Is Eliezer alive and well? He's not said anything here (or on Hacker News, for that matter) for a month...
If the various species of ET are such that no particular species makes up the bulk of sentient life, then there's no reason to be surprised at belonging to one species rather than another. You had to be some species, and human is just as likely as klingon or wookie.
"why am I me, rather than an animal?" is not obviously sillier than "why am I me, rather than a person from the far future?".
Well, quite. Both are absurd.
I suppose. The comment could be:
"Also Crystal nights is a good story about a topic of some interest to the futurist/transhumanist element on LW, namely rfpncr sebz n fvzhyngvba."
Reading through it now. There are two relevant words in Roko's description, only one of which is obvious from the outset.
Still I'm not sure I fully agree with LW's spoiler policy. I wouldn't be reading this piece at all if not for Roko's description of it. When the spoiler is that the text is relevant to an issue that's actually discussed on Less Wrong (rather than mere story details, e.g. C3PO is R2D2's father) then telling people about the spoiler is necessary...
if something better were possible, it probably would have evolved by now
I don't think this argument works. Adaptive evolution has mostly been driven by DNA mutations and natural selection. DNA is transcribed to RNA and then translated into proteins. I'm not sure evolution (of Earth's cell-based life) could produce something radically different, because this central mechanism is so fundamental and so entrenched.
Proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which are much weaker than covalent bonds
I'm not sure how this affects the argument, but the very flexibility of proteins is one of the things that makes them work. A whole bunch of biological reactions involve enzymes changing shape in response to some substance.
"In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time."
This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.
Do you also get annoyed by people who don't believe in ghosts who criticize people who do without being aware of their own irrationality?
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can't be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn't seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man.
It's not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to "a monkey gave birth to a man".
you could try asking them
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like "Well all I know is that God is just." Or they just say "Hmm." What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Or reading their books
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I'm not sure how heavily it's defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that "I do not regard Scripture as infallible [... bu...
IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers.
Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.
Its conceptually possible to believe that the Bible is full of nonsense yet Jesus really did die for our sins. But nobody ever seems to actually hold this position. Or if they do, they never seem to come out and say it.
Why that Culture novel, precisely? I don't recall it as one of the better ones.
Admittedly, I'm unusual in that my favourite Culture story is The State of the Art. General Pinochet Chili Con Carne! Richard Nixon Burgers! What's not to like?
"Small Sounds, Big Deals: Phonetic Symbolism Effects in Pricing", DOI: 10.1086/651241
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/651241
Whether you'll be able to access it I know not.
If the player has the SPADE:
So 5/6 of the time he chooses the SPADE, but only 1/6 of the time does he choose the SPADE while having the HEART.
Thus, the chance of him having the HEART when he has chosen the SPADE is 1/5.
contains a correction on its last page
Argh how silly of me not to see that. I stop reading at the references! Honestly though, it's annoying that the abstract remains wrong.
The influence can only proceed via their actual treatment.
But the question is whether it's safe to advise people to wait, knowing that they can have surgery later if needed.
Anyway my main question was whether I'd done the stats right.
Well, I was only going to post all the minutiae if there was any interest...
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/295/3/285.pdf
The two groups are as follows:
Assigned to "Watchful Waiting":
Assigned to surgery:
Some patients crossed between the two groups, but this does not matter, as they were testing the effects of the initial assignment.
They report p = 0.52, but they also give a 95% confidence interval for the difference in risk, which just barely contains z...
I recently had to have some minor surgery. However, there's a body of thought that says it's safe to wait and watch for symptoms, and only have surgery later. There's a peer reviewed (I assume) paper supporting this position.
Upon reading this paper I found what looked like a statistical error. Looking at outcomes between two groups, they report p = 0.52, but doing the sums myself I got p = 0.053. For this reason, I went and had the surgery.
Since I'm just a novice at statistics, I was wondering if I had in fact got it right - it's disturbing to think that a...
In science, that step is already done.
Only in general, but not for specific questions like: does compound XYZ affect tumour growth?
why theologians never come up with arguments disproving the existence of God
Well if they do they get called philosophers of religion instead...
However to state the following: "one in which the null hypothesis is always true" is making a bold statement about your level of knowledge.
OK. But the point about what we can conclude about regular science stands even if this is only mostly correct.
I really like the idea of parapsychology as the control group for science; it deserves to be better known.
Of course, Kant distinguished between two different meanings of "should": the hypothetical and the categorical.
This seems useful here...
the only reason, as far as I can tell, why the MWI is being chosen as the source of the dilemma is because we're already starting with the assumption that the MWI is correct and relevant here.
I think we're starting with the assumption that it's vastly more likely than the other possible explanations.
After all these experiments, all you know is that the LHC isn't turning on. You don't really have evidence of anything going in potential parallel universes.
Sure you do - the probability of you making the observation that the LHC persistently fails to turn on is something like 1 if MWI is true and if a functional LHC would destroy the world; it's surely much lower otherwise.
"Statistically significant results" mean that there's a 5% chance that results are wrong
Hmm. Assuming the experiment was run correctly, it means there's a less than 5% chance that data this extreme would have been generated if the null hypothesis - that nothing interesting was happening - were true. The actual chance can be specified as e.g. 1%, 0.01%, or whatever.
Also, assuming everything was done correctly, it's really the conclusions drawn from the results, rather than the results themselves, that might be wrong...
a "ko" rule which says that the location of the last move played can make a difference
That information could however be considered part of the current position.
I'm perfectly happy with the idea that there could be stuff that we can't know about simply because it's too "distant" in some sense for us to experience it; it sends no signals or information our way. I'm not sure anyone here would deny this possibility.
But if that stuff interacts with our stuff then we certainly can know about it.
On the other hand, there is no proof that X is not dependent upon or manipulated in (scientifically) unfathomable ways by a larger X-prime
But is there any reason to favour this more complex hypothesis?
to avoid circularity, it is sufficient to take the MRCA of a few indisputable mammalian groups such as primates, rodents, carnivores, ungulates, etc. to include all mammals
But the MRCA of "indisputable" groups won't be an ancestor of basal groups like the monotremes or marsupials.
However, there's no dispute about including monotremes. The clade that excludes them is called the Theria. Likewise with the marsupials: the clade that excludes both them and the monotremes is the Eutheria. Every clade potentially has a name; Mammalia is just a partic...
Mmm. You can usually tell that something's a celestial object, and thus not a flying object, without being able to classify it further...
Ugh. The horrible music is the worst thing about church. Give me sermons about fire and brimstone any day.
Again I have failed. Actually I'm not sure I know what an RPG convention is...
OK, some results of a Google image search for "RPG convention crowd":
Eliezer asks so I deliver (MtG conventions):
http://www.collectorsquest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/magic_nationals_2008_player.jpg
http://www.wizards.com/mtg/images/daily/events/pthon09/Players.jpg
http://www.wizards.com/mtg/images/daily/events/usnat09/SF_AndersonGindey2.jpg
This is cherry-picked slightly - I ignored some pics with relatively low numbers of people, and some pics that looked like they weren't in the U.S. (but these had few females in attendance too).
This might explain the maintainance of the trait better than how it came to arise in the first place... but maybe that's good enough.
an enabler for speeding evolution
While the idea of evolving the ability to evolve faster might be made to work, it needs to be spelled out carefully, lest it attribute foresight to evolution.
Ordinarily you have trait X and you say it increases fitness and goes to fixation in a population, but it's less obvious how this works with the trait of evolving faster... which is not to say that such a thing is impossible. But you might need to invoke differing long-term survival of large groups of species, or something...
But does it work well in any environment? Someone, I forget where, once argued that rape in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness - where everyone knows everyone - would just get the rapist's skull bludgeoned in by the victim's friends or relatives.
(Though to be fair, a number of possible circumstances where this wouldn't be true could be imagined, I suppose...)
I'm not sure I'm understanding properly. You talk as if my action would drastically affect society's views of friendship. I doubt this is true for any action I could take.
Though not exactly a quantum immortality believer, I take it more seriously than most...
Objections mostly seem to come down to the idea that, if I split in two, and then one of me dies a minute later, its consciousness doesn't magically transfer over to the other me. And so "one of me" has really died.
However, I see this case as being about as bad as losing a minute's worth of memory. On the reductive view of personal identity, there's no obvious difference. There is no soul flying about.
Is there a difference between these four cases:
Huh, integer. I don't know how that got past me when I wrote that.