I want everyone to be able to achieve world they would really like; guess the best way to do that is to help people learn, build one’s strengths, build small-scale and large-scale projects, and also to cooperate.
Any gift must be accepted with gratitude and, if possible, with grace.
As of 2024-12-21, I have signed no contracts I cannot mention exist. I finally got to adding this notice thanks to the one in the-gears-to-ascension’s bio.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values.
After thinking on this a bit, I’ve somewhat changed my mind.
(Epistemic status: filtered evidence.)
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average. However, now it came to mind that it’s possible for someone to
1) get two dates to accidentally overlap (or before confirming with partners-to-be that poly is OK),
2) lose an arbitrarily large bunch of money on gambling just online,
3) take revenge on a past offender with a firearm (or more destructive ways, as it happens),
and I’m not sure the failure margins have widened over time at all.
By the way, if technology effects aren’t really on topic, I’m open to move that discussion to shortform/dialogue.
---
(Epistemic status: obtained with introspection.)
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”. Given tech level and my current lifestyle, there isn’t instrumental goal “eat more sweets” nor “eat less sweets”; I think I’m somewhere near the balance, and I wouldn’t want society to pass any judgement.
I object to the framing of society being all-wise, and instead believe that for most issues it’s possible to get the benefits of both ways given some innovators on that issue. For example, visual communication was either face-to-face or heavily resource-bounded till the computer era—then there were problems of quality and price, but those have been almost fully solved in our days.
Consequently, I’d prefer “bunch of candy and no diabetes still” outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
As for “nonmarital sex <...> will result in blowing past Goodhart’s warnings into more [personal psychological, I suppose] harm than good”, that seems already solved with the concept of “commitment”? The society might accept someone disregarding another person if that’s done with plausible deniability like “I didn’t know they would even care”, and commitment often makes you promise to care about partner’s feelings, solving* the particular problem in a more granular way than “couples should marry no matter what”. The same thing goes with other issues.
That said, I’ve recently started to think that it’s better to not push other people to less-socially-accepted preferences unless you have a really good case they can revert from exploration well and would be better off (and, thus, better not to push over social networks at all), since the limit point of person’s preferences might shift—wicked leading to more wicked and so on—to the point person wouldn’t endorse outcomes of change on reflection. I’m still considering if just noting that certain behavior is possible is a nudge significant enough to be disadvantaged (downvoted or like).
*I’d stop believing in that if commitment-based cultures had higher rate of partners failing on their promises to care than marriage-based; would be interested in some evidence either way.
Nicely written!
A nitpick: I believe “Voluntary cooperation” shouldn’t always be equal to “Pareto preferred”. Consider an Ultimatum game, where two people have 10 goodness tokens to split; the first person suggests a split (just once), then the second may accept or reject (when rejecting, all tokens are discarded). 9+1 is Pareto superior to 0+0 but one shouldn’t [100%] accept 9+1 lest that becomes anything they are ever suggested. Summarizable with “Don’t do unto yourself what you wouldn’t want to be done unto you”, or something like that.
Well I’d really love to see a practical example because for now the text clicks as “yes, that’s how it should be, indeed, and what’s novel here?”. (By the way it seems you haven’t yet started at how the gains would be divided; that seems relevant for continuing, and is already described in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJ7ggyjuP4u2yHNcP/threat-resistant-bargaining-megapost-introducing-the-rose.)
Do you have an operational definition of “intrinsic preferences”?
Let me try. I believe that if copies of a person (as determined by their genotype*) would be raised in different cultures and environments, their revealed preferences would mainly be clustered around a single point, with some shifts determined by what desires society showed them as acceptable/tractable and what as unfashionable. Given proper diversity of surrounding cultures list, I’d say the cluster median indicates person’s intrinsic preferences.
*it also seems intuitively right to discount traits that were [IVF?]optimized for, if any, as an outside influence; though, I have no strong opinion on this.
This article seems like it was not written for LessWrong? It explores how we need to do conscious thinking, how we need to suggest and evaluate choices using our emotions, and essentially rephrases part of Sequences while reverting to pre-LW terminology, for “rationality” in particular.
And on top of that, “superrationality” concept is described unsoundly:
Different choices are impossible …
then if a dilemma requires two players to choose different ways at risk of losing (e.g. colliding on road, or booking one conference room at the same time), the text implies there would be no valid choice. In fact we know that there are randomized strategies, and that there often are distinctors useful for decision making.
DeekSeek v3: The Six Million Dollar Model
A typo in the title.
When happy and content, the Assistant Characters can channel more helpfulness and capabilities.
Is there anything preventing them to channel capabilities and helpfulness regardless of context, or is it in a large part derived?
I also use this idea of conditioning on context when taking notes on probability+decision theory!
In the same vein, I suggest to use for “philosophers of perfect emptiness” who take nothing but mathematical logic as valid.
At personal level, “debt” usually stands for something that will be paid back eventually. Not claiming whether US should strive to pay out most debt, but that may help explain the people’s intuitions.
Does your family have the same opinions as your social circle?
Quite similar, in fact—at least where they care to do so! I do listen for perspective, but I still can’t put society’s revealed opinion into span of those who I know better!
Getting to know your neighbors is another way to expose yourself to people who often think differently.
A good idea! I’ll have to take it a bit more general, because I’m an university student with dormitory and already know many people around; though, eating at some local cafe with diverse customers should work.
Being an Uber driver would be too taxing on my time, but I’m sure there is another idea instantiation which would work!
(And while we’re in an Open Thread, I’d like to thank LessWrong for featuring that one can make informed decisions on pretty much any topic! I’ve chosen uni aligned with me and I’m not disappointed with it so far.)
Tsukasa just plain lost and the logical ending is for him to be stoned or killed
except that
1) there is sometimes too much of such hostility in the real world,
2) some people can legitimately be redeemed—that is, they change thinking strategies and approximations to their values when they see what has been created (re: Einstein’s reaction to atomic bomb creation),
3) I don’t think anyone depicted in the anime would have valued fairness/consistency/other base for punishing Tsukasa—and with death penalty, no less—over compassion.
Authors might have held the position (shout-out to @the gears to ascension!) “[we] want literally every human to get to go to space often and come back to a clean and cozy world. This currently seems unlikely. Let’s change that.” Even if they haven’t: there is such vibe, and I somewhat endorse it!
Nice to see more fans!)) I have also written a review with more focus on rationality demonstration within the anime: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yqXoFx7jsSjbWgvBq/review-dr-stone.
How can I get an empathic handle on my region/country/world’s society (average/median/some sample of its people, to be clearer)?
I seem to have got into a very specific social circle, being a constant LW reader and so on. That often makes me think “well, there is question X, a good answer is A1 and it is also shared within the circle, but many people overall will no doubt think A2 and I don’t even know who or why”. I can read survey/poll results but not understand why would people even want to ban something like surrogate motherhood or things like that.
I’ve heard one gets to know people when works with them. If so, I’d like to hear suggestions for some [temporary] professions which could aid me here?
We can suggest a Weak Zombie Argument: It is logically possible to have a universe where all qualia of red and green are inverted in the minds of its inhabitants, while all physical things remain the same.
I’d say that universe you describe IS one we’re living in (note I’m not using “equal to” or “same as”, I’m rejecting that those are two different worlds). It doesn’t really matter for anything happening in the universe whether strawberry color is labelled “red”, “black”, “colF00” or “qualia_fa615f8f”, or if that particular quale might never happen, as long as causal network is isomorphic to the original one.
Shapley values are the ONLY way to guarantee: <Efficiency, Symmetry, Linearity, Null player properties>
Well it doesn’t end at that: it turns out Shapley values for more than 2 players are not nicely behaved and instead violate Maximin Dominance, as demonstrated in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJ7ggyjuP4u2yHNcP/threat-resistant-bargaining-megapost-introducing-the-rose#ROSE_Value__N_Player_Case__.
The article I link showed how this is fixed:
Shapley values are about adding everyone one-by-one to a team in a random order and everyone gets their marginal value they contributed to the team.
And that’s kinda like giving everyone a random initiative ordering and giving everyone the surplus they can extract in the resulting initiative game.
If we’re doing that, then maybe a player, regardless of their position, can ensure they get their maximin value? Maybe this sort of Random-Order Surplus Extraction can work. ROSE.
I’ve completed the survey, skipping just a few questions I thought too ambiguous!
(Note: I’ve waited a bit to intentionally mask submit time, since otherwise I’d be identifiable by brag order :-) )
I think CBs won’t work as described at least because they need to be allocated to children/new citizens somehow? Given that territory of adopting country is non-increasing while its population increases over time, the state would need to buy out part of CB and grant those pieces, and that would presumably create CB borders drift.
Overall, I downvoted this post because I felt it only describes “that’s the idea of expevolu, and its benefits”, not realistically exploring what would happen upon adoption, and what drawbacks are inherited from previously suggested ideas.
It’s a solution! However it comes with its own downsides. For instance, Codeforces users ranted on Cloudflare usage for a while, with following things (mapped to LessWrong) highlighted:
The purpose of an API is defeated: even the API endpoints on the same domain are restricted, which prevents users from requesting posts via GraphQL. In particular, ReviewBot will be down (or be hosted in LW internal infrastructure).
In China, Cloudflare is a big speed bump.
Cloudflare-protected sites are reported to randomly lag a lot.
> I had been assuming that this is a server problem, but from talking to some people it seems like this is an issue with differential treatment of who is accessing CF.
Lack of interaction smoothness might be really noticeable for new users, comparing to current state.
Yes, many people will have problems with the Archimedes’ axiom because it implies that everything has a price (that any good option can be probability-diluted enough that a mediocre is chosen instead), and people don’t take it kindly when you tell “you absolutely must have a trade-off between value A and value B” - especially if they really don’t have a trade-off, but also if they don’t want to admit or consciously estimate it.
Thankfully, that VNM property is not that critical for rational decision-making because we can simply use surreal numbers instead.
Wouldn’t work well since in real world outcomes are non-deterministic; given that, minimizing expected number is accomplished by simply having zero children.