Interested in math, Game Theory, etc.
Pattern
Karma: 1,301
Yes.
Both tags and sequences are just collections of posts. The bi[g] advantage sequences have over tags is order, i.e. “sequencing” :P
Some of the discussion around the way voting could work for tags suggested something like “sequencing” could be good for tags. (For cluster similarity or value to cluster, I think.)
Unfortunately, the current UI for editing sequences is not very good at all.
Maybe something like this stuff could be done on the wiki, although I’m not sure if that fits with the point of the wiki.
(Which isn’t read/used as much, and having (public) pages with things called ‘sequences’ over there that aren’t over here could be small source of confusion.)
Prompted by tuberculosis risk, 100 years ago, occasionally students would have school outdoors, even in the winter:
So that’s what a forest school is. (The link is really worth reading, and it’s got a lot more pictures with great ideas.)
Interesting username. (The email.)
Let’s say hypothetically, one year of school closures takes 1 year off of every child’s life on average.
I wonder what the actual number would be, absent corona.
Ourorobos species.
The question I had until half way through the post:
What is an AXI? ASI?
(Artificial eXpert Intelligence and...artificial scientist?)
The firefighters know their enemy is fires (sort of), and don’t require a notion of ‘firefighter’.
Why GPT-4 would magically know how to cure cancer isn’t clear.
The title “Doctor of Philosophy” is older than calculus, though neither of its inventors, Newton and Leibniz, held it. (They had BAs though.)
In Expected-Value prioritization
Related: Expected Information/Value of Information/Most ambiguous
often over updated on in
over emphasized/prioritized
The ‘any one can edit’ feature/aspect seems like it might be useful for sequences.
It could be talking about:
In the far past of the universe:
Physics might have been different (look up the beginning of the universe—right after that)
I’m not sure there were stars (pretty sure there weren’t planets for a long time) - big differences like that
In the far future of the universe:
Energy might cease to be usable (equilibrium), maybe some physics changes
The stars die out
The Echo Fallacy
Hall of Mirrors or Plato’s Cave
(Currently complete, but subject to change with post—unless different versions are separate posts?)
Content:
Contents:
Content
Open
Addressed by document’s later contents
Style
(Numbering is within sections and only reflects order within text (appearance), but doesn’t cross categories.)
Open:
1.
In a statistical sense, that would mean the loss function would be something like: the expected squared difference between the percent a proposal gets in the legislature, and the percent it would have gotten in a direct referendum, given that the proposal is drawn from some predefined distribution over possible proposals.
I’m curious how this loss function differs from the results being the same, rather than the ratios. I’d guess that it would get smoother results, but the main issue would probably be interactions. (Systematic rather than random variance.)
Which brings us to the third way better outcomes might be possible: by making representatives accountable primarily not on a moment-by-moment basis, but on a once-per-election time cycle, we might nudge them to think from a slightly more future-oriented perspective.
The question of how to get a future oriented perspective seems an empirical one.
2.
For example, imagine the fictional planet mentioned in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, where people vote to elect lizards. Though the complete lack of representativity makes this a poor democracy, it would clearly be even less democratic if the losing lizard committed electoral fraud.
Obligatory mention that gerrymandering might be detectable by measuring variance in outcomes (of elections).
If the “effective dimension” is low, then a relatively small legislature can do quite a good job at representing even an infinite population.
But the election would take forever.
If the effective dimension is high, though, then the ideological distance between a randomly-chosen voter and the closest member of the legislature, will tend to be almost as high as the distance between any two randomly-chosen voters. In other words, there will be so many ways for any two people to differ, that the very idea that one person could “represent” another well begins to break down (unless the size of the legislature grows exponentially in the number of effective dimensions)
Unless people are organized into groups based around a group that literally negotiate over the tradeoffs, possibly reversing the ‘usual’ direction of voters → legislature. With the last step being the one that makes the Laws.
3.
What is the effective dimension of political ideology in reality? It depends how you measure it. If you look at US incumbent politicians’ voting records using a methodology like DW-NOMINATE
The choice of dimensions seems like a bigger deal than the number.
But if I’m wrong, and the variation in political opinions/interests that are politically salient in an ideal world is much higher, then the very “republican idea” of representative democracy is problematic.
And the question of whether things (like the factors captured by the dimensions, as well as ‘representability’) interact with each other to greatly affect outcomes (laws or whatever the means in question is that itself leads to outcomes).
4.
Having individual representation, where each voter can point to the representative they helped elect, and each representative was elected by an equal number of voters, is good from several perspectives.
Why? Getting a more diverse set of perspectives seems doable via:
Electing one or more officials with different numbers of votes, but giving them power based on the number of votes they received. (Officials with less power may have less of an impact most of the time.* But if they’re able to bring new ideas to the table that work...)
*Ignoring the possibility of officials with powers based on circumstance, or within certain domains.
For instance, in this case, we could optimize for piety even while also ensuring unbiasedness and minimizing variance.
Variance seems like it might be a red herring, given a focus on outcomes/exemplariness.
5.
3a from the next section seems like it might be relevant.
In practice, it’s impossible to create a voting method that elects S equally-weighted candidates without wasting some votes; typically at least somewhere between 1/2S and 1/(S+1) of them.
Imprecision: instead of dividing voters into S separate groups with one representative per group, the method might divide them into fewer groups with more than one representative each. This almost certainly would lead to higher bias and/or variance at the next step.
Weird methods:
Representatives are chosen from Group A, but chosen by Group B voters. (There’s also changing power amounts as mentioned previously.)
6.
Note that in rating a voting method, we’re doing this “backwards”: we constructed the “set of responsible voters” from the candidate, not vice versa.
In some ways there seemed to be a similar circularity around the use for “utilitarianism” whcih seemed to mean ‘representativeness of democracy’ in context.
.… (I’m making good progress writing this but I’ve gotta go now; to be continued)
I look forward to seeing more in this section.
Addressed by document’s later contents:
1.
When you’re choosing between a finite number of options that are known at the time of voting, you need a single-winner voting method. It’s pretty easy to define a way to measure “how good” such a method is: we can just use utilitarianism.
utilitarianism
Based on the rest of this document, you mean a utility function*, or something else very different from utilitarianism.
This (later) part makes it more clear:
The legislative outcome is an approximation of the popular outcome which is an approximation of the ideal outcome; if the first step of approximating goes wrong, there’s no reason to believe the second step will fix it.
2.
But electing a legislature is something different. How do you define the utility of a legislature that has a 60⁄40 split between two parties, versus one that has 70⁄30 split?
Depends on the system—The utility is based on the actions of the legislature (and also it’s cost and thus size, especially if the people/voters have to pay for it).
(Later) Addressed here:
The legislative outcome is an approximation of the popular outcome which is an approximation of the ideal outcome; if the first step of approximating goes wrong, there’s no reason to believe the second step will fix it.
3.
In practice, “all” tends to be limited by some eligibility criteria, but I’d say that most such criteria make the system less democratic, other than maybe age and residency.
The normative case that this kind of democracy is a good idea tends to rest on the Condorcet jury theorem: that is, if the average voter is more likely to be “right” than “wrong” (for instance, more likely to choose the option which will maximize global utility), then the chances the referendum outcome will be “right” quickly converge towards 100% as the number of voters increases.
a) Voters could also be selected to ‘create/represent’ conflict, and see which side wins. (If the remaining population that hasn’t voted isn’t big enough to overturn the current win/result, the voting stops, or the result is passed. (An error rate/margin could also be included.))
b) This could be reversed; the voters are selected in order to create a body in which
the average voter is more likely to be “right” than “wrong”
and where additional voters improve this probability.
c)
which will maximize global utility
The question of cost is also a matter of global utility.
d)
If instead of voters voting, a body that deliberates on the question/s this can allow for more options being evaluated, and perhaps more “right” being found—though the bigger the body (and the search space), the longer this might take, and costs probably should be taken into account.
Later addressed here:
First, it may even be that there is some optimum size for reasoned debate and
(And it may be different for “exemplary representatives”.)
Style:
on a fooding
on a footing
((OK, “effective dimension” isn’t exactly that; it measures not only how many “relatively big” dimensions there are, but also how “relatively small” the rest are. I’m being deliberately vague about how precisely I’d define “effective dimension” because I suspect that unless you ignore variation below a certain noise threshold the ED is actually infinite in the limit of infinite voters.))
...
))(...)((
The multiple parenthesis are an interesting style choice.
The “ongoing” nature of this post is interesting and I like it. Having read it as it is, I think it worked really well, and some of the empty sections could fit together in a different post. Though since they don’t exist I don’t know how important the connections between them in one document are. (Maybe having this version as is might be useful.)
Benefits:
Generally: Resting/Taking a break. (There might be more information on this in neuroscience, I’m not deeply familiar with that.)
Specifically: Starting over.
Normally if you stick with might be the benefits of:
1. if you’re productive you can continue to be
2. Not having to spend time re-loading context, figuring out what you were thinking/doing before
Sometimes 2 is an advantage. (Particularly if you stop doing something that isn’t productive.) If your approach isn’t working, ‘starting over’ can be very beneficial without thinking about the problem in the mean time. For an extreme example, if you stop doing something for not just days but weeks or months, and don’t think about it, and then you do it again, you have to figure things out again (knowledge, approach, etc.) to a fair extent (and restart context).
This can help in moving from ‘this isn’t working’ equilibria to ‘things working great’.
(Having a different perspective can also be related to ‘unconscious’ thought or making (random) connections. Over a larger time frame there’s more things that connections can be made between. Above I emphasized losing context and starting afresh, rather than connecting/borrowing contexts.)
Are there any other posts by your co-author?
Message received. To avoid confusion, it might help if your comment (above) is deleted within 29 days.
The problem is solved if the limit as x approaches infinity, of p(x)*x, where x is the utility the mugger offers, is 0. (This is the case if p(x) ⇐ x^2. If that’s an upper bound, however loose, then the problem is solved.)
This seems like a better idea.
It could just be the effects of taking a break; i.e., the benefits of not consciously thinking about the problem, instead of a benefit stemming from unconscious thought.
Are all statements improvable?
Why deploy the method against your side?
In this failure mode, science works more or less like religion. There’s
There’s a difference between science and “science”. (In this case, schools != science. And it’s not obvious why there would be a relation—the process of absorbing ‘knowledge’ or ‘information’ need not be conducted any differently between truth and falsehood.)
What makes a belief unscientific?
boss
What he lacked was/He lacked a
Close—he was working from his own logic and intuition. (If he learned ‘other’ ‘systems’ from other people that might be relevant.)
Or seeing under what conditions they do and don’t hold, but yes.
Perhaps some day this (A) will be seen the same way as (B).
Does the world lose out because people aren’t running around committing murder? Doesn’t seem like it. But whether or not you think ‘widespread morality has issues’ it seems worth noting that not everyone is ‘moral’. Perhaps this is related to the way ‘ethics’ is understood.
.