Karma: 103
• It occurs to me that from a system robustness perspective, luxury is actually great, because it implies surplus capacity (assuming society can and will divert luxury-production to essentials-production in a crisis).

• The “best” values in KS are those that result when you optimize one player’s payoff under the constraint that the second player’s payoff is higher than the disagreement payoff.

I’m not sure this is the case? Wiki does say “It is assumed that the problem is nontrivial, i.e, the agreements in [the feasible set] are better for both parties than the disagreement”, but this is ambiguous as to whether they mean some or all. Googling further, I see graphs like this where non-Pareto-improvement solutions visibly do count.

I agree that your version seems more reasonable, but I think you lose monotonicity over the set of all policies, because a weak improvement to player 1′s payoffs could turn a (-1, 1000) point into a (0.1, 1000) point, make it able to affect the solution, and make the solution for player 1 worse. Though you’ll still have monotonicity over the restricted set of policies.

• First of all, this is awesome.

I didn’t know about KS bargaining before reading this, thinking through it now…

It seems kind of odd that terrible solutions like (1000, −10^100) could determine the outcome (I realize they can’t be the outcome, but still). I would hesitate to use KS bargaining unless I felt that values were in some sense ‘reasonable’ outcomes. Do you have a general sense of what a life of maximizing your spouse’s utility would look like (and vice versa)?

Trying to imagine this myself wrt my own partner, figuring out my utility function is a little tricky. The issue is that I think I have some concern for fairness baked in. Like, do I want my partner to do 100% of chores? My reaction is to say ‘no, that would be unfair, I don’t want to be unfair’. But if you’re referencing your utility function in a bargaining procedure to decide what ‘fair’ is, I don’t think that works. So, would I want my partner to do 100% of chores if that were fair? I can simulate that by imagining she offered to do this temporarily as part of a trade or bet and asking myself if I’d consider that a better deal than, say, her doing 75% of chores. And yes, yes I would. But I’d consider ‘she does 100% of chores no matter what, I’m not allowed to help’ a worse deal than ‘she does 100% of chores unless it becomes too costly to her’ for some definitions of ‘too costly’.

Assuming that my utility function is like that about most things, and that hers is as well, I’d say our values are actually reasonable counterfactuals to consider. Which inclines me to think yours are as well.

Still, ‘everything I do’ is a big solution space to make assumptions about. The Vow of Concord pretty much requires you to look for edge cases where your spouse’s utility can be increased by disproportionate sacrifices of yours; I’d suggest you start looking now (if you haven’t yet), before you’ve Vowed to let them guide your decisions.

• It makes a difference whether punishment is zero-sum or negative-sum. If we can’t take $100 from Bob to give to someone else but can only impose$100 of cost on him to no one’s benefit, we’d rather not do that.

In that case I think the answer is to forego the punishment if you’re sufficiently confident the harm is an inevitable result of a net-good decision.

• Since I first heard of controversy around ballot selfies, I’ve thought that an alternative to prosecuting those who take them would be to facilitate fake ballot selfies.

I was going to say you could implement this by letting people surrender a filled-out-but-not-submitted ballot to a poll worker in exchange for a new one, but you can probably already do this if you just say you made a mistake? In that case polling sites would just need to put posters up telling people to do this if they are under pressure of any kind to produce a ballot selfie.

• Do you have thoughts on pros and cons of this relative to progressive consumption tax? (I agree they’re mostly equivalent and both good).

I think consumption tax has an advantage in terms of perceived fairness in that it (almost) guarantees you won’t get years where e.g. Jeff Bezos pays literally zero taxes, which look pretty bad. Whereas these reforms could give you years where his taxes are highly negative, which would look worse.

• Hmm… I find the scaling aspect a bit fishy (maybe an ordinal vs cardinal utility issue?). The goodness of a proxy should be measured by the actions it guides, and a V-maximizer, a log(V) maximizer and an maximizer will all take the same actions (barring uncertain outcomes).

That said, reverse Goodhart remains possible. I’d characterize it as a matter of being below a proxy’s range of validity, whereas the more familiar Goodhart problem involves ending up above it. E.g. if V = + Y, then U = X is a reverse-Goodhart proxy for V—the higher X gets, the less you’ll lose (relatively) by neglecting Y. (Though we’d have to specify some assumptions about the available actions to make that a theorem).

An intuitive example might be a game with an expert strategy and a beginner strategy—‘skill at the expert strategy’ being a reverse-Goodhart proxy for skill at the game.

• A more general observation that I’m sure has been stated many times but clicked for me while reading this: Once you condition on the output of a prediction process, correlations are residuals. Positive/​negative/​zero coefficients then map not to good/​bad/​irrelevant but to underrated/​overrated/​valued accurately.

(“Which college a student attends” is the output of a prediction process insofar as diff students attend the most selective college that accepts them and colleges differ only in their admission cutoffs on a common scoring function, I think).

• Shorter statement of my answer:

The source of the apparent paradox here is that the perceived absurdity of ‘getting lucky N times in a row’ doesn’t scale linearly with N, which makes it unintuitive that an aggregation of ordinary evidence can justify an extraordinary belief.

You can get the same problem with less anthropic confusion by using coin-flip predictions instead of Russian Roulette. It seems weird that predicting enough flips successfully would force you to conclude that you can psychically predict flips, but that’s just a real and correct implication of having on nonzero prior on psychic abilities in the first place.

• Okay. So, we agree that your prior says that there’s a 1/​N chance that you are unkillable by Russian Roulette for stupid reasons, and you never get any evidence against this. And let’s say this is independent of how much Russian Roulette one plays, except insofar as you have to stop if you die.

Let’s take a second to sincerely hold this prior. We aren’t just writing down some small number because we aren’t allowed to write zero; we actually think that in the infinite multiverse, for every N agents (disregarding those unkillable for non-stupid reasons), there’s one who will always survive Russian Roulette for stupid reasons. We really think these people are walking around the multiverse.

So now let K be the base-5/​6 log of 1/​N. If N people each attempt to play K games of Russian Roulette (i.e. keep playing until they’ve played K games or are dead), one will survive by luck, one will survive because they’re unkillable, and the rest will die (rounding away the off-by-one error).

If N^2 people across the multiverse attempt to play 2K games of Russian Roulette, N of them will survive for stupid reasons, one of them will survive by luck, and the rest will die. Picture that set of N immortals and one lucky mortal, and remember how colossal a number N must be. Are the people in that set wrong to think they’re probably immortals? I don’t think they are.

• Even after you’ve gotten an infinite amount of evidence against every possible alternative consideration, you’ll still believe that youre certain to survive

Isn’t the prior probability of B the sum over all specific hypotheses that imply B? So if you’ve gotten an arbitrarily large amount of evidence against all of those hypotheses, and you’ve won at Russian Roulette an arbitrarily high number of times… well, you’ll just have to get more specific about those arbitrarily large quantities to say what your posterior is, right?

• ‘Symmetric vs. asymmetric’ isn’t the right distinction; merely noting that a Hamiltonian is asymmetric in position and momentum can’t tell you anything about which one is fundamental!

The notable thing about position in our universe is that there are no interactions that don’t lose strength with increasing distance (I think?), and in ancestral human life the Earth’s gravity is the only obviously-important violation of strong locality.

As for why this is, I’m inclined toward anthropic explanations. This could just be a limit of human intuition, but it seems like locality is really helpful for complex purposeful structures. E.g., it allows a cell to control an interaction neighborhood such that everything that happens inside the membrane is coordinated. If some interactions were position-local and others momentum-local, you’d have to try to defend a neighborhood in both position-space and momentum-space, but your momentum-space boundaries would drift apart in position-space, and the need to stay in your momentum-space neighborhood would constrain your ability to update your position… it seems hard.

• For question 5, maybe try out different shopping-like activities to see if any of them are less aversive.

Some examples:

• Researching a product category without the intention to make a purchase.

• A few ways to motivate this, if ‘product orientation practice’ isn’t motivating

• Market research for a potential product

• Write a buying guide others might appreciate

• Things you might buy someday but not soon

• Fantasy purchases. “If I were going to buy a yacht/​private plane/​supercar, which one would I want?”

• Cheap unimportant purchases where the consequences of choosing wrong are minimal

• Choosing among free things (e.g open-source libraries)

• “Eurocentric paint” is an imprecise phrase. I first read it as meaning “traditionally-used European paints”, with the implication that other cultures chose their colors based on different paints. But the rest of the post makes clear it’s the idea of basing colors on paints that’s allegedly Eurocentric; so the better phrasing might be “Eurocentric fixation on paint”.

I was taught in (US) school that the primary colors were red, yellow, and blue and the secondaries were green, orange and purple (which matches the ‘rainbow’ in the comic, though the ‘rainbow’ I learned was ROYGBIV). Per https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Color_theory#Traditional_color_theory, this only works with paint:

One reason the artist’s primary colors work at all is due to the imperfect pigments being used have sloped absorption curves, and change color with concentration… Another reason the correct primary colors were not used by early artists is they were not available as durable pigments. Modern methods in chemistry were needed to produce them.

Granted, I was taught those colors in conjunction with being given paint to play with, which is a good reason to teach them. But it’s still a bit striking that at no point in my education was I taught any other set of primary colors, except implicitly by picking RGB colors in MS Paint (an ironic name, in context).

I’m pretty sure that the common intuition among my classmates, way back in childhood, was that the first-tier colors were red, yellow, blue and green. This turns out to be supported by a relatively sophisticated color theory based neither on natural occurrences of colors nor on any means of producing colors but rather the brain’s fundamental abstractions for processing them.

• I think one of my main contrarian instincts is to see a flat direction and worry we’ve been creeping up it, to the point that I’m actually pretty receptive to arguments for going the other way.

I take it somewhat as a sign I have this well-calibrated that your more-sleep and less-sleep paragraphs sounded about equally reasonable to me.

• I remember very early in the pandemic reading an interview with someone who justified their decision to continue going to bars by pointing that they had a high-contact job that they still had to do. I noticed that this in fact made their decision worse (in terms of total societal Covid risk).

(And as the number of cases was still quite low at the time, the 100% bound on risk was much less plausibly a factor)

• Another explanation for logarithmic thinking is Laplace’s rule of succession.

If you have N exposures and have not yet had a bad outcome, the Laplacian estimate of a bad outcome from the next exposure goes as 1/​N (the marginal cost under a logarithmic rule).

Applying this to “number of contacts” rather than “number of exposures” is admittedly more strained but I could still see it playing a part.