philh
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When I saw Gurkenglas’ comment, I had a quick think for “a name for the class of things that “punching” is a metaphor for”, and didn’t come up with anything. But I agree that “sanctions” fits, so thanks for supplying that word.
Still, I’m basically going to ignore this criticism. Not that it’s necessarily unfair or incorrect or anything. (It doesn’t strike me as particularly salient. But I may be atypical, or I may be too close to be objective.)
But I’m not confident I could have reliably anticipated it without also anticipating a bunch of other potential criticisms that would seem similarly important. And I have a hard enough time writing something that satisfies myself. I don’t want to add more prune.
As an aside: I assume it’s just an oversight, but I would prefer if you link your copy back to the original, since it’s publicly listed.
I was thinking of actions, not motivations. If Alice wants to convince people to punch Bob, then her motivations (punishment, protection, deterrence, restoration) will be relevant to what sort of arguments she makes and whether other people are likely to agree. But I don’t think they’re particularly relevant to the contents of this post.
that’s very different from the decisions philh is talking about.
So, I’ve had the feeling from all of your comments on this thread that you think I’m talking about something different from what I think I’m taking about. I’ve not felt like going to the effort of teasing out the confusion, and I still don’t. But I would like to make it clear that I do not endorse this statement.
To be clear, I think this is a good (prosocial) way for individuals to act. I’m not trying to advocate that we should make it a community norm.
But I’m unconvinced by this particular failure mode.
if there is a norm like this in place, Alice always has a strong incentive to pretend that she is punching based on some generally accepted theory, and that the only thing that needs arguing is the application of this theory to Bob (point 2).
Surely this incentive exists anyway for Alice? There’s no existing norm against what I propose.
she will almost certainly be able to convincingly pass it off as such.
I don’t see why this would be. At least not any general principle that her readers will be familiar with and agree with, which is what would be required.
I’m not suggesting that after Alice publishes part (2), people who don’t think “punching Bob is better than the alternatives” should punch Bob. Alice doesn’t just need to convince people that there is an argument for punching Bob, she needs to convince people to punch Bob.
I agree with Raemon here. It would be good to think about ambiguous cases in advance, and I like the idea that fiction is one way of doing so.
But ambiguous cases are still going to come up, and you need to have some way of dealing with them. (And if you deal with them by never punching anyone, then you’re encouraging bad actors to seek them out.)
“Now here’s why I’m punching you...”
Something I don’t think anyone’s said explicitly is that athletic performance is more legible than intellectual performance. If a new breakfast food makes you 1% faster or slower, that’s not necessarily easy to notice, but it’s easier than noticing if it makes you 1% “better at thinking”.
Hm. I’d been thinking the whole thing would work better if each party could perform some small negative-sum defection against the other. Along the likes of, each party commits to destroy $10, and has the ability to restore $1 to themselves while increasing the other party’s obligation by $2 up to a max of $30. (And after either party gets nuked, the money values remain fixed.)
I think that would be a good thing for us to practice, but I agree the “just don’t press the button that you have no reason to press anyway” variant is also good to practice.
it’s fine with even 1% accuracy with 1000:1 payout difference.
Well, if 1% accuracy means 99% of one-boxers are predicted to two-box, and 99% of two-boxers are expected to one-box, you should two-box. The prediction needs to at least be correlated with reality.
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.
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.
Thanks.