Viewing profile — AlexMennen

What do you think "bottom 25%" and "top 25%" mean, exactly?

This seems overly harsh. Few people took COVID-19 seriously on Feb 4, so this standard makes almost everyone have no credibility, including people who don't admit to the error. All…

> This implies second order logic. No, it does not. The second incompleteness theorem is provable in first-order Peano Arithmetic. > Of course I'm in no position to say a similar t…

I think the idea is that the machines are supposed to learn what humans want from human behavior, and then help humans get what they want their own way, rather than imitating human…

This reasoning uses the self-indication assumption, which I tentatively also agree with, but there are some pretty good criticisms of it. http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprin…

That's just a special case of a general feature of probabilistic arguments: a small but positive fraction of the times they are used, they will give wildly misleading predictions. …

No. It would probably pick up on the correlation, but AIXI assumes that its only interactions with the universe are through its input and output channels, so it cannot recognize th…

Yes, thank you.

2 micromorts does not mean 2 separate risks, each of which has a 1 in 1 million chance of killing you. It means a single risk that has a 1 in 500 thousand chance of killing you. Si…

So is 1 mort a guaranteed death or a [edit:] 1 - 1/e chance of death?

Moving is generally much easier for sellers, who are more likely to be large corporations, than for buyers, who are more likely to be individuals.

Good point, but the chances of a failed launch are fairly small, and the damage from accidentally detonating a large nuke on the Earth's surface, while bad, would be small compared…

If there is a significant chance that a comet will hit and destroy us, it makes sense to do everything we can to prevent it from doing so. Given the stakes, .1% chance should be mo…

In your tax example, that reasoning would make sense, since the legislature would be unlikely to pass those on its own. My point was that, even if "prop 35 gets enacted" is better …

> those that cared may have decided "on the balance, in this flawed democratic system where I have to vote on this as a single unit, I think the result is better despite this conse…

> One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the …

States have an incentive to use a winner take all policy to maximize their influence in the outcome.