Shortform Content [Beta]
Game theory is widely considered the correct description of rational behavior in multi-agent scenarios. However, real world agents have to learn, whereas game theory assumes perfect knowledge, which can be only achieved in the limit at best. Bridging this gap requires using multi-agent learning theory to justify game theory, a problem that is mostly open (but some results exist). In particular, we would like to prove that learning agents converge to game theoretic solutions such as Nash equilibria (putting superrationality aside: I think that superrational
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postFor a fixed policy, the history is the only thing you need to know in order to simulate the agent on a given round. In this sense, seeing the history is equivalent to seeing the source code.
The claim is: In settings where the agent has unlimited memory and sees the entire history or source code, you can't get good guarantees (as in the folk theorem for repeated games). On the other hand, in settings where the agent sees part of the history, or is constrained to have finite memory (possibly of size ?), you can (maybe?) prove convergence to Pareto
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postThread on The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
The Lesswrong comment guidelines say, "Aim to explain, not persuade." Is this a method by which we cut out our own chests?
I‘m curious how this question parses for Vaniver
After this weeks's stereotypically sad experience with the DMV....
(spent 3 hours waiting in lines, filling out forms, finding out I didn't bring the right documentation, going to get the right documentation, taking a test, finding out somewhere earlier in the process a computer glitched and I needed to go back and start over, waiting more, finally getting to the end only to learn I was also missing another piece of identification which rendered the whole process moot)
...and having just looked over a lot of 2018 posts investigating coordination failure...&n
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postFwiw, my experiences with DMVs in DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York, and Minnesota have all been about as terrible as my experiences in California.
So apparently Otzi the Iceman still has a significant amount of brain tissue. Conceivably some memories are preserved?
In response to lifelonglearner's comment I did some experimenting with making the page a bit bolder. Curious what people think of this screenshot where "unread" posts are bold, and "read" posts are "regular" (as opposed to the current world, where "unread" posts "regular", and read posts are light-gray).
Fwiw, for reasons I can't explain I vastly prefer just the title bolded to the entire line bolded, and significantly prefer the status quo to title bolded.
Bookmarking comments (This is a list.)
Also pages (https://www.lesswrong.com/allComments) and sequences (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yai5mppkuCHPQmzpN).
Better stored tag-wise (Issue appeared here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/po8guXNhXzXYo5yFM/shortform#YzXqCuWTZqF8ZTToX)
Great things about Greaterwrong:
[On LW] if a comment is automatically minimized and buried in a long thread, then even with a link to it, it's hard to find the comment - at best the black line on the side briefly indicates which one it is. This doesn't seem to be a problem in greaterwrong.
Over in this thread, Said asked the reasonable question "who exactly is the target audience with this Best of 2018 book?"
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postBy compiling the list, we are saying: “here is the best work done on Less Wrong in [time period]”. But to whom are we saying this? To ourselves, so to speak? Is this for internal consumption—as a guideline for future work, collectively decided on, and meant to be considered as a standard or bar to meet, by us, and anyone who joins us in the future?
Or, is this meant for external consumption—a way of saying to others, “see what we ha
+1 excitement about bookshelves :)
Some advice to my past self about autism:
Learn about what life is like for people with a level 2 or 3 autism diagnosis. Use that reference class to predict the nature of your problems and the strategies that are likely to help. Only after making those predictions, adjust for your own capabilities and circumstances. Try this regardless of how you feel about calling yourself autistic or seeking a diagnosis. Just see what happens.
Many stereotypically autistic behaviors are less like symptoms of an illness, and more like excellent strategies for getting shit d... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Attention Conservation Warning: I envision a model which would demonstrate something obvious, and decide the world probably wouldn't benefit from its existence.
The standard publication bias is that we must be 95% certain a described phenomenon exists before a result is publishable (at which time it becomes sufficiently "confirmed" to treat the phenomenon as a factual claim). But the statistical confidence of a phenomenon conveys interesting and useful information regardless of what that confidence is.
Consider the space of all possible relationships: most o
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI recently realized that the formalism of incomplete models provides a rather natural solution to all decision theory problems involving "Omega" (something that predicts the agent's decisions). An incomplete hypothesis may be thought of a zero-sum game between the agent and an imaginary opponent (we will call the opponent "Murphy" as in Murphy's law). If we assume that the agent cannot randomize against Omega, we need to use the deterministic version of the formalism. That is, an agent that learns an incomplete hypothesis converges to the corresponding max
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postYeah, I agree that the objective descriptions can leave out vital information, such as how the information you know was acquired, which seems important for determining the counterfactuals.
EDT agents handle Newcomb's problem as follows: they observe that agents who encounter the problem and one-box do better on average than those who encounter the problem and two-box, so they one-box.
That's the high-level description, but let's break it down further. Unlike CDT, EDT doesn't worry about the fact that their may be a correlation between your decision and hidden state. It assumes that if the visible state before you made your decision is the same, then the counterfactuals generated by considering your possible decisions are c... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about monographs .
“A monograph is a specialist work of writing… or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject… Unlike a textbook, which surveys the state of knowledge in a field, the main purpose of a monograph is to present primary research and original scholarship ascertaining reliable credibility to the required recipient. This research is presented at length, distinguishing a monograph from an article.ȁ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I was honestly a bit surprised how well you managed to pull the exact moment from my childhood where I learned the word 'monograph'. I read every page of a beautiful red book that contained all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I distinctly recall the line about having written a monograph on the subject of cigar ash, and being able to discern the different types.
From Gwern's about page:
I personally believe that one should think Less Wrong and act Long Now, if you follow me.
Possibly my favorite catch-phrase ever :) What do I think is hiding there?
- Think Less Wrong
- Self anthropology- "Why do you believe what you believe?"
- Hugging the Query and not sinking into confused questions
- Litany of Tarski
- Notice your confusion - "Either the story is false or you model is wrong"
- Act Long Now
- Cultivate habits and practice routines that seem small / trivial on a day/week/month timeline, but will result in you
Act Short Now
- Sleeping in
- Flirting more
Think More Wrong
- I longer buy that there's a structural difference between math/the formal/a priori and science/the empirical/ a posteriori.
- Probability theory feels sorta lame.
As part of the Athena Rationality Project, we've recently launched two new prototype apps that may be of interest to LWers
Virtual Akrasia Coach
The first is a Virtual Akrasia Coach, which comes out of a few months of studying various interventions for Akrasia, then testing the resulting ~25 habits/skills through internet based lessons to refine them. We then took the resulting flowchart for dealing with Akrasia, and created a "Virtual Coach" that can walk you through a work session, ensuring your work is focused, productive and enjoyab... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I could discuss everything within a few very concrete examples. A concrete example tends to create a working understanding in a way mathematical abstraction fails to. I want to give my readers real knowledge, so I do often insist on describing concepts in the world without numbers or equations or proofs.
However, math exists for a reason.
Some patterns generalize so strongly that you simply cannot communicate the breadth of its applications in concrete examples. You have to describe the shape of it by constraint. To do otherwise would render it a handful of independent parlor tricks instead of one sharp and heavy blade.
A fun problem I'm trying to figure out: how to make the PADsynth algorithm faster.
The idea of the algorithm is to simulate an infinite choir of voices. Imagine a sound whose fundamental isn't exactly a sine wave with frequency f, but a spread of frequencies in a narrow Gaussian around f. The second harmonic is a twice wider Gaussian around 2f, and so on. The amplitudes of harmonics can fall off as 1/n, 1/n^2, or something else. It sounds very pleasant, like a smooth choir.
The obvious way to synthesize such a sound is by IFFT. But I don't like it, because I
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postCould convolution work?
EDIT: confused why I am downvoted. Don't we want to encourage giving obvious (and obviously wrong) solutions to short form posts?
Has someone re-read the sequences? did you find value in doing so?
Further, I do think the comments on each of the essays are worthy of reading, something I did not do the first time. I can pinpoint a few comments from people in this community on the essays which were very insightful! I wonder if I lost something by not participating in it or by not having read all the comments when I was reading the sequences.
It would be nice to have a "comment synthesis" that is written sufficiently long after the debate ended (not sooner than one month after publishing the original article?).
By the way, if you do this for many articles in the Sequences, perhaps you could also afterwards join those reactions into one big "community reaction to the Sequences", as a new article where people could read it all in one place.
Sketch of a post I'm writing:
"Keep your identity small" by Paul Graham $$\cong$$ "People get stupid/unreasonable about an issue when it becomes part of their identity. Don't put things into your identity."
"Do Something vs Be Someone" John Boyd distinction.
I'm going to think about this in terms of "What is one's main strategy to meet XYZ needs?" I claim that "This person got unreasonable because their identity was under attack" is more a situation of "This person is panicing at the p... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Yesterday I read the first 5 articles on google for "why arguments are useless". It seems pretty in the zeitgeist that "when people have their identity challenged you can't argue with them. A few of them stopped there and basically declared communication to be impossible if identity is involved, a few of them sequitously hinted at learning to listen and find common ground. A reason I want to get this post out is to add to the "Here's why identity doesn't have to be a stop sign."
I think one idea I'm excited about is the idea that predictions can be made of prediction accuracy. This seems pretty useful to me.
Example
Say there's a forecaster Sophia who's making a bunch of predictions for pay. She uses her predictions to make a meta-prediction of her total prediction-score on a log-loss scoring function (on all predictions except her meta-predictions). She says that she's 90% sure that her total loss score will be between -5 and -12.
The problem is that you probably don't think you can trust Sophia unless she has a lot of experience
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post"I'd be willing to bet $1,000 with anyone that the eventual total error of my forecasts will be less than the 65th percentile of my specified predicted error."
I think this is equivalent to applying a non-linear transformation to your proper scoring rule. When things settle, you get paid S(p) both based on the outcome of your object-level prediction p, and your meta prediction q(S(p)).
Hence:
S(p)+B(q(S(p)))
where B is the "betting scoring function".
This means getting the scoring rules to work while preserving properness will be trick... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Theorem: Fuzzy beliefs (as in https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Ajcq9xWi2fmgn8RBJ/the-credit-assignment-problem#X6fFvAHkxCPmQYB6v ) form a continuous DCPO. (At least I'm pretty sure this is true. I've only given proof sketches so far)
The relevant definitions:
A fuzzy belief over a set X is a concave function ϕ:ΔX→[0,1] such that sup(ϕ)=1 (where ΔX is the space of probability distributions on X). Fuzzy beliefs are partially ordered by ϕ≤ψ⟺∀μ∈ΔX:ϕ(μ)&... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘/CTRL+F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post