please make lots of jokes involving the normal force so that i can use them in my first year class

that black hole must be full of spaghetti. right?

Mood

I gotta say this is a great skeet to find myself included on!

Anyway The way to win the game is to go in with a 6 sided dice (or quantum random number generator). If you roll a 1-2-3-4 pick the one box, if you roll a 5-6 pick the second box.

Free will doesn't exist, but randomness does.

And the rest of the video was about whether free will exists or some stuff about game theory and playing chicken.

So anyway, my reasoning was wrong.
Also, expected values aren't helpful if you only get to play the game once.

Also, the computer knows you are going to change your mind.

Knowing that the computer's strategy is just to pick one box always, the best strategy is to pick two boxes! How clever!

I watched the rest of the video in hopes of having thought to an equivalent depth as a philosopher or game theorist.

Anyway I was wrong. 1/3 people choose 2 boxes off the bat

What if the optimal computer strategy is NOT to setup complicated predictions, but just instead to have computer just assume that everyone is only taking one box. And then the high probability of success would be from the equally high likelihood of everyone choosing one box.

But then! Knowing this

So I figured that the rest of the veritasium video was about conditional probabilities. The overall probability of success for the computer (recall: only "almost perfect" at guessing) depends on these conditional probabilities.

But what if: in this clever situation, in spite of everything...

I noticed as I did my computation that I was using probabilities for the computer being right, which I had assumed were independent of the condition of my choice.

My choice was made after the computer had guessed what I would do (so it should be independent) but formally they should be dependent.

Here is where it gets fun...

I reasoned that we could expect everyone to choose 1 box rather than 2 ( Almost a Million dollar expected value, neglecting a small possibility the computer would pick wrong)

Then I started wondering what the rest of the video was about...

The lowest possible expected values were that both the computer and I had 50/50 random number generators.

Ironically, this is probably the strategy most likely to get you the biggest prize.

I noted that the expected value goes up with the likelihood of me taking one box.

Instead I (bored) had only watched the first 2 minutes of the video and wanted to scratch out my own answer.

So I ascribed a probability to the computer being right, and a probability to me choosing one box, and then looked at expected values based on outcomes.

The narrator in the video gets really attached to chronology, as if the game is not based around predictions of him making logical decisions in the room... But the psychologist computer knew that you would be thinking this way.

free will is somehow baked into the question in a way I did not notice

The premise of this game is wild: an almost infallible supercomputer! It almost certainly knows what you are going to do!

I had fun with this because I was interpreting the "almost certainly" in terms of some probabilistic fallibility rather than in terms of whether or not free will exists.

This Paradox Splits Smart People 50/50 YouTube video by Veritasium

youtu.be/Ol18JoeXlVI?...

As I wait for my students to finish writing their exam, I started playing around with this old thing!

That time I got shipwrecked and found a manservant

Alasdair Stuart: tell me this? Is Robinson Crusoe an isekai story?

Kaiju (but make it haiku)

Misfortune visits
Unexpectedly today
A loud, harsh sorrow

Kaiju (but make it haiku)

My head hurts this morning
The familiar landscape's changed
Just fragile nonsense

A grey blue washed image of a bearded young ish white guy looking into the mirror all serious with his palm pressed against it. A serif font title reads: DID I JUST ARGUE WITH A JOKE? A semi opaque navy snoot near the bottom bears the bluesky logo and the text PART OF A BLUESKY EDUCATIONAL SERIES

This is why the following quote from Mayor Mamdani echoes in my head frequently: "For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty."

thanks

holy crow let’s hear more about them! what glaze?

One of the interesting thing from talking to economists is the extent to which the private discourse is way more narrow than the public discourse, on e.g. immigration, rent control, and free trade. Like in immigration, the private discourse is almost exclusively pro; just a question of specifics.

exams start next week. last lecture tomorrow 8am

Osamu Tezuka's Communist vision of tomorrow

Come grade this backlog of astronomy assignments

JD Vance keep up man