If your strategy remains unchanged, I can change my strategy to “999,999.99 please” and come away with 1,000,000.01 in total, so that’s not a Nash equilibrium.
GuySrinivasan
Karma: 1,280
These notifications just showed me a very old thread I did not know existed. The thread made me laugh. Thank you, I think. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yffPyiu7hRLyc7r23/#okLFFnQhgTzqANvQy
Do you have a way of seeing your expenditures for the past year, categorized and summed? Use Mint or something similar. Take a day every couple years to go through and look at _all_ of them and determine which are simply extraneous, which you don’t endorse.
Good point. I can’t really imagine being several hours late and still showing up, except for events where that is explicitly the norm, like a long party.
What I have learned as to do as an organizer both private and professional life:
Always assume the buck stops with you*, that people you’re trying to organize will not effectively volunteer the information you need to make an informed decision. If you want to know what the best date is, one of the most effective ways to find out is to choose a date, then ask everyone individually “does this date fail for you?”
To gather useful data rather than making a Dictator’s Decision, first go abstract: declare, as Dictator, that this meeting is a brainstorming session. Then tell them exactly how to brainstorm, like “okay in the next 3 minutes we’ll write down everything we can about X”. Dictate that they must spend this time giving you useful data. Then use it to make decisions. Other methods include creating a poll, sending it out, pinging everyone the next day to please fill it out, then two days after that pinging individually everyone who hasn’t yet filled it out. Or having a 1:1 with each person for 5 minutes to discuss.
Never ask for people to take initiative unless you are asking a specific person or are prepared to very soon after designate a specific person.
Recent examples: we’re having Christmas with 10 people. I told one “you are responsible for acquiring materials for communal cookie decorating. Do you accept or should I pick someone else?” I’m putting some people together for a game this weekend and needed exactly 1-2 more. I emailed a couple asking if they wanted to join. The day after, rather than waiting, I emailed again, specifying one of them, saying “reply yes, no, or maybe-but-we’re-not-sure so that if
noI can email others”. I needed a design for a project at work. It is not my responsibility to produce the design. So I wrote up a design, put a meeting on relevant people’s calendars, and said “hey let’s discuss the design, here’s a proposal”, knowing my design was definitely flawed but someone had to produce a seed for others to critique. Two coworkers were supposed to lead a meeting to bring our team up to speed on some work they’d done in the past few months so that we could all participating in planning the followup. One said he had a fire to put out; the other said there are no more free times this week so let’s meet next week; I said that sounds awful, pick one of meet anyway, meet tomorrow missing one person, or meet two days from now missing one other person.All this has a common theme, I think.
No one wants to risk imposing, so in the absence of hard constraints, no one makes low-stakes decisions where any decision is far better than no decision, and any reasonable decision is at most a bit worse than any other reasonable decision. Whenever it’s super easy to change the decision if it turns out it’s actually really bad, like choosing a date and then the main event says they’re busy that day, just make a decision. It’s pro-social. You’re providing a ton of value by allowing everyone else to avoid feeling bad about risking imposition. Far more value than the value lost by not having great coordination first.
*buck stops with you, or with someone else who is actually engaged in making this thing happen. Just never with a mere participant.
I went from borderline nonfunctional to pretty functional. This is not at all obvious even to those who knew me because I had been masking the growing problems really well using just raw intellectual brute force. More “attracts the walking wounded” anecdote.
Further, I kind of expect that Really Winning in the sense you’re talking about is far more likely when (a) you get lucky, and/or (b) you’re willing to stomp on other people. The first is not increased and the second is actively decreased by LWing (I think and hope).
Also, we have funded, active research into the not-so-covert true goal of original LW.
Can we do better? Yeah, definitely. Is it really so bleak? I don’t think so.
I don’t like it. To me, very broadly, “values” are what I want, “priorities” are what I will go after given that I have limited resources and it costs things to go after what I want and succeed at getting it.
“I mean we wouldn’t suspect there is a fact of the matter about which formal model of computation (Turing machines, register machines, DFAs, Quantum Turing Machines etc..) is the true model. They are all valid formal constructs and we use whatever one seems most appropriate to a given question. So why would we suspect decision theory to be any different?”
We also have an entire field of study devoted to characterizing exactly when one model is equivalent to another, the power of each, etc. I would suspect decision theory to be very similar, and would expect to end up with a similar poset zoo, in particular claiming that certain decision theories are just straight up better than others assuming you have the power to implement them.
Simple sounding question.
I don’t know enough math to understand whether you’ve covered this in your examples, but here’s my intuition in the form of typing without a lot of reflection or editing okay disclaimer over:
If we have two variables, A and C, and we’re considering A, C, and (A xor C), it sounds to me like we’ve privileged things arbitrarily in some sense… relabeling them A, B, and C it’s clear that we could have pivoted to consider any two of them the “base” variables and the third the “xor’d” variable, so there should be no preferred counterfactual. It’s a loopy cause, a causal diagram that’s not a DAG. Which doesn’t show up IRL. Like going back in time to kill grandpa.
But we often pretend they occur by abstracting time and saying steady-state is a thing (or steady-states, and we’re looking at the map of transitions) and then we get loops and start studying feedback and whatnot. But if you unpacked any of those loops you’d get a very-very-repetitive DAG that looks a lot like the initial diagram copied over and over with one-way arrows from copy to copy.
Seems like there are three options to deal with {A,B,C}. They are isomorphic to each other, so in some sense we shouldn’t be able to say which counterfactuals to use. We could:
do our modeling relative to a specified imposed ordering of all variables, which seems really hard, or
somehow calculate all possible results and average over permutations, which seems either factorially harder or much easier depending on Math!, or
assume there is hidden structure, that A, B, and C are abstractions atop a real DAG, and use a not-known-to-me mathematics of loopy causation to define something other than counterfactuals atop the variables, calling counterfactuals over A, B, C a sort of type error.
“No one will need to comment on this, and no one will.”—bets please, lizardman constant, etc etc.
Tradeoffs. Do the mods have to deal with more BS because they show the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? I got something good from that one comment!” or because they hide the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? What if you’re acting in bad faith?” I assume that’s what’s going on here.
Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking. “What do we have to do to make Eugine just go away forever and we never have to talk about it again?” ==> disappear everything and hope
I’m not. And I have given up on many comments because commenting on Android has been broken. It appears to be almost working right now, except the text is flowing outside the comment box. :S
Buying expensive things does not make you rich.
Played through the campaign. It feels too slow and arbitrary. That’s why I almost quit. There’s no quick feedback loop saying “you did well!” other than whether you won, and the progression in the campaign has too much time between concepts. I want to know “okay so I captured 3 mines is that a little, expected, lucky...?” I want to progress quickly to “the real game” once I understand what’s going on. And only at the end do I know what mines are for, and I don’t know whether I have enough or way too much or what. Arbitrary: you can do the right thing and lose and no one even says “hey you did the right thing”, also there’s a feeling of “am I a chump if I keep playing rather than restart when the completely unavoidable shot from the turret hits me rather than misses?”.
That said, it was fun! The above is my guess at why you get fun without engagement.
Love it. Reminds me of my strong preference to make rules for myself and follow them even when it seems locally silly over trying to continually make good decisions in the moment.
Polled.
As a rule, practitioners are currently very averse to giving credence estimations to patients. Chesterton’s Fence: understand thoroughly why before tearing that down. Here are some possible reasons.
practitioners are unskilled in that estimation; their heuristics output a decision instead
patients are unskilled in interpreting that estimation and on average providing it would be harmful
hospitals disincentivize providing that information
insurance companies disincentivize providing that information
patients would rather be told what to do and would be averse to doctors otherwise
doctors would rather tell what to do and would be demoralized otherwise
I’m sure there are more. For each, if it were the main driver of the current situation, what would happen if you tried a startup that tore down the fence?
This is a dense comment which I would love to see unpacked with a concrete example in a top level post. Do you have an example of working through this process on some other data?
This is well written and makes me want to play.
I think the cartoon could benefit from concrete, short, A and B. It also may benefit from rewording the final statements to “If I change my mind about B, that would change my mind about A too”?
Take some of your actual double crux sessions, boil down A and B into something short, try the comic out with the concrete example?
On the contrary, one of my go-to techniques for decision-making is to examine questions that seem relevant to see if I can tell by the magnitude of their possible answers whether I care about what their possible answers are. If my choice boils down to “if X > 100, yes, otherwise no” and I am pretty confident that X is somewhere around 90-110 and I find a question that seems relevant but it turns out any answer sways X by at most a tenth of a point, I will dismiss that question and look for more important questions.
It is a flag to check for rationalization, sure.