Right after norklet
Ericf
This is obvious, but, if you are in a position of power, however small, seek to reward people who are making the first kind of decisions rather than the second. Even, or especially?, if the object level decision is one you disagree with.
Crucial example that is both high leverage and ubiquitous is being a parent and what behavior you reward in your kids.
I’m too lazy to go find the citations, but other people have pointed out two objections to this concept, and I find them compelling:
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A norm of exchanging cash for assistance makes it very difficult for “the poor person” to get assistance when they have a bad day and, for example, just need someone else to do the dishes that night. 1a. Financial situations can change, and “the poor person” next year might be the same human as the one offering cash today.
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Open-ended transactions build relationships. By paying for the favor, that closes the transaction. 2a. Maybe a deeper relationship with a roommate is not desired? 2b. Maybe the person you ask for a cheerful price can quote $0 (or something else obviously trivial like $1 to bake a cake). That seems like the most effective way of indicating “asking me for a cheerful price will backfire and damage our relationship, rather than maintaining it.” 2c. Maybe in some circles, relationships can be mediated by cash, and it’s just among the ~80% of everyone who hold money at least somewhat sacred and/or budgeted that such a scheme doesn’t work.
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90% of games are designed to be fun. Meaning the point is to stimulate your brain to produce feel-good chemicals. No greater meaning, or secret goal. To do this, they have goals, rules, and other features, but the core loop is very simple:
I want to get a dopamine hit, therefore
I open up a game, and
The game provides a structure that I follow, subordinating my “real life” to the artificial goals and laws of the game
Profit!
In summary: Creating an agent was apparently already a solved problem, just missing a robust method of generating ideas/plans that are even vaguely possible.
Star Trek (and other Sci fi) continues to be surprisingly prescient, and “Computer, create an adversary capable of outwitting Data” creating an agen AI is actually completely realistic for 24th century technology.
Our only hopes are:
The accumulated knowledge of humanity is sufficient to create AIs with an equivalent of IQ of 200, but not 2000.
Governments step in and ban things.
Adversarial action keeps things from going pear shaped (winning against nature is much easier than winning against other agents—just ask any physisit who tried to win the stock market)
Chimps still have it pretty good, at least by thier own standards, even though we took over the world.
As a rule of thumb, if you are in the top 1% of some non-lucrative thing (metacalc, Magic The Gathering, women’s softball, etc) then there are millions of people in the US and a billion people in the world that would be better than you at it, if they put in as much effort as you did.
If you are the absolute aknowledged best at the niche thing, there’s only thousands / millions who would have done better.
And many of those are devoting their effort towards something lucrative, like a stock market (or becoming CEO)
Better headline would be “I created a market on whether, in 2 months, I will believe that IQ tests measure what I believe to be intelligence” Not a particularly good market question.
For further study: Did the observed increase represent a repeatable gain, or an optimization? Within-subject studies show a full SD variation between test sessions for many subjects, so I would predict that “a set of interventions” could produce a “best possible score” for an individual but hit rapid diminishing returns.
You and your spouse will each and together be different people 10 years from now. It will be impossible and undesirable to use “[the interpretation] which my [spouse] and I would agree on at the time of our wedding”
High School (and even more so College) is a good time to try lots of different things. Don’t pursue one thing obsessively, sample different kinds of activities.
Coding, writing, drawing, exercise, conversation, dating, “going steady,” playing video games, playing irl games, playing sport, build things with your hands, clean every room in your house, cook, pontificate, take standardized tests (PSAT), visit other places—that could be other countries or just a different neighborhood depending on your parents finances, go camping overnight, watch live performances, perform live, eat new things, babysit various ages of kid, have a variety of part-time jobs.
As you build up a wide range of experiences, you will be able to get a sense of what you actually like to do, and can make a life plan from that.
Specifics:
If you want to eventually raise kids, the most important thing you can do now is work on your own mindfulness, and improve your patience. The second thing you need is upper body strength.
Unless you’re in the top 0.1% of something (family wealth, acting ability, writing ability, etc.), having a BS degree will make your career easier. Talk to your financial advisor, but it seems like the best options are:
If you aren’t Asian, and live in the US, but not in New England, and you can get great grades and great test scores (ie perfect ACT / Over 750 on each section of the SAT, plus AP & subject exams with similarly good scores), you can get in to a school with a big endowment (Ivy or Ivy equivalent) and have them pay for it (as long as your parents can afford the “family contribution.”)
If you just have the great grades and test scores, you can get a full academic scholarship to some rando university somewhere
If you live in California or another location that has good community colleges, you can pay for and take classes there while living at home, and transfer to a full college, possibly while still living at home. You can even stop going to High School to do this—if you finish your BS or BA, no-one will care that you didn’t actually get a HS diploma.
If you don’t have parents (or someone else) who can support you financially while you go to college, line up a job first. Big institutional employers often have educational support, and you can get a degree taking one class at a time, and having your employer pay for it (especially if it’s a job-relevant program). Note that this requires you to work an 8-4:30 style job, not at an “unlimited vacation and food” startup where you’re actually working 12 hour days, and 4 on Sunday, with one day off a year to attend your “Grandmother’s Funeral.”
Get a credit card ASAP (or get added to your parent’s account) (one statistic in your credit report is longest open account). Use it and Pay it off every month (% on-time payments is another). Open as many cards as you can, and get the limit raised whenever possible (low % of available credit used is another statistic). Don’t ever buy something unless you already have the money in the bank—the card is just a convenience / source of free points.
There’s no evidence to suggest that this mental substitution will lead to better outcomes.
Harry speculates that the marauders stole part of the Hogwarts security system, but he’s not necessarily a reliable narrator.
Other fics imply that the map might have read-only access to the Hogwarts Wards/wardstone, in which case the Chamber would not have been there until the wards were adjusted to allow entry.
Agree that closer to reality would be one advisor, who has a secret goal, and player A just has to muddle through against an equal skill bot with deciding how much advice to take. And playing like 10 games in a row, so the EV of 5 wins can be accurately evaluated against.
Plausible goals to decide randomly between:
Player wins
Player loses
Game is a draw
Player loses thier Queen (ie opponent still has thier queen after all immediate trades and forcing moves are completed)
Player loses on time
Player wins, delivering checkmate with a bishop or knight move
Maximum number of promotions (for both sides combined)
Player wins after having a board with only pawns Etc...
This misses the point of Zvi’s comment. Alice saying “there is no evidence of X” is more likely in worlds where Alice is BSing than in worlds where Alice is attempting to provide factual information (ie Level 1 communication). That is orthogonal to any actual calculations of {amount of evidence observed} / {amount of evidence that could have been observed, given the amount of looking that has been done}.
Also, too, the second thing is a gradient, not a dichotomy. And “your priors” are just a way of saying {amount of evidence observed that I know about} / {amount of evidence that could have been observed, given what I know about the amount of looking that has been done}
Academic <> economist. I don’t have an answer, but the arguments in favor of rent control are based on fairness, not efficiency. The domain of academics to consult is, therefore, greater than “economists.”
Based on the original post, and OP comments, it sounds like the proposal here is:
Thesis: Not once ever has causality existed in the territory.
Support: There’s nothing I can say that does not involve drawing a map.
Which, to me, looks like textbook “begging the question”—OP is picking one specific thing that can be said: “A causes B” and saying “look: causality can’t be in the territory because it’s just an idea in the map, just like everything else.”
But that provides no insight or additional information. There’s nothing special about “causality” not being in the territory, any more than saying “apples” aren’t in the territory or “atoms aren’t in the territory” or “justice isn’t in the territory” or “paradoxes aren’t in the territory”
Once you place “the territory” beyond the reach of mere words to describe, it ceases to be possible to talk about what attributes it does or does not have. You can’t usefully say “the territory doesn’t have causality” when you have already said “I can’t talk about the territory”
Even within the meta-map that places the territory outside the reach of mere words, it remains useful to talk about the presence or absence of causality at the limit of what words can reach. Is there time at the quantum interaction level; does it behave in the same way; are there iff relationships between superstrings—I’m certainly not qualified to opine on the answers, but the questions are of at least theoretical interest. (and theory with no practicality can still be useful—imaginary numbers were just a plaything of the mind for hundreds of years, until suddenly they became the math of a key industry)
One answer: #toolazytolink Taboo Your Words when they could be seen as an attack. Instead of “lie” use “document reasonably expected results in lieu of actual measures outcomes” or whatever the specific instance is.
There are some mainstream-ish ideas out there like Servant Leadership or Agile that try to work around this problem by dis-entangling power and prestige. If the lower level managers are organizationally “in charge” of what actually gets done (leaving the higher levels just in charge of who to hire/fire), that breaks up some of the feedback.
Another thing to do is ensure that Management is not the only (and hopefully not even the best) way to gain prestige in the company. Include the top widget makers in the high level corporate meetings. They might not care about strategic direction, but if the CEO’s golf foursome includes the senior production employees in the rotation alongside upper management (and the compensation packages are similar between them), that can help.
Both examples are in “Cut time” [2÷2] - so only 2 beats to a measure.
Note: survivorship bias warning. We don’t know how many counterfactual lsusr clones died or were permanently disabled after pushing too hard.
Note 2: privilege bias warning. Lsusr doesn’t mention how much of a financial and social safety net he had, but given he had a failed startup and tried again implies way more Maslow level 0-2 stability than most people.