Paul Crowley

Disabled LJ crossposting

2018-12-20T16:43:45Z

All content will now appear only on https://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/

Joining the Tumblr diaspora

2018-12-19T02:45:31Z

I've neglected Dreamwidth, but with the Tumblr diaspora it's emerging as a good place to be - adding it to the rotation of sites I check! *waves*

This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Snoozing TODOs

2015-04-26T11:54:42Z

I manage my personal TODO list with Zendone, while at work I use Google Inbox. For the most part, Zendone is the more sophisticated and capable tool, but there's one thing Inbox has that I dearly miss from Zendone: a snooze button. In Inbox I send an email, then I snooze the conversation for a few days. If I don't get a reply, I can decide what to do when the conversation pops back into my inbox.

In Zendone, I can set dates on items, but it treats them like deadlines. Snooze is the opposite of a deadline: it's not the latest it needs to be done by, it's the earliest it can be done by. What I need is for them to be invisible until their date comes up.

Does anything apart from Inbox support snoozing items?

Update: Zendone say the feature is coming in version 2.0, which has been in the works for a year now.

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Let's start calling it paternalism.

2015-04-18T16:34:17Z

I’m not one of those who think that paternalism is always wrong. I’m OK with laws that require the use of seat belts, for example; people aren’t too good at weighing up small unavailable risks, the cost of wearing a seat belt is pretty small for nearly everyone, and the rule saves a large number of lives for a fairly small cost in liberty. But I’d like to start calling it what it is; it’s a statement that we know better what is good for people than they do.

Prostitutes prefer it if their clients aren’t arrested. So if you’re going to advocate the “Swedish Model” in the interests of those currently working as prostitutes, please be upfront that what you’re calling for is paternalism. Don’t advocate this model if you’re not prepared to say, in terms, that you think you know what is good for those working as prostitutes better than they do.

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/362370.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Not on Facebook today

2014-12-15T08:33:45Z

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/events/ce4har11bm54cpldl30m7gt83a8

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/362001.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Device dilemmas

2013-10-02T07:10:55Z

It's time I bought one or more new small glowing rectangles. All of mine are ancient; my contract expires in less than a fortnight and I just got a bonus at work. I'm definitely going to stick with Android devices. But apart from that, I'm totally at sea on what to buy or how many! Your advice gratefully received.

I use them to:

check Twitter, Facebook and RSS
look things up online
read books (that rectangle doesn't currently glow)
read PDFs of scientific papers, books etc
make voice memos
look at maps
make journey plans
check bus arrival times
occasionally take photos
from time to time even make and receive voice calls.

I'd like to use them also to make Skype calls.

One thing I can't work out is whether to buy one device or two. What fits comfortably in a pocket is too small for reading PDFs and smaller than I'd like for many of the other jobs. But with my current collection of ageing devices, I've found setting up a WiFi hotspot every time I want to get one of the other devices online on the move is a right pain; it's slow and cumbersome, and you have to remember to turn it off or you're wondering why your Internet is so slow when you get home, or why it's not working on the Tube platform. I don't really want the expense of two SIM cards and contracts to go with them if I can help it either!

If such a thing existed, I'd almost be tempted by a 7" phone, but it wouldn't fit in my pocket at all, and though my bag is with me everywhere it's often too far away to have my phone in. I just tried some PDFs on my slightly broken Galaxy Note 1, and the maths PDF is fine but the philosophy one is awful, very hard to read - in part simply due to the double spacing.

For the price of, say, the Galaxy Note 3, I could get something like a top-of-the-range Nexus 7 and a smaller but fairly high-spec phone.

What should I buy? Thanks! This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/361655.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Legal templates

2013-01-04T13:05:56Z

I'm changing my cryonics life insurance provider, and it seems I need a new "absolute trust" document. My IFA has found a lawyer who will draw me one up for £250.

The thing that bugs me is that the last two people who needed them paid £250 each, and the next person who needs one will also pay £250, but the only change is crossing out some names and writing in others. There's nothing in there that tailors it to my personal circumstances or anything like that. But I need their imprimateur if the life insurance company are to accept it, and they charge a lot for that.

Is there a way I can pay a once-off fee to get the proper legal stamp of approval on a template document, which I and other people can then fill in the blanks on and use, with no further charges?

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/361465.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Mounting a TV to the wall

2012-11-27T11:47:22Z

I bought this wall bracket for this TV. I want to attach it to a brick wall. I'm a bit disturbed by how close together the top and bottom wall fixings are - it seems like it will work hard to pull the top fixings out of the wall. I find myself wanting to somehow attach vertical strips of metal with holes in to the bracket at either end making an H shape, and use the holes at the top and bottom of each strip to attach to the wall. Is this a crazy idea? Where online can I get such a strip of metal, and how would I go about it? Or should I just rawlplug it into the brick wall and not worry about it?

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/361020.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

More lotteries

2012-09-13T07:57:53Z

Thanks for all your answers and discussion in the last entry! I don't think either those questions, or these, have a straighforward "right" answer, I'm just interested how different people think about these things.

So instead of the offer last time, the behavioural economics unit funded by an eccentric billionaire is offering you a different choice. Now there are no guaranteed wins. To decide if you win, they will roll a fair 100-sided die to get a number from 1-100. If you choose the first bet and the die reads 60 or less, you win; for the second bet if it reads 9 or less, you win. However, in the first case they'll tell you only whether you won or lost, while in the second case they roll the die in front of you and you see the exact number they used to decide.

View Poll: Strange lotteries part 2

Lotteries and waiting

2012-09-12T06:53:45Z

Assume that the institution offering these things is fully vetted by the Gambling Commission, insured so that you still get the money if they fold, and has every other kind of guarantee and backer you care to think of so that they are in every way 100% trustworthy.

View Poll: Would you rather have

Ways the singularity could fail to happen - the poll

2012-08-22T11:26:42Z

Coo, free accounts can do LJ polls now! Following on from this post, a poll.

I often find discussion of the idea of superintelligence quickly devolves into a less interesting discussion about how people feel about those who talk about superintelligence. I'm interested to know what you think will happen

Read carefully: ~~two~~three important caveats:

For each option, what I'm interested in is how likely you think it is GIVEN THAT NONE OF THE ABOVE ARE TRUE. So for the third one, what I want to know is, ASSUMING THAT human minds are NOT fundamentally different to other physical things, AND that it is meaningful to think of one mind being greatly more efficient than another, would you say it's more likely than not that human minds are within a few orders of magnitude of the most efficient minds possible in principle in our corner of the Universe? So for the penultimate option, you're asking, given that the idea of superintelligence is meaningful and we have the capacity to build them, will we?
And there's one big assumption that I don't even put in the poll: the assumption that we don't wipe ourselves out or otherwise permanently limit our potential some other way before doing the things we discuss here. I think there's an excellent chance we will; I just want to set that aside for a moment in order to have a distinct discussion about this.
Given that, the question is more likely than not, not merely "likely enough to be worth taking seriously". Emphasized because I'm very surprised to see some boxes being ticked - you really think those things are more likely than the converse?

View Poll: Ways the Singularity can fail to happen

Going to the Bay Area in FIVE DAYS - who should I meet?

2012-07-14T07:39:40Z

I board my flight on Thursday! I'll be at the CfAR minicamp for the first week, then I have a week in the Bay Area, from Sunday 29 July to Sunday 5 August. Do you want to meet up? Do you know someone I should meet? Is there something I should go to in that time? What are your transatlantic travel top tips? Thanks!

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/360722.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Apology

2012-07-11T13:01:50Z

A comment on this post reminds me that I meant to say something about this and never did. I made this post about the Old Testament God a few months ago. It was a copy of a comment from an ongoing discussion between a current believer in the Jewish religion and various former believers. In context, therefore, the focus on problems with Judaism specifically made lots of sense. However, when I yanked it out of context and posted it here, it sounded like something very different, and set lots of people's antisemitism alarms off. It was a mistake for me not to see what a difference taking it out of context would make and I apologise!

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/360469.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Pills puzzle

2012-06-30T09:49:49Z

The following puzzle appears on Futility Closet:

My doctor wants to establish a dosage for a new drug, so he gives me a bottle of 48 pills and tells me to take them throughout the month of June. I can take as many or as few as I like on any given day, so long as I take at least 1 pill each day. Show that there’s a sequence of consecutive days during which I take exactly 11 pills.

You can click through that link for their solution. Here's what I want to know.

In their proof, they write 2 numbers on each of 30 days, and they write 59 different numbers, and invoke the pigeonhole principle to show that some number must be written twice. I think we can take this further: if we're writing cumulative totals, we should write them between days, not on days. So we start before 1 June by writing 0 pills, and finish after 30 June by writing 48 pills, then write the row above. So we really write the 60 numbers from 0-59 in 62 places.

There therefore must be an interval between which I took 12 pills, since this still only gives us the 61 numbers 0-60 to write in the 62 slots.

First question: is the above correct? Must a 12-pill interval exist?

Let's suppose I take one pill each day except for the 15th, on which I take the other 19 pills. Then there is no interval during which I take exactly 16, 17, or 18 pills; any interval that doesn't include the 15th has at most 15 pills in it, while any that does has at least 19.

Second question: does the above counterexample work? Can you extend it to handle any other intervals?

If we have p pills to take over d days, where d < p < 2d, the above proof shows that there must be an interval in which we take exactly l pills for 0 <= l <= 2d - p. The above counterexample shows that there need not be such an interval where d < 2l and l <= p - d.

Supposing we take 19 pills over 11 days like this:

x
x
x
xxxxx
x
x
x
xxxxx
x
x
x

Then there's no interval in which we take 4 pills. So there's a counterexample for l if there's some k > 0 for which d < l(k+1) and p >= d + kl.

Obvious third question: given d days and p pills, where d < p < 2d, what is the rule that tells us whether an interval of l pills has to exist?

jack suggested a different way of looking at this puzzle on Facebook. Instead of imagining the days as slots in which you have to fit the pills, imagine the 48 pills laid out in a row in front of you. The midnight at the start of June is at one end, and the one at the finish at the other. You have to fit the other 29 midnights in the gaps between the pills in such a way that there's at most one midnight in each gap, and no two midnights are exactly 11 pills apart. From this it follows immediately that having more days can only hurt, never help, and the above counterexamples flow from a simple "greedy" strategy of going from gap to gap, putting in a midnight in each gap if you can without breaking the rule. If we can prove that this greedy strategy is optimal, the problem is solved.

Update I'm now convinced that there is always a greedy strategy. Arrange the pills in rows of 11; now the rule is simply that no midnight may have a midnight directly below it. So for any allowable arrangement, I think you can turn it into a greedy arrangement by shuffling midnights upwards, moving whole columns leftwards, and taking midnights from the end to move them into empty columns. Need to think about the immovable midnights at either end to make this rigorous.

Update with answer: There is a way of taking p pills over d days with no l-pill intervals iff p ≠ l and d < floor((p+l+1)/2). Update to the update: This answer is slightly wrong. Update with new answer: There is a way of taking p pills over d days with no l-pill intervals iff p ≠ l and 2d ≤ p + min(p mod 2l, 2l - (p mod 2l) -2)

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/360095.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Going to the Bay Area in three months!

2012-04-21T08:40:51Z

In the afternoon of Thursday 19th July, I'll be boarding a plane that will ultimately take me to SFO airport. I'll be attending the Center for Modern Rationality minicamp, then staying in the Bay Area with the marvellous shevek for at least some of the time until my flight back in the afternoon of Sunday 5th August. EEEEEEEEEE!

Three days after I return to the UK, I leave for BiCon. I'll be spending two of those days in the office. So I'm going to have to have everything totally lined up for BiCon before I go!

Todo:

Renew passport
Sort out forms for the visa waiver program
Book post-flight hotel
Travel insurance
Order a credit card
Book for BiCon
Plan what I'm wearing for BiCon - find it all now
Book hair dye, haircut, leg wax, eyebrow threading appointments before trip
Add hold luggage to my flights - do I need to do anything here? Email says "Baggage is 1PC + 7Kg (Hand Baggage)" but Delta's page on checked baggage seems to indicate I get one free 23kg bag...
WHAT HAVE I FORGOTTEN???

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/359778.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Imagine you're a young Midianite woman.

2012-03-22T22:00:59Z

Christian, Islamic, and Jewish religious tradition reveres the character of Moses as described in the Old Testament. It's easy to forget what an incredibly evil character he is. Here's an excerpt from a discussion on the subject; since it's between people of Jewish background it discusses specifically Jewish tradition, but it applies to all three.

The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.

[...] The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went?

Imagine you're a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You've barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he's already bashed your brother's brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.

[...] What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying "amen" as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people's genocide.

At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. "They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option." I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator's heritage as your own?

The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She's watching you kiss it. She knows what's written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?

--HonoreDB, Less Wrong

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/359474.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Rant I wrote in IM

2012-02-21T13:35:58Z

I never post, so here's a rant written in IM I want to preserve. Edited somewhat.

here's how it seems to me
there's an argument for the singularity that goes like this
"A, B, C, D, and E all seem likely"
"E says that A + B + C + D = Singularity"
and then people say "No, the singularity is rubbish"
and we say "do you disagree with A, B, C, D, or E?"
and they say "You're all a bunch of wild-eyed dreamers"
and we say "Err, so is that C you disagree with?"
and they say "It's religion for geeks, man!"
and we say "Err, but..."
and ... they just DON'T FUCKING ENGAGE AT ALL.
That's why I keep pointing at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/357313.html
it takes the contrapositive, and says "If not singularity, then either ¬A or ¬B or ¬C or ¬D or ¬E"
No-one said "oh wait, you forgot F"
but none of ¬A or ¬B or ¬C or ¬D or ¬E got a lot of support.

I am willing to accept that this misrepresents singularity critics horribly - you certainly don't all call us names for example! But I hope the broad form of my frustration is clear and if I'm confused I hope it makes it easier for you to clear up my confusion :-)

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/359382.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Valentinr

2012-02-11T08:38:15Z

I ignored all these because I hadn't set one up. Now I have one, I'm worried about all the ones I missed. What if they've all sent me mutual love notes, and I never receive them because I didn't click at the time? I encourage you all to re-link to your Valentinr entries this weekend to be on the safe side :-)

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/359043.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Phone buying advice

2011-10-24T19:12:01Z

The time is coming for lovelybug to get a new Android mobile phone. My feeling is that it should be at least the same resolution as my HTC Desire (ie 480x800)~~, and should be able to be a USB host - ie it should be possible to connect things like digital cameras to it and copy off the photos~~. Apart from that the most important consideration is cost, though a better battery life would be nice.

Any recommendations? Should we get a phone with a contract, or buy the phone separately and get eg this £10/month deal from 3?

Thanks!

Update: damn, very sorry to hear the USB host thing isn't going to work :-(

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/358750.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

Rationality

2011-10-21T12:28:43Z

As many of you know, I'm part of a website whose purpose is to discuss how to think and make decisions more rationally; we also meet face-to-face. Leaving aside the specific characteristics of that website and group, what's your immediate reaction to the whole idea of a group for discussing how to be more rational?

(edited to make clear that it's at least in part how the idea makes you feel that I'm interested in!)

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/358551.html, where there are comments. You can comment there using OpenID.

What will happen to the newspapers?

2011-10-17T10:20:13Z

Newspapers everywhere are finding it progressively harder to make any money, and their future is in doubt. Lots of people have opinions on what should happen next, or what newspapers should do. I'm interested in a different question here - leaving aside all normative discussion of what we might like or not like, what do people think is actually going to happen?

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/358287.html. You can comment there using OpenID.

Pinker on statistics

2011-10-16T19:08:56Z

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. Yet pundits continue to hallucinate trends in freak events, like the Norwegian sniper (who shot all those young people on an island) and make wildly innumerate comparisons, such as between Afghanistan and Vietnam, or between today's human trafficking and the African slave trade. It's a holdover of the literary sensibilities of our science-flunking intellectual elite, who would be aghast if someone didn't know who Milton was, but cheerfully flaunt their ignorance of basic science and mathematics. I lobbied – unsuccessfully – for a course requirement at Harvard in statistical and logical reasoning.

-- Steven Pinker

Do men make the first move?

2011-10-06T07:31:54Z

Reading this fascinating comment thread on Greta Christina's blog:

What counts as “the first move”?
Fair question. I would say “the first overt, unambiguous, verbal move.” I.e., asking someone out, or otherwise making a move that can’t be interpreted as anything other than a move, and that requires an overt response. (The point being that if you toss your hair at someone and they ignore you, you can save face and pretend you weren’t making a first move — but if you say, “Would you like to go out with me?”, that’s not possible, and you have to accept the possibility and indeed the likelihood of overt rejection.)

The stories told there seem somewhat American, even when they're from the pansexual, BDSM Bay Area. How does it work in our community, when a man and a woman hook up?

This entry was originally posted at http://ciphergoth.dreamwidth.org/358064.html. You can comment there using OpenID.

Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable

2011-09-20T12:59:51Z

Following up my earlier post asking what shall I start a fight on the Internet about, I present:

Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2007-08-04.

The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.

The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it - quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah's bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah - the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar - ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the early days - to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah's altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout "The Lord is God!" - peer review.

And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.

[...] Maybe someday, humanity will advance further, and anyone who endorses the Bible as a source of ethics will be treated the same way as Trent Lott endorsing Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign. And then it will be said that religion's "true core" has always been genealogy or something.

The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie - a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe. You have to admire its sheer brazenness, on a par with Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The prosecutor whips out the bloody axe, and the defendant, momentarily shocked, thinks quickly and says: "But you can't disprove my innocence by mere evidence - it's a separate magisterium!"

What shall I argue about?

2011-09-20T12:12:28Z

Am off sick and in bed, typing on my phone, and bored. A friend recommends I entertain myself in the time honoured fashion, by starting a fight on the Internet. But what about? Suggestions both frivolous and serious please!