich is the logical twin of "you are intelligent if and only if you have a good sperm". It is a tautology because the 2 expressions are equivalent and the meaning of the first is included in the second.

Even if it sounds superfluous, this kind of exercice actually helps you to spot the weakness of this study, because it logically excludes any other parameter than intelligence to determine successfuly the quality of sperm (depends can be translated to "is a function of"). <=> is a very strong connector. In their study, men with low intelligence and a good quality of sperm don't exist, neither do highly intelligent men wich poor sperm, then they draw conclusions. Wich is convenient, but dumb.

It is unfortunate that an article talking about intelligence starts with a tautology.

The hack will make you laugh : right click on the flash app, select "Stop", and enjoy unlimited time to answer the questions instead of the 10 secs countdown. Then, when I was ready to submit the answer, I'd change my Windows clock time back in time since you'd have to be the fatest player as well.

But the interesting part is how I started playing this quizz. One night, very very late, I bumped into the site and I decided to try the practice mode, wich was free. I started the quizz, and I had a surprise when I discovered that a small white asterix showed next to the right answer every time. I thought that it was dumb even if it was the practice mode and I suspected something wierd was going on, so I immediatly started a real paying game to verify my suspicions. Again, a white asterisk would sit next to the right answer.

You'd have to answer 5 grids of 10 questions successfuly to make the best score, then the winner would be the overall best time. I managed to finish the 1st grid, then in the middle of the second one, the white asterisks suddenly disappeared. This is when I understood what happened : the admin was probably cheating the game, and he made a mistake wich made the asterisks visible by everyone instead of himself only.

Still, the game was under French juridiction and supposely enforced by an "Huisser", like every other game in France. My bet is that the huissier didn't understood jack about computers and didn't care at all about this internet quizz.

I talked about this quizz to my best friend and we quickly discovered the exploits. We figured out that if we set the Windows clock back in time before I even started to answer the question, the final time per question would be a couple of hundreds milliseconds, varying from 50-300.

So I decided I would take my chance against the admin and try to win the 1000 euros, wich was plenty of money for a teenager. It was still a lot of work because most of the questions were insanely difficult and even with Google it was often hard to find the answer. As a matter of fact, the quizz was plain impossible to answer for a human.

Nevermind, with a lot of patience and a couple of days, I managed to answer the 5 grids with an amazing final time, I figured out that if the admin was cheating, then he couldn't say anything. The game would automatically ends at midnight every Sunday and declares the winner. I did the last grid on Sunday evening so that I wouldn't appear in the high scores too early and the admin wouldn't suspect anything.

I watched anxiously the table of scores and as midnight approached I started to relax, nothing unusual happened. Then suddenly, at 23:45, 15 mins before the game would end, a player appeared out of nowhere in the scores and was quickly climbing the ladder. I knew it was him.

When he finaly ended his fifth grid, he reached the top scores, but only took the second position because I had a best overall time, so my plan worked perfectly as I knew he wasn't prepared for this. A couple of seconds later, the game ended and I was declared winner. I was given a phone number I had to call to claim my reward.

On the next day, I dialed up the number. When he picked up, you could almost hear the spider webs being removed from the phone :

- "Hello ?"

- "Hi, I won the game yesterday, and I was given this number to call."

- "Ohhhh, it's you", his tone was priceless. You could guess I was the first person ever claiming the reward. At this moment, I knew he knew and he knew I knew. He asked for my details and told me I would receive the check soon.

I tuned up to the radio show in the afternoon, and waited for my minute of glory. "And congratulations to our internet winner of the week, , living in , for winning the 1000 euros". Good.

A couple of days later, I received my 1000 euros check and I went to see the updated list of winners on the site. Unsurprisingly, I was the only one listed with a real name instead of a nickname and an actual town showing in the details.

The following week, I decided I would beat the admin again, for my best friend this time. I tweaked my tactic a bit so I would valid the last grid in the last minutes. It wasn't as easy as it sounded since the pages had an expiration time, but I figured it out.

This time, the admin figured out he should make a better score and his final score was much better than the last week. Still, I had predicted it and when I valided my last grid with a nearly perfect overall time (50 questions in about 20 secs), it was too late for him and I won again.

My friend called and he received his check. The rules wouldn't allow us to participate again before 6 months, but I knew there was a time to stop, and we decided to never participate again. Moreover, I had beaten the admin twice and that was my main satisfaction, and I knew I had played all my cards and beating him again would be very difficult if not impossible.

The third week, I went to check the winner and his overall time was indeed ridiculous. It was clear the admin was unbeatable from now. Well, in one sense only, because a couple of weeks later, the winner prize turned from the 1000 euros to a ticket to participate in the actual radio show. I laughed hard, because I knew I forced the admin to make unbelievable times and they figured out he was cheating. I don't know if he was fired, but he certainly didn't have a 4000 euros monthly bonus anymore.

Since this time, I have a different look on this kind of games, especially when there is an admin behind. Moral of the story : Poker is no exception, and if you cannot fully trust the admin, even with the best legislation, you cannot trust the game either.

You'll notice that it also allowed the society of services to emerge, and we wouldn't have this discussion on Hacker News if we had to work 12 hours a day just to satisfy our basic needs.

Overall, I don't share your opinion that the country is a "whole worse off" now. We only face different challenges because our fathers did their job in their own time.

Necessity is the mother of all virtues. People responsabilise when there is a need for it, especially when there is no other choice. Should the economic crisis worsen and make our life tougher, you'll see a lot of young people do whatever it takes to support their family and take a more serious stance on life and politics.

Some people are afraid that young people cannot responsabilise because of their education. I would argue that the same people underestimate (1) the potential of the young people, wich fuels the problem, and (2) underestimate the greatest educator of all : necessity.

The real problem is making cars that people want and selling them. I'll give you a clear example with the history of Fiat :

Fiat is an Italian auto-maker that had a very bad decade, the cars weren't selling and their reputation was bad, when you tought about Fiat, the first image that came to you was a subpar car. After they attempted everything else (cutting costs, you guess how), they finally resolved to fire every single guy with a tie in the company, from the simple chief to the CEO, the WHOLE management that was pointing to the high cost workers, unions, etc. as the sole responsible for the demise of the company, all these people that refused to take responsability were fired and replaced by new heads, an unprecedented move.

Guess what ? It worked. Fiat is making a strong come back in Europe and their reputation is building up again. Their cars are not synonymous of subpar anymore, they sell, even if it takes a lot of time to restore confidence and change your image, their strategy is ultimatly working.

I believe GM could take a lesson or two here. The problem is when the management refuses to take responsibility of a failure, they aren't qualified anymore to excercise responsibility, and their real chances of saving the company, bailout or not, are very slim.

The contract was eventually cancelled. I believe that this kind of protectionism harms everybody, the US and the Europeans. Now Boeing won't try their best to make a better offer than Airbus, since they know they won't be allowed to fail, and the US taxpayer will ultimatly end paying higher for an inferior product.

“Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.” - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Ok, let's think "outside of the box" for a moment : we wouldn't expect a different behavior from time travelers as well. Maybe they're just humans ;-)