Slashdot had a story today about some academic research with a simple model of fun in games.
jmmcd
I don’t think it’s correct to assume a pure strategy (ie each male is either dominant OR submissive). It might make more sense for males to be able to switch when the opportunity arises from submissive to dominant (a mixed strategy in game theory terms). I think outsider orang-utans can become alphas (adding the distinctive cheek-flaps etc) when they find a group that will let them join, for example.
We do see humans making the same transition (and in the other direction too) when they move between groups, and when opportunities arise.
“OMG so good to be in love!!!!!<3” and “Oh no my heart was broken again how could u do this to me?” I would anticipate that just a little bit more rationality would greatly benefit this person.
It’s not clear to me what assumption you’re making here. Should this person shun relationships? Look for longer-term ones? Something else? The OMG part should remind us that new love is a powerful source of happiness and it’s not available in a long-term relationship. Maybe the OMG and “Oh no” parts add up to more than zero.
You don’t chit-chat about the weather because you really want to consider how recent local atmospheric patterns relate to long-run trends, you do it to show that you care about the other person.
No, you chat about the weather because it allows both parties to become comfortable and pick up the pace of the conversation to something more interesting. Full-on conversations don’t start in a vacuum. In a worst case scenario, you talk about the weather because it’s better than both of you staring at the ground until someone else comes along.
it’s much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury
But jurors are subject to intimidation. I’m not sure of the situation in the rest of the world, but in Ireland this is currently a significant problem for some (mostly gang- and drug-related) trials.
EDIT: in designing an ideal system maybe we can assume that good legislation and procedures make this problem go away.
Doesn’t that seem like a weakness in the definition of memes? After all, a gene that does not replicate (eg arising through mutation and causing the organism to be non-viable) is still a gene.
Robert Wright’s Non-Zero is a good popularisation of the ideas, but I can’t remember whether/how much the alleged bias per se is discussed.
I realized that I’d been asking the wrong question. I had been asking which decision would give the best payoff at the time and saying it was rational to make that decision. Instead, I should have been asking which decision theory would lead to the greatest payoff.
I wonder if it is possible to go one more step: instead of asking which decision theory to use (to make decisions), we should ask which meta-decision theory we should use (to choose decision theories). In that case, maybe we would find ourselves using EDT for Newcomb-like problems (and winning), but a simpler decision theory for some other problems, where EDT is not required to win.
I don’t know what a meta-decision theory would look like (I barely know what a decision theory looks like).
That makes sense. It implies that we wouldn’t find ourselves using different object-level decision theories in different situations.
(But is it possible to construct a problem analogous to Newcomb’s on which EDT loses? If so it seems we would need different object-level DTs after all.)
There might be useful things I want to accomplish with my post-upload body and brain. I agree with inklesspen: this is a fatal inconsistency.
Your entire reply deals with arguments you wish I had made.
Without coming down anywhere on the issue of continued personal identity being an illusion, OR the issue of a sense of purpose in this scenario, I’m trying to point out a purely logical inconsistency:
If uploading for personal immortality is “pursuing an illusion”, then so is living: so you should allow inklesspen to murder you.
The other way around: if you want to accomplish things in the future with your current body, then you should be able to conceive of people wanting to accomplish things in their post-upload future. The continuity with the current self is equally illusory in each case, according to you.
Yeah, I mean have you seen Dwarven women?
Applying this reasoning to the real world would mean choosing a career without bothering to find out what sort of salary and lifestyle it supports; but things in the real world are almost never balanced in this sense. (Many people, in fact, do not do this research, which is why colleges turn out so many English majors.)
It would have been worth noting that there are valid criteria for choice of university courses other than these. As it is, this section looks rather philistine.
Would be nice, but I think it’s different from the five OP examples—being well-rested isn’t a state that’s achieved by sending the brain the right chemicals.
(But is “infatuation” just brain-chemicals?)
I think Coleridge was on laudanum, not sleepiness.
The point is that women generally enjoy sex even without orgasm.
This stuff is like arithmetic: one right answer, nothing to argue about.
Under the assumption of universal rationality. Without that assumption (which would not be fulfilled in a real fantasy sword-fighting game), the best strategy/mixed strategy does not correspond to the Nash equilibrium, and there remains plenty to argue about.
What happens when some percentage of people are picking randomly, some people are “stylin”, and some people are performing “misinformed” calculations and/or simulations? The fact that some people actually did the latter shows that the effect must be taken into account.
I think you’re making a distinction between one-shot and iterated games. This is a different distinction than that between mixed and non-mixed strategies. You can have a mixed strategy equilibrium in a one-shot game, as in both the swords-n-armour example and the attack/defend East/West example.
So: if the game is one-shot (and you can see the current distribution), the right decision depends only on the current distribution, as you said.
If I understand it right, it makes you feel awake “when you should”, but doesn’t actually replace sleep.
If we focus on the bounded subspace of mind design space which contains all those minds whose makeup can be specified in a trillion bits or less, then every universal generalization that you make has two to the trillionth power chances to be falsified.
Conversely, every existential generalization—“there exists at least one mind such that X”—has two to the trillionth power chances to be true.
So you want to resist the temptation to say either that all minds do something, or that no minds do something.
This is fine where X is a property which has a one-to-one correspondence with a particular bit in the mind’s specification. For higher-level properties (perhaps emergent ones—yes, I said it) this probabilistic argument is not convincing.
Consider the minds of specification-size 1 trillion. We can happily make the generalisation that none of them will be able to predict whether a given Turing machine halts. Yes, there are 2^trillion chances for this generalisation to be falsified, but we know it never will be.
But this generalisation is true of everything, not just “minds”, so we haven’t added to our knowledge. Well, let’s try this generalisation instead: no mind’s state will remain unchanged by a non-null input. This is not true of rocks, but is true of minds. Perhaps there are some other, more useful, things we can say about minds.
Apologies for resurrecting a months-old post. I’m new here.