In this post, I proclaim/endorse forum participation (aka commenting) as a productive research strategy that I've managed to stumble upon, and recommend it to others (at least to try). Note that this is different from saying that forum/blog posts are a good way for a research community to communicate. It's about individually doing better as researchers.
Welcome, new readers!
This is my weekly AI post, where I cover everything that is happening in the world of AI, from what it can do for you today (‘mundane utility’) to what it can promise to do for us tomorrow, and the potentially existential dangers future AI might pose for humanity, along with covering the discourse on what we should do about all of that.
You can of course Read the Whole Thing, and I encourage that if you have the time and interest, but these posts are long, so they also designed to also let you pick the sections that you find most interesting. Each week, I pick the sections I feel are the most important, and put them in bold in the table of contents.
Not everything...
This is the ninth post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is The Solution to Sleeping Beauty.
There are some quite pervasive misconceptions about betting in regards to the Sleeping Beauty problem.
One is that you need to switch between halfer and thirder stances based on the betting scheme proposed. As if learning about a betting scheme is supposed to affect your credence in an event.
Another is that halfers should bet at thirders odds and, therefore, thirdism is vindicated on the grounds of betting. What do halfers even mean by probability of Heads being 1/2 if they bet as if it's 1/3?
In this post we are going to correct them. We will understand how to arrive to correct betting odds from both thirdist and halfist positions, and...
Yes, if the bet is about whether the room takes the color Red in this experiment. Which is what event "Red" means in Technicolor Sleeping Beauty according to the correct model. The fact that you do not observe event Red in this awakening doesn't mean that you don't observe it in the experiment as a whole.
The situation is somewhat resembling learning that today is Monday and still being ready to bet at 1:1 that Tuesday awakening will happen in this experiment. Though, with colors there is actually an update from 3/4 to 1/2.
What you, probably, tried to ask, ...
Moreover, legal texts are not super strict (much is left to interpretation) and we are often selective about "whether it makes sense to apply this law in this context" for reasons not very different from religious people being very selective about following the laws of their holy books.
Today a trend broke in Formula One. Max Verstappen didn't win a Grand Prix. Of the last 35 Formula One Grand Prix, Max Verstappen has won all but 5. Last season he had something like 86% dominance.
For context I believe that I am overall pessimistic when asked to give a probability range about something "working out". And since sports tend to vary in results if using a sport like Formula One would be a good source of data to make and compare predictions against?
Everything from estimating the range a pole position time, or the difference between pole and the last qualifier, from to a fastest lap in a race or what lap a driver will pit for fresh tyres.
What is the best way of doing it?
Tracking your predictions and improving your calibration over time is good. So is practicing making outside-view estimates based on related numerical data. But I think diversity is good.
If you start going back through historical F1 data as prediction exercises, I expect the main thing that will happen is you'll learn a lot about the history of F1. Secondarily, you'll get better at avoiding your own biases, but in a way that's concentrated on your biases relevant to F1 predictions.
If you already want to learn more about the history of F1, then go for it, it...
Human interactions are full of little “negotiations”. My friend and I have different preferences about where to go for dinner. My boss and I have different preferences about how soon I should deliver the report. My spouse and I are both enjoying this chat, but we inevitably have slightly different (unstated) preferences about whose turn it is to speak, whether to change the subject, etc.
None of these are arguments. Everyone is having a lovely time. But they involve conflicting preferences, however mild, and these conflicts need to somehow get resolved.
These ubiquitous everyday “negotiations” have some funny properties. At the surface level, both people may put on an elaborate pretense that there is no conflict at all. (“Oh, it’s no problem, it would be my pleasure!”) Meanwhile, below...
that thing about affine transformations
If the purpose of a utility function is to provide evidence about the behavior of the group, we can preprocess the data structure into that form: Suppose Alice may update the distribution over group decisions by ε. Then the direction she pushes in is her utility function, and the constraints "add up to 100%" and "size ε" cancel out the "affine transformation" degrees of freedom. Now such directions can be added up.
On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community.
The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.)
ZMD: I actually have some questions for you.
CM: Great, let's start with that.
ZMD: 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...
So despite it being "hard to substantiate", or to "find Scott saying" it, you think it's so certainly true that a journalist is justified in essentially lying in order to convey it to his audience?
About 15 years ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. He profiled Chris Langan, an extremely high-IQ person, claiming that he had only mediocre accomplishments despite his high IQ. Chris Langan's theory of everything, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, was mentioned. I considered that it might be worth checking out someday.
Well, someday has happened, and I looked into CTMU, prompted by Alex Zhu (who also paid me for reviewing the work). The main CTMU paper is "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory".
CTMU has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The paper itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially...
(This post is intended for my personal blog. Thank you.)
One of the dominant thoughts in my head when I build datasets for my training runs: what our ancestors 'did' over their lifespan likely played a key role in the creation of language and human values.[1]
I imagine a tribe whose members had an approximate of twenty to thirty-five years to accumulate knowledge—such as food preparation, hunting strategies, tool-making, social skills, and avoiding predators. To transmit this knowledge, they likely devised a system of sounds associated with animals, locations, actions, objects, etc.
Sounds related to survival would have been prioritized. These had immediate, life-and-death consequences, creating powerful associations (or neurochemical activity?) in the brain. "Danger" or "food" would have been far more potent than navigational instructions. I...
This is the eighth post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is Lessons from Failed Attempts to Model Sleeping Beauty Problem. The next one is Beauty and the Bets.
Suppose we take the insights from the previous post, and directly try to construct a model for the Sleeping Beauty problem based on them.
We expect a halfer model, so
On the other hand, in order not repeat Lewis' Model's mistakes:
But both of these statements can only be true if
And, therefore, apparently, has to be zero, which sounds obviously wrong. Surely the Beauty can be awaken on Tuesday!
At this point, I think, you wouldn't be surprised, if I tell you that there are philosophers who are eager to bite this bullet and claim that the Beauty should, indeed, reason as...
The Two Coin version is about what happens on one day.
Let it be not two different days but two different half-hour intervals. Or even two milliseconds - this doesn't change the core of the issue that sequential events are not mutually exclusive.
observation of a state, when that observation bears no connection to any other, as independent of any other.
It very much bears a connection. If you are observing state TH it necessary means that either you've already observed or will observe state TT.
What law was broken?
The definition of a sample space - it's suppos...