Yet another survey be-takener here.
DataPacRat
Once MetaMed has been paid for and done a literature search on a given item, will that information only be communicated to the individual who hired them, or will it be made more widely available?
I’m afraid that, as written, I cannot answer the problem’s final question, as by the time it was asked...
… I’d been hit by the trolley.
I’ve had a thought about a possible replacement for ‘hyperbolic discounting’ of future gains: What if, instead of using a simple time-series, the discount used a metric based on how similar your future self is to your present-self? As your future self develops different interests and goals, your present goals would tend to be less fulfilled the further your future self changed; and thus the less invested you would be in helping that future iteration achieve its goals.
Given a minimal level of identification for ‘completely different people’, then this could even be expanded to ems who can make copies of themselves, and edit those copies, to provide a more coherent set of values about which future selves to value more than others.
(I’m going to guess that Robin Hanson has already come up with this idea, and either worked out all its details or thoroughly debunked it, but I haven’t come across any references to that. I wonder if I should start reading that draft /before/ I finish my current long-term project...)
Still More to the Prisoner’s Dilemma
After reading http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/16/1206569109.full.pdf+html , the detail that’s caught my attention: “The player with the shortest memory sets the terms of the game.” If a strategy remembers 0 turns, and simply Always Cooperates, or Always Defects, or randomly chooses between them, then no matter how clever its opponent might be, it can’t do any better than by acting as if it were also a Memory-0 strategy. Tit-for-Tat is a Memory-1 strategy—and despite all the analysis that I’ve read on it before, I now see it from a new perspective, in that it’s one of the few Memory-1 strategies that gracefully falls back to the appropriate Memory-0 strategy when faced with All-C or All-D… and any strategy which tries to implement a more complicated scheme based on longer strings is faced with the fact that Tit-for-Tat simply doesn’t remember anything beyond a single turn.
I would like to see if this perspective can be extended to a Memory-2 strategy that falls gracefully back to appropriate Memory-1 strategies such as Tit-for-Tat when faced with Memory-1 strategies, and like Tit-for-Tat, to a suitable Memory-0 strategy when faced with Memory-0 ones.
Does anyone have a link to a suitable set of programs to run some experimental tourneys, and instructions on how to apply them? (If it matters, the OSes I have available are WinXP and Fedora 21.)
I currently find myself tempted to write a new post for Discussion, on the general topic of “From a Bayesian/rationalist/winningest perspective, if there is a more-than-minuscule threat of political violence in your area, how should you go about figuring out the best course of action? What criteria should you apply? How do you figure out which group(s), if any, to try to support? How do you determine what the risk of political violence actually is? When the law says rebellion is illegal, that preparing to rebel is illegal, that discussing rebellion even in theory is illegal, when should you obey the law, and when shouldn’t you? Which lessons from HPMoR might apply? What reference books on war, game-theory, and history are good to have read beforehand? In the extreme case… where do you draw the line between choosing to pull a trigger, or not?”.
If it was simply a bad idea to have such a post, then I’d expect to take a karma hit from the downvotes, and take it as a lesson learned. However, I also find myself unsure whether or not such a post would pass the muster of the new deletionist criteria, and so I’m not sure whether or not I would be able to gather that idea—let alone whatever good ideas might result if such a thread was, in fact, something that interested other LessWrongers.
This whole thread-idea seems to fall squarely in the middle, between the approved ‘hypothetical violence near trolleys’ and ‘discussion violence against real groups’. Would anyone be interested in helping me put together a version of such a post to generate the most possible constructive discourse? Or, perhaps, would somebody like to clarify that no version of such a post would pass muster under the new policy?
Wrote Something Story-like
Prisoner’s Dilemma Variant
There are a few tweaks to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma which can affect which strategies tend to be successful. A very common one is to randomize how long the round is, so predicting the end-game doesn’t overwhelm all other strategy factors. A less common one is adding noise, so that what each program tries to do isn’t necessarily what happens.
Does anyone know of any tourneys that have been run where, in addition to Cooperation or Defection, each program also has the choice to End The Game, simulating quitting a business relationship, moving away, shunning, or otherwise ceasing to interact with another program?
I’ve passed 200,000 words in the story I started writing at the end of May, and as far as I can tell, I’m still on track to keep writing daily and bring it to a finish, instead of just trailing off into… well… not. That’s pretty close to four NaNoWriMos in a row, with more to come. And the next story I write will be that much better for the work I’ve done on this one; and if I can manage my motivation so as to keep it up, I just might be able to consider myself “a writer” instead of “someone who writes”.
“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”—Nietzsche
Tsuyoku naritai!
As a cryonicist, I’m drafting out a text describing my revival preferences and requests, to be stored along with my other paperwork. (Oddly enough, this isn’t a standard practice.) The current draft is here. I’m currently seeking suggestions for improvement, and a lot of the people around here seem to have good heads on their shoulders, so I thought I’d ask for comments here. Any thoughts?
After writing a story-like object, in which my background research indicated that it’s within the realm of reasonable possibility for the first em to be created as early as 2030, with all sorts of socioeconomic disruption ensuing therefrom...
… I’ve noticed myself explicitly asking myself, “What would the me of 15 years from now think about that?”, or “What would the me of 15 years from now want me to have been doing now?”. And in addition to consider the perspective of someone facing a widescale socioeconomic disruption, I’m also using, as a comparison, what I in the present think about my younger self of 2000 AD, and trying to think of what my 2000-AD-self would have thought about by 1985-AD-self.
It’s such a simple little thing, and so obvious, that it seems likely that a lot of other people have been using it for quite some time, and I’m rather a ninny for only starting to apply it at this late date. However, it has been enough to help me nudge my behaviour in certain ways that my existing tricks haven’t quite managed—avoiding a bit of junk food here, reconsidering how to publicly present myself there, and so on. And so, this comment, just in case someone else has been missing out on applying this bit of perspective as I’d been.
I’m trying to get at least a rough approximation of the upper bound of confidence that LWers place on an idea that seems, to me, to be about as proven as it’s possible for an idea to be.
Holy shamoly, I got name-dropped in the notes.
Now I’ve got even more incentive to blast apart my current writer’s block on “Myou’ve”.
A friend and I once put together a short comic trying to analyze democracy from an unusual perspective, including presenting the idea that an underlying threat of violent popular uprising should the system be corrupted helps keep it running well. This was closely related to a shorter comic presenting some ideas on rationality. The project led to some interesting discussions with interesting people, which helped me figure out some ideas I hadn’t previously considered, and I consider it to have been worth the effort; but I’m unsure whether or not it would fall afoul of the new policy.
How ‘identifiable’ do the targets of proposed violence have to be for the proposed policy to apply, and how ‘hypothetical’ would they have to be for it not to? Some clarification there would be appreciated.
What is the purpose to making any sort of distinction between the identity of one person, and the identity of another?
On a practical level, it often seems to have something to do with people being more willing to work harder for the benefit of people they identify as ‘themselves’ than they would work for ‘other people’, such as being willing to do things that are unpleasant now so their ‘future selves’ will enjoy less unpleasantness.
Out of the various people in the future who might or might not fall under the category of ‘yourself’, for which of them would you be willing to avoid eating a marshmallow now, so that those people could enjoy /two/ marshmallows?
Mainly, because estimating the accuracy of a math statement brings in various philosophical details about the nature of math and numbers, which would likely distract from the focus on theories relating to the nature of our universe. So I went for the most foundational physical theory I could think of… and phrased it rather poorly.
If you have a suggestion on how to un-vague-ify my main post, I’d be happy to read it.
This week’s writing lesson: If your motivation for writing is almost entirely internal, then you should write what you enjoy writing, not what you think you should write.
(I lost a few days’ worth of productivity getting that one knocked into my skull, though hopefully I’m back to snuff.)
Camping vs Cryonics
Assuming that a cryonicist a) has a limited budget; b) believes that going solo hiking, canoeing, and camping have salutary effects on mental health; and c) believes that camping provides one of the best available ratios of improved long-term mental functioning to dollars spent...
… then what measures could said cryonicist take to minimize the odds of ending up not just dead, but warm-and-dead? And, secondarily, how much would each such measure cost, and how much would it reduce that risk?
Example 1: A PLB (Personal Locator Beacon) costs around $300, and uses satellites to signal search-and-rescue teams to start looking in roughly an area a mile around. Requires someone alive to push the button, that the PLB can be placed right-side-up. Benefits are increased if, eg, a pen-type flare launcher can more precisely identify location to searchers.
Example 2: A backup cell phone can cost $20, and at least one provider offers service for $10 for the SIM chip and $20 per year if no calls are made. Requires limiting trips to areas within range of cell towers.
If you don’t mind the question: How confident are /you/ in the existence of cats?
The reason I ask, is that I’m still trying to train myself to think of probability, evidence, confidence, and similar ideas logarithmically rather than linearly. 10 decibans of confidence means 90% odds, 20 decibans means 99%, 30 means 99.9%, and so on. However, 100% confidence in any proposition translates to an infinite number of decibans—requiring an infinite amount of evidence to achieve. So far, the largest amount of confidence given in the posts here is about 100 decibans… and there is a very large difference between ’100 decibans’ and ‘infinite decibans’. And that difference has some consequences, in terms of edge cases of probability estimation with high-value consequences; which has practical implications in terms of game theory, and thus politics, and thus which actions to choose in certain situations. While the whole exercise may be a waste of time for you, I feel that it isn’t for me.
Done—and mildly disappointed that we won’t be measuring the prevalence of transponyism this year.
Does this post appear on LW’s Main or Discussion pages for anyone else? I only found it via an offsite reference. Edit: Nevermind, I had my Main set to ‘Promoted’ instead of ‘New’.