grobstein

• grobsteinApr 3, 2009, 4:22 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Technologos’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity is Sys­tem­atized Winning

  Quoting myself:

  (though I don’t see how you identify any distinction between “properties of the agent” and “decisions . . . predicted to be made by the agent” or why you care about it).

  I’ll go further and say this distinction doesn’t matter unless you assume that Newcomb’s problem is a time paradox or some other kind of backwards causation.

  This is all tangential, though, I think.

• grobsteinApr 3, 2009, 4:21 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Technologos’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity is Sys­tem­atized Winning

  Yes, all well and good (though I don’t see how you identify any distinction between “properties of the agent” and “decisions . . . predicted to be made by the agent” or why you care about it). My point is that a concept of rationality-as-winning can’t have a definite extension say across the domain of agents, because of the existence of Russell’s-Paradox problems like the one I identified.

  This is perfectly robust to the point that weird and seemingly arbitrary properties are rewarded by the game known as the universe. Your proposed redefinition may actually disagree with EY’s theory of Newcomb’s problem. After all, your decision can’t empty box B, since the contents of box B are determinate by the time you make your decision.

• grobsteinApr 3, 2009, 3:57 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity is Sys­tem­atized Winning

  What you give is far harder than a Newcomb-like problem. In Newcomb-like problems, Omega rewards your decisions, he isn’t looking at how you reach them.

  You misunderstand. In my variant, Omega is also not looking at how you reach your decision. Rather, he is looking at you beforehand—“scanning your brain”, if you will—and evaluating the kind of person you are (i.e., how you “would” behave). This, along with the choice you make, determines your later reward.

  In the classical problem, (unless you just assume backwards causation,) what Omega is doing is assessing the kind of person you are before you’ve physically indicated your choice. You’re rewarded IFF you’re the kind of person who would choose only box B.

  My variant is exactly symmetrical: he assesses whether you are the kind of person who is rational, and responds as I outlined.

• grobsteinApr 3, 2009, 2:46 PM

  5 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity is Sys­tem­atized Winning

  I don’t think I buy this for Newcomb-like problems. Consider Omega who says, “There will be $1M in Box B IFF you are irrational.”

  Rationality as winning is probably subject to a whole family of Russell’s-Paradox-type problems like that. I suppose I’m not sure there’s a better notion of rationality.

  What links here?

  • grobstein's comment on Ra­tion­al­ity is Sys­tem­atized Winning by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Apr 3, 2009, 4:43 PM; 3 points)
  • Dave9's comment on New­comb’s Prob­lem and Re­gret of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Apr 3, 2009, 4:02 PM; 1 point)

• grobsteinApr 3, 2009, 5:25 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Can Hu­man­ism Match Reli­gion’s Out­put?

  “Passing out condoms increases the amount of sex but makes each sex act less dangerous. So theoretically it’s indeterminant whether it increases or decreases the spread of AIDS.”

  Not quite—on a rational choice model, passing out condoms may decrease or not impact the spread of AIDS (in principle), but it can’t increase it. A rational actor who doesn’t actively want AIDS might increase their sexual activity enough to compensate for the added safety of the condom, but they would not go further than that.

  (This is different from the seatbelt case because car crashes result in costs, say to pedestrians who are struck, that are not internalized by the driver.)

• grobsteinApr 3, 2009, 5:04 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Where are we?

  Cambridge, MA. Rarely venture beyond Boston metro area.

  However, I’ll in the Pioneer Valley on Apr. 17-19, if anyone is interested in a meetup that Sunday (19th), say NoHo or Amherst.

• grobsteinMar 10, 2009, 6:09 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: LessWrong anti-kib­itzer (hides com­ment au­thors and vote counts)

  Simply annoying from a usability point of view. It requires you to know too surely which posts you will want to vote on and which authors you’ll want to know; if you care about the value of your karmic vote you’ll wind up interfering with your enjoyment of the posts to preserve its value; etc.

• grobsteinMar 7, 2009, 1:39 AM

  3 points

  on: For­mal­iza­tion is a ra­tio­nal­ity technique

  Formalizations that take big chunks of arguments as black boxes are not that useful. Formalizations that instead map all of an argument’s moving parts are very hard.

  The reason that specialists learn formalizations for domain-specific arguments only is because formalizing truly general arguments[FN1] is an extremely difficult problem—difficult to design and difficult to use. This is why mathematicians work largely in natural language, even though their arguments could (usually or always) be described in formal logic. Specialized formal languages are possible and useful only because they describe radically stripped-down models of the world.

  Overall, this means that—while moves like the example in the post probably are helpful—we shouldn’t expect to go much further in this direction.

  ---

  [FN1]To be precise, formalizing truly general arguments in a way that simplifies and clarifies is hard. There is a trivial formalization for every argument, since the class of arguments is equinumerous with the natural numbers; the decision process can be a symbolic representation of a bunch of experts’ brains or something like that.

• grobsteinMar 6, 2009, 2:19 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Nick Hay’s comment on: That You’d Tell All Your Friends

  Totally agree—helps if you can convince them to read Fire Upon the Deep, too. I’m not being facetious; the explicit and implicit background vocabulary (seems to) make it easier to understand the essays.

  (EDIT: to clarify, it is not that I think Fire in particular must be elevated as a classic of rationality, but that it’s part of a smart sci/​fi tradition that helps lay the ground for learning important things. There’s an Eliezer webpage about this somewhere.)

• grobsteinMar 6, 2009, 2:16 AM

  1 point

  on: That You’d Tell All Your Friends

  Clarity and transparency. One should be able to open the book to a page, read an argument, and see that it is right.

  (Obviously this trades off against other values—and is in some measure a deception --, but it’s the kind of thing that impresses my friends.)

• grobsteinMar 5, 2009, 8:55 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Annoyance’s comment on: The Costs of Rationality

  This has no bearing on the point above. In essence you’re just rephrasing Robin’s definition, “better believing what is true, given one’s limited info and analysis resources.” The disposition best-calculated to lead to true beliefs will not produce true beliefs in every instance, because true beliefs will not always be justified by available evidence.

  So what?