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Oskar Mathiasen
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Danish math major

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Game theory of "Nuclear Prisoner's Dilemma" - on nuking rocks
Oskar Mathiasen2mo62

Minor note. Your choice of utilities makes a 50/50 mixture of Cooperate:Defect and Defect:Cooperate better than the Cooperate:Cooperate outcome. So Cooperate:Cooperate isnt on the pareto frontier.  

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A Fraction of Global Market Capitalization as the Best Currency
Oskar Mathiasen4mo10

Here are some relevant quotes by Eliezer from a discord discussion on dath ilan currency:
Note that i have skipped parts of the conversation between each paragraph
 

dath ilan does have an artificial currency used as a medium-of-exchange, meant to track the value of unskilled labor hours (note unskilled qualifier) as they're regularly auctioned in Taskrabbit-like markets about that, and this currency also serves as the notional definition of a medium of account because it fluctuates less than unskilled labor prices.

Nobody is supposed to be holding currency; it's strictly a medium of exchange to instantiate a unit of account, not at all a store of value.  Value is held in investment accounts.

the unit of the account affects quite a lot because people do negotiate contracts about future delivery of milk, priced that way, and many small businesses prefer not to adjust all the prices on their Web Page on a daily basis.

there's also a coordination problem when you have a complicated supply chain; everyone wants to be first in line to raise prices, but everyone wants to be last in line to lower prices

yep.  dath ilan's system is not meant to be superior to an NGDPLT-indexed inflationary unit of account, holding fixed the part about stores of value being held mainly in equities and the land taxes and so on. they're just legit not at the optimum there and got to their current position via NGDPLT having not been invented by the time of the historical screen, and earlier generations being not quite that smart and being much more bullheaded about "downward nominal wage rigidity is a BIAS and we will TRAIN PEOPLE OUT OF IT and COORDINATE AROUND LOWERING PRICES SUCCESSFULLY so we can RETAIN OUR IDEALISTIC COMMITMENT to the unit of account being something that EVERYONE COULD PERSONALLY SELL"

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Economics Roundup #2
Oskar Mathiasen1y50

To the extent that purchases stay the same and we pay the cost domestically, that is indeed a tax paid by producers or consumers. Yes, it lowers their remaining capital, but is probably one of the least distortionary available taxes. In the terms described above, if you used the money to cut income tax rates, you’d probably be ahead.

Taxing something where the supply or demand is fixed is extremely efficient, and the extent to which purchases stay the same is exactly the extent to which supply or demand is inflexible. The economic inefficiency of a tax comes from the changes in behavior induced by the tax. The difference between a tariff and a sales tax, is that it induces you to buy native products.

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What distinguishes "early", "mid" and "end" games?
Oskar Mathiasen1y10

Sorry I see now that i lost half a sentence in the middle. I agree that the notions of early/mid/late game doesn't map well to real life, and I don't think there is a good way to do so. I then (meant to) propose the stages of a 4X game as perhaps mapping more cleanly onto one-shot games

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What distinguishes "early", "mid" and "end" games?
Oskar Mathiasen1y31

I think the most natural definitions are that early game is the part you have memorized, end game is where you can compute to the end (still doing pruning), and mid game is the rest.
So eg in Scrabble the end game is where there are no tiles or few enough tiles in the bag that you can think through all (relevant) combinations of bags.

I think perhaps the phases of a 4X game.

Explore: gain information that is relevant for what plan to execute 

Expand: Investment phase, you take actions that maximise your growth

Exploit: You slowly start depriotizing growth as the time remaining grows shorter.

Exterminate: You go for your win condition

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What do coherence arguments actually prove about agentic behavior?
Oskar Mathiasen1y-1-3

The arguments in the Aumann paper in favor of dropping the completeness axiom is that it makes for a better theory of Human/Buisness/Existent reasoning, not that it makes for a better theory of ideal reasoning.
The paper seems to prove that any partial preference ordering which obeys the other axioms must be representable by a utility function, but that there will be multiple such representatives.

My claim is that either there will be a dutch book, or your actions will be equivalent to the actions you would have taken by following one of those representative utility functions, in which case even though the internals don't seem like following a utility function they are for the purposes of VNM.

But demonstrating this is hard, as it is unclear what actions correspond to the fact that A is incomparable to B.

The concrete examples of non complete agents in the above, either seem like they will act according to one of those representatives, or like they are easily dutch bookable.

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What do coherence arguments actually prove about agentic behavior?
Oskar Mathiasen1y10

I don't understand how you are using incompleteness. For example, to me the sentence

"agents can make themselves immune to all possible money-pumps for completeness by acting in accordance with the following policy: ‘if I previously turned down some option X, I will not choose any option that I strictly disprefer to X.’"

Sounds like "agents can avoid all money pumps for completeness by completing their preferences in a random way." Which is true but doesn't seem like much of a challenge to completeness.

Can you explain what behavior is allowed under the first but isn't possible under my rephrasing?

Similarly can we make explicit what behavior counts as two options being incomparable?

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Is CDT with precommitment enough?
Oskar Mathiasen1y10

It seems to me that FDT has the property that you associate with the "ultimate decision theory".

My understanding is that FDT says that you should follow the policy which is attained by taking the argmax over all policies of the utility from following that policy (only including downstream effects of your policy).

In these easy examples your policy space is your space of committed actions. In which case the above seems to reduce to the "ultimate decision theory" criterion.

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Generalized Stat Mech: The Boltzmann Approach
Oskar Mathiasen1y54

The assumptions made here are not time reversible as the macrostate at time t+1 being deterministic given the macrostate at time t, does not imply that the macrostate at time t is deterministic given the macrostate at time t+1.

So in this article the direction of time is given through the asymmetry of the evolution of macrostates. 

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General Thoughts on Secular Solstice
Oskar Mathiasen1y76

I think "book of X" can be usefully "translated" as beliefs about X.
The book of truth is not truth, just like the book of night is not night.

I think "book of names" can be read as human categoristion of animals (giving them name). Although other readings do seem plausible. 

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