Even in a world where people would be universally willing to do this, it may fail in the case where a unified plot of land is required for a building or project of whatever kind (as in the recent Kelo vs. New London eminent domain case).
Also, “routing around” a particular house may be difficult; it’s made impossible if a group of people in the way band together and collectively hold out to take the builder’s surplus.
My emotional stability has noticeably increased since I left Catholicism. Realizing that I was responsible for any outcome I achieved or failed to achieve left me with no choice but to focus on winning and to shut up and multiply.
This was, of course, long before I learned of those particular concepts. The effect has significantly amplified since then. It is now very difficult to make me unhappy, for essentially that reason.
I agree—in fact, we’re seeing some of this right now, with the financial crisis. It’s related to the paradox of thrift: if everybody saves, the economy collapses and we’re all in trouble.
Similarly, if instead of spending money on consumption and local goods, I sent it all to the poorest people I could find, a whole variety of other people would have no means of income. Remember that spending on consumption goods doesn’t destroy the money (or more to the point, prevent charity from being done), since somebody else still gets it.
As an offset, of course, we might expect the poorest countries to become legitimate markets and thus increase total wealth.
Voting the topic up can send signals other than agreement—I vote up articles which I find interesting but with which I disagree. Explicit (dis)agreement would reduce the noise in the up/down metric.
Also, stating agreement prior to a negative remark helps with interpretation without nonverbal clues.
Blast… I apparently shouldn’t have gotten distracted while writing my comment. [I agree with SA.]
Far from being a negative aspect of the post, the self-linking is a key element of Eliezer’s effort to build a common vocabulary for rationalists. I’ve personally found them extremely helpful for reminding myself of the context of the words, when I’ve forgotten. They’re basically footnotes.
How can we cooperate if we don’t even speak the same language?
A good point, and a serious problem. When I was in high school debate (Lincoln-Douglas), I hated the degree to which the competition was really about jargon and citation of overwhelming but irrelevant “evidence.” I think the tipping point was when somebody claimed that teaching religion in public schools would lead to an environmental catastrophe (and even more, it was purely an argument from authority).
At one point, I ran a case that relied on no empirical evidence whatsoever (however abhorrent that may sound here): it was a quasi-Aristotelian argument that if you accept the value in the first premise—I believe it was “knowledge”—then the remainder followed. The whole case was perhaps three minutes long, half the allowed time, and formatted to make the series of premises and conclusions very obvious.
Best I could tell, there was only one weak link in the argument that was easily debatable. I correctly guessed that the people I was debating were more used to listing “evidence” than arguing logic, and most people had absolutely no idea how to handle even clearly stated premises and conclusions.
I was arguing against the position I actually hold, which is why there was still a flaw in the argument, but it won the majority of the debates nonetheless. Sad, more than anything.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has counted to Aleph 3^^^3.
The payoff to defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma against Eliezer Yudkowsky is a paperclip. In the eye.
The Peano axioms are complete and consistent for Eliezer Yudkowsky.
In an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma between Chuck Norris and Eliezer Yudkowsky, Chuck always cooperates and Eliezer defects. Chuck knows not to mess with his superiors.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s brain actually exists in a Hilbert space.
In Japan, it is common to hear the phrase Eliezer naritai!
Or if there were tags reflecting the level of the post, based on the amount of background knowledge or vocabulary you need to know to understand it.
In fact, I’d say that OB reinforced in a more concrete way the belief I got from Wittgenstein that not all questions are meaningful (in particular, the ones for which there cannot be “genuine answers”).
I disagree with your conclusion on the grounds that I think you’re interpreting the passage in a different way than the author intended it.
My interpretation is more along the lines of “Steve Jobs, on seeing the profound economic destitution in the East, examined his beliefs about human utility functions. Finding that Western values/practices seemed to promote utility better than Eastern values/practices in developing countries (and perhaps that they do even in developed countries), he decided that the East should adopt the West’s values/practices.”
I loved the dissection into multiple biases, and I agree with your dissection based on your reading of the passage, but I think the author is saying something different and more in line with the prevalent beliefs on Less Wrong.
South Side of Chicago
For whatever reason, I am able to access an overview of anybody else’s profile, but cannot bring up my own. I have been unable to do so for about a week. I was previously able to do so, so I don’t believe it is my browser (I also cleared the cache, logged out and back in, etc.)
Any assistance would be appreciated.
We have such an Omega: we just refer to it differently.
After all, we are used to treating our genes and our environments as definite influences on our ability to Win. Taller people tend to make more money; Omega says “there will be $1mil in box B if you have alleles for height.”
If Omega makes decisions based on properties of the agent, and not on the decisions either made or predicted to be made by the agent, then Omega is no different from, well, a lot of the world.
Rationality, then, might be better redefined under these observations as “making the decisions that Win whenever such decisions actually affect one’s probability of Winning,” though I prefer Eliezer’s more general rules plus the tacit understanding that we are only including situations where decisions make a difference.
The bug appears to be fixed. Thanks!
Agreed. In fact, the classic game-theoretic model of chicken requires that the players vastly prefer losing their pride to losing their lives. If winning/losing > losing/dying, then in a situation with imperfect information, we would assign a positive probability to playing aggressively.
And technically speaking, it is most rational, in the game-theoretic sense, to disable your steering ostentatiously before the other player does so as well. In that case, you’ve won the game before it begins, and there is no actual risk.
I’m not sure how you can implement an admonition to Win and not just to (truly, sincerely) try. What is the empirical difference?
I suppose you could use an expected regret measure (that is, the difference between the ideal result and the result of the decision summed across the distribution of probable futures) instead of an expected utility measure.
Expected regret tends to produce more robust strategies than expected utility. For instance, in Newcomb’s problem, we could say that two-boxing comes from expected utility but one-boxing comes from regret-minimizing (since a “failed” two-box gives $1,000,000-$1,000=$999,000 of regret, if you believe Omega would have acted differently if you had been the type of person to one-box, where a “failed” one-box gives $1000-$0=$1,000 of regret).
Using more robust strategies may be a way to more consistently Win, though perhaps the true goal should be to know when to use expected utility and when to use expected regret (and therefore to take advantage both of potential bonanzas and of risk-limiting mechanisms).
Either a) your opponent truly does believe that you’ve disabled your steering, in which case the outcomes are identical and the actions are equally rational, or b) we account for the (small?) chance that your opponent can determine that you actually have not disabled your steering, in which case he ostentatiously disables his and wins. Only by setting up what is in effect a doomsday device can you ensure that he will not be tempted to information-gathering brinksmanship.
Yep! I’ll get in touch.
It’s my understanding that a good amount of social science does the same—I was recently in a class on organization theory that made few if any testable predictions and ended up being a bunch of just-so stories about how people in organizations think.
One of the side effects of prediciton markets of the Hansonian variety is that people would rapidly see who is doing good science and who isn’t: wealth would be rapidly transferred from those who don’t know how to make good evidence-centric predictions to those who do.