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Quantum Bayesian Networks
I am currently trying very hard to write a long, crazy paper on quantum SIT (Shannon Information Theory). So I’m thinking a lot about SIT these days. Here is a short “song” about the subject.
Blog :: Joseph Javier Perla
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Disconnecting Distraction
Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying other strategies now, but I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them. May 2008 Procrastination feeds on distractions.
Good and Bad Procrastination
Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important.
May 25, 2007 I originally discovered the fiendishly addictive Tower Defense as a multiplayer game modification for Warcraft III . It's a cooperative game mode where you, and a few other players, are presented with a simple maze. A group of monsters appear at the entrance and trudge methodically toward the exit. Your goal is to destroy the monsters before they reach the exit by constructing attack towers along the borders of the maze.
How to Get Rich Programming
Less Wrong
Thinking and deciding are central to our daily lives. The Less Wrong community aims to gain expertise in how human brains think and decide, so that we can do so more successfully. We use insights from cognitive science , social psychology , probability theory , and decision theory to improve our understanding of how the world works and what we can do to achieve our goals .
I just finished reading a history of Enron's downfall, The Smartest Guys in the Room, which hereby wins my award for "Least Appropriate Book Title". An unsurprising feature of Enron's slow rot and abrupt collapse was that the executive players never admitted to having made a large mistake. When catastrophe #247 grew to such an extent that it required an actual policy change, they would say "Too bad that didn't work out—it was such a good idea—how are we going to hide the problem on our balance sheet?" As opposed to, "It now seems obvious in retrospect that it was a mistake from the beginning." As opposed to, "I've been stupid." There was never a watershed moment, a moment of humbling realization, of acknowledging a fundamental problem.
Less Wrong: The Importance of Saying "Oops"
The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
" Zombies " are putatively beings that are atom-by-atom identical to us, governed by all the same third-party-visible physical laws, except that they are not conscious. Though the philosophy is complicated, the core argument against zombies is simple: When you focus your inward awareness on your inward awareness, soon after your internal narrative (the little voice inside your head that speaks your thoughts) says "I am aware of being aware", and then you say it out loud, and then you type it into a computer keyboard, and create a third-party visible blog post. Consciousness, whatever it may be—a substance, a process, a name for a confusion—is not epiphenomenal; your mind can catch the inner listener in the act of listening, and say so out loud. The fact that I have typed this paragraph would at least seem to refute the idea that consciousness has no experimentally detectable consequences.
Quantum Explanations
I think I must now temporarily digress from the sequence on zombies (which was a digression from the discussion of reductionism , which was a digression from the Mind Projection Fallacy ) in order to discuss quantum mechanics. The reasons why this belongs in the middle of a discussion on zombies in the middle of a discussion of reductionism in the middle of a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy, will become apparent eventually. It's a sequence that has been weighing on my mind, demanding to be written, for a quite a long time.
An epistle to the physicists: When I was but a little lad, my father, a Ph.D. physicist, warned me sternly against meddling in the affairs of physicists; he said that it was hopeless to try to comprehend physics without the formal math. Period. No escape clauses. But I had read in Feynman's popular books that if you really understood physics, you ought to be able to explain it to a nonphysicist. I believed Feynman instead of my father, because Feynman had won the Nobel Prize and my father had not.
Decoherence is Simple
"For one thing," I said, "the many-worlds issue is just about the only case I know of where you can bring the principles of Science and Bayesianism into direct conflict ." It's important to have different mental buckets for "science" and "rationality", as they are different concepts . Bringing the two principles into direct conflict is helpful for illustrating what science is and is not, and what rationality is and is not.
Why Quantum?
Followup to : Decoherence , Where Philosophy Meets Science Once upon a time, there was an alien species, whose planet hovered in the void of a universe with laws almost like our own. They would have been alien to us, but of course they did not think of themselves as alien. They communicated via rapid flashes of light, rather than sound. We'll call them the Ebborians.
Where Physics Meets Experience
On a long drive across the country this summer I noticed something odd about construction areas. They put out cones to block off an area for construction many hours before the construction actually starts, and take them away many hours after the construction ends. Most of the time you drive by a blocked-off area, there is no construction actually happening there, though there are a lot of travelers delayed by these cones. Now I’m sure they save some time by being able to put out and pick up the cones on some schedule and plan convenient to them, and it would cost more to put out and pick up the cones just before and after the construction.