philh
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I think from a wide-circle perspective, the things you’re talking about don’t look like a cost of a wide circle, so much as just reasons the problem is hard. From a wide-circle perspective, the cost of a narrow circle is that you try to solve a problem that’s easier than the real problem, and you don’t solve the real problem, and children in Africa continue to die of malaria. It sounds like you’re telling me that I shouldn’t care about children dying of malaria because they’re far away and can’t do anything for me and I could spend that money on myself and people close to me… and my reaction is that none of that stops children from dying of malaria, which is really actually a thing I care about and don’t want to stop caring about
There is yet another cost to a wide circle of moral concern, and that is the discrepancy with people who have a smaller circle. If you’re my compatriot or family member or fellow present human being, and you have a small circle of concern, I can expect you to allocate more of your agency to my benefit. If you have a wide circle of concern that includes all kinds of entities who can’t reciprocate, I benefit less from having you as an ally.
To be precise, this seems like a cost to Alice of Bob having a wide circle, if Alice and Bob are close. If they aren’t, and especially if we bring in a veil of ignorance, then Alice is likely to benefit somewhat from Bob having a wide circle. Not definite, but this still seems like a thing to note.
Separate from my other comment:
He then targeted those blogs with a series of provocative actions, such as buying billboards promoting the movie and then vandalizing them himself, calling feminist groups to protest showings of the movie, arranging for provocative advertisements on buses, and other acts designed to go viral on social media.
It occurs to me that his relationship with these feminist groups may not have been entirely adversarial.
That is, my first inclination is to read a situation like this as: he wants people to see the movie, the feminist groups want people not to see the movie, and he slyly manipulates them into doing things that achieve what he wants and not what they want.
And maybe this should have been obvious, but—of course that’s not the only thing feminist groups want. They might also want members; newspaper coverage; a highly-visible thing to rally around and point people at. (And if someone is the sort of person who would see the movie if they heard about it, maybe the feminist groups don’t even really care if they do happen to hear about it and see it.) Perhaps “all publicity is good publicity” applies to both sides, here.
And if that’s right, then this problem seems harder to solve.
Regardless of whether the problem can be resolved, I confess that I don’t see how it’s related to the original two-envelopes problem, which is a case of doing incorrect expected-value calculations with sensible numbers. (The contents of the envelopes are entirely comparable and can’t be rescaled.)
Meanwhile, it seems to me that the elephants problem just comes about because the numbers are fake. You can do sensible EV calculations, get (a + b/4) for saving two elephants versus (a/2 + b/2) for saving one human, but because a and b are mostly-unconstrained (they just have to be positive), you can’t go anywhere from there.
These strike me as just completely unrelated problems.
A concrete example of this is work he did for the movie I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, starring Tucker Max.
I think it’s important to note that the movie was a box office failure. That’s not the only thing that counts, Max was probably glad to be interviewed by the Post regardless, but it does seem like Holiday’s approach failed at its main goal. Or if the Post coverage really was the main goal, then it’s less obvious why we should care.
Does Holiday ever address this?
(Unimportant nitpick: Max wrote the book and cowrote the film, but didn’t star in it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hope_They_Serve_Beer_in_Hell_%28film%29
I suggest that you only make comments like this for people who’ve opted in.
Regardless of that, I request that you not make comments like this on anything I post.
(I had written reasons for these, but on the spirit of the post, I’m defaulting to not including them.)
enumerates the worlds seen as possible by every agent, no matter what their decision theory is
Can you clarify this?
One interpretation is that you’re talking about an agent who enumerates every world that any agent sees as possible. But your post further down seems to contradict this, “the unpunched world is not a possible one for the world enumerator”. And it’s not obvious to me that this agent can exist.
Another is that the agent enumerates only the worlds that every agent sees as possible, but that agent doesn’t seem likely to get good results. And it’s not obvious to me that there are guaranteed to be any worlds at all in this intersection.
Am I missing an interpretation?
Using the definitions from the post, those agents would be optimising the same utility functions, just by taking different actions.
Note that it wouldn’t mean that, since there are various other factors that might affect it. E.g. people might set their fonts larger. It might mean that almost everyone has line breaks in the same place. Though even then you’re assuming that phone browsers are wide enough or uncommon enough, and that greater wrong is uncommon.
I like looking at my total karma too, partly because I like knowing about votes on my comments and if total karma hasn’t changed then I assume I haven’t received any votes recently.
Some of this feels like a kind of criticism that’s inevitably going to apply to a project like REACH, whether it succeeds or not. Like, there’s basically no way to avoid it being very expensive. There may be a path to “not cash-strapped”, but it seems like basically any such path is going to go via “cash-strapped store front”, because it’s going to be much easier to get money after it’s seen to be successful.
(Perhaps it would be nice if we could raise money for these things without someone like Sarah needing to fund their initial success, and then maybe we could avoid them being both cash-strapped and highly public. But if so, that’s more a criticism of the community than of REACH.)
That doesn’t make your criticisms false, but if I’m right, this seems like a property of them that’s important to note and engage with.
Separately, I’m not convinced that the signaling properties of clothes exchanges are what you say. I have no evidence here, just intuition.
Geras was the physical rewards indicating contribution to the group—in the division of plunder after the battle, more plunder went to the warriors who fought most bravely. Time was the group’s estimation of your worth—this determined how one person was treated relative to another, and consequently how they thought of themselves. Kleos is usually translated as “glory”—the poets will tell your story and so your deeds will live on after your death
If these are separate components, then someone could have had e.g. high Geras but middling or low Time and Kleos? I’d be curious to hear more about such people.
Part of me wants tell a story relating these to employees of a company: Geras is receiving a high salary, Time is people being friendly and respectful and inviting you to after-work drinks, and Kleos is when people talking about your projects make a point of giving you credit.
It feels weird to me to set time as “index of the current observation in the sorted order” rather than as “magnitude of the current observation”.
Like, I feel like whatever an observer perceives as “the passage of time” must be something in the physical universe, something that changes from one state to the “next”. But here there’s nothing to distinguish states except their magnitude, so it feels like cheating to say that the same amount of time passes regardless of the magnitude gap.
They don’t cost the theater ANYTHING to keep
This may be approximately true, but I don’t think it’s obvious and uncomplicated.
According to the googling I did on the last post, the price to the theatre of showing a film goes up with the number of seats. It’s banded, so unless they’re near the bottom of a band, removing those seats will have no marginal effect on that. And we’d expect them to cluster near the tops of bands.
But I can imagine other things it might have an effect on: ad revenue, trailer prices (I think they have to pay to show them, but I’m not sure), insurance prices, weird corporate manoeuvring (if we increase our seat count by 5%, we’ll be able to negotiate a better deal).
It may also be relevant that: if a group of five people agrees on something, then any individual group member need not agree. A member may keep their disagreement to themselves.
But if someone speaks at length about why this is the right decision, they’re more committed than “I’m willing to passively go along with this”. It’s a minor form of how a Mafioso is required to have carried out a hit.
Suppose the invasion of Mallorca goes badly. Do you want a merchant, a general, an aristocrat and a bishop to be able to say “that was a bad idea all along, those with power are unfit to wield it”?
I have. I like having the app better than not having an app. It’s likely that a better app exists, but finding it is higher activation energy.
Though this doesn’t explain why they don’t simply remove the ads and keep the trailers, which have most of the same benefits plus I think many people enjoy watching them plus they bring people back.
The ads give people time to arrive late and still buy snacks. And people who find them sufficiently aversive can just show up late, except for sold-out screenings. (Which are the ones the theatre least needs to intice people in for.)
From a quick google, it does look like the ads themselves don’t make much money, which surprises me a bit.
Not all theaters have the front seats too close.
(Incidentally, how much does “too close” vary from person to person?)
This is great.
It looked to me like PrudentBot could be done in depth 1 - “(proof that X(PB) cooperates) AND (proof that X(DB) defects)”. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQWk5jYeDg5ACCmpx/robust-cooperation-in-the-prisoner-s-dilemma (and the paper that’s about) tells me that’s wrong, if you only have the one layer of provability then PB doesn’t cooperate with itself. It also had an introduction to the math here that I found helpful.
There’s nothing wrong with using relative measurements, and using absolute measurements doesn’t resolve the problem. (It hides from the problem, but that’s not the same thing.)
The actual resolution is explained in the wiki article better than I could.
I agree that the naive version of the elephants problem is isomorphic to the envelopes problem. But the envelopes problem doesn’t reveal an actual difficulty with choosing between two envelopes, and the naive elephants problem as described doesn’t reveal an actual difficulty with choosing between humans and elephants. They just reveal a particular math error that humans are bad at noticing.