“Can I get you a coffee?” a young quant named said.
It’s really good, am waiting for the next part, keep it up!
Maximum_Skull
Karma: 70
Excellent as always!
Throughout the entire process it is implied that words if you specify a value and if you specify a criterion...
By training children in the traditional of adversarial competitive rhetoric...
I agree, but my reasoning for it is different.
Given that the simulacra levels framework is fake, I care mostly about the way it pumps my intuition. For me it has more impact with less levels. Grouping everything in levels 4+ as a single thing does speed processing up, and doesn’t seem to meaningfully change my conclusions.
There likely exists some context where those extra levels are useful and offer new insights, but I’ve not seen it yet.
The meritocratic part is the best are significantly more likely to rise to the top, real world is best thought of as a stochastic place, full of imperfect information and surprises.
Being the best at content creation is not the same as being the best at YouTube: size of one’s target demographic matters, the ability to self-promote matters, ability to network matters, ad-friendliness of content matters… Akin to evolution, the system does not select the *best* creators in the conventional sense of creating the best videos, being the best at writing and so on. In fact, one might argue for the opposite being the default.
The selection criteria are messy, the variance in outcomes is significant, the variance in perceived selection criteria even more so.
My takeaway is that one should be lucky and avoid being unlucky, while trying to stack the deck as much as one can in order to manipulate variance.
two her brain
This gave me the chills. I have never thought about digital brain modification safety before, although now the idea seems obvious. Wonder what else am I missing.
One way to keep bots out is to validate real-world identities.
Currently, the actual use case is more akin to an assistant for human writers, so validating the identity would not do much good. Additionally, if the demand for real-life tethered online identities ever gets high, there would appear a market for people selling theirs. I have a friend, who has found a Chinese passport online, because a (Chinese) online game required one as part of registration data.
Use of social media as a marketing platform for small, tightly-knit communities is probably the way to largely mitigate this problem.
I would probably move the “spoilers ahead” section before the “Japanese history” one. Unsure if it’s possible to make this non-spoilery somehow, but history section is written as if to make the ending twist obvious.
I would suggest E.T. Jaynes’ excellent Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. While this is a book about Bayesian probability theory and it’s applications, it contains a great discussion of entropy, including, e.g., why entropy “works” in thermodynamics.
You cannot falsify mathematics by experiment (except in the subjective Bayesian sense).
Actually, that’s technically false. The statements mathematical axioms make about reality are bizarre, but they exist and are actually falsifiable.
One of the fundamental properties we want from our axiomatic systems is consistency — the fact that it does not lead to a logical contradiction. We would certainly reject our current axiomatic foundations in case we found them inconsistent.
Turns out it’s possible to write a program which would halt if and only if ZFC is consistent. I would not recommend running this one as it’s a Turing machine and thus not really optimized (and in any case, ZFC being inconsistent is unlikely, and it’s even more unlikely that the proof of it’s inconsistency would be easy to be found with current technology), but in theory one might run one of such machines long enough to produce a contradiction, which would basically physically falsify the axioms.
Stamp collecting (e.g. “history” and “English literature”) does not count.
Interesting to see your perspective change from this post and it’s comments, which suggested that history is a useful source of world models. Or am I misinterpreting past/current you?
It actually would, as long as you reject a candidate password with probability proportional to it’s relative frequency. “password” in the above example would be almost certainly rejected as it’s wildly more common that one of those 1000-character passwords.
The correct condition for real numbers would be absolute convergence (otherwise the sum after rearrangement might become different and/or infinite) but you are right: the series rearrangement is definitely illegal here.
Those probabilities are multiplied by s, which makes it more complicated.
If I try running it with s being the real numbers (which is probably the most popular choice for utility measurement), the proof breaks down. If I, for example, allow negative utilities, I can rearrange the series from a divergent one into a convergent one and vice versa, trivially leading to a contradiction just from the fact that I am allowed to do weird things with infinite series, and not because of proposed axioms being contradictory.
EDIT: concisely, your axioms do not imply that the rearrangement should result in the same utility.
Oh, thanks, I did not think about that! Now everything makes much more sense.
It does work for negative bases. Representation of a number in any base is in essence a sum of base powers multiplied by coefficients. The geometric series just has all coefficients equal to 1 after the radix point (and a 1 before it, if we start addition from the 0th power).
This one is a classic, so I can just copy-paste the solution from Google. The more interesting point is that this is one of those cases where math doesn’t correspond to reality.
In the spirit of “trying to offer concrete models and predictions” I propose you a challenge: write a bot which would consistently beat my Rob implementation over the long run enough that it would show on numerical experiments. I need some time to work on implementing it (and might disappear for a while, in which case consider this one forfeited by me).
One of the rules I propose that neither of us are allowed to use details of others’ implementation, in order to uphold the spirit of the original task.
Reminds me of a discussion I’ve had recently about whether humans solve complex systems of [mechanical] differential equations while moving. The counter-argument was “do you think that a mercury thermometer solves differential equations [while ‘calculating’ the temperature]?”
Oh, so human diseases in the form of bacteria/viruses! And humans working on gain-of-function research.
Bayesian probability theory fully answers this question from a philosophical point of view, and answers a lot of it from the practical point of view (doing calculations on probability distributions is computationally intensive and can get intractable pretty quick, so it’s not a magic bullet in practice).
It extends logic to handle be able to uniformly handle both probabilistic statements and statements made with complete certainty. I recommend Jaynes’s “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science” as a good guide to the subject in case you are interested.
There won’t be any more harm done to Oliver by spreading the story, so, at least from utilitarian-ish point of view, the case is clear.