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I did a check and am now more confident in my answer, and I'm not going to try to come up with an entry that uses fewer soldiers.

Just got to this today. I've come up with a candidate solution just to try to survive, but haven't had a chance yet to check & confirm that it'll work, or to try to get clever and reduce the number of soldiers I'm using.

10 Soldiers armed with: 3 AA, 3 GG, 1 LL, 2 MM, 1 RR

I will probably work on this some more tomorrow.

Unnamed70

Is this calculation showing that, with a big causal graph, you'll get lots of very weak causal relationships between distant nodes that should have tiny but nonzero correlations? And realistic sample sizes won't be able to distinguish those relationships from zero.

Andrew Gelman often talks about how the null hypothesis (of a relationship of precisely zero) is usually false (for, e.g., most questions considered in social science research).

Unnamed4924

A lot of people have this sci-fi image, like something out of Deep Impact, Armageddon, Don't Look Up, or Minus, of a single large asteroid hurtling towards Earth to wreak massive destruction. Or even massive vengeance, as if it was a punishment for our sins.

But realistically, as the field of asteroid collection gradually advances, we're going to be facing many incoming asteroids which will interact with each other in complicated ways, and whose forces will to a large extent balance each other out.

Yet doomers are somehow supremely confident in how the future will go, foretelling catastrophe. And if you poke at their justifications, they won't offer precise physical models of these many-body interactions, just these mythic stories of Earth vs. a monolithic celestial body.

Unnamed52

They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your reputation. But I think criticism is good, because if I write a bad blog post, and someone tells me it was bad, I can learn from that, and do better next time.

I read this as saying 'a common view is that being criticized is bad because it hurts your reputation, but as a person with some knowledge of the secret lore of rationality I believe that being criticized is good because you can learn from it.'

And he isn't making a claim about to what extent the existing LW/rationality community shares his view.

Unnamed102

Seems like the main difference is that you're "counting up" with status and "counting down" with genetic fitness.

There's partial overlap between people's reproductive interests and their motivations, and you and others have emphasized places where there's a mismatch, but there are also (for example) plenty of people who plan their lives around having & raising kids. 

There's partial overlap between status and people's motivations, and this post emphasizes places where they match up, but there are also (for example) plenty of people who put tons of effort into leveling up their videogame characters, or affiliating-at-a-distance with Taylor Swift or LeBron James, with minimal real-world benefit to themselves.

And it's easier to count up lots of things as status-related if you're using a vague concept of status which can encompass all sorts of status-related behaviors, including (e.g.) both status-seeking and status-affiliation. "Inclusive genetic fitness" is a nice precise concept so it can be clear when individuals fail to aim for it even when acting on adaptations that are directly involved in reproduction & raising offspring.

Unnamed60

The economist RH Strotz introduced the term "precommitment" in his 1955-56 paper "Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization".

Thomas Schelling started writing about similar topics in his 1956 paper "An essay on bargaining", using the term "commitment".

Both terms have been in use since then.

Unnamed30

On one interpretation of the question: if you're hallucinating then you aren't in fact seeing ghosts, you're just imagining that you're seeing ghosts. The question isn't asking about those scenarios, it's only asking what you should believe in the scenarios where you really do see ghosts.

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