I think smart people try things less often than they should, because of a cached mental pattern where you think of what might go wrong, and you find a foolproof countermeasure on the part of some antag, and so we call it off.
Stockfish, playing itself, might as well resign from the first move if you force it to give knight odds. Sensei(the Go AI), should do the same when it has to give 6 stones. Getting ready to go into the stock market, do I really think I have some edge that Adderall swilling quants and their AI pets haven’t already priced in? (The pricing in, of course, is also priced in).
And yet Stockfish could wipe the floor with the breathing populace with knight odds. Sensei regularly beats kyu players with 6 stones (or would, if one could find a kyu player who isn’t running the AI on their other tab), and my modest portfolio of index funds made me money last year. (But not provably more than....)
The robots, of course, are just benefiting from their imperfect adversaries mistakes. They play in a losing situation because, over time, their foes will crumble and ruin their own shots. That is, despite their situation being hopeless, they do not resign, and profit thereby. This generalizes quite a bit.
Panhandlers, e-girls and scammers are up against an unbeatable wall. Their prey has the opportunity to simply walk by / not click. There is no counterplay on their part that can save them. All of the agency, all of the volition, is in the hands of the party with the resources. Should they decline and move on, that’s it, game over.
And yet, such individuals still succeed, from time to time. Despite their powerlessness, despite their timeworn approach, someone would love to help the Nigerian king move his money.
True story, a long time ago, when Netflix was first rising up, I got a big chunk of its stock. I sold it, because, after all, mailing CDs to people can’t possibly be the future! They were pursuing a ridiculous course of action, and surely they would be outcompeted by someone less silly.
The bumblebee, of course, flies anyway, and my derision only impoverished me, Netflix made out just fine. Doing a dumb thing outcompeted sneering at those who did a dumb thing, once again. (Insert Uber comparison here)
What I’m sort of gesturing at here is the basic notion that taking action succeeds more than it ‘ought’ to. Red Team rarely has its act together (through no virtue of our dauntless heroes), and you may skate by.
Smart people have a tendency to enjoy the if/then of it all, the play and counterplay of how the game theory could work out. (If I play Rock, he will play Paper, so I should play Scissors after initially signalling Rock, but of course he’ll know that my initial signal has no incentive to be accurate, and therefore he might read my read and...) But from what I’ve seen, in the actual way the world operates, countermove is very rare. Counter-counter-move is all but extinct.
You can, to steal a phrase, just do things. They might fail, but I suspect that if you are concerned about failing due to adversarial interference you may be overestimating its likelihood.
Try, even if they have you cold
I think smart people try things less often than they should, because of a cached mental pattern where you think of what might go wrong, and you find a foolproof countermeasure on the part of some antag, and so we call it off.
Stockfish, playing itself, might as well resign from the first move if you force it to give knight odds. Sensei(the Go AI), should do the same when it has to give 6 stones. Getting ready to go into the stock market, do I really think I have some edge that Adderall swilling quants and their AI pets haven’t already priced in? (The pricing in, of course, is also priced in).
And yet Stockfish could wipe the floor with the breathing populace with knight odds. Sensei regularly beats kyu players with 6 stones (or would, if one could find a kyu player who isn’t running the AI on their other tab), and my modest portfolio of index funds made me money last year. (But not provably more than....)
The robots, of course, are just benefiting from their imperfect adversaries mistakes. They play in a losing situation because, over time, their foes will crumble and ruin their own shots. That is, despite their situation being hopeless, they do not resign, and profit thereby. This generalizes quite a bit.
Panhandlers, e-girls and scammers are up against an unbeatable wall. Their prey has the opportunity to simply walk by / not click. There is no counterplay on their part that can save them. All of the agency, all of the volition, is in the hands of the party with the resources. Should they decline and move on, that’s it, game over.
And yet, such individuals still succeed, from time to time. Despite their powerlessness, despite their timeworn approach, someone would love to help the Nigerian king move his money.
True story, a long time ago, when Netflix was first rising up, I got a big chunk of its stock. I sold it, because, after all, mailing CDs to people can’t possibly be the future! They were pursuing a ridiculous course of action, and surely they would be outcompeted by someone less silly.
The bumblebee, of course, flies anyway, and my derision only impoverished me, Netflix made out just fine. Doing a dumb thing outcompeted sneering at those who did a dumb thing, once again. (Insert Uber comparison here)
What I’m sort of gesturing at here is the basic notion that taking action succeeds more than it ‘ought’ to. Red Team rarely has its act together (through no virtue of our dauntless heroes), and you may skate by.
Smart people have a tendency to enjoy the if/then of it all, the play and counterplay of how the game theory could work out. (If I play Rock, he will play Paper, so I should play Scissors after initially signalling Rock, but of course he’ll know that my initial signal has no incentive to be accurate, and therefore he might read my read and...) But from what I’ve seen, in the actual way the world operates, countermove is very rare. Counter-counter-move is all but extinct.
You can, to steal a phrase, just do things. They might fail, but I suspect that if you are concerned about failing due to adversarial interference you may be overestimating its likelihood.