Fandom people on Tumblr, AO3, etc. really responded to The Last Jedi (because it was targeted to them). Huge phenomenon. There are now bestselling romance novels that started life as TLJ fanfiction. Everything worked just like it does for the Marvel movies, very profitably.
However there was an additional group of Star Wars superfans outside of fandom, who wanted something very different, hence the backlash. This group is somewhat more male and conservative, and then everything polarized on social media so this somehow became a real culture war issue. Of course, Disney did not like the backlash, and tried to make the 3rd movie more palatable to this group.
That kind of fan doesn't organically exist for most things outside of Star Wars though. For most things, you only get superfans in this network of fan communities which skew towards social justice. And for any new genre story without a pre-existing fanbase, there's an opportunity to get fandom people excited about it, which is very valuable.
As far as running a media company goes, fandom is extremely profitable, increasingly so in an age where enormous sci-fi/fantasy franchises drive everything. And there's been huge overlap between fandom communities and social justice politics for a long time.
It's definitely in Disney's interest to appeal to Marvel superfans who write fanfiction and cosplay and buy tons of merchandise, and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
Like, nothing is being forced on this audience -- there are large numbers of people who get sincerely excited when a new character is introduced that gives representation for the first time to a new minority group, or something like that.
As with so many businesses, the superfans are worth quite a few normies who might be put off by this. I think this is the main explanation.
The “canonical” rankings that CS academics care about would be csrankings.org (also not without problems but the least bad).
The KataGo paper says of its training, "Self-play games used Tromp-Taylor rules modified to not require capturing stones within pass-alive territory".
It sounds to me like this is the same scoring system as used in the adversarial attack paper, but I don't know enough about Go to be sure.
The Sprawl trilogy by William Gibson (starting with Neuromancer) is basically about this, and is a classic for a reason. It's not exactly hard sci-fi though.
If you don’t signal the expected way then you are, if not being dishonest, at least misleading people — in many cases it is less honest.
Everyone knows your job application is written to puff you up, and they price it in. If you don’t have the correct amount of puffery, you’re misleading people into thinking you’re worse than you are.
It’s a bad way to communicate and a bad race-to-the-bottom equilibrium but not actually dishonest.
You can write “Dear X” on a letter to a person you don’t know. People used to sign off letters “Your obedient servant”. It evolves for weird signaling reasons but is not taken literally.
"Systems that would adapt their policy if their actions would influence the world in a different way"
Does the teacup pass this test? It doesn't necessarily seem like it.
We might want to model the system as "Heat bath of Air -> teacup -> Socrates' tea". The teacup "listens to" the temperature of the air on its outside, and according to some equation transmits some heat to the inside. In turn the tea listens to this transmitted heat and determines its temperature.
You can consider the counterfactual world where the air is cold instead of hot. Or the counterfactual world where you replace "Socrates' tea" with "Meletus' tea", or with a frog that will jump out of the cup, or whatever. But in all cases the teacup does not actually change its "policy", which is just to transmit heat to the inside of the cup according to the laws of physics.
To put it in the terminology of "Discovering Agents", one can add mechanism variables going into the object level variables. But there are no arrows between these, so there's no agent.
Of course, my model here is bad and wrong physically speaking, even if it does capture crude cause-effect intuition about the effect of air temperature on beverages. However I'd be somewhat surprised if a more physically correct model would introduce an agent to the system where there is none.
There are industry places that will, at least as stated, take you seriously with no PhD as long as you have some publications (many job postings don't require a PhD or say "or equivalent research experience"), and it's unusual but not unheard of for people do this.
The thing is, a PhD program is a reliable way to build a research track record. And you don't see too many PhD dropouts who want to be scientists because if you've got a research track record, the extra cost of just finishing your dissertation and graduating is pretty low.
People sometimes seem to act like unsolved problems are exasperating, aesthetically offensive, or somehow unappealing, so they have no choice but to roll up their sleeves and try to help fix them, because it's just so irritating to see the problem go unsolved. So one can do purely altruistic stuff, but with this selfish posture (which also shifts focus away from motivation and psychology) it won't trip the hypocrisy alarms. It may also genuinely be a better attitude to cultivate, if it helps deflate one's ego a little bit -- I'm not quite sure.
Normal, standard causal decision theory is probably it. You can make a case that people sometimes intuitively use evidential decision theory ("Do it. You'll be glad you did.") but if asked to spell out their decision making process, most would probably describe causal decision theory.