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[silverspawn]

The thing about this is that the failsafe way to do all of these problems is always "apply Bayes rule" but Bayes rule is too complicated to do in your head. The odds version of bayes rule is completely equivalent and it is easy enough to do in your head as I've done above, but of course I wasn't taught that in school or at university

In some sense I think all of this is only confusing because it's almost always taught poorly, similar to Linear Algebra.

[silverspawn]

Although I realize now that all of the people on twitter who brought up Monty Hall probably didn't realize it's the opposite and brought it up like "read up on this to realize why the real answer is 0.8"

[silverspawn]

The "intuitive" solution works in both cases, you  just have to adjust where the probability mass of the revealed door/compartment goes. I.e., you always start with equal probability mass on all three doors/all five compartments (with "it's not there" as fifth compartment); when you open one and see a goat/no adapter the probability for that door/compartment goes to 0 and then have to be careful about where that probability mass goes to instead.

In Compartment/Monty Hall with random door, the probability distributes across all other doors/compartments equally, so Monty Hall (1/3, 1/3, 1/3) becomes (0, 1/2, 1/2) and Compartment (1/5,1/5,1/5,1/5,1/5) becomes (0, 1/4, 1/4, 1/4, 1/4) and then (0, 0, 1/3, 1/3, 1/3) and finally (0, 0, 0, 1/2, 1/2).

In Monty Hall with Goat, all probability mass flows to the third door and (1/3, 1/3, 1/3) becomes (0, 1/3, 2/3)

[silverspawn]

Relatively little to do now that the submission has been done, and also it's the holidays so I don't even have school

Time to use that money netflix gets from me every month. Let's try to guess how many shows/movies I have to try to find something worth watching.

I'll say 7 is a reasonable estimate.

[silverspawn]

I feel like my low productivity days like the past couple are similar to my average productivity days from like three years ago. It totally slacking off relative to normal but still got a whole bunch of things done

[silverspawn]

Okay 1/n: Maid here we go

[silverspawn]

Well that came kind of close but it feels like I'm watching something written not something real. Maybe this works for most people but I can recognize those recurring generic-writing patterns. This is probably going to be my complaint about half of the time.

2/n Crash landing on you

[silverspawn]

Well that certainly had more heart and also more thought but no I'm not watching a self aware but plainly dumb romantic comedy

3/n Christine

[silverspawn]

Older movies sure take more time to get going but all of these people are uninteresting I'm bored (this was supposed to be a horror film)

4/n The Craft

[silverspawn]

This was such a weak attempt at horror it's a little endearing let's try another genre

5/n Geisha

[silverspawn]

Ok well A+ for trying but no

Usually what happens when I try this is that I see something good I already know and watch some of that, but this time that's not allowed. (Right now i have to not click on the tale of the princess kaguya which is a gazillion times better than anything I've just tried.)

6/n Brand new cherry flavor

[silverspawn]

The title of this show makes me significantly less likely to click on it but I'm into it so far also I feel like I know the main character's voice from somewhere

[silverspawn]

Well I'll watch at least an episode of this so my guess was pretty good

[silverspawn]

ok she vomited out a cat at the end of episode 1, good stuff. no idea if I'll finish this show but I'm entertained so far

[silverspawn]

ok this show is kind of awesome I'm glad I did this

[silverspawn]

I feel like I derive a ton of genuine benefit from this thread. For one is because it resolves the problem of "I never post things because I don't know if they're good enough". This is something I've struggled with forever, and then sometimes I've also made the opposite error ("The hesitation to post this is just because of my anxiety, so I'm just going to take the heroic step of just posting it" into "well actually that definitely was something I shuoldn't have said"). Now I can instead look at the stream-of-consciousness version and make a more informed decision about whether or not that's worth putting more effort into. And then the other reason is as a form of mild commitment. Yesterday I had to watch the beginning of five shows I didn't like to find one I like. That's really not an unreasonable price; assuming I finish brand new cherry flavor, that'll be something like 85%/15% time on watching good/bad things. But without this thread, I would have given up after probably the second or third,  if not definitely the fifth because the titlecard of princes kaguya was looking at me, and instead either closed Netflix or half-heartedly rewatched something I already know.

[silverspawn]

Somehow feel like bragging about this

look at my awesome semi-auto-generated list of all classes I have to teach the entire year. Isn't it beautiful?



Was totally worth making this at the start of the year, for the psychological benefit of feeling like I have an overview alone

[silverspawn]

The only non-auto-generated part about this is that I can manually delete specific classes if they don't happen for some reason, in which case the numbering adapts automatically. The logic only supports a list of entire days as holidays

[silverspawn]

A little known fact is that there is a close correspondence between Excel-type programs and the functional programming paradigm (as supposed to object oriented programming and various others). This basically means that your program consists of a bunch of functions calling each other. This is kind of what an excel spreadsheet is

A massive caveat/simplification/restriction of Excel is that only the full output of functions can be utilized by other functions. E.g., in the functional programming language Haskell, you can define the factorial function via

fac :: int -> int
fac 0 = 1
fac n = n * fac (n-1)

You can't do this in excel because the function that created the output of a cell isn't a thing other cells can reference; only the output can be referenced. (In particular, a cell can't reference itself.) So you'd need to use a column of numbers. That makes it like a tenth as powerful but it can still do a lot of things.

I actually believe that functional programming is way way superior to object oriented programming and the only reason not everyone is doing it is because of historical trends. (But python has a lot of functional elements, and I think they're like the main reason why it's so popular.) Purely functional code a la Haskell is like the most beautiful thing there is. It matches how humans describe problems a quadrillion times better than object oriented code, and you can have the ridiculous experience of writing a complex program, running it, and having it work on the first try because you make so much fewer mistakes with functional code. A major reason is that you don't use indices to loop over lists. And the code is usually shorter.

[silverspawn]

Caveat to the above is that functional code is less efficient then object oriented code, just like object oriented code is less efficient than C and C is less efficient than Assembly. A natural consequence of moving up the ladder of abstraction

[silverspawn]

Ok I like the thriller, comedy, horror, and uncategorizable surrealness of this show. I'm fine with the drama and characters. I'm largely indifferent to the slapstick comedy. But the grossness is yuck. Why do shows try to be deliberately gross? Grossing me out is extremely easy and unimpressive and it's never ever good.

[silverspawn]

So I feel like I'm significantly better at chess than two months ago but my rating is 70 lower. Also don't think I was overrated back then. This should imply that I can now win most games if I really try. Let's test that by trying for the next 10 games.

[silverspawn]

Ok I like the thriller, comedy, horror, and uncategorizable surrealness of this show. I'm fine with the drama and characters. I'm largely indifferent to the slapstick comedy. But the grossness is yuck. Why do shows try to be deliberately gross? Grossing me out is extremely easy and unimpressive and it's never ever good.

Do you guys like being grossed out? I assume people must like it, otherwise it shouldn't still be a thing. And it's not like there's any objective reason to like horror but not gross

[silverspawn]

Go for terror. If you can't manage terror, go for horror. If you can't manage horror, go for gross.

-- A possibly misremembered Stephan King quote

[Awaclus]

Do you guys like being grossed out? I assume people must like it, otherwise it shouldn't still be a thing. And it's not like there's any objective reason to like horror but not gross

Not for the sake of being grossed out, but it can serve a purpose, especially in horror or comedy. I mean, it's a feeling, and feelings evoked by fiction are like colors in a painting — by themselves, they're neither good nor bad.