I think the evidence against (most) miracles is stronger because they violate the laws of physics. Although I think the same could be said for a few UAPs--if a UAP moves in a way that is physically impossible as far as we know, that's strong evidence against it being aliens, because aliens still have to follow the laws of physics.
How would a tic-tac to accelerate at 700g with no visible propulsion, even positing the existence of super-advanced technology? The best I can think of off the top of my head is that it's using an extremely strong magnet to manipu...
To add more on "what we don't see": if some UAPs are aliens, why have they been on earth for decades, but they haven't done anything yet other than fly around? Why have they never landed (or, if they've landed, why did they only land at secret military bases)? My prior is that if intelligent aliens visited earth, they would do one of two things:
It seems a lot less likely that they'd arrive, fly around for decades, get spotted several times, but only ever in the distance.
It's weird that the US has such a low price to income ratio and thus such a high rental yield. In an efficient market, real estate investors should flock to countries with high rental yields, buying up housing until rental yields equalize. Why hasn't this happened yet?
If you disagree but can't succinctly explain, I would suggest doing one of these things:
Your comment is being downvoted (I suspect) because it does neither of these, instead it indirectly insults the author without providing any information as to why you disagree. IMO this sort of comment doesn't really contribute anything—all I know is that you disagree, I have no idea what's going on inside your head, so I'm not learning anything from it.
Perhaps it's worth distinguishing between two types of "I don't know":
Perhaps teachers should encourage students to replace "I don't know" with "my mental model predicts A, but I observe B", which communicates that the student is thinking correctly about the problem.
One concern I have with this method is that it's greedy optimization. The next character with the highest probability-of-curation might still overly constrain future characters and end up missing global maxima.
I'm not sure the best algorithm to resolve this. Here's an idea: Once the draft post is fully written, randomly sample characters to improve: create a new set of 256 markets for whether the post can be improved by changing the Nth character.
The problem with step 2 is you'll probably get stuck in a local maximum. One workaround would be to change a bunch of characters at random to "jump" to a different region of the optimization space, then create a new set of markets to optimize the now-randomized post text.
Thanks for the reply. If I'm understanding correctly, leaving aside the various complications you bring up, are you describing a potential slow growth curve that (to a rough approximation) looks like:
This story sounds plausible to me, and it basically fits the slow-takeoff operationalization.
Fortified milks usually don't contain much iron. The soymilk in my fridge (Silk unsweetened) has 120% RDA of B12 but only 6% RDA of iron.
Maybe this is off topic, but if I'm getting tested for iron deficiency, are there other tests it would make sense to do at the same time (if I'm vegan)? I'm optimizing for minimizing number of doctor's visits/blood draws rather than minimizing cost.
A related pattern I noticed recently:
Alice asked for a one-variable model with limited but positive predictive power, and Bob replied with a zero-variable model with no predictive power whatsoever.
What's going on with /r/AskHistorians?
AFAIK, /r/AskHistorians is the best place to hear from actual historians about historical topics. But I've noticed some trends that make it seem like the historians there generally share some bias or agenda, but I can't exactly tell what that agenda is.
The most obvious thing I noticed is from their FAQ on historians' views on other [popular] historians. I looked through these and in every single case, the /r/AskHistorians commenters dislike the pop historian. Surely at least one pop historian got it right?
I don't know ...
I am pretty uncertain about whether this change is good, and I don't think anyone can confidently say it is or isn't good. But no other forum with voting does this (AFAIK), so it's good to try it and see what happens.
Something to think about: What sorts of observations might constitute evidence in favor of or against this system?
I agree. OP is saying people should be more willing to make low-confidence predictions, whereas the type of rambling that people do too much of is information-sparse (taking too many words to say something simple). More rambling about meaningful but low-confidence claims, and less meaningless/redundant rambling.
IMO, articles should include TLDRs, but shouldn't just be TLDRs. You have a short, high-context, high-trust summary. Then you write a longer article for people who don't have all the necessary background to understand your summary, or don't immediately trust that your summary is correct.
As a silly example, if you did an experiment to determine the acceleration due to gravity, your TLDR could simply be, "The acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2." And for many readers, that's all they need to know. But you should definitely also explain your methodology and present the data from your experiment.
I thought it was obviously fiction, but I didn't know that it was set in Dath Ilan, and the fact that it's set in Dath Ilan would give away that the red hair thing is fake.
You see this sort of thing with acquisitions. Say company A is currently priced at $100, and company B announces that it's acquiring A for $200 per share. A will jump up to something like $170 per share, and then slowly increase to $200 on the acquisition date. The $30 gap is there because there's some probability that the acquisition will fall through, and that probability decreases over time (unless it actually does fall through, in which case the price drops back down to ~$100).
I get motion sickness easily, but I don't often suffer from nausea because I avoid doing things that make me motion sick (e.g., reading in the car). If I took anti-nausea pills, I could do those things more.
I "know" that nausea can be handled with a pill, but it had never occurred to me to carry around a couple anti-nausea pills.
[P]eople don’t know whether they dream in colour. Dreams may not even have associated colours one way or the other! Indeed, when I asked a few friends and family whether they dreamed in colour, a surprising number of them answered “I don’t know”.
I don't know much about the science of dreams, but I suspect that the answer may be that many dreams activate rods but not cones (or, at least, activate the parts of the brain that receive signals from rods). When it's dark, and my cones are not receiving enough light to function, I wouldn't describe the world I...
I have a question about COVID spread. Based on what I know of the numbers, the rate of spread + immunity doesn't add up, but my numbers could be wrong.
It seems to me that one of two things must be true:
Before the vaccine launched, r0 was greater than 1, but still low enough that most people didn't catch it. Then, after ~50% of people in the developed world got the vaccine (and ~20% of people had already gotten COVID), r0 was low enough that COVID died out in the developed world within a few months. After the vaccine launched and most people got it, r0 was ...
10 million dollars will probably have very small impact on Terry Tao's decision to work on the problem.
That might be true for him specifically, but I'm sure there are plenty of world-class researchers who would find $10 million (or even $1 million) highly motivating.
When people sneeze, do they expel more fluid from their mouth than from their nose?
I saw this video (warning: slow-mo video of a sneeze. kind of gross) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNeYfUTA11s&t=79s and it looks like almost all the fluid is coming out of the person's mouth, not their nose. Is that typical?
(Meta: Wasn't sure where to ask this question, but I figured someone on LessWrong would know the answer.)
This could be tested by a) inducing sneezing (although induction methods might produce an unusual sneeze, which works differently). and b) using an intervention of some kind.
Inducing sneezing isn't hard, but can be extremely unpleasant, depending on the method. However, if you're going to sneeze anyway...
The high-level explanation I'd give for this is that smart people make better decisions in general, and certain classes of bad decisions are also illegal. So perhaps the reason smart people follow rules more isn't that they're more inherently rule-abiding, but that they behave in more reasonable ways, and rules tend to be reasonable (obviously not always, but they're more reasonable than if they were assigned at random).
Intelligent people tend to be more rule abiding in general
As an aside, do you have a source for this? A quick search didn't turn up anything useful.
My intuition would be the opposite: if people are acting meta-rationally, then less intelligent people should be more rule-abiding because they know they're not smart enough to figure out when exceptions are worth it. But I don't have anything to back that up.
My attempt to answer my own question:
The preference to get/not get a refund is a derived preference. My true preferences are to both owe and pay as little tax as possible. If I am in a situation where I can change how much tax I pay, but not how much I owe (by setting my withholding), then by maximizing my preferences I happen to minimize my refund. And if I can change how much I owe (e.g., by taking different deductions), but not how much I pay, then by maximizing my preferences I happen to maximize my refund.
I believe [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ftbtZy9dBmYC5StQz/lesswrong-v2-0-anti-kibitzer-hides-comment-authors-and-vote) is what you are referring to. I have the same preference as you and I use Marcello's script.
Ok, fair point, I was going too far in assuming that the sort of engineering necessary was physically impossible.