reasonableapproximation.net
The "Poorly Defined Scotsman" fallacy
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2013/12/22/poorly-defined-scotsman.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. The "Poorly Defined Scotsman" fallacy. If you hang out on /r/scifi. For long enough, you'll hear someone say that. Is not science fiction. It's fantasy in space, or space opera, or whatever, but it isn't science fiction. The example that inspired this post, nine months ago, was this thread. And, well, they're. Worse, the person in question usually. But what this should tell us is not ". Isn't as...
reasonableapproximation.net
Cooperative conversational threading
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2015/04/14/cooperative-conversational-threading.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. Which is fine. I shouldn't expect people to want to talk about something just because I want to talk about it, and it's not as if I find the actual conversation boring. But it's not necessarily optimal. People might in fact want to talk about the same thing as me, and following the path of least resistance in a conversation is unlikely to result in the best possible conversation. I think what I'...
reasonableapproximation.net
The Farmer's Dilemma
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2015/05/05/farmers-dilemma.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. Suppose you and I are farmers, owning adjacent fields. One day you have a brilliant idea. If we dig a ditch from the nearby river, between our fields, then irrigating our fields becomes a lot less work. It would cost two utils. To dig the ditch - one utilon each - and we'd get five utils each from its existence. You object that I'm being dumb not to take those four utils. On the other hand, if w...
reasonableapproximation.net
Fascists and Rakes
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/01/04/facists-and-rakes.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. Cross-posted to Less Wrong. And there's another moral intuition, the harm-minimising principle: "you should not hurt other people unless you have a good reason". When someone violates harm-minimisation, we might call them a rake, someone who acts purely for their own pleasure without regard for others. Except that by the harm-minimising principle, those people probably. It's not that they disagr...
reasonableapproximation.net
Meetup report: London LW paranoid debating session
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/02/16/london-lw-paranoid-debating.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. Meetup report: London LW paranoid debating session. A photo from a (different) recent LW London meetup. I wasn't going to bother writing this up, but then I remembered it's important to publish negative results. The other team did considerably better, getting answers in the 8,000s for a true answer of 8,600. Left log left({ text{given answer} over text{true answer} right) right $. The mole score...
reasonableapproximation.net
How Red Will the Oceans Run?
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/08/09/how-red-will-the-oceans-run.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. How Red Will the Oceans Run? In which I inexpertly channel Randall Munroe. Soon the seas will turn red with the blood of the human race, as the unspeakable terrors come from beyond the gate, which is Yog Sothoth, to devour all in their path! Who will be eaten first? If you were to mix the blood of the human race into the oceans, how red would they turn? How about the oceans? Initially, I forgot ...
reasonableapproximation.net
Cliffs Notes: "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", part 1
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/02/02/cliffs-notes-pttlos-part-1.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. Cliffs Notes: "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", part 1. A book sometimes cited on LessWrong as recommended reading is E.T. Jaynes'. Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. I intend to write a series of posts reading this book, summarizing the key points, and solving the exercises. (There are no solutions in the book.). Next we get a brief history of the book. The rules of probabi...
reasonableapproximation.net
pi.py
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/01/18/pi-py.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. There's a fairly well-known (as these things go) IOCCC entry. Westly.c") to calculate pi. It looks like this:. Define F- 00 F-OO- ;. But you could get more digits by increasing the size of the circle (and changing the. I recently decided to port this to python. Here's the result:. The rest of this post is spoilers, so stop reading if you'd like to figure out what's going on for yourself. We can ...
reasonableapproximation.net
How unbalanced is The Resistance?
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/03/29/how-unbalanced-is-the-resistance.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. How unbalanced is The Resistance? I'm a fan of the board/card game The Resistance. My hypothesis is that for many game sizes, the spies will have considerably greater than even odds of winning. To be less vague, I expect the spies to have a disadvantage in five-player games at least. In addition, for seven players and up, you win round four unless you select two or more spies, not one or more.
reasonableapproximation.net
A Half-Baked Idea for Keeping Code and Docs in Sync
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2015/01/16/keeping-code-and-docs-in-sync.html
Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives. A Scream of Swifties. Unix pro tip: Print and pipe. A Half-Baked Idea for Keeping Code and Docs in Sync. It's widely regarded that documentation is an important task that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. Oh, I can't frobnicate the spam here unless I also make the user pass in an egg. And of course, having written a function and documented it (in whatever order) - you can subsequently. If your code is in a git (or other VCS) repositor...
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