Zack_M_Davis(Zack M. Davis)

• Zack_M_Davis 14 Jul 2020 6:15 UTC

  13 points

  on: The New Front­page De­sign & Open­ing Tag Creation!

  I strongly dis­ap­prove of graph­i­cally ren­der­ing “Front­page” and “Per­sonal Blog” as if they were tags on post pages. They’re not tags! Con­flat­ing “Per­sonal” with topic tags on the home page “Lat­est” con­trols wasn’t jar­ring, but this re­ally is.

Al­gorith­mic In­tent: A Han­so­nian Gen­er­al­ized Anti-Zom­bie Principle

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Jul 2020 5:16 UTC

  2 points

  on: Was a ter­mi­nal de­gree ~nec­es­sary for in­vent­ing Boyle’s desider­ata?

  Devin Hel­ton asks a similar ques­tion about col­lege and achieve­ment in ar­chi­tec­ture/​en­g­ineer­ing/​law/​busi­ness/​writ­ing.

• Zack_M_Davis 11 Jul 2020 22:27 UTC

  13 points

  on: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult

  Cade Metz at The Register

  It’s in­ter­est­ing to stum­ble across old refer­ences to au­thors whose names you only rec­og­nize now, but didn’t at the time. Cade Metz, huh? I won­der what he’s been up to lately!

• Zack_M_Davis 9 Jul 2020 5:41 UTC

  2 points

  on: The New Front­page De­sign & Open­ing Tag Creation!

  you can go to https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​tags/​​all,

  The link cur­rently points to less­es­t­wrong.com, pre­sum­ably your stag­ing server.

• Zack_M_Davis 9 Jul 2020 4:01 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Clas­sify­ing games like the Pri­soner’s Dilemma

  if some­one does know of an ex­ist­ing article

  Her­bert Gin­tis’s Game The­ory Evolv­ing (2nd edi­tion) offers the fol­low­ing ex­er­cise. (Bold­ing and hy­per­links mine.)

  6.15 Char­ac­ter­iz­ing 2 x 2 Nor­mal Form Games I

  We say a nor­mal form game is generic if no two pay­offs for the same player are equal. Sup­pose $A=\left(a_{ij}\right)$ and $B=\left(b_{ij}\right)$ are the pay­off ma­tri­ces for Alice and Bob, so the pay­off to Alice’s strat­egy $s_i$ against Bob’s strat­egy $t_j$ is $a_{ij}$ for Alice and $b_{ij}$ for Bob. We say two generic 2 x 2 games with pay­off ma­tri­ces (A, B) and (C, D) are equiv­a­lent if, for all i, j, k, l = 1, 2:

  $$a_{ij}>a_{kl}\text{if and only if}{c}_{ij}>c_{kl}$$

  and

  $$b_{ij}>b_{kl}\text{if and only if}{d}_{ij}>d_{kl}$$

  In par­tic­u­lar, if a con­stant is added to the pay­offs to all the pure strate­gies of one player when played against a given pure strat­egy of the other player, the re­sult­ing game is equiv­a­lent to the origi­nal.

  Show that equiv­a­lent 2 x 2 generic games have the same num­ber of pure Nash equil­ibria and the same num­ber of strictly mixed Nash equil­ibria. Show also that ev­ery generic 2 x 2 game is equiv­a­lent to ei­ther the pris­oner’s dilemma (§3.11), the bat­tle of the sexes (§3.9), or the hawk-dove (§3.10). Note that this list does not in­clude throw­ing fingers (§3.8), which is not generic.

• Zack_M_Davis 30 Jun 2020 4:28 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Op­ti­mized Pro­pa­ganda with Bayesian Net­works: Com­ment on “Ar­tic­u­lat­ing Lay The­o­ries Through Graph­i­cal Models”

  Thanks, you are right and the thing I ac­tu­ally typed was wrong. (For the graph A → C ← B, the col­lider C blocks the path be­tween A and B, but con­di­tion­ing on the col­lider un-blocks it.) Fixed.

Op­ti­mized Pro­pa­ganda with Bayesian Net­works: Com­ment on “Ar­tic­u­lat­ing Lay The­o­ries Through Graph­i­cal Models”

• Zack_M_Davis 28 Jun 2020 4:46 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: A re­ply to Agnes Callard

  (Done.)

• Zack_M_Davis 27 Jun 2020 3:43 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: eapache’s comment on: Atem­po­ral Eth­i­cal Obligations

  the fu­ture will agree Rowl­ing’s cur­rent po­si­tion is immoral

  This is vague. An ex­er­cise: can you quote spe­cific sen­tences from Rowl­ing’s re­cent es­say that you think the fu­ture will agree are im­moral?

  Maybe don’t an­swer that, be­cause we don’t care about the ob­ject level on this web­site? (Or, maybe you should an­swer it if you think avoid­ing the ob­ject-level is po­ten­tially a sneaky poli­ti­cal move on my part.) But if you try the ex­er­cise and it turns out to be harder than you ex­pected, one pos­si­ble moral is that a lot of what passes for dis­course in our So­ciety doesn’t even rise to the level of dis­agree­ment about well-speci­fied be­liefs or policy pro­pos­als, but is mostly about coal­i­tion-mem­ber­ship and in­fluenc­ing cul­tural sen­ti­ments. Those who scorn Rowl­ing do so not be­cause she has a spe­cific pro­posal for re­vis­ing the 2004 Gen­der Recog­ni­tion Act that peo­ple dis­agree with, but be­cause she talks in a way that pushes cul­ture in the wrong di­rec­tion. Every­thing is a motte-and-bailey: most peo­ple, most of the time don’t re­ally have “po­si­tions” as such!

• Zack_M_Davis 22 Jun 2020 1:14 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning

  So, I ac­tu­ally don’t think Less Wrong needs to be nicer! (But I agree that elab­o­rat­ing more was war­ranted.)

• Zack_M_Davis 22 Jun 2020 1:11 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning

  Thanks for the com­ment!—and for your pa­tience.

  So, the gen­eral an­swer to “Is there any­one who doesn’t know this?” is, in fact, “Yes.” But I can try to say a lit­tle bit more about why I thought this was worth writ­ing.

  I do think Less Wrong and /​r/​ra­tio­nal read­ers know that words don’t have in­trin­sic defi­ni­tions. If some­one wrote a story that just made the point, “Hey, words don’t have in­trin­sic defi­ni­tions!”, I would prob­a­bly down­vote it.

  But I think this piece is ac­tu­ally do­ing more work and ex­pos­ing more de­tails than that—I’m ac­tu­ally pro­vid­ing ex­e­cutable source code (!) that sketches how a sim­ple sender–re­ciever game with a re­in­force­ment-learn­ing rule cor­re­lates a not-in­trin­si­cally-mean­ingful sig­nal with the en­vi­ron­ment such that it can be con­strued as a mean­ingful word that could have a defi­ni­tion.

  In anal­ogy, ex­plain­ing how the sub­jec­tive sen­sa­tion of “free will” might arise from a de­ter­minis­tic sys­tem that com­putes plans (with­out be­ing able to pre­dict what it will choose in ad­vance of hav­ing com­puted it) is do­ing more work than the mere ob­ser­va­tion “Naïve free will can’t ex­ist be­cause physics is de­ter­minis­tic”.

  So, I don’t think all this was already ob­vi­ous to Less Wrong read­ers. If it was already ob­vi­ous to you, then you should be com­mended. How­ever, even if some form of these ideas was already well-known, I’m also a pro­po­nent of “writ­ing a thou­sand roads to Rome”: part of how you get and main­tain a com­mu­nity where “ev­ery­body knows” cer­tain ba­sic ma­te­rial, is by many au­thors grap­pling the ideas and putting their own ever-so-slightly-differ­ent ped­a­gog­i­cal spin on them. It’s fun­da­men­tally okay for Yud­kowsky’s ac­count of free will, and Gary Drescher’s ac­count (in Chap­ter 5 of Good and Real), and my story about writ­ing a chess en­g­ine to all ex­ist, even if they’re all ba­si­cally “point­ing at the same thing.”

  Another pos­si­ble mo­ti­va­tion for writ­ing a new pre­sen­ta­tion of an already well-known idea, is be­cause the new pre­sen­ta­tion might be bet­ter-suited as a pre­req­ui­site or “build­ing block” to­wards more novel work in the fu­ture. In this case, some re­cent Less Wrong dis­cus­sions have used a “four simu­lacrum lev­els” frame­work (loosely in­spired by the work of Jean Bau­drillard) to try to model how poli­ti­cal forces al­ter the mean­ing of lan­guage, but I’m pretty un­happy with the “four lev­els” for­mu­la­tion: the fact that I could never re­mem­ber the differ­ence be­tween “level 3″ and “level 4” even af­ter it was ex­plained sev­eral times (Zvi’s lat­est post helped a lit­tle), and the con­trast be­tween the “lin­ear pro­gres­sion” and “2x2” for­mu­la­tions, make me feel like we’re talk­ing about a hodge­podge of differ­ent things and hap­haz­ardly shov­ing them into this “four lev­els” frame­work, rather than hav­ing a clean de­con­fused con­cept to do se­ri­ous think­ing with. I’m op­ti­mistic about a for­mal anal­y­sis of sender–re­ceiver games (fol­low­ing the work of Skyrms and oth­ers) be­ing able to provide this. Now, I haven’t done that work yet, and maybe I won’t find any­thing in­ter­est­ing, but lay­ing out the foun­da­tions for that po­ten­tial fu­ture work was part of my mo­ti­va­tion for this piece.

• Zack_M_Davis 21 Jun 2020 17:00 UTC

  4 points

  on: When is it Wrong to Click on a Cow?

  It is always wrong to click on a cow. Click­ing on cows is con­trary to the moral law.

• Zack_M_Davis 19 Jun 2020 3:03 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What is meant by Si­mul­cra Levels?

  Be­cause the lo­cal dis­cus­sion of this frame­work grew out of Jes­sica Tay­lor’s read­ing of Wikipe­dia’s read­ing of con­ti­nen­tal philoso­pher Jean Bau­drillard’s Si­mu­lacra and Si­mu­la­tion, about how mod­ern So­ciety has ceased deal­ing with re­al­ity it­self, and in­stead deals with our rep­re­sen­ta­tions of it—maps that pre­cede the ter­ri­tory, copies with no origi­nal. (That irony that no one in this dis­cus­sion has ac­tu­ally read Bau­drillard should not be for­got­ten!)

  What links here?

  • Zack_M_Davis's comment on Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning by Zack_M_Davis (22 Jun 2020 1:11 UTC; 17 points)

• Zack_M_Davis 18 Jun 2020 4:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning

  (Thanks for your pa­tience.) If you liked the tech­ni­cal part of this post, then yes! But sup­ple­ment or sub­sti­tute Ch. 6, “De­cep­tion”, with Don Fal­lis and Peter J. Lewis’s “Towards a For­mal Anal­y­sis of De­cep­tive Sig­nal­ing”, which ex­plains what Skyrms gets wrong.

  What links here?

  • Zack_M_Davis's comment on Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning by Zack_M_Davis (22 Jun 2020 1:11 UTC; 17 points)

• Zack_M_Davis 16 Jun 2020 6:28 UTC

  4 points

  on: That Alien Message

  (This was adapted into a longer story by Ali­corn.)

• Zack_M_Davis 11 Jun 2020 5:28 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: wizzwizz4’s comment on: Failed Utopia #4-2

  Thanks for com­ment­ing! (Strong-up­voted.) It’s nice to get new dis­cus­sion on old posts and com­ments.

  prob­a­bly ap­plies to some peo­ple, somewhere

  Hi!

  I don’t think I’m do­ing the idea a disservice

  How much have you read about the idea from its pro­po­nents? (“From its pro­po­nents” be­cause, trag­i­cally, op­po­nents of an idea can’t always be trusted to para­phrase it ac­cu­rately, rather than at­tack­ing a straw­man.) If I might recom­mend just one pa­per, may I sug­gest Anne Lawrence’s “Au­to­g­y­nephilia and the Ty­pol­ogy of Male-to-Fe­male Trans­sex­u­al­ism: Con­cepts and Con­tro­ver­sies”?

  by dis­miss­ing it with a cou­ple of silly comics

  Usu­ally, when I dis­miss an idea with links, I try to make sure that the links are di­rectly about the idea in ques­tion, rather than hav­ing a higher in­fer­en­tial dis­tance.

  For ex­am­ple, when de­bat­ing a cre­ation­ist, I think it would be more pro­duc­tive to link to a page about the ev­i­dence for evolu­tion, rather than to link to a comic about the ap­pli­ca­tion of Oc­cam’s ra­zor to some other is­sue. To be sure, Oc­cam’s ra­zor is rele­vant to the cre­ation/​evolu­tion de­bate!—but in or­der to com­mu­ni­cate to some­one who doesn’t already be­lieve that, you (or your link) needs to ex­plain the rele­vance in de­tail. The cre­ation­ist prob­a­bly thinks in­tel­li­gent de­sign is “the sim­plest ex­pla­na­tion.” In or­der to re­but them, you can’t just say “Oc­cam’s ra­zor!”, you need to show how they’re con­fused about how evolu­tion works or the right con­cept of “sim­plic­ity”.

  In the pre­sent case, link­ing to Ex­is­ten­tial Comics on falsifi­a­bil­ity and pe­nis envy doesn’t help me un­der­stand your point of view, be­cause while I agree that sci­en­tific the­o­ries need to be falsifi­able, I don’t agree that the au­to­g­y­nephilia the­ory is un­falsifi­able. An ex­am­ple of a more rele­vant link might be to Ju­lia Ser­ano’s re­but­tal? (How­ever, I do not find Ser­ano’s re­but­tal con­vinc­ing.)

  I don’t see how “want­ing to see a world with­out strict gen­der roles” has any­thing to do with sexuality

  That part is ad­mit­tedly a bit spec­u­la­tive; as it hap­pens, I’m plan­ning to ex­plain more in a forth­com­ing post (work­ing ti­tle: “Sex­ual Di­mor­phism in Yud­kowsky’s Se­quences, in Re­la­tion to My Gen­der Prob­lems”) on my se­cret (“se­cret”) blog, but it’s not done yet.

• Zack_M_Davis 9 Jun 2020 22:05 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: korin43’s comment on: What highly-up­voted posts are over­rated?

  You would down­vote them in or­der to make the sorted-by-karma archives more use­ful! (See the trag­i­cally un­der­rated “Why Ar­tifi­cial Op­ti­mism?”)

• Zack_M_Davis 9 Jun 2020 5:55 UTC

  3 points

  on: Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning

  (More com­ments on /​r/​ra­tio­nal and /​r/​SneerClub.)

Philos­o­phy in the Dark­est Timeline: Ba­sics of the Evolu­tion of Meaning