"The previously observed drop off in the value of additional miners after 5 seem to occur because it makes it less likely for other valuable types to be present, not because it is intrinsically bad."
My go-to check when there's decent data is to compare P(something | N miners, M dwarves) to P(something | N-1 miners, M-1 dwarves).
Miners: 5
Smiths: 1
Woodcutters: 1
Farmers: 2
Brewers: 1
Warriors: 2
Crafters: 1
I expect to survive: in the Light Forest, 2 Farmers and 2 Warriors seem necessary for good odds and also sufficient for great odds. I suspect the Brewer is not needed, except that obviously the Brewer is needed. I expect my profits are not maximized without some rearrangement; I didn't try to account for which resources were present much at all.
I did not know any specifics. I did think it was worth my time start skimming because I have another interesting problem vaguely related; then I thought it was worth my time to understand what the objection buried under the word salad (yes, Benjamin, it's word salad) might be, because it seemed like there might actually be one. And there was! Standard lambda calculus at face value doesn't work with nonconstructive proofs. That's interesting and I didn't know it. Then:
[Googles]
as expected, looks like there's plenty of work on this, and there's nothing actua... (read more)
[Googles] Why does something like https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.05433.pdf not resolve things? Is it simply wrong? Is it not actually applicable?
... (read more)A program for the full axiom of choice
The theory of classical realizability is a framework for the Curry-Howard correspondence which enables to associate a program with each proof in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. But, almost all the applications of mathematics in physics, probability, statistics, etc. use Analysis i.e. the axiom of dependent choice (DC) or even the (full) axiom of choice (AC). It is therefore important
You know you're arguing with a psychedelic-abusing schizophrenic who sees things, right? (Haven't you been online long enough to recognize the very distinctive wordsalad & exclusively verbal style of argumentation, or the free association & redefining in his comments while ignoring widely-accepted physics about spacetime?) Seems like a waste of time, IMO.
I now agree with you. Or possibly with a steelmanned you, who can say. ;)
This is why I was stressing that "chaa" and "fair" are very different concepts, and that this equilibrium notion is very much based on threats. They just need to be asymmetric threats that the opponent can't defuse in order to work (or ways of asymmetrically benefiting yourself that your opponent can't ruin, that'll work just as well).
(from the next post in this sequence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RZNmNwc9SxdKayeQh/unifying-bargaining-notions-2-2)
and
... (read more)in physical reality, payoffs o
A better example might be literally paying for something while in a marketplace you're not going to visit again. You don't have much cash, you do have barter items. Barter what you've got, compensate for the difference. Cooperative is "yes a trade is good", competitive is "but where on the possibility list of acceptable barters will we land"?
I guess the difficulty is that the example really does want to say "all games can be decomposed like this if they're denominated, not just games that sound kind of like cash", but any game without significant reputational/relationship effects is gonna sound kind of like cash.
Maybe a side note to not forget outside-of-game considerations? But I'm perfectly fine reading about 4/3 pi r^3 without "don't forget that actually things have densities that are never uniform and probably hard to measure and also gravity differs in different locations and in fact you almost certainly have an ellipsoid or something even more complicated instead", and definitely prefer a world that can present it simply without having to take into account everything in the real world you'd actually have to account for when using the formula in a broader context.
The exact mechanism would have been pretty tricky to figure out
I was getting close. :) Had I spent 3x as long, I probably would have gotten it. Where I left off:
T... (read more)
Seeing if I can figure out how duels work, now. First guess is not correct: that mages pick an offensive spell and defensive spell at random, then calculate damage, and whoever hits for more, wins; damage is determined by for each offensive element, taking the mana level, reducing it by half the mana levels of the defensive elements, adjusting defensive x2 if element opposes and x0 if element is the same, summing the two results.
I need more randomness, maybe; my calibration curve looks decent, but overconfident at both ends. In particular this predicts cer
Wondering about:
Are mana levels actually normalized to 150 total, or is that an effect of our measurement/prediction process?
How do duels actually work? They could be as simple as "add up mana values of elements on offense, modify defense mana values according to effectiveness, subtract; compare results; higher wins" or much more complicated like bucketizing mana levels, choosing a random person to attack first, choosing a random attack and a random defense, doing [something like the simple one] to determine damage, switch attackers, repeat until someone has taken X damage, also wizards have native attack/defense/elemental bonuses, also wizards have different HP so X1 and X2 not just X".
Half the spells are for offense, half for defense. A wizard never goes to a duel with pure offense or pure defense prepared.
As per other spoilers, Dark is an element, elements come in anti-correlated pairs, and total mana level is 150.
Each spell has elemental affinities that make sense. For example, Fireball works better with high levels of Fire and Air mana and Abyssal works better with high levels of Water and Dark mana. (3C2)*(2^2)=12.
Offensive and defensive spells' affinities are divided "fairly".
Something lets weaker-mana spells win sometimes. It look
One of the many common Curses of Smart is being hypercompetent at a couple of tricks that you've adopted to be passably effective at life while being incredibly blind to your own limitations and bad habits.
Just want to drop a note here that this curse (a) got me through years of major depression, making me, I guess, "high-functioning", and (b) caused the worst interpersonal crisis I've had-or-expect-to-have in my life.
For me it wasn't really a trick, per se. Just, more like... being smart enough allows you to simply brute force a bunch of areas witho... (read more)
Welp. I decided to do this, and here it is. I didn't take nearly enough screenshots. Some large percent of this is me writing things, some other large percent is me writing things as if I thought the outputs of OpenAI's Playground were definitely something that should be extracted/summarized/rephrased, and a small percentage is verbatim text-continuation outputs. Virtually no attempts were made to document my process. I do not endorse this as useful and would be perfectly fine if it were reign of terror'd away, though IMO it might be interesting to compare... (read more)
(I of course told my partners up front that a public essay was one possible outcome of the survey and that I would not-publish anything they flagged as private.)
flunked out
Gonna guess zero. Much less costly to leave 'em in for 12 weeks for goodwill than to try to remove people in that timeframe.
pre-selected for
Good point. Probably at least some of this. You need referrals, and I was definitely not the smartest of the people in my reference class available to refer, though maybe 3rd, and someone looking at me versus the one I know definitely had more-raw-IQ should definitely have guessed that I was more likely to pick up that particular thing.
It's also possible I'm someone "amenable" to this mindset and that was just the "on switch". DSP, by the way.
But yeah I could see a post on... cryptanalysis, and finding and minimizing attack surfaces, without necessarily having an attack in mind, and a hindsight-view story of what first caused me to think in that way.
But in general I liked the setup a lot!
... (read more)Security mindset seems highly related, and the training thing here seems like it shouldn’t be that hard? Certainly it seems very easy compared to the problem the trained people will then need to solve, and I think Eliezer has de facto trained me a substantial amount in this skill through examples over the years. There was a time I didn’t have security mindset at all, and now I have at least some such mindset, and some ability to recognize lethal issues others are missing. He doesn’t say how many other people he knows who have the abilities referred to here
I notice that I am extremely surprised by your internship training. Its existence, its lessons and the impact it had on you (not you specifically, just a person who didn't come in with that mindset) are all things I don't think I would have predicted. I would be thrilled if you would write as much as you can bring yourself to about this, braindump format is fine, into a top level post!
I spent all of my time trying to figure out how to figure out how much [the hidden variable causing the correlation between nerd and otaku] affects trait choices and winrates.
Apparently they are correlated without a relevant hidden variable. :D
I don't understand why it's plausible to think that AI's might collectively have different goals than humans.
Future posts, right? We're assuming that premise here:
So, for what follows, let's proceed from the premise: "For some weird reason, humans consistently design AI systems (with human-like research and planning abilities) that coordinate with each other to try and overthrow humanity." Then what? What follows will necessarily feel wacky to people who find this hard to imagine, but I think it's worth playing along, because I think "we'd be in trouble if this happened" is a very important point.
I'm not talking (yet) about whether, or why, AIs might attack human civilization. That's for future posts.
This was a fantastic idea and I am more interested in model interpretability for understanding these results than any I have seen in a while. In particular any examples of nontrivial mesa-optimizers we can find in the wild seem important to study, and maybe there's one here.
I think the problem is that Wolfram wrote things up in a manner indistinguishable from a perpetual-motion-believer-who-actually-can-write-well's treatise. Maybe it's instead legit, but to discover that you have to spend a lot of translation effort, translation effort that Wolfram was supposed to have done himself in digestible chunks rather than telling N=lots of people to each do it themselves, and it's not even clear there is something at the heart because (last time I checked which was a couple years ago) no physics-knowledgable people who dived in seem... (read more)
Ah yes. Space Alert. An incredibly good co-op game with rather a lot of depth if you play with the same group many many times.
Jaipur - best quick strategic 2p game I know of; hand management, risk assessment, heuristic position evaluation.
Codenames - very good mix of cooperation, competition, other-mind-modeling, cleverness, not-being-too-clever, different levels of engagement, even trolling. Two teams of 2+ people apiece. Can be problematic for ESL. Word association, risk management.
Werewords - best quick party game that's not boring that I know of. A cross between Werewolf and 20 questions. Bluffing, language, social deduction.
Goa - most interesting economics of any game I've e... (read more)
it's just much harder than I expected to make deductions like that
This is something I noticed from some earlier .scis! I forget which, now. My hypothesis was that finding underlying unmentioned causes was really hard without explicitly using causal machinery in your exploration process, and I don't know how to, uh, casually set up causal inference, and it's something I would love to try learning at some point. Like, my intuition is something akin to "try a bunch of autogenerated causal graphs, see if something about correlations says [these] could work and... (read more)
If you might have played it but decided not to, what drove you away?
I set up the same kind of thing that abstractapplic did:
I created a sub-df for each province, reset their indices, then recombined; and for "does this predict that with a lag of N years?" investigations, I shifted one of the sub-dfs back by N before recombining.
then bounced off because while I had decent ideas of what I wanted to look for, I never got excited enough to get past the activation energy of trying to look for it.
My guesses about why include:
I've been noodling on an example, and did notice this kind of problem. Currently working on what would happen if collusion was limited to vote trades between pairs of issues you directionally agree on. So only "I vote +1 puppy, +2 frog; you vote +2 puppy, +1 frog; we transform into +1.58 puppy, +1.58 frog apiece".
0. How accurate is it? 1-4 all seem to be about how fast we can get the answer to a problem that a certain algorithm would give, including by using a new algorithm to get to the same answer. But it's also (maybe primarily more) important to get a better answer.
a specific worked example
Yep that's my next step if no one "just knows" or links to a paper. :D
I was thinking about enforced trades, more votes for the same price (fractional is allowed).
We're probably talking past each other. I'm saying "no you don't get to build lots of general AIs in the process of solving the alignment problem and still stay alive" and (I think) you're saying "no you don't get to solve the alignment problem without writing a ton of code, lots of it highly highly related to AI". I think both of those are true.
There is a massive difference between a technique not working and a technique being way less likely to work.
A: 1% chance of working given that we get to complete it, doesn't kill everyone before completing
B: 10% chance of working given that we get to complete it, 95% chance of killing everyone before completing
You pick A here. You can't just ignore the "implement step produces disaster" bit. Maybe we're not in this situation (obviously it changes based on what the odds of each bit actually are), but you can't just assume we're not in this situation and say "Ah, well, B has a much higher chance of working than A, so that's all, we've gotta go with B".
The contention is that we are in a new situation. Writing software is a new type of activity with different constraints than building a bridge; creating a general AI is a new type of activity with different constraints than writing software. In particular, the standard "waterfall doesn't work, agile/iteration is far better" solution to writing software is contended to fail when creating a general AI, specifically because the implement step produces disaster without sufficient design, rather than simply producing failure or waste.
You can argue that we're no... (read more)
It is very unclear that generally humans are unlike Stalin. Maybe! But most humans have far too little power to reveal their preferences-with-lots-of-power. And we seem to have sayings like "power corrupts", but it's not at all clear to me whether power corrupts, only the corrupt can gain power, or power simply reveals.
100% this.
In poker or MtG you can often actually figure out your outs.
Even in games with just a bit more complexity (yes, in certain ways MtG is very simple) it can be very very hard to know what your outs really are. And if one of your outs is "actually the next few turns will not be as devastating as I think they will", then almost all versions of playing to your outs will be worse than playing for generic-looking EV.
Same with life. Don't play to your outs until and unless you're extremely sure you've modeled the world well enough to know what ALL of you... (read more)
I am applying this principle to good effect right now, prepping a lightning talk. It allowed me to easily figure out which pieces of my 6-7 minute talk to discard to go down to 3-4 minutes, and also that a certain piece needed reworking to fit the single narrative rather than bringing in thoroughly interesting detail that needs to stay in the appendix.
I enjoyed this one a lot! It was simple enough to inspire educated guesses about how the system worked, but complex enough that probably no exact values would be forthcoming. Intuitions from similar games ported pretty well. I was "coerced" into writing some fun code. Thank you for explicitly stating the random nature of the dataset's decks, I think this particular challenge would have been worse if we needed to try to model [something] about that, too.
Fundamentally I think good writing is about having enough cognitive empathy for your audience to understand what you need to say in order to generate the desired thoughts in their minds.
This is what I need to work on most.
I have had several important ideas which took literally years to really get acted on (proving out that they were important, incidentally) and I'm almost certain it is because I don't have a lot of skill at overcoming the inferential distance that was (in retrospect) a huge blocker to communication, and partially, that's because I wasn't r... (read more)
Likes Dragon ramp pretty well in general. My best guesses are that:
- I've got bugs (90%)
- Networks are hard to fit (60%)
- Angels appear to do well because if you can ramp into them that's good but also they are friendly with some other pieces, that you don't actually want to have? (25%).
I have completed the modeling I'm going to do.
I built a NN from scratch! That was fun. It probably has bugs. It has a deck eval with leaky ReLU and (12, 6, 4) arch. Two of those feed into a deck vs deck eval with (8, 3, 1) arch and a sigmoid output.
This NN loves Dragon ramp, it seems. I mean not loves loves, it thinks the best ramp still only beats our rival ~60% of the time.
New PvE deck:
Dragon: 4x (this is a Dragon ramp deck)
Emperor: 2x (with even more top end)
Lotus: 6x (how to ramp)
At the same time, I let myself visualize nonsense images. My visual imagination isn't very vivid, and I don't try to create any specific images. It's nothing more than a patchy and low-res mental screensaver.
I also don't visualize. To reliably put myself to sleep assuming I'm not wide awake, I do my best to focus on the static and try to see images.
I visualize during dreams; or at least my waking memory says I was visualizing during dreams.
During hypnagogia, I can visualize, a bit. Trying to visualize moves me into hypnagogia, continuing puts me to sleep.
I know exactly what I want to do to continue analysis, but don't know whether I'll get/make the time to do it. For now, here is my PvE deck:
Angel: 3x (because they're just solid!)
Lotus: 3x (need to turbo out the Angels)
Emperor: 2x (I mean if you already have the Lotuses...)
Dragon: 1x (cannot resist a Dragon)
Vigilante: 3x (just some filler to stabilize)
Here are informed but wildly overconfident beliefs:
The more I think about it, the more the "for supporting people with a serious enough disability" doesn't feel like "civilization" to me. It does feel good, and I like the use of an abundance of resources being spent that way, but it feels to me like "everyone relinquishes power so that it can be used in a coordinated way" is civilization and "the coordinated use of power is for good things rather than for bad things" is moral progress. Not sure if I'm just trying to fit things into the OP frame but it doesn't feel like it.
It feels like American people are more civilized when they create a military, but nations are less civilized when they all have militaries which are doing things to each other?
vastly more sense than at least half
I would not be surprised if this is the most clearly false bit of everything in the OP plus comment section. I have been subscribed to his posts since the games he ran and I don't think there's any way at least half of his posts could possibly be described as making vastly less sense than the OP.
Hmm. Let me rethink. Okay, possibly? If you think fiction makes no sense? That would do it, maybe. Otherwise nah.
My plan of "when out of time, do enough to capture pairwise stuff and combine with an adhoc heuristic" works surprisingly well in these. :D
Which SCPs are available for capture each quarter, how do we know how many teams of which types were available to capture them, and how were teams allocated in the past?
Feedback: my gut reaction is that it would have been extremely difficult to divine the underlying-source nature of the data. Do you have a suggested method or technique that would have been likely to work? I think that noticing the success rates of teams... (read more)
Exactly 7 days after contest entries are posted, note the net upvotes of each top-level comment. Only top-level comments with net upvotes higher than the average and less than twice the average contribute towards rules for future rounds.
:chagrin:
I have replaced the first legal team target with a... legal target.