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Seems like the main difference is that you're counting up with status and counting down with genetic fitness.

There are plenty of people who plan their lives around having & raising kids. And there are plenty of people who put tons of effort into leveling up their videogame characters, or affiliating-at-a-distance with Taylor Swift or LeBron James, with minimal real-world benefit to themselves.

And it's easier to count up lots of things as status-related if you're using a vague concept of status which can encompass all sorts of status-related behaviors, including (e.g.) both status-seeking and status-affiliation. "Inclusive genetic fitness" is a nice precise concept so it can be clear when individuals fail to aim for it even when acting on adaptations that are directly involved in reproduction & raising offspring.

The economist RH Strotz introduced the term "precommitment" in his 1955-56 paper "Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization".

Thomas Schelling started writing about similar topics in his 1956 paper "An essay on bargaining", using the term "commitment".

Both terms have been in use since then.

On one interpretation of the question: if you're hallucinating then you aren't in fact seeing ghosts, you're just imagining that you're seeing ghosts. The question isn't asking about those scenarios, it's only asking what you should believe in the scenarios where you really do see ghosts.

My updated list after some more work yesterday is

96286, 9344, 107278, 68204, 905, 23565, 8415, 62718, 83512, 16423, 42742, 94304

which I see is the same as simon's list, with very slight differences in the order

More on my process:

I initially modeled location just by a k nearest neighbors calculation, assuming that a site's location value equals the average residual of its k nearest neighbors (with location transformed to Cartesian coordinates). That, along with linear regression predicting log(Performance), got me my first list of answers. I figured that list was probably good enough to pass the challenge: the sites' predicted performance had a decent buffer over the required cutoff, the known sites with large predicted values did mostly have negative residuals but they were only about 1/3 the size of the buffer, there were some sites with large negative residuals but none among the sites with high predicted values and I probably even had a big enough buffer to withstand 1 of them sneaking in, and the nearest neighbors approach was likely to mainly err by giving overly middling values to sites near a sharp border (averaging across neighbors on both sides of the border) which would cause me to miss some good sites but not to include any bad sites. So it seemed fine to stop my work there.

Yesterday I went back and looked at the residuals and added some more handcrafted variables to my model to account for any visible patterns. The biggest was the sharp cutoff at Latitude +-36. I also changed my rescaling of Murphy's Constant (because my previous attempt had negative residuals for low Murphy values), added a quadratic term to my rescaling of Local Value of Pi (because the dropoff from 3.15 isn't linear), added a Shortitude cutoff at 45, and added a cos(Longitude-50) variable. Still kept the nearest neighbors calculation to account for any other location relevance (there is a little but much less now). That left me with 4 nines of correlation between predicted & actual performance, residuals near zero for the highest predicted sites in the training set, and this new list of sites. My previous lists of sites still seem good enough, but this one looks better.

Did a little robustness check, and I'm going to swap out 3 of these to make it:

96286, 23565, 68204, 905, 93762, 94408, 105880, 9344, 8415, 62718, 80395, 65607

To share some more:

I came across this puzzle via aphyer's post, and got inspired to give it a try.

Here is the fit I was able to get on the existing sites (Performance vs. Predicted Performance). Some notes on it:

Seems good enough to run with. None of the highest predicted existing sites had a large negative residual, and the highest predicted new sites give some buffer.

Three observations I made along the way. 

First (which is mostly redundant with what aphyer wound up sharing in his second post):

Almost every variable is predictive of Performance on its own, but none of the continuous variables have a straightforward linear relationship with Performance.

Second:

Modeling the effect of location could be tricky. e.g., Imagine on Earth if Australia and Mexico were especially good places for Performance, or on a checkerboard if Performance was higher on the black squares.

Third:

The ZPPG Performance variable has a skewed distribution which does not look like what you'd get if you were adding a bunch of variables, but does look like something you might get if you were multiplying several variables. And multiplication seems plausible for this scenario, e.g. perhaps such-and-such a disturbance halves Performance and this other factor cuts performance by a quarter.

My current choices (in order of preference) are

96286, 23565, 68204, 905, 93762, 94408, 105880, 8415, 94304, 42742, 92778, 62718

Answer by UnnamedJan 11, 2024277

What's "Time-Weighted Probability"? Is that just the average probability across the lifespan of the market? That's not a quantity which is supposed to be calibrated.

e.g., Imagine a simple market on a coin flip, where forecasts of p(heads) are made at two times: t1 before the flip and t2 after the flip is observed. In half of the cases, the market forecast is 50% at t1 and 100% at t2, for an average of 75%; in those cases the market always resolves True. The other half: 50% at t1, 0% at t2, avg of 25%, market resolves False. The market is underconfident if you take this average, but the market is perfectly calibrated at any specific time.

Have you looked at other ways of setting up the prior to see if this result still holds? I'm worried that they way you've set up the prior is not very natural, especially if (as it looks at first glance) the Stable scenario forces p(Heads) = 0.5 and the other scenarios force p(Heads|Heads) + p(Heads|Tails) = 1. Seems weird to exclude "this coin is Headsy" from the hypothesis space while including "This coin is Switchy".

Thinking about what seems most natural for setting up the prior: the simplest scenario is where flips are serially independent. You only need one number to characterize a hypothesis in that space, p(Heads). So you can have some prior on this hypothesis space (serial independent flips), and some prior on p(Heads) for hypotheses within this space. Presumably that prior should be centered at 0.5 and symmetric. There's some choice about how spread out vs. concentrated to make it, but if it just puts all the probability mass at 0.5 that seems too simple.

The next simplest hypothesis space is where there is serial dependence that only depends on the most recent flip. You need two numbers to characterize a hypothesis in this space, which could be p(Heads|Heads) and p(Heads|Tails). I guess it's simplest for those to be independent in your prior, so that (conditional on there being serial dependence), getting info about p(Heads|Heads) doesn't tell you anything about p(Heads|Tails). In other words, you can simplify this two dimensional joint distribution to two independent one-dimensional distributions. (Though in real-world scenarios my guess is that these are positively correlated, e.g. if I learned that p(Prius|Jeep) was high that would probably increase my estimate of p(Prius|Prius), even assuming that there is some serial dependence.) For simplicity you could just give these the same prior distribution as p(Heads) in the serial independence case.

I think that's a rich enough hypothesis space to run the numbers on. In this setup, Sticky hypotheses are those where p(Heads|Heads)>p(Heads|Tails), Switchy are the reverse, Headsy are where p(Heads|Heads)+p(Heads|Tails)>1, Tails are the reverse, and Stable are where p(Heads|Heads)=p(Heads|Tails) and get a bunch of extra weight in the prior because they're the only ones in the serial independent space of hypotheses.

Try memorizing their birthdates (including year).

That might be different enough from what you've previously tried to memorize (month & day) to not get caught in the tangle that has developed.

My answer to "If AI wipes out humanity and colonizes the universe itself, the future will go about as well as if humanity had survived (or better)" is pretty much defined by how the question is interpreted. It could swing pretty wildly, but the obvious interpretation seems ~tautologically bad.

Agreed, I can imagine very different ways of getting a number for that, even given probability distributions for how good the future will be conditional on each of the two scenarios.

A stylized example: say that the AI-only future has a 99% chance of being mediocre and a 1% chance of being great, and the human future has a 60% chance of being mediocre and a 40% chance of being great. Does that give an answer of 1% or 60% or something else?

I'm also not entirely clear on what scenario I should be imagining for the "humanity had survived (or better)" case.

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