oops! For some reason I brain-farted and thought it was a different constant I wasn't familiar with.

I wonder if he'd just memorised the first couple dozen digits of something like Chaitin's constant or e or pi like you or whatever and just started somewhere in the middle of his memorised substri

Yeah that's what I suggested people try if they want a near-perfect external source of randomness.

Yeah I suspect a distilled/pruned neural-net could do really well against the existing strategies, I dunno what the latest state of the field is. I also don't have a very good sense of recent progress in computer/ML optimizations so maybe there are other tricks I'm discounting. 

When I remember to, I try to keep my fist in a "neutral" state (thumb not touching fist so it's easy to either close or open) until after my hand starts moving, but I do wonder how common hand-shape prediction is, and if so, how often high-level players try to "bait." 

I don't take the game very seriously outside of the bot exercises and I've never played in irl tournaments. 

Thanks for being nice about the whole thing! Would totally understand if you're really angry given the context etc.

Interesting, are there examples of people feeling positive-tribal-emotions to "go insane" in the abstract? 

I suspect in practice it looks more like social pressure to be sleep-deprived, social pressure to repeat what the Glorious Leader says without question, pressure to ignore widely held taboos, pressure to sacrifice the self, etc.

Yeah I thought about including randomness exploits for bots too (instead of just noting it for humans) but decided it'd be distracting. 

Hopefully if I ever run that contest I'll be able to catch problems like randomness exploits and forced crashes! 

Thanks for the feedback!

Hmm my general take on this is that war is bad! It is frequently irrational, and always destructive I'd like there to be less war. Conditional upon there being war however, I think the sadness of weapons causing people to die is sort of "priced in"^[1], whereas the death of the bats was idiosyncratic and particular to stealth technology specifically. 

I do get what you're saying, and I apologize if my post was insensitive. For what it's worth, my impression is that other things I've seen covering weapons are substantially more cold-minded, and my full review of Skunk Works will investigate the ethical issues of working in the US military-industrial complex more thoroughly. 

1. ^{^}

   Though I suppose you could make the argument that stealth is more offense dominant than defense dominant, unlike say trench-lines.

Sure but at some point your probability of murder goes below that of suicide, no? It seems like your argument would imply that you can never think suicide is more likely than murder based on investigating all the plausible ways it could be murder, unless you have an actually exhaustive search or an airtight logical argument.

Similarly, re: the Fatima sun case, I think what Ethan did was that he investigated all the ways he thought it could be natural, until his probability of natural explanation was lower than his probability that it was a miracle.  At face value, this seems like a perfectly reasonable method of investigation to me! To the extent there was a reasoning mistake, I think of it as very different from how you're conceiving it. I think he had a) too high a prior for supernatural explanations, b) did not sufficiently adjust for the selection bias in choosing the most plausible miracle (Where the correct update is that if the most plausible miracle is <X persuasive, you should update downwards on God), and c) was overly credulous in one direction than the other.

In the Rethink and superforecaster cases, I don't think what you said is a particularly plausible account of what they did to begin with.

David Graeber is not saying that all middlemen are bad. His thesis is that middleman jobs where the person who has the job believes the job is useless are bad. 

I think alienation is real but exaggerated, and we also shouldn't take people's alienation as substantial evidence their work is actually meaningless.