81–90 of 279 posts
* Think: fight or flight. Slow to decide flight could lead to death.
From the Github description, a quote: "In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternation…
yes, I've done some of these before. Ive gotten up above 200 key presses at ~50% before getting bored. my secret was decidedly less sexy than free will though. i just had XX years of working as a statistician and having a better intuition as to what random strings and numbers actually look like :/
I did have a job where I had to implement a bunch of cognition tests for scientific studies. Initially I worked purely off the research papers describing how the some of the tests work - apparently by presenting a series of random numbers.
After I had the first few up and running, the feedback from the researchers was that my random numbers weren't random enough. "Weird", I thought... I had seeds for their sessions so I could reproduce the sequences they'd seen and they looked pretty random to me.
In the end it turned out my sequences were "too random", they didn't like any number being repeated, having more than 3 instances of the same number within any 6-digit sequence, and a few other "tweaks". Turns out actual randomness is confusing even for some very experienced and well trained people!
Really like the website, I'm a fan on these minimal websites
Does going below 50% make me more human? ;) xDxD
It sounds like the only way to "beat" this is to try to find some unrelated feed of noise to base the key presses on. Because when you actually do think about it deliberately, you fall into a pattern. One way to do this without an external data source might be to just visualize (or look at) each object in turn clockwise of a room you are familiar with. Or use any other random source of data. Then come up with a rule…
Granted, I only tested this for a few minutes, but I found that if I thought about "repeat" vs "switch" instead of "d" vs "f", then I could reliably get under 50% prediction. Sure, the prediction rate was high 40's, but that at least means I won! A lot of it comes down to avoiding auto-piloting into a 50/50 distribution. Subconsciously, "random" means approaches 50/50 since that's how it works, right ? I'm sure given…
More importantly I can use my free will to stop engaging with it and go back to doing something productive.
My 2c:
Regardless of philosophy, free will is something you can have.
One must fight for it,but I think it is worth the fight.
The question is never if we have free will or not. The question is if we are in a state where free will is available or not. For example, when I’m aware that there is space around myself, then I’m also aware that there are thoughts, feeling in the body, breath etc. In this state, I believe, it’s possible to choose. In this test I can choose the only press the other key and this algorithm doesn’t do so well. Then some…
I identify with consciousness, and the origins of these intentions is unconscious, therefore I conclude that the intentions do not originate from “me”. It’s still my action, my “choice”, my kamma, but it’s not my “free will”.