The proposal is known as ‘quantilization’ eg https://intelligence.org/2015/11/29/new-paper-quantilizers/
gwern
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On Seeing Through ‘On Seeing Through: A Unified Theory’: A Unified Theory
Also, 1 sock lost is automatically 1 pair of socks lost since they can only function in pairs.
Only in the worst cast of all-unique pairs. If you buy in batches (as I and a lot of people seem to do), then 1 lost sock is just 1 lost sock until you reach as low as n=2.
In terms of sibling effects, they could be large drains. Imagine a sibling who never bothers to buy their own socks but just unconsciously takes one sock too many once in a while. If there’s 2 siblings, now the responsible one must buy twice as much socks as they should (because of the hidden drain). Such people would simply show up as rare-purchasers in my survey, and there are quite a few such people. Ones lost in a dryer may be de facto permanently gone: even if you pull the units out a decade later and find them, do you even want to wear them anymore? And what does one do with a mismatched sock? If its mate doesn’t show up in a few months, you might toss it or use it for something else entirely, and then should the mate reappear later, now it’s a mismatch as well...
I certainly don’t lose 8 pairs of socks a year, but then, I don’t spend $200+ a month on groceries either.
Samsung says
There are many practical reasons for sock loss rather than supernatural disappearances. Research interviews found the common causes included items falling behind radiators or under furniture without anyone realising, stray items being added to the wrong coloured wash and becoming separated from its matching sock, not being secured to a washing line securely so they fall off and blow away – or they are simply carelessly paired up
And I think they do get lost. In multi-person households, socks have a tendency to migrate to other people’s rooms, flowing along a sock gradient. (I lost a lot of socks to my brother. I know because we labeled them with markers and I’d regularly find them in his drawer.) Sometimes they get physically lost in the dryer. In cluttered households, it’s easy for a sock to fall out of the dryer or the basket when you’re moving a big load, or fall behind drawers/beds and get lost there. Pet animals can steal them: I’ve seen ferrets making off with socks to hide in corners (or behind the dryer), and supposedly Siamese cats often have a pica just for socks & woolens. And in some cases, there may be things man was not meant to know.
Personally, I think my sock shortage was due more to them wearing out than actually going missing. I’d get rid of them as necessary, but I then didn’t buy any replacements.
On Having Enough Socks
This still doesn’t seem to address why one should be risk-averse and prioritize an impoverished survival in as many branches as possible. (Not that I think it does even that, given your examples; by always taking the risky opportunities with a certain probability, wouldn’t this drive your total quantum measure down rapidly? You seem to have some sort of min-max principle in mind.)
Nor does it deal with the response to the standard ensemble criticism of expected utility: EU-maximization is entirely consistent with non-greedy-EU-maximization strategies (eg the Kelly criterion) as the total-EU-maximizing strategy if the problem, fully modeled, includes considerations like survival or gambler’s ruin (eg in the Kelly coinflip game, the greedy strategy of betting everything each round is one of the worst possible things to do, but EU-maximizing over the entire game does in fact deliver optimal results); however, these do not apply at the quantum level, they only exist at the macro level, and it’s unclear why MWI should make any difference.
They are characters in the well-known Vinge SF novel A Fire Upon the Deep.
This name seems unnecessarily intrinsically prejudicial. Perhaps ‘legible’ vs ‘illegible’ would be better, or use McLuhan’s ‘hot’ vs ‘cool’ mediums.
I’ve always felt that life is more like “A Solar Labyrinth”.
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A rapporteur?
My search guide might be helpful.
Do you think any of the examples are better termed ‘modus delens’?
Related: “sleeping beauty” papers.
“One Man’s Modus Ponens Is Another Man’s Modus Tollens”
In what sense is being able to do addition or subtraction with different numbers, for example, which is what it means to learn addition or subtraction, not ‘the exact same problem but with different labels’?
For EU quantilization. But you could apply quantilization to beliefs rather than the utilities. (I don’t think it would work as well because I immediately wonder how many different ways belief quantilization breaks the probability axioms and renders any such agent inconsistent & Dutch-bookable, and this illustrates why people generally discuss EU quantilization instead.)