Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)
enjoy this glorious piece of LW lingo
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no I don't know what it means, and I don't want it to be explained to me. Just let me bask in its inscrutibility.
The sad thing is I have some idea of what it's trying to say. One of the many weird habits of the Rationalists is that they fixate on a few obscure mathematical theorems and then come up with their own ideas of what these theorems really mean. Their interpretations may be only loosely inspired by the actual statements of the theorems, but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math.
One of these theorems is Aumann's agreement theorem. I don't know what the actual theorem says, but the LW interpretation is that any two "rational" people must eventually agree on every issue after enough discussion, whatever rational means. So if you disagree with any LW principles, you just haven't read enough 20k word blog posts. Unfortunately, most people with "bounded levels of compute" ain't got the time, so they can't necessarily converge on the meta level of, never mind, screw this, I'm not explaining this shit. I don't want to figure this out anymore.
I know what it says and it's commonly misused. Aumann's Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It's trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don't know what that LW post is talking about and I don't want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~
I don't think that's an accurate summary. In Aumann's agreement theorem, the different agents share a common prior distribution but are given access to different sources of information about the random quantity under examination. The surprising part is that they agree on the posterior probability provided that their conclusions (not their sources) are common knowledge.
I think Aumann's theorem is even narrower than that, after reading the Wikipedia article. The theorem doesn't even reference "reasoning", unless you count observing that a certain event happened as reasoning.
@gerikson @lagrangeinterpolator
> but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math
Misread this as "meth", perfect, no further questions
The Wikipedia article is cursed
I'd say even the part where the article tries to formally state the theorem is not written well. Even then, it's very clear how narrow the formal statement is. You can say that two agents agree on any statement that is common knowledge, but you have to be careful on exactly how you're defining "agent", "statement", and "common knowledge". If I actually wanted to prove a point with Aumann's agreement theorem, I'd have to make sure my scenario fits in the mathematical framework. What is my state space? What are the events partitioning the state space that form an agent? Etc.
The rats never seem to do the legwork that's necessary to apply a mathematical theorem. I doubt most of them even understand the formal statement of Aumann's theorem. Yud is all about "shut up and multiply," but has anyone ever see him apply Bayes's theorem and multiply two actual probabilities? All they seem to do is pull numbers out of their ass and fit superexponential curves to 6 data points because the superintelligent AI is definitely coming in 2027.
the get smart quick scheme in its full glory
"you should watch [Steven Pinker's] podcast with Richard Hanania" cool suggestion scott
Surely this is a suitable reference for a math article!
Honestly even the original paper is a bit silly, are all game theory mathematics papers this needlessly farfetched?
this sounds exactly like the sentence right before "they have played us for absolute fools!" in that meme.
oh man, it's Aumann's
Are you trying to say that you are not regularly thinking about the meta level of evidence convergence procedures?
retains the same informational content after running through rot13
Tbh, this is pretty convincing, I agree a lot more with parts of the LW space now. (Just look at the title, the content isn't that interesting).
i actually find the content pretty amusing, since it amounts to "have you guys tried using words correctly every once in a while?"
the comments also do not get it at all. The guy going “don't say you have 99% percent credence in something¹, for most people saying that it's a virtual certainty is the same thing” these people cannot speak as a non-cultmember for even a second
¹yeah don't, nobody says that