I think that's one issue with protests. Many people gather with ill defined goals that are tangentially related to what most would agree is the actual problem. The "actual problem" for Occupy relates to unequal distribution of wealth, and the "actual problem" for the recent police brutality protests relates to systemic bias in the criminal justice system. I'm not sure if there actually is this sort of systemic bias, nor am I sure of the implicit claim that "things have gotten worse."
So, what do protests actually achieve, and is that effective in making things better? It seems that they do raise some level of awareness in the sense that more eye balls are on the issue for a short period of time. It's unclear to me that that's effective though, especially since it's a double edged sword. Raising awareness about the issue makes the negative externalities (like rioting and looting) more likely to be picked up and emphasized about the media.
That's an interesting schedule. Do you find it easier to fast during the day, vs the commonly recommended "don't eat anything after 6pm until 1pm the next day"?
I have a question about a seemingly complex social issue, so I'm interested if anyone has any insights.
Do protests actually work? Are e.g. the Ferguson/police crime protests a good way of attacking the problem? They seem to me to have a high cost, to be deflecting from the actual problem, and not enough sustained effort by people who care to push through to actual social change in the U.S.
Look at SNPs corresponding to methylation defects, and run a self experiment on any interventions that drop out of that.
Some off the cuff thoughts:
Can you imagine an intelligent agent that is not rational? And vice versa, can you imagine a rational agent that is not intelligent?
AIXI is "rational" (believe that it's vNM-rational in the literature). Is "instrumental rationality" a superset of this definition?
In the case of human rationality and human intelligence, part of it seems a question of scale. E.g. IQ tests seem to measure low level pattern matching, while "rationality" in the sense of Stanovich refers to more of a larger scale self reflective corrective process. (I'd conjecture that there are a lot of low level self reflective corrective processes occurring in an IQ test as well).
What's the current status of this? I'm looking to get started on the course list and would love a study partner.
There is this paper, http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Hintze-Problem-class-dominance-in-predictive-dilemmas.pdf which was an honors thesis.
More discussion relevant to the state of UDT and TDT in this comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3m/open_thread_2127_april_2014/au6e
Thanks for your enticing comment!
I understand your first point, but my math knowledge is not up to par to really understand point #2, and point #3 just makes me want to learn category theory. BTW, I also posted this question on the philosophy stackexchange: http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/14689/how-does-abstraction-generalization-in-mathematics-fit-into-inductive-reasoning.
Do you have any recommendations of what to study to understand category theory and more about the foundations of math? (Logic, type theory, computability & logic, model theory seem like contenders here)
So there's a MIRIxMountain View, but is it redundant to have a MIRIxEastBay/SF? It seems like the label MIRIx is content to be bestowed upon even low key research efforts, and considering the hacker culture/rationality communities there may be interest in this.
Are there any updates on when the Sequences e-book versions are going to be released? I'm planning a reread of some of the core material and might wait if the release is imminent.