You appear to be unclear on the meaning of “arbitrage”. Simply taking a position that has positive expected return is not arbitrage; it’s just plain investing. Arbitrage has positive (or at least nonnegative) ‘guaranteed’ return. Arbitrage involves taking both sides of a bet, but with a spread. If a lot of people are “overpaying” for one side, that doesn’t create arbitrage unless there’s someone else “underpaying”. In cases where people are hedging on both sides (for instance, corn growers hedge by selling corn futures, pig farmers hedge by buying corn futures), assuming an efficient market the effects of the two hedgers will cancel each other out and the price will converge on an equilibrium price. You would have arbitrage only if you have some special ability to sell to one and buy from the other that market participants in general do not have.
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A bet reveals that the bettor believes that the bet increases their utility. So it reveals the beliefs of the bettor about the bettor’s utility. The relationship between the utility of a bet and the outcome probabilities is more complicated, though.
the current MtGox rate is $132!
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1!
If the current price of a bitcoin is $132, then obviously the cost of generating new coins is greater than or equal to $132, is it not? Otherwise, no one would buy bitcoins, they would just mine them.
However, the two other world powers in 1984 are exactly the same as Oceania, so it won’t happen.
They are apparently the same, but we don’t have any reliable source information about them. For all we really know, they might not even actually exist.
Well, the statement that “supermassive black holes with no ordinary matter nearby cannot evolved or be turned into anything interesting” is false.
I don’t see any need to “solve” the “problem”, at least in this context. The goal is maximize utility, not to minimize “surprise”. All we care about is the ordinal values of the choices; getting the quantitative values right is simply a means to that end. The “solution” presented in your article doesn’t make any sense; unless there’s some asymmetry between the choices, how can your “solution” change the ordinal value of the choices?
Money spent on traditional charity benefits you more than x-risk reduction does.
For it to be an open problem, there would have to not be a proof either way. Since Eliezer is claiming (or, at least, implying) that there is a proof that there is no PRNG indistinguishable, arguing that there is no proof that there is a PRNG indistinguishable doesn’t show that it is an open problem.
First, this is equivocating rationality and accuracy. Second, just because something results in more rational decisions, that doesn’t mean that it is valid to characterize it as increasing rationality. If I observe a compass, and see that the direction is pointing coincides with the direction that Oregon is from my current location, it would be an error to conclude that compasses point towards Oregon.
If you’re interested in increasing your rationality, I have a homeopathic treatment specifically formulated for that purpose.
The term “formal logic” seems to be being used in several senses. I understand it refer to the branch of mathematics, but you seem to be using it to mean “rigorous reasoning”. Most people would not understand a statement written in formal logic, according to the former definition, let alone find it convincing. And even with the latter meaning, there is much of formal logic that ordinary people find unconvincing, such as “The statement ‘all crows are black’ is logically equivalent to ‘all non-black things are non-crows’; therefore, if I find something that isn’t black, and it isn’t a crow, that is support for the claim that all crows are black”.
The key is that there are three different dimensions being collapsed into two “orientations”. With a needle, two dimensions are “horizontal”, and one is “vertical”. With a disk, two are “vertical”, and one is “horizontal”. Part of the issue with this problem is that people don’t generally have an explicit definition of “vertical” and “horizontal”. Ask them whether they know what they mean, and they’ll say “sure”, but ask them to give a definition, and they’ll flounder.
I find those two puzzles to be rife with ambiguities. First, a “force” is not going affect the attitude; only a torque will do that, and as another poster has noted, there’s a bit of a difference between “random force” and “random attitude”. There’s also the question of just what “random” means. The word “random” just means that there is some probability distribution; it does nothing to tell us what it is. Finally, there’s the issue of starting orientation. If the needles start out vertical, then the most likely result is that they will end up vertical.
If the off-diagonals are impossible, then it’s not the Prisoners’ Dilemma, it’s just Cake or Death. If you’re facing an identical copy of yourself, then it’s really the Newcomb Paradox. Open code (or, at least, unilateral open code) only works in the Ultimatum Game. One study found that knowing how the other person chose actually increases defection; the probability that Player Two defects given that Player One defects > probability given Player One cooperates > probability given Player One’s action is unknown. Furthermore, open code only makes sense if you have a way of committing to following the code, and part of the Prisoners’ Dilemma is that there is no way for either player to commit to a course of action. And another part of the whole concept of the one-off Prisoners’ dilemma is that there is no way to retaliate. If the players can sue each other for reneging on agreements, then it’s basically an iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma (and if there’s a defined endpoint, then you have the Backwards Induction Paradox).
When you say that choosing to defect might make it more likely that they defect, do you mean that choosing to defect may cause the probability that the other person will defect to go up, or do you mean that the probability of the other player defecting, given that you defected, may be greater than the probability given that you cooperated?
To quote Douglas Adams, “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.” If it is impossible to have off-diagonal results, that is a much stronger argument for cooperating than having it be improbable, even if the probability of an on-diagonal result is 99.99%; as long as the possibility exists, one should take it into consideration.
Sometimes, that “fraction” is greater than 1 (not that I’m saying that it is in the case of Google). Rent seeking, regulatory capture, arbitrage, and tournament theory are all cases where people make more money than their contribution to the economy.
Working at Google diverted these people’s skilled labor from other worthwhile endeavors.
Huh? If someone writes a software program worth $100,000, then they have contributed $100,000 to the economy. If the person could have written a program worth $80,000, that doesn’t mean that the person has only contributed $20,000 to the economy. Your comment makes sense if evaluating the value of Google to the economy, but not when evaluating the value of the employees to Google or the economy.
At one point, Yahoo was actually using Google to create its searchable index.
Money spent on x-risk reduction benefits everyone who will live, while traditional charity benefits people who are currently alive. Since you make up a larger percentage of the latter than the former, it is reasonable to assume that money spent on traditional charity benefits you more. I suppose you might have special circumstances that make you an exception, but given a choice between an expenditure optimized to reduce x-risk, and an expenditure optimized to improve the standard of living of people currently alive, the latter, by definition, helps the average currently-alive person by an amount equal to, or greater, than the former does.
Well, first, I think that there are ethical issues in trying to hedge your risk from employment. Your risk exposure is beneficial to the company, and the employment is made with an expectation of it. If I hired a lawyer on contingency, and found out that they managed to hedge out all of the risk of losing the case, I would find this behavior quite unethical, to say the least. An employee should not be indifferent to the bankruptcy of their employer.
The being said, there are informal ways of hedging this risk. The biggest is having a social network of people who support each other through times of unemployment. While families are often in the same line of work, from a risk management point of view it’s best to diversify. Besides the other issues, having a spouse that works at the same company as you is quite dangerous if the company runs into financial difficulties. (However, I don’t expect to see many personal ads along the lines of “SWM working in bio engineering field seeks SWF in anti-correlated field”.) And obviously, buying stock in the company increases your risk and should only been done if your company compensates you for doing so (such as offering free/discounted stock options). If you are offered stock option, the rational, although perhaps not most loyal, course of action is to sell them as soon as you can.