I made the mistake of assuming that my experience with LSD would be the same as anybody else's. Prior to that, I'd known that if you all drink whisky, you all get drunk, you all feel dizzy and you all start slipping around. So I presumed, mistakenly, that everybody who took LSD was a most enlightened being. And then I started finding that there were people who were just as stupid as they'd been before, or people who hadn't really got any enlightenment except a lot of colours and lights and an Alice in Wonderland type of experience.

— George Harrison, quoted on page 179 of the Beatles Anthology

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make Barbie.

Suppose you say that you’re 99.99% confident that 2 + 2 = 4.

Then you're a dillbrain.

Then you have just asserted that you could make 10,000 independent statements, in which you repose equal confidence, and be wrong, on average, around once. Maybe for 2 + 2 = 4 this extraordinary degree of confidence would be possible

Yes, how extraordinary that I can say every day that the guy in front of me at the bodega won't win the Powerball. Or that [SystemRandom().random() >= 0.9999 for i in range(10000)] makes a list that is False in all but one spot.

P(x|y) is defined as P(x,y)/P(y). P(A|A) is defined as P(A,A)/P(A) = P(A)/P(A) = 1. The ratio of these two probabilities may be 1, but I deny that there's any actual probability that's equal to 1. P(|) is a mere notational convenience, nothing more.

No, you kneebiter.

I think this belongs over in TechTakes rather than SneerClub; it doesn't seem TREACLES-focused.

I didn't expect that the repetition of a banal yet occasionally useful saying like "the map is not the territory" could make a person deserve being shoved into a locker, but life will surprise us all.

Mixed in with the rank, fetid ego are amusing indications that Yud gave very little thought to what Bayesian probability actually means. I find that entertaining.

A joke I heard in the last century: Give a professor a nickel and they'll talk for an hour. Give 'em a quarter and you'll be in real trouble.

This is why it's better just to say mind blown guy having his mind blown.gif

I looked in the telescope and just saw a cow.

Enclosed please find one (1) Internet, awarded in recognition of the best/worst mental image I've had all week

Here's Arthur Chu's story from the time.

My experiences with cops have ranged from the comically absurd to the "I just have to close my eyes and I can still taste the pepper spray", so hey, I'm plenty prepared to be sympathetic with Scott Aa here. But boy did he ever step on that hard.

I got as far as this blog post that I shared in the first days of new!SneerClub, but that was only a first stab.

Likewise, Arthur Chu recently tweeted that he’s “unhappy about [my] continued existence”–i.e., on a straightforward reading, that he wants me to die.

The tweet was a reply to Aaronson saying (in part),

Far be it from me to psychoanalyze him, as he constantly does to me, but Chu's unremitting viciousness doesn't strike me as coming from a place of any great happiness with his life. So I say: may even Mr. Chu find whatever he's looking for.

To which Chu replied,

I am unhappy about many things, including the continued existence, wealth and social status afforded to men like you, and the cheesy sentimentality is not reciprocated

I.e., on a straightforward reading, he was talking about "existence" in the sense of lifestyle, not life. (The OED gives "sheltered existence" as an example of this meaning, which I find apt.)

I've more than once been tempted to write Everything the Sequences Get Wrong about Quantum Mechanics, but the challenge is doing so in a way that doesn't just amount to teaching a whole course in quantum mechanics. The short-short version is that it's lazy, superficial takes on top of cult shit — Yud trying to convince the reader that the physics profession is broken and his way is superior.

When I was a teenager, I read every novel by Isaac Asimov, including those that I could only find in second-hand bookshops (A Whiff of Death, Murder at the ABA and The End of Eternity). I read most of his short fiction, too; I didn't hunt down the ephemera that had never been anthologized, but I did visit the archive at the Boston University Library and find the movie plot outline that he wrote at the request of Paul McCartney. On the nonfiction side, to mention only the thickest books. I read his Chronology of Science and Discovery in sixth grade, and I followed it up with Asimov's Chronology of the World and his two-volume guides to Shakespeare and the Bible both.

It's not that I fail to understand where LessWrong is coming from. It's that I actually grew up to become a scientist.

If the conventional wisdom is correct, Bayesianism is potentially wrong (it’s not part of the Standard Approach to Life), and certainly useless: why try to learn through probability theory when tradition can tell you everything you need to know much faster?

Oh, you say you're a Bayesian? Name all 46,656 varieties.

I would also tell them that it’s possible to actually understand things.

The most perfect set-up to date for a joke about how the Thing Understander has logged on

It's an old creationist ploy. DNA is like a computer program, which implies there must have been a programmer, yadda yadda, just asking questions, wharblgarbl, brave scientists are speaking up and challenging the Darwinist regime.

Wokism is a conspiracy by Big Kitchenware to sell more woks

lol at "forged"

while you were studying continental philosophy, I studied the blade