[...] the only good thing about any form of utilitarianism: [...] Anyone with complete information of the universe could [...]
It doesn’t make sense to use an impossibility as part of the judging criteria for the goodness of something.
An action/utility function can only ever be a function over (at most) all information available to the agent.
I’m not arguing for any particular view, but the causal reach of possible policies/actions should determine the reach of the averaging function, right? It makes as little sense to include other possible universes in our calculation of optimal policies for this universe, as it does to try to coordinate policies between two space-time points (within the same universe) that can’t causally interact with one another.
If we’re trying to find and implement good policies (according to whatever definition of “good”), then in deciding on goodness of a policy, we should only care about the things that we can actually affect, and in proportion to the degree to which we can affect them.
A bunch of new names on the RSVP—looking forward to meeting you all tomorrow! Note that Yi Xin is so ‘small and casual’ that it doesn’t usually take table bookings, but it shouldn’t take any longer than 10 mins to get a table. Please try to let me know in the comments here if you’re likely to be more than 20 mins late so we can time our ‘chope-ing’ (we’ll need multiple tables).
See you tomorrow night!
Ah, interesting to think about the stuff in these principles/ideas for non-mathy problems!
Regarding your point about actively forgetting: Yeah, it seems like there’s an interesting trade-off to consider in choosing how long to stay “steeped” in a task. I’m guessing it depends a lot on the “depth” of the problem being solved—i.e. for some problems I think it can take several days or more just to get to the point where you’ve loaded in enough “context” to start actually making any progress on it, and so you need to stay deep in it for several days at a time. Whereas with other problems it could take hours or less to get “deep” into the problem, and so in that case it probably makes sense to have a faster cadence of solving vs actively forgetting because you hit diminishing returns fairly quickly after attacking the problem for several hours. I’ll have to think more about this.
Thanks for your comment!
Thanks for sharing, matto—I’ll look into those two authors 👍
Thanks for commenting—glad to know it’s useful!
The short answer is that most of the lessons come from my hobby of thinking about weird learning rules—alternatives to back-prop that make more sense under certain conditions/requirements.
(Can’t say I pass my own test from the “Are you solving the right problem?” section, but it’s just a hobby anyway.)
Hey all, @FlorianH is right, Yi Xin is closed today—my bad! So we’ll be heading across the road to the backup location—the hawker center has lots of different options (including McDonalds). They have excellent an Mala stall (I’ll be getting that), but there are a million other stalls there. We’ll still be meeting at Yi Xin just in case someone doesn’t get this notification.
We’ll either eat at the hawker center (if it’s quiet enough today), or get takeaway and sit in a public mini park thing that’s nearby, or sit in McDonalds (I’ll buy us some drinks as an excuse if no one orders from there).
Sorry for the late reply to Florian’s message! My sleep schedule is such that I’m currently nocturnal (I’m trying to loop it around), and I just woke up. Completely understand if some of you have to change your RSVP status!
Hey all, Nathan and I sitting inside—I’m wearing a grey shirt and black shorts. Nathan is wearing a black shirt that says “deep note”.
Hey friends, just a quick reminder that the dinner is tomorrow night. I’m going to get there a bit early to try and grab us a table. See you tomorrow! :)
I’m here early, and managed to snag a table. I’m wearing a light-brown shirt and black shorts. My hat is in the middle of the table (it’s one of the two outside tables).
No problem 👍
No problem!
Hey all, I’ve booked a table that seats up to 10, so we have room for a couple more in case there are any last minute RSVPs (it was the only table they had left anyway). We’ll meet outside the restaurant at 7pm and wait a bit before heading in. Please try to be on-time-ish, and let me know if you’re likely to be late. Eight Treasures is quite busy tomorrow and they’re requesting advanced orders, so I’ll send out a menu to you all soon and you can pick some stuff. If you’re fine with whatever, then I’ll fill out the order with a variety of ‘recommend’ dishes. I think most dishes will be shared (it’s a round table with a turntable), so there should be a lot of variety for those who don’t really know what to order.
Looking forward to tomorrow!
Edit: Here’s the menu. Also, this FoodPanda link has dietary stuff marked (most dishes are vegan), and also has prices (click item to see small/medium/large price).