Status: musings. I wanted to write up a more fleshed-out and rigorous version of this, but realistically wasn't likely to every get around to it, so here's the half-baked version. Related posts: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases, Deep honesty What I mean by 'honesty' There are nuances to this,...
(I wrote this about a year ago, so parts of it might be out of date; I'm not much involved with OBNYC anymore.) Context Overcoming Bias NYC, the rationalist meetup in New York City, has for the last several years had a system of rotating month captains, who each volunteer...
If you interact with the kind of entity that offers you a better deal if you reject their first offer, and they make an offer before you explain what you'll do, you just always reject their first offer, explain your strategy to them, and say that it's in their interest to make a fair offer, and if you probabilistically reject that one, they won't be able to make more offers.
I'm not convinced that this remains optimal when you're bargaining with an entity that might offer you a better deal if you reject their first offer for legitimate reasons, rather than in an attempt to exploit your bargaining strategy.
Suppose a deal falls through,... (read more)
This caused me to get around to writing a comment on the linked How to Give in to Threats post, which I had meant to for a while.
I'd say it's more like D&D 3.5 than any two of [AD&D, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, D&D 5E] are like each other.
... (read more)When somebody offers you a 7:5 split, instead of the 6:6 split that would be fair, you should accept their offer with slightly less than 6/7 probability. Their expected value from offering you 7:5, in this case, is 7 * slightly less than 6/7, or slightly less than 6. This ensures they can't do any better by offering you an unfair split; but neither do you try to destroy all their expected value in retaliation. It could be an honest mistake, especially if the real situation is any more complicated than the original Ultimatum Game.
If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly-more-less than 6/8, so they do even worse in their
Made some updates to this:
The terms 'living money' and 'dead money' seem to include an unwarranted implication that living is better. As I understand it, that framework would count money spent on buying something just because one wants it as 'dead money' - there's no hope of a financial return, it gets used up via paying people to do things and then it's gone. But being able to spend it to get what one wants is arguably the entire point of money! It's not clear to me if this generalizes to willpower in this analogy, though.
I think parts of your Notes on Honesty are as close to the post I was trying to write as what I actually wrote was. I wonder if I had some cryptomnesia going on, even. In any case, thanks for writing that and for pointing it out here!
Status: musings. I wanted to write up a more fleshed-out and rigorous version of this, but realistically wasn't likely to every get around to it, so here's the half-baked version.
Related posts: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases, Deep honesty
There are nuances to this, but I think a good summary is 'Not intentionally communicating false information'.
This is the only one here that I follow near-absolutely and see as an important standard that people can reasonably be expected to follow in most situations. Everything else here I'd see as either supererogatory, or good-on-balance but with serious tradeoffs that one can reasonably choose to sometimes not make, or good in some... (read 547 more words →)
(A list of songs compiled from impromptu group singing sessions at several rationalist-adjacent events. Anything where the program was decided in advance is excluded from this list. This is all done from memory of events I happened to be at, and I'm more likely to remember songs I'm familiar with.)
(and see the 'Filk and filk-adjacent' and 'Uncategorized' sections, which include some that weren't written for Solstice but are oft sung at it)
So, in general not having your values changed is an Omohundro goal, right? But would I suggest that if you you change your utility function[1] from U(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w) or whatever it is, to U(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w) + 5000, all your choices that involve explicit expected utility comparisons will come out the same as before, but you'll be happier.
There are a lot of issues with utility functions as a framing for describing actual human motivations, but bear with me.
(I wrote this about a year ago, so parts of it might be out of date; I'm not much involved with OBNYC anymore.)
Overcoming Bias NYC, the rationalist meetup in New York City, has for the last several years had a system of rotating month captains, who each volunteer to take responsibility for scheduling meetups in a given month. Before we adopted this system (in 2017, I think), there was already a tradition of having a meetup every Tuesday, but this ran into some difficulties:
During some periods, there'd be diffusion of responsibility and sometimes the weekly meetup would fail to happen, since no-one took it upon themself to organize one (or there'd be
[...] Ricardo’s Law Of Comparative Advantage was one of the most inspirational things he’d ever read. This is an economic theorem which says that under ideal frictionless capitalism, even if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can do the thing you’re relatively least worst at, trade with other people, and be guaranteed to make nonzero money. Maybe not very much money, but nonzero. It will mean that your actions have made other people nonzero better off, and they are nonzero grateful to you.
I do not find this inspiring! Under ideal... (read more)
If you didn't expect to complete the program, or didn't expect to like the program, you probably wouldn't go. My takeaway here is less that Inkhaven is very good and more that the people who might go to Inkhaven are very good at predicting whether it'll go well for them.