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Cedric and Bertrand want to see a movie. Bertrand wants to see Muscled Duded Blow Stuff Up. Cedric wants to see Quiet Remembrances: Time as Allegory. There's also Middlebrow Space Fantasy. They are rational but not selfish - they care about the other's happiness as much as their own. What should they see?
They decide to write down how much pleasure each movie would provide them:
| Bertrand | Cedric | |
|---|---|---|
| Muscled Dudes | 8 | 2 |
| Quiet Remembrances | 1 | 7 |
| Middlebrow | 6 | 5 |
Since Middlebrow provides the most total pleasure, they see Middlebrow.
The puppy offer
A few months later, they are walking in the ... (Read more)
Click here to participate. Entries must be submitted on October 18th, 2020 or earlier.
Entry is now closed.
In 2017, Zvi posted an exciting story about The Darwin Game, a variation of iterated prisoner's dilemma.
I will run my own version of the game in the week following October 18th, 2020. You do not have to know how to program in order to participate. I will code simple bots for non-programmers. If you do know how to program then you may create your own complicated bot.
Here are the rules. Changes from Zvi's original game are in brackets [like this].
... (Read more)For the first round, each player gets 100
The parent comment comes from a private conversation between me and philh in which I conveyed erroneous information. The mistake is my fault—not philh's. A line such as foo = 'bar' is legal in some contexts. A line which uses the global namespace to preserve information between class instances is illegal.
Some background, I was interested in AI before the hype, back when neural networks were just an impractical curiosity in our textbooks. I went through an undergrad in Cognitive Science and decided that there was something to the idea of connectionist bottom up AI having tremendous untapped potential because I saw the working example of the human mind. So I embarked on a Masters in Computer Science focused on ML and eventually graduated at just about the perfect time (2014) to jump into industry and make a splash. It helped that I'd been ambitious and tried to create crazy thi... (Read more)
I have been able to land interviews at a rate of about 8/65 or 12% of the positions I apply to. My main assumption is that the timing of COVID-19 is bad, and I'm also only looking at positions in my geographical area of Toronto. It's also possible that I was overconfident early on and didn't prep enough for the interviews I got, which often involved general coding challenges that depended on data structures and algorithms that I hadn't studied since undergrad, as well as ML fundamentals for things like PCA that I hadn't touched in a long time a... (read more)
Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.
Rats v. Plague
The Rationality community was never particularly focused on medicine or epidemiology. And yet, we basically got everything about COVID-19 right and did so months ahead of the majority of government officials, journalists, and supposed experts.
We started discussing the virus and raising the alarm in private back in January. By late February, as American health officials were almost unanimously downplaying the threat, we wrote posts on taking the disease seriously, buying masks, and preparing for quarantine.
Throughout March, the CDC was tel... (Read more)
(I know of 1-2 other examples.)
(Of course, this isn't any serious question.)
I used to walk to my job along a small park area. It is not fenced off, but there are these strange teeth-like posts around it to keep out cars in the rush hours. I liked to watch the plants and how they changed, knowing I'd spend the rest of the day inside.
The sun had not risen high, and the shadows of the posts were long and stark on the lawn on that morning in late October; the air was still crisp, there was a nip in it, even though it promised to be a warm day.
What colour were the shadows?
What a beautiful experience that must have been!
I've recently been using habits to increase my productivity.
However, I've noticed a downside. If I start the day off by failing
my morning routine (wake up early, exercise) the entire rest
of the day is wasted since I feel off track.
Before habits I was much more flexible. Is there a way to avoid the mental state of
giving up when, for example, I wake up late?
G. Gordon Worley's answer is much more profound and perhaps more powerful but sounds like it could take some time to come to fruition. In the meantime: how about creating backup plans for the most common failure modes? For example, if I wake up late, then I will...
I have many posts that I want written but do not have time to write and I suspect there are other people that feel similarly. This post on the Solomonoff prior was one example, until I got fed up and just wrote it.
Please write one post idea per answer so they can be voted on seperately.
Thanks!
Ah, the humiliation of using the wrong ctrl-f inputs! But of course it would be lower level.
Well that's reason enough to cap my investment in the notion; we'll stick to cheap experiments if the muse descends.
LessWrong was founded in 2009 and relaunched in 2018 with a new codebase and full-time team.
We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality.[1]
To that end, LessWrong is a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems.
LessWrong serves these purposes with its library of rationality writings, community discussion forum, open questions research platform, and community... (Read more)
Facts are independent of beliefs, which is sort of their defining characteristic. But beliefs can be in alignment with the facts, or not; the goal is the former.
What rational person doesn't?
None. But there are no such people in the strong sense, yet. This is the ambition of the project.
Thanks to Rebecca Gorman for co-developing this idea
On the 26th of September 1983, Stanislav Petrov observed the early warning satellites reporting the launch of five nuclear missiles towards the Soviet Union. He decided to disobey orders and not pass on the message to higher command, which could easily have resulted in a nuclear war (since the soviet nuclear position was "launch on warning").
Now, did Petrov have free will when he decided to save the world?
Maintaining free will when knowledge increases
I don't intend to go into the subtle philosophical debate on the nature of free will. See t... (Read more)
Like if I'm choosing which pair of shoes to buy, and I ask the AI for help, and no matter what preferences I had for shoes to begin with, I end up buying blue shoes, then I'm probably being manipulated.
Manipulation 101: tell people "We only have blue shoes in stock. Take it or leave it."
Fixed, thanks
Professional athletes are arguably the most publicly understood meritocracy around. There are public records of thousands of different attributes for each player. When athletes stop performing well, this is discussed at length by enthusiasts, and it's understood when they are kicked off their respective teams. The important stuff is out in the open. There's a culture of honest, open, and candid communication around meritocratic competence and value.
This isn't only valuable to help team decisions. It also helps data scientists learn which sorts of characteristics and records correlate best with... (Read more)
The point about proof generation is interesting. A general proof is equivalent to collapsing the scope of predictions covered by the proof; a method of generating strong evidence effectively setting a floor for future predictions.
A simple way to score this might be to keep adding to their prediction score every time a question is found to succumb to the proof. That being said, we could also consider the specific prediction separately from the transmissibility of the prediction method.
This might be worthwhile even with no change in the overall score; it feels obvious that we would like to be able to sort predictions by [people who have used proofs] or [people who generate evidence directly].
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section... (Read more)
There's a time-sensitive trading opportunity (probably lasting a few days), i.e., to short HTZ because it's experiencing an irrational spike in prices. See https://seekingalpha.com/article/4379637-over-1-billion-hertz-shares-traded-on-friday-because-of-bankruptcy-court-filings for details. Please only do this if you know what you're doing though, for example you understand that HTZ could spike up even more and the consequences of that if it were to happen and how to hedge against it. Also I'm not an investment advisor and this is not investment advice.
Economists say free trade is good because of "comparative advantage". But what is comparative advantage? Why is it good?
This is sometimes considered an arcane part of economics. (Wikipedia defines it using "autarky".) But it's really a very simple idea. Anyone can use it to understand the world and make decisions.
I Islands
Say you live alone on an island.
Each week you gather and eat 10 coconuts and 10 bananas. It takes you five minutes to gather a coconut, and 10 minutes for a banana. Thus, you work 150 minutes per week.
| You Need | Time to gather one | Time You Spend | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coconuts | 10 | 5 minute |
Restaurants, car dealerships, spas and hair salons, construction, plumbers and electricians, doctors and lawyers. Every industry dominated by small businesses.
Even in some of the sectors you list - like automotive manufacturing - we haven't seen much net consolidation. We haven't seen a lot of new entrants, but's it's not like the number of car manufacturers is rapidly decreasing either. It's at an equilibrium, and that equilibrium has a lot more than just one company - which is not something you'd see if economic forces generally favored consolidation.
This is the third of three sets of fixed point exercises. The first post in this sequence is here, giving context.
Note: Questions 1-5 form a coherent sequence and questions 6-10 form a separate coherent sequence. You can jump between the sequences.
-
Let be a complete metric space. A function is called a contraction if there exists a such that for all , . Show that if is a contraction, then for any , the sequence converges. Show further that it converges exponentially quickly (i.e. the distance between the th term and the limit point
Ex5 (this is super ugly but I don't think it's worth polishing and it does work. All important ideas are in the first third of the proof, the rest just inelegantly resolves the details.)
We define our metric space as where is the set of probability distributions, and . Let and let , then can be computed as
where the last step holds because multiplying a vector with the state-transition matrix leaves the sum of entries unchanged.
Related to: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
There is a well-known fable which runs thus:
“Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.”
This gives rise to the common expression ‘sour grapes’, referring to a situation in which one incorrectly claims
... (Read more)I believe you took a simple concept and then attempted to attribute it to ideas it was not meant to convey.
Previously about PredictIt this election cycle: Free Money at PredictIt: 2020 General Election,
It is important, on occasion, to state the obvious, on the record, at the proper time.
The prediction (alternatively, read: gambling) markets on the 2020 Presidential Election increasingly do not make sense.
In particular, their movements over time do not make any sense.
Nate Silver’s model at 538, which puts Trump at 12.5% or so, does not take into account the possibility of anyone taking extraordinary measures to distort who is physically able to vote or to have their... (Read more)
I doubt that kind of hidden information can affect PredictIt betting odds as it limits the amount each person can bet.
There is bias or Zvi is reaching wrong conclusions with the same info.
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the pandemic lockdowns have been worth it. However, much of the reasoning that we’ve seen has been very motivated and un-nuanced in a way that for us has distorted a lot of the information.
So this is not a thread for taking a position on that. This is a thread for raising individual considerations that are relevant for thinking about the question “Have the pandemic lockdowns, in general, been worth it?”
Every answer to this thread should analyze a single belief that is relevant to whether pandemic lockdowns have been worth it, such as
- "No lock
An important consideration is that the 'thing that the US, UK and China have been doing, and what Sweden didn’t', may not refer to anything. There are two meanings of 'lockdowns have not been worth it' - 'allow the natural herd immunity to happen and carry on as normal, accepting the direct health damage while saving the economy' or 'we shouldn't adopt legally mandatory measures to attempt to suppress the virus and instead adopt voluntary measures to attempt to suppress the virus'. The latter of these is the only correct way to interpret 'thing Sweden did ... (read more)
So you can now drag-and-drop images into comments. (Thanks, LessWrong dev team!)
Hence, this post is an excuse to build a beautiful, inspiring, powerful — and primarily visual — comment section.
Let's celebrate all that is great about the Art of Rationality, with images.
Rules
- Each answer must contain a picture. No links!
It should be possible to just scroll through the comments and adore the artwork. There shouldn't be any need to click-through to other pages. (Think of it like a Pinterest board, if you've ever seen those.)
Adding text is fine, but consider doing it in... (Read more)
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the thing that feels most rationalist-y about SpaceX, which is the exercise of agency against civilizational inadequacy. Elon Musk looked at space travel and was like, 'that seems inadequate, I bet I could do it better.' And everyone said, 'you're crazy, that's impossible.' And Elon Musk didn't listen to them and now SpaceX is a leader in space flight.
Judging from the upvotes, it seems like people are quite interested in my grandparents' failure to emigrate from Communist China before it was too late, so I thought I'd elaborate here with more details and for greater visibility. They were all actually supporters of the Communist Party at the beginning, and saw it as potential saviors/liberators of the Chinese people and nation. They were also treated well at the beginning - one of them (being one of few people in China with a higher education) was given a high official post, and another retained a manager position at the factory that he used... (Read more)
I agree that "the USA overthrew Chile's government" seems like it goes too far. But your initial comment, objecting to the idea that the US had anything to do with Pinochet's coup, also seems like it goes too far.
A few excerpts from that same Wikipedia page:
... (read more)After a review of recordings of telephone conversations between Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Robert Dallek concluded that both of them used the CIA to actively destabilize the Allende government. [...] In one particular conversation about the news of Allende's overthrow, Kissinger complains about the lack
Can you clarify which answer you believe is the correct one in the puppy example? Or, even better, the current utility for the dog in the "yes puppy" example is 5. Can you clarify for what values you believe it is correct to have or not have the puppy?