So, I've been hearing a lot about the awesomeness of Solomonoff induction, at least as a theoretical framework. However, my admittedly limited understanding of Solomonoff induction suggests that it would form an epicly bad hypothesis if given a random string. So my question is, if I misunderstood, how does it...
Today an Italian court has declared that Amanda Knox is, once again, guilty. She did not attend that trial (is not required to in Italy), so her final verdict will be either by appeal to the Supreme Court of Italy or the US extradition court. Extradition requests might be impeded...
Pascal's mugging against an actual opponent is easy. If they are able to carry out their threat, they don't need anything you would be able to give them. If the threat is real, you're at their mercy and you have no way of knowing if acceding to their demand will actually make anyone safer, whereas if he's lying you don't want to be giving resources to that sort of person. This situation is a special case of privileging the hypothesis, since for no reason you're considering a nearly impossible event while ignoring all the others.
If we're talking about a metaphor for general decision-making, eg an AI who's actions could well affect the... (read more)
It is pretty much a necessity that humans will believe contradictory things, if only because consistency checking each new belief with each of your current beliefs is impossibly difficult. Cognitive dissonance won't occur if the contradiction is so obscure that you haven't noticed it, or perhaps wouldn't even understand exactly how it contradicts a set of 136 other beliefs even if it was explained to you. Even if you could check for contradictions, your values change drastically from one hour to the next (how much you value food, water, company, solitude, leisure, etc), and that will change all your beliefs that start with "I want ...". Most likely you actually have different... (read more)
I myself lie effortlessly, and felt not a shred of guilt when, say, I would hide my atheism to protect myself from the hostility of my very anti-anti-religious father (he's not a believer himself, he's just hostile to atheism for reasons which elude me).
Hm, an atheist who hides his atheism, from his father who also seems to be an atheist (aka non-believer) but acts hostile towards atheists? Just out of curiosity, do you also act hostile towards atheists when you're around him?
FWIW these questions have standard answers in Christian doctrine: he didn't want to be tortured to death, but he wanted to do God's will more than he not-wanted to be crucified.
Sure, but don't forget that in Christian doctrine Jesus=God. This vastly complicates the issue, God-the-Father demands that God-the-Son die on behalf of the sins of humanity, which God-the-Son doesn't want to do but is willing to do because it's what God-the-Father requires to bring Himself to forgive people and He may have been ordered to as well. I don't know what would happen if God disobeys Himself.
And I expect the reason is that people who insufficiently ironman an argument are either more interested in the argument's technical correctness, or more interested in discrediting the claim.
Summary: Agreeing with people who insufficiently ironman an argument, will be treated as agreeing that the argument is complete rubbish.
Supplemental data preservation seems like a synergistic match with cryonics. You'd want to collect vast amounts of data with little effort, so no diaries or random typing or asking friends to memorize facts. MRIs and other medical records might help, keeping a video or audio recording of everything you do, and recording everything you do with your computer, should take little time and might preserve something that might aid cryonic preservation.
Simulation-based preservation attempts may be more likely than people expect, based on the logic that simulated humans likely outnumber physical humans (we could be in a simulation to determine how many simulations per human we will eventually make ourselves). However it is... (read more)
I don't consider this an advantage. My goal is to find vivid and direct demonstrations of scientific truths, and so I am happy to use things that are commonplace today, like telephones, computers, cameras, or what-have-you.
Well, you could use your smartphone's accelerometer to verify the equations for centrifugal force, or its GPS to verify parts of special and general relativity, or the fact that its chip functions to verify parts of quantum mechanics. But I'm not sure how you can legitimately claim to be verifying anything; if you don't trust those laws how can you trust the phone? It would be like using a laser rangefinder to verify the speed of light. For this sort of thing the fact that your equipment functions is better evidence that the people who made it know the laws of physics, than any test you could do with it.
Some hypotheses: 1) Words in the foreign language are not tainted with morality. Using more neutral words in the problem description would have a similar effect.
2) The extra time taken to parse the foreign language description forces more time to think about the problem. Saying the problem slowly, or writing with a huge font, would have a similar effect.
3) The distraction of translating has an effect. Giving the subjects an additional task to do would have a similar effect.
Other studies showed an effect of language helping to discriminate between things like two different colors (aided if your language uses different words for them). That seemed like a different thing, perhaps an effect of categories and practice.
So, I've been hearing a lot about the awesomeness of Solomonoff induction, at least as a theoretical framework. However, my admittedly limited understanding of Solomonoff induction suggests that it would form an epicly bad hypothesis if given a random string. So my question is, if I misunderstood, how does it deal with randomness? And if I understood correctly, isn't this a rather large gap?
Edit: Thanks for all the comments! My new understanding is that Solomonoff induction is able to understand that it is dealing with a random string (because it finds itself giving equal weight to programs that output a 1 or a 0 for the next bit), but despite that is... (read more)
Today an Italian court has declared that Amanda Knox is, once again, guilty. She did not attend that trial (is not required to in Italy), so her final verdict will be either by appeal to the Supreme Court of Italy or the US extradition court. Extradition requests might be impeded due to the fact US does not have double jeopardy.
Previously on LessWrong, in The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom there was some complaint that it actually took more than an hour on the internet to thoroughly research the case. Of course, the courts have been at this since 2007...
Her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito,... (read more)
Weirdtopia? No -- history. For example, the Bible rules allowed for capturing the enemy's women as loot, having sex with their slave, and I'm fairly certain that a woman's wishes in terms of consent mattered a lot less than those of the male in charge of her. I seem to recall that at some point in Europe the feudal lord or whatever could have his way with your wife, and you had no recourse. This, of course, probably has more to do with inequality than anything else.
As for consent, it's ... complicated. For one thing, it exists in the mind and thus cannot reliably leave a physical trace (because of how memory... (read more)