Yet another survey be-takener here.
DataPacRat
Karma: 2,004
[Fiction] IO.SYS
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.
Fiction: LW-inspired scenelet
What are your rules of thumb?
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...)
Cryo and Social Obligations
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.)
How to become a PC?
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?
Simulationist sympathetic magic
Wrote Something Story-like
A rationalist My Little Pony fanfic
Cryo: Legal fees of $2500
Prisoner’s Dilemma vs the Afterlife
Finally Ending My Cryo-Crastination
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!
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’.