So where can I find your ten paragraph take on meta-ethics?
Andreas_Giger
Karma: 211
Fixed-Length Selective Iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma Mechanics
At first glance I thought this would be an awesome post to introduce normal people to rationality. However it quickly becomes theoretical and general, ending pretty much with “to make actual use of all this you need to invest a lot work.”
So… why isn’t there some kind of short article along the lines of “xyz is a cognitive bias which does this and that, here’s an easy way to overcome said bias, this is your investment cost, and these are your expected returns” or something? Could be as short as half a page, maybe with a few links to short posts covering other biases, and most importantly without any math. You know, something that you could link a manager or CEO to while saying “this might interest you, it allows you to increase the quality of your economic and otherwise decisions.”
Or is there?
A tournament like this would be much more interesting if it involved multiple generations. Here, the results heavily depended upon the pool of submitted strategies, regardless of their actual competitiveness, while a multiple-generations tournament would measure success as performance against other successful strategies.
I noticed today that hovering over a user’s total karma score displays the percentage of positive votes; didn’t realize it was in fact a new feature until I saw this post. It came as something of a surprise to me to learn that my karma of 53 is in fact 56% positive, which implies a total of around 440 votes. I wasn’t aware of being this controversial.
I wonder if displaying the total positive and negative votes instead wouldn’t be more intuitive, though; especially with comments. As Emile pointed out, it would also convey more information.
Edit: I thought there might be something fishy about this...
Considering this was an experimental tournament, learning how certain strategies perform against others seems far more interesting to me than winning, and I can’t imagine any strategy I would label as a troll submission. Even strategies solely designed to be obstacles are valid and valuable contributions, and the fact that random strategies skew the results is a fault of the tournament rules and not of the strategies themselves.
You don’t “judge” a book by its cover; you use the cover as additional evidence to more accurately predict what’s in the book. Knowing what the publisher wants you to assume about the book is preferable to not knowing.
What do you think about this?
Let’s find out!
[pollid:402]
It is obvious you’re not overly familiar with mathematics, but I can’t help but notice how despite writing “since infinitesimals don’t exist” several times in your post, you fail to give any kind of proof for this assumption. I hope you don’t consider such a ludicrous line as “few advocate actual infinitesimals because an actually existing infinitesimal is indistinguishable from zero” your proof.
You also fail to define “existence”, and the post you link to does little else than go to great lengths to avoid this issue. There’s a difference between 2∈ℕ, 2∈ℝ, 2∈ℂ and so on; and a meaningful question isn’t whether 2∈ℕ “exists” but whether ℕ is a good enough approximation of some parts of reality. Likewise, your question whether infinitesimals exist should be rephrased as whether ℚ (or ℝ or anything similar) is a good enough approximation of some parts of reality. Assuming the hypothesis of quantization this is not the case for anything made of mass/energy, but I see no reason why the same should be said of anything that is not, like time or space.
Your argument is, at best, incomplete.
This is very good post. The real question that has not explicitly been asked is the following:
How can utility be maximised when there is no maximum utility?
The answer of course is that it can’t.
Some of the ideas that are offered as solutions or approximations of solutions are quite clever, but because for any agent you can trivially construct another agent who will perform better and there is no metrics other than utility itself for determining how much better an agent is than another agent, solutions aren’t even interesting here. Trying to find limits such as storage capacity or computing power is only avoiding the real problem.
These are simply problems that have no solutions, like the problem of finding the largest integer has no solution. You can get arbitrarily close, but that’s it.
And since I’m at it, let me quote another limitation of utility I very recently wrote about in a comment to Pinpointing Utility:
Assuming you assign utility to lifetime as a function of life quality in such a way that for any constant quality longer life has strictly higher (or lower) utility than shorter life, then either you can’t assign any utility to actually infinite immortality, or you can’t differentiate between higher-quality and lower-quality immortality, or you can’t represent utility as a real number.
Yes, nothing new for LW indeed.
Another Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament?
I didn’t find this paper particularly interesting, mostly because it doesn’t show the strength of extortionate strategies, but rather the limits of evolution in the way the paper defines it, and because these kind of “evolutionary” strategies have never been empirically shown to be particularly successful in IPD matches of infinite length, so their exploitation is not a “significant mathematical feature” as claimed.
To sum up the paper: In a non-zero-sum game of this kind, strategies that only care about gradually improving their own score cannot fully utilize defection as a punishment or deterrent, and thus are permanently exploited by strategies that can.
Note that the kind of evolution the paper talks about has little to do with actual evolution, and the last paragraph is nothing but an empty phrase.
You should probably edit your post then, because it currently suggests an IQ-atheism correlation that just isn’t supported by the cited article.
Am I the only one who sees a problem in that we’re turning a non-zero-sum game into a winner-take-all tournament? Perhaps instead of awarding a limited resource like bitcoins to the “winner”, each player should be awarded an unlimited resource such as karma or funny cat pictures according to their strategy’s performance.
I can attest that I have personally saved the lives of friends on two occasions thanks to good situational awareness, and have saved myself from serious injury or death many times more.
I have no idea who you are and what you do for a living, but it appears you are or have been living a rather dangerous live, so I wonder what benefits compensate for this?
if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.
It may be a critical skill only for those who need to make correct decisions under very tight time costraints. Maybe the skill of avoiding dangerous situations is preferable to the skill of mastering them.
The current education system in Europe does a much better job at making education unpopular than at actually preventing those who may positively impact technology and society in the future from acquiring the necessary education to do so. Turning education into a chore is merely an annoyance for anyone involved, but doesn’t actually hold back technological advance in any way.
If I was the devil, I would try to restrict internet access for as many people as possible. As long as you have internet, traditional education isn’t really needed for humanity to advance technologically.
Also, does the devil win if humanity goes extinct? Because in that case I would instead try to make the best education available for free to all children, and focus on getting a few Satanists in positions where you get to push red buttons. Since the devil is traditionally displayed as persuasive and manipulative to the point that intelligent and well-educated people tend to more receptive to his offers than normal folk, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Just imagine a few Hitlers with modern nuclear ICBMs.
Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Never heard of Hanlon’s razor before, but I think it makes much more sense if you replace stupidity with indifference.
Sure, but this extortionate strategy wouldn’t survive long in such a tournament because it would perform poorly against TFT variants as well as against itself.
I think DefectBot, RandomBot and at least TFT-0D should be included by default. The last tournament was pretty much a battle of TFT-nD with varying n; I wonder if a new tournament would only result in an equivalent battle of Afterparty (TFT-DnC) strategies or whether we would actually see more successful CliqueBots and maybe completely new approaches. The tools are there.
I’ll bite:
The U.S. government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour through diplomacy and/or fleet redeployment, and it was not by chance that the carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet weren’t at port when the attack happened.
Very confident. (90-95%)
By the way, the reason I assume I am personally more rational about this than the LW average is that there are lots of US Americans around here, and I have sufficient evidence to believe that people tend to become less rational if a topic centrally involves a country they are emotionally involved with or whose educational system they went through.