Alternatively, just look at the people who live the kind of life you want to live and see how they got there and follow their path
When I was in high school, I wrote and ran a prisoner’s dilemma simulation where strategies reproduced themselves via this mechanism. After every cell played several rounds against its neighbors, each examined itself and its neighbors to see how many points were accumulated, then either mutated randomly or copied its most successful neighbor.
I was trying to experiment in the fashion of vaguely described other simulations I’d read of, and maybe replicate their interesting result: reportedly initial random strategies were soon beaten by always-defect, which would then eventually be beaten out by tit-for-tat, which would then be beaten by always-cooperate, which would in turn be beaten when always-defect reappeared. Psychological/sociological/historical analogies are an interesting exercise for the reader.
But what did I get, instead? Overwhelming victory of a stategy I eventually called “gangster”. IIRC it was something like “start with a random high probability of cooperating, then if your opponent cooperates, you start always defecting, but if your opponent defects you start always cooperating”.
Sounds like a pretty awful strategy, right? And overall, it was: its resulting scores at each iteration were a sea of always-cooperated-against-defectors losers, punctuated by dots of lucky always-defected-against-many-cooperators winners. But the losers and the winners were using the same strategy! And because each new generation looked at that strategy’s great peak performance rather than it’s lousy average performance, there was no likelihood of switching to anything better.
Here I’ll make some of the sociological analogies explicit: looking at people who live the kind of life you want to live is a lousy way to pick a life path. It’s how gangsters are born, because every little hoodlum imagines themselves as one of the rich dealers’ dealers’ dealers at the top of the pyramid, not as one of the bottom rung dealers risking jail and death for near minimum wage. It’s how kids waste their time aiming at star entertainer and athlete careers, because they all imagine themselves as part of the 99.9th percentile millionaire superstars rather than as one of the mere 99th percentile B-listers or the 90th percentile waitstaff. It’s how people waste their salaries gambling, even—who doesn’t want to live a life as a multimillionaire who didn’t have to work for any of it? Other people did it, and all we have to do is follow their path...
This is a nitpicking digression, but I think it’s an important nitpick. “Pick a life path whose average results you prefer” is a great metastrategy, but following it means examining the entire lives of the 50th percentile schlubs. Instead emulating your “heroes” as chosen based on the peak of their fame is just common sense, which commonly fails.
I very nearly missed this which would have been sad. Might you edit it a little and post it to Less Wrong main? It’d be a great post. A few hints at where psychological/sociological/historical analogies might be drawn would also be cool.
I’d like to have my references in better shape than “vague recollection of code I wrote a decade or two ago” and “vague recollection of decades-old potentially-distorted pop science magazine summary of someone else’s unpublished code” first.
Hmmm… that might be doable. My own code I could probably fix with a rewrite (it was a simple algorithm and even the original BASIC version was a few hundred lines at worst). And as for the latter reference, I found one of the articles which inspired me here:
Looks like this is behind a paywall, though? I seem to be able to access it from work computers (the UTexas library has a subscription to this swath of Scientific American archives) but not home computers.
One other point of reluctance occurs to me: there are conditions under which imagining yourself to be a superstar, while still bad from a selfish viewpoint, might be good for society as a whole: when you’re considering becoming a scientist or inventor. Finding a working tungsten light-bulb filament was more than worth wasting hundreds or thousands of failed filaments in Edison’s experiments, both from society’s point of view and from Edison’s… but what if you look at harder scientific problems, for which each world-changing breakthrough might cost hundreds or thousands of less-successful scientists who would have been happier and wealthier in finance or law or medicine or software or...? Maybe it’s a good thing that lots of smart kids imagine being the next Einstein, then pick a career which is likely to be suboptimal in terms of personal utility but optimal in terms of global utility.
On the gripping hand, maybe the world would be better in the long run if science was seen as inglorious, (relatively) impoverishing, low status… but very altruistic. “Less science” might be a tolerable price to pay for “less science in the wrong hands”.
When I was in high school, I wrote and ran a prisoner’s dilemma simulation where strategies reproduced themselves via this mechanism. After every cell played several rounds against its neighbors, each examined itself and its neighbors to see how many points were accumulated, then either mutated randomly or copied its most successful neighbor.
I was trying to experiment in the fashion of vaguely described other simulations I’d read of, and maybe replicate their interesting result: reportedly initial random strategies were soon beaten by always-defect, which would then eventually be beaten out by tit-for-tat, which would then be beaten by always-cooperate, which would in turn be beaten when always-defect reappeared. Psychological/sociological/historical analogies are an interesting exercise for the reader.
But what did I get, instead? Overwhelming victory of a stategy I eventually called “gangster”. IIRC it was something like “start with a random high probability of cooperating, then if your opponent cooperates, you start always defecting, but if your opponent defects you start always cooperating”.
Sounds like a pretty awful strategy, right? And overall, it was: its resulting scores at each iteration were a sea of always-cooperated-against-defectors losers, punctuated by dots of lucky always-defected-against-many-cooperators winners. But the losers and the winners were using the same strategy! And because each new generation looked at that strategy’s great peak performance rather than it’s lousy average performance, there was no likelihood of switching to anything better.
Here I’ll make some of the sociological analogies explicit: looking at people who live the kind of life you want to live is a lousy way to pick a life path. It’s how gangsters are born, because every little hoodlum imagines themselves as one of the rich dealers’ dealers’ dealers at the top of the pyramid, not as one of the bottom rung dealers risking jail and death for near minimum wage. It’s how kids waste their time aiming at star entertainer and athlete careers, because they all imagine themselves as part of the 99.9th percentile millionaire superstars rather than as one of the mere 99th percentile B-listers or the 90th percentile waitstaff. It’s how people waste their salaries gambling, even—who doesn’t want to live a life as a multimillionaire who didn’t have to work for any of it? Other people did it, and all we have to do is follow their path...
This is a nitpicking digression, but I think it’s an important nitpick. “Pick a life path whose average results you prefer” is a great metastrategy, but following it means examining the entire lives of the 50th percentile schlubs. Instead emulating your “heroes” as chosen based on the peak of their fame is just common sense, which commonly fails.
Post this as a top level post.
I just want to thank you for this great post, one of the best I’ve seen in a while.
I very nearly missed this which would have been sad. Might you edit it a little and post it to Less Wrong main? It’d be a great post. A few hints at where psychological/sociological/historical analogies might be drawn would also be cool.
I’d like to have my references in better shape than “vague recollection of code I wrote a decade or two ago” and “vague recollection of decades-old potentially-distorted pop science magazine summary of someone else’s unpublished code” first.
Hmmm… that might be doable. My own code I could probably fix with a rewrite (it was a simple algorithm and even the original BASIC version was a few hundred lines at worst). And as for the latter reference, I found one of the articles which inspired me here:
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v272/n6/pdf/scientificamerican0695-76.pdf
Looks like this is behind a paywall, though? I seem to be able to access it from work computers (the UTexas library has a subscription to this swath of Scientific American archives) but not home computers.
One other point of reluctance occurs to me: there are conditions under which imagining yourself to be a superstar, while still bad from a selfish viewpoint, might be good for society as a whole: when you’re considering becoming a scientist or inventor. Finding a working tungsten light-bulb filament was more than worth wasting hundreds or thousands of failed filaments in Edison’s experiments, both from society’s point of view and from Edison’s… but what if you look at harder scientific problems, for which each world-changing breakthrough might cost hundreds or thousands of less-successful scientists who would have been happier and wealthier in finance or law or medicine or software or...? Maybe it’s a good thing that lots of smart kids imagine being the next Einstein, then pick a career which is likely to be suboptimal in terms of personal utility but optimal in terms of global utility.
On the gripping hand, maybe the world would be better in the long run if science was seen as inglorious, (relatively) impoverishing, low status… but very altruistic. “Less science” might be a tolerable price to pay for “less science in the wrong hands”.