An Algorithmic Lucidity

Mark Twain wrote that honesty means you don't have to remember anything.

I was curious to see how various prognosticators—specifically, FiveThirtyEight and The Economist's models, and the PredictIt prediction markets—did on predicting the state-by-state (plus the District of Columbia) results of the recent U.S. presidential el…

(originally published at Less Wrong) Someone is broadcasting a stream of bits.

(originally published at Less Wrong) I'll be brief, omit needless words.

(originally published at Less Wrong) How is it possible to tell the truth?

No one cares if you're in pain; They only want results.

In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, a scorpion was creepy-crawling along a riverbank, wondering how to get to the other side.

(originally published at Less Wrong) "Why didn't you tell him the truth?

(originally published at Less Wrong) Derek Powell, Kara Weisman, and Ellen M.

(originally published at Less Wrong) A decade and a half from now, during the next Plague, you're lucky enough to have an underground bunker to wait out the months until herd immunity.

(originally published at Less Wrong) In "Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization" (due in a forthcoming issue of the philosophy-of-science journal Synthese), James Owen Weatherall and Cailin O'Connor propose a possible answer to the question of why people f…

(originally published at Less Wrong) The efficient markets hypothesis (or EMH for short) is the idea "that asset prices reflect all available information".

After a friendship-ending fight, you feel an impulse to push through the pain to do an exhaustive postmortem of everything you did wrong in that last, fatal argument—you could have phrased that more eloquently, could have anticipated that objection, could…

(originally published at Less Wrong) Honest rational agents should never agree to disagree.

(originally published at Less Wrong) The explaining-away effect (or, collider bias; or, Berkson's paradox) is a statistical phenomenon in which statistically independent causes with a common effect become anticorrelated when conditioning on the effect.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Reply to: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases Eliezer Yudkowsky, listing advantages of a "wizard's oath" ethical code of "Don't say things that are literally false", writes— Repeatedly asking yourself

(originally published at Less Wrong) Reply to: Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms Chris Leong, following John Nerst, distinguishes between two alleged discursive norm-sets.

(originally published at Less Wrong) I want you to imagine a world consisting of a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables \(X_i\), and two computer programs.

(originally published at Less Wrong) In "Against Lie Inflation", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that the word "lie" should be reserved for knowingly-made false statements, and not used in an expanded sense that includes unconscious motivated reasonin…

If I sound like a broken record about school or whatever ("or whatever"), it's only because the dominant ideological trends of Society are engaging in conceptual gerrymandering that artificially raises the message length of my existence, such that I need…

(originally published at Less Wrong) Followup to: What Evidence Filtered Evidence?

(looking at baby/toddler photos a year apart) "How does he look so different and yet so the same at the same time?"

(originally published at Less Wrong) Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

"We really need another bookcase."

(originally published at Less Wrong) Sometimes, people are reluctant to admit that they were wrong about something, because they're afraid that "You are wrong about this" carries inextricable connotations of "You are stupid and bad."

"The sink is full and it's your turn to do the dishes!

(originally published at Less Wrong) There's this statistical phenomenon where it's possible for two multivariate distributions to overlap along any one variable, but be cleanly separable when you look at the entire configuration space at once.

(originally published at Less Wrong) If you ever find yourself saying, "Even if Hypothesis H is true, it doesn't have any decision-relevant implications," you are rationalizing!

(This is a blog post adaptation of a talk I gave at !!

(Part of Math and Wellness Month.)

Forgiveness is an important input into Wellness, but contrary to popular belief, Forgiveness is incompatible with Forgetting.

(Part of Math and Wellness Month.)

(Previously, previously.)

(originally published at Less Wrong) Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundary?

(Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.) future-timeskip episode in which the AI from TOS S2E24 "The Ultimate Computer" starts taking over the galaxy, until being countered by an upload superorganism composed of copies of Lt.

Retarget loyalty intuitions onto specific humans (never ideologies or collective identities).

She's a ward of the state; you have an inalienable right to live; I'm literally more useful alive rather than dead with respect to the values of powerful coalitions.

Always be peaceful and tell the truth to your friends because you love and trust them.

"We need to institutionalize people in order to prevent them from hurting themselves" has the same memetic-superweapon structure as "We need to torture terrorists to get them to tell us where they've hidden the suitcase nuke."

"—but I am not a vengeful man." "..."

"I know it might seem like a lot to ask, but I wouldn't hesitate to do the same for you if our positions were reversed."

"You look happy.

It is now April!

"I can't stand being apart any longer.

$ history | grep freeciv 605 freeciv 606 sudo apt-get install freeciv 607 sudo apt-get remove freeciv 652 rm -rf ~/.freeciv/ 706 sudo apt-get install freeciv 722 sudo apt-get remove freeciv 735 rm -rf ~/.freeciv/ 752 sudo apt-get i…

"I'm going to need about 600 bits of entropy for this.

As a freshman on my high school's cross country team, our captain told me that to be a good runner, you needed to love pain.

(Previously, previously, previously, previously.)

(Previously, previously, previously, previously on Star Trek: An Algorithmic Lucidity.)

"Plastic flowers?