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Showing posts from September, 2018

Realism about rationality

Epistemic status: trying to vaguely gesture at vague intuitions. Cross-posted to Less Wrong , where there's been some good discussion. A similar idea was explored here under the heading "the intelligibility of intelligence", although I hadn't seen it before writing this post. There’s a mindset which is common in the rationalist community, which I call “realism about rationality” (the name being intended as a parallel to moral realism). I feel like my skepticism about agent foundations research is closely tied to my skepticism about this mindset, and so in this essay I try to articulate what it is. Humans ascribe properties to entities in the world in order to describe and predict them. Here are three such properties: "momentum", "evolutionary fitness", and "intelligence". These are all pretty useful properties for high-level reasoning in the fields of physics, biology and AI, respectively. There's a key difference between the

I'm so meta, even this acronym

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This is my 52nd blog post within the span of one calendar year, since I (re)started blogging on September 5th, 2017. My writing productivity has far exceeded my expectations, and I'm very happy about managing to explore so many ideas. Here are some metrics. Breakdown by topic: 10 posts on computer science, machine learning, and maths 10 posts on philosophy 7 posts on politics and economics 6 posts on modern life and the future of society 5 posts on history and geography 3 posts on intelligence 12 miscellaneous posts (including this one) Most popular (in order): In search of All Souls Is death bad? What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? Utilitarianism and its discontents The unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning Yes, you should be angry about the housing crisis Oxford vs Cambridge Longest posts (in order of word count): A brief history of India . 5915 Proof, computation and truth . 5627 Utilitarianism and its discontents . 5550 Y

A compendium of conundrums

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Logic puzzles None of the puzzles below have trick answers - they can all be solved using logic and a bit of maths. Whenever a group of people need to achieve a task, assume they're allowed to confer and come up with a strategy beforehand. They're listed roughly in order of difficulty. Let me know of any other good ones you find! Two ropes I have two ropes which each, if lighted at one end, takes 1 hour to burn all the way to the other end. However, they burn at variable rates (e.g. the first might take 55 minutes to burn 1/4 of the way, then 5 minutes to burn all the rest; the second might be the opposite). How do I use them to time 45 minutes? 25 horses I have 25 horses, and am trying to find the 3 fastest. I have no timer, but can race 5 at a time against each other; I know that a faster horse will always beat a slower horse. How many races do I need to find the 3 fastest, in order? Monty hall problem ( explanation taken from here ) The set of Monty Hall&