trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Nash equilibriums can be arbitrarily bad
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-05-01T14:58:21.765Z

Go hungry with Almost Free Lunches

Consider the following game, called "Almost Free Lunches" (EDIT: this seems to be a variant of the traveller dilemma). You name any pound-and-pence amount between £0 and £1,000,000; your opponent does likewise. Then you will both get whichever amount named was lowest.

On top of that, the person who named the highest amount must give £0.02 to the other. If you tie, no extra money changes hands.

What's the Nash equilibrium of this game? Well:

The only Nash equilibrium of Almost Free Lunches is for both of you to name £0.00.

Proof: Suppose player A has a probability distribution pA over possible amounts to name, and player B has a probability distribution pB over possible amounts. Let mA be the highest amount such that pA(mA) is non-zero; let mB be the same, for B. Assume that (pA,pB) is a Nash equilibrium.

Assume further that mA≥mB (if that's not the case, then just switch the labels A and B). Then either mA> £0.00 or mA= £0.00 (and hence both players select £0.00).

We'll now rule out mA> £0.00. If mB> £0.00, then player A can improve their score by replacing mA with m′A=mB−£0.01. To see this, assume that player B has said nB, and player A has said mA. If nB<m′A<mA, then player A can say m′A just as well as mA - either choice gives them the same amount (namely, nB− £0.02).

There remain two other cases. If nB=m′A, then m′A is superior to mA, getting m′A (rather than m′A− £0.02). And if nB=mB, then m′A gets m′A+ £0.02 =mB+ £0.01, rather than mB (if mA=mB) or mB−£0.02 (if mA>mB).

Finally, if mB= £0.00, then player A gets -£0.02 unless they also say £0.00.

Hence if mA> £0.00, the pA cannot be part of a Nash Equilibrium. Thus mA= £0.00 and hence the only Nash Equilibrium is at both players saying £0.00.

Pareto optimal

There are three Pareto-optimal outcomes: (£1,000,000.00, £1,000,000.00), (£1,000,000.01, £999,999.97), and (£999,999.97, £1,000,000.01). All of them are very much above the Nash Equilibrium.

Minmax and maximin

The minmax and maximin values are also both terrible, and also equal to £0.00. This is not surprising, though, as minmax and maximin implicitly assume the other players are antagonistic to you, and are trying to keep your profits low.

Arbitrary badness with two options

This shows that choosing the Nash Equilibrium can be worse than almost every other option. We can of course increase t

...
Has government or industry had greater past success in maintaining really powerful technological secrets?
by habryka — 2019-05-01T02:24:52.302Z

Context: As part of our efforts of working on Open Questions the LessWrong team has been reaching out to various researchers we know and asked them about questions they would be interested in getting answered.

This question was given to us by Ryan Carey and some of the answers below are the result of us trying to answer the question for a day on a private LessWrong instance, copied over to allow other people to contribute and read what we wrote.
A quick map of consciousness
by Elo — 2019-05-01T02:17:42.593Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/a-quick-map-of-consciousness/

Prior knowledge: Many maps lightly held, Leaky concepts, Boundaries

Map and territory: mind to reality – To be presented alongside the caveat, “what is good?”

(Well “good” is in the map, not the territory. This diagram very quickly becomes a mess, but before that happens, let’s talk about reifying the parts of this model to see if it’s useful)

To me right now, it seems like consciousness is the ladder between the map and the territory. In the diagram, on the left is a thought, suggesting that “this is an apple” on the right, pictured is a red apple. When the attention points at a red apple, the consciousness is filled with a map of declarative definition that labels, names and concludes that this is an apple.

Consciousness seems to be a label generating machine. Something fundamental about brains is that they map the territory. They quest towards mapping the territory.

That’s.Just.What.They.Do.

This brings us to the question of – how do I have a good life. I have 3 strategies:

1. [content] Look at different apples

2. [map] modify so that there are more positive opinions of apples

3. [relationality] appreciate looking at rotten apples if that’s what’s to look at today.

Content

If I look at dead apples all day, I’m not going to auto-magically have a great day. On the other hand if I look at great apples, I’m going to be impressed and delighted. The apple could be replaced with beautiful artwork, nice sunsets, tasty food, nice music. Whatever strikes in the heart of desire to be attended to. Improve the content is a reasonable and helpful strategy sometimes.

Sometimes it’s not the content that’s the problem. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with apples but they make me puke. Then I can try the map.

Map

If every time I see an apple I remember that one time I bit an apple and found half a worm, maybe there’s some work I can do so that I don’t keep thinking worms when I see an apple. Even sunsets are irrelevant when I’m too busy on my phone. If art galleries remind me of my ex, music reminds me of screeching cats (not in a good way), food reminds me of how fat I am (and how I can’t take care of my body). Maybe the work to be done is in the map. Sometimes with more and less force, the map can be trained to be less miserable when presented with stimuli. Usually the good stuff is found by passing through ...
Natural Structures and Conditional Definitions
by Chris_Leong — 2019-05-01T00:05:35.698Z

There's a sense in which definitions are arbitrary. Words are made by humans and no-one can stop me from calling red blue and blue red if I really want to. So when people ask questions like, "What is consciousness?" or "What is free-will?", it seems quite reasonable to respond, "Just pick a definition. These terms can be defined many different ways and it's completely your choice which one you choose to use".

This may appear to dissolve the question, however, I would suggest that such an answer often misunderstands what the asker is attempting. Typically the asker is concerned by more than the linguistic question, but also with attempting to understand the ontology or structure of reality. And it may be the case that this structure includes a substructure that naturally fits with our intuitions of what consciousness is or what freewill is or it may be the case, as per the standard LW view of these two cases, that such a structure doesn't exist.

What makes this especially confusing is that many people will conditionally accept the "it's arbitrary" answer when they are convinced that such a natural structure doesn't exist, while pointing out the natural structure otherwise. Here's an example. Let's suppose it was common knowledge that we all have souls. Then whenever someone asked about the definition of consciousness, we'd be tempted to point to the soul, just as whenever people ask about the definition of trees, we'd be tempted to talk about leaves and branches. The arguments for being able to use language arbitrarily and the fact that this isn't a perfectly well-specified definition remain. It's just that one definition suffices for 95% of cases, so we don't bring up that argument. But if instead it was common knowledge that there are no souls, it'd be much more likely they'd say that the definition is arbitrary. And by accepting answers to different questions depending on how things turn out, the intent behind the original question can easily be obscured.

Appendix

Here are some possible interpretations of, "What is X?":

What does term X intrinsically mean? (no intrinsic meaning exists)
What natural structure (if any) corresponds to X?
What are some useful interpretations of the term X?
How is the term X used in society?

These kinds of discussions ...
Change A View: An interesting online community
by habryka — 2019-04-30T18:34:37.351Z
Link: https://changeaview.com/our-mission

I've recently stumbled across the platform Change A View, which is a subreddit that forked/graduated to its own website that is centered around the idea of people creating posts in which they ask to have their mind changed. This tends to create a frame that enables much more healthy discourse than most online discussion.

Their new platform is centered around the ideas of "deltas" which users can award to other users when their minds have been changed by them.

I've surfed around the site a bit and generally found it pretty enjoyable and figured other people might find it valuable to. It's also an interesting for studying the psychology of what changes people's minds and what facilitates good discourse.
Pecking Order and Flight Leadership
by sarahconstantin — 2019-04-29T20:30:01.168Z

It was recently pointed out to me that humans are weird, compared to other social animals, in that we conflate the pecking order with the group decision-making process.

The pecking order, for instance in birds, is literally the ranking of who gets to eat first when food is scarce.

We can also call it a “dominance hierarchy”, but the words “dominance” and “hierarchy” call up associations with human governance systems like aristocracy and monarchy, where the king or chief is both the decisionmaker for the group and the person entitled to the most abundant resources.

In birds, it’s not like that. Being top chicken doesn’t come with the job of “leading” the other chickens anywhere; it just entitles you to eat better (or have better access to other desirable resources). In fact, group decisionmaking (like deciding when and where to migrate) does occur in birds, but not necessarily according to the “pecking order”. Leadership (setting the direction of the group) and dominance (being high in the pecking order) are completely independent in pigeons, for instance. Pigeons have stable, transitive hierarchies of flight leadership, and they have stable pecking order hierarchies, and these hierarchies do not correlate.

Logically, it isn’t necessary for the individual who decides what others shall do to also be the individual who gets the most goodies. They can be related — one of the things you can do with the power to give instructions is to instruct others to give you more goodies. But you can, at least with nonhuman animals, separate pecking-order hierarchies from decision-making hierarchies.

You can even set this up as a 2×2:

High rank in pecking order, high decision-making power: Lord

High rank in pecking order, low decision-making power: Eloi

Low rank in pecking order, high decision-making power: Morlock

Low rank in pecking order, low decision-making power: Vassal

“Eloi” and “Morlocks” are, of course, borrowed from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which depicted a human species divided between the privileged, childlike Eloi, and the monstrous underground Morlocks, who farm them for food. Eloi enjoy but don’t decide; Morlocks decide but don’t enjoy.

The other archetypal example of someone with low rank in the pecking order but high decision-making power is the prophet. Biblical prophets told people what to do — they could even give instructions to the king — but they did not...
Reference request: human as "backup"
by Yuxi_Liu — 2019-04-29T17:13:51.493Z

I remember reading some paper that suggests humans to take a specialized role inside super AI, like mitochondria, or like a biological "backup". The argument was that humans might have specialized functions that they can do well, like mitochondria is good at making energy. And humans might be good at surviving, so might be a good "biological backup".

I feel like it's by Vernor Vinge, but I just checked and he didn't write that. I googled around and couldn't find it either. Can you find from which paper this might have come from?
Buying Value, not Price
by Jacob Falkovich — 2019-04-29T15:51:55.470Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

Follow-up to Shopping for Happiness.

My old Galaxy smartphone recently gave up the ghost, and I upgraded to the new model for $750. My friend was surprised when I told him. The old model is now available for $250, is the new one really three times better?

“Three times” better can mean several things, but in my post on spending money wisely I came up with the metric that should guide purchasing decisions: happiness gained per unit of time spent experiencing a thing, or :-)/hr. By this metric, since the new phone costs 3x as much, unless it provides 3x the :-)/hr it’s worse in terms of $/:-). That means I’m getting less happiness per dollar spent.

I like my new phone a lot: the screen is bigger, the battery lasts all day and night, I can use it for blogging. It brings me at least 25% more :-) than the old phone. But, it doesn’t make me 200% happier. And yet I feel like I’m getting a good deal.

When my friend asked how I would justify this decision I warned him not to trust my explanation – since I already bought the phone, any justification may just be a post hoc rationalization. That caveat aside, my justification is that the price of the phone is a red herring. What I really care about is the value.

Ask yourself: how much would you be willing to pay for your smartphone if it was the only model available for sale?

Whether they “ruined a generation” or not, but I think that smartphones are awesome and immensely improve my life. If I had to choose between no phone at all or a Galaxy smartphone, I’d pay at least $4,000 for the old model and $5,000 (25% more) for the new one. That means I’d be willing to pay $1,000 more for the upgrade, and they only charge me $500 more ($750 vs. $250) for it. The fact that smartphones cost less than what I’m willing to pay is just a wonderful bonus born of engineering ingenuity and market competition.

I square this with the $/:-) disparity by noting that my goal is to maximize :-) over all the money I spend, not in each category separately.

Consider a toy example of a world in which only two product categories exist: jackets and smartphones. You have $1,000 to spend, and four products to choose from:

Galaxy S7, $250, 4,000 :-)
Galaxy Note 9, $750, 5,000 :-)
Regular jacket, $250, 500 :-)
Fucking jacket, $750, 1,000 :-)

Given the constraint that you can only enjoy one smartphone at a time, the most happiness is b...
My poorly done attempt of formulating a game with incomplete information.
by RocksBasil — 2019-04-29T04:36:15.784Z

Epistemic Status: I was bored so I wrote this, forgetting that I was probably making a poor attempt of reinventing some wheel, and realising how I forgot to solve

Motivation: To formulate the stereotypical “Obedience Test” in game theory terms.

The idea came into my mind when I saw the “Three CIA Candidates” joke:

The goal of the test was stated as “To know that you will follow instructions, no matter what.”, and apparently the sure-fire way to know this is to let the subject make a choice of harming themselves (or troubling their conscience) or to disobey command. Obedience is taken as the willingness to put oneself and their own conscience under harm in order to obey the command.

And the command in the obedience test probably serves little or no higher purpose other than being a test, and would probably appear so. (Arguably, if the subject believes the test serves a higher purpose, the instructor may still need to find out what happens when him and the purpose contradicts each other)

This pattern seems sensible, although maybe not logically vigorous.

I can think of a few other examples with similar logic:

God tested whether Abraham would be willing to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, and when Abraham was about to kill Isaac the Angel of the Lord (to God’s credit compared to the other examples) stopped Abraham and acknowledged that Abraham showed his fear towards God.

Ancient Chinese general Wu Qi allegedly (this incident’s historicity was under question) murdered his wife, who was from the State of Qi (the enemy of the State of Lu, which Wu Qi was serving under), as the Lu leadership was hesitant to assign Wu Qi as an army commander concerning his loyalty.

Tokugawa Ieyasu executed his own wife Lady Tsukiyama and forced his first son Nobuyasu to suicide, when his ally/master Oda Nobunaga showed allegations that Tsukiyama conspired against the Oda Clan.

And I guess it is the same logic that lies behind gang initiation murders and the same logic that makes fraternity/sorority hazing rituals dangerous.

Now let’s try to formulate the process:

(This game has incomplete information, and so I haven't solved it just yet)

We will have a “monarch” M, who gives commands to the “subject” S, and M would like to figure out how “obedient” (denoted by b, a positive real number) was to him/her. M chooses a test with “repulsiveness” (denoted by r, a positive real number), ...
Rationality made me less bad at Mario Kart 8
by Three-Monkey Mind — 2019-04-28T21:29:59.790Z

Originally posted at https://www.threemonkeymind.com/wgir/mario-kart/.

“Rationality techiques helped me to become less bad at Mario Kart” isn’t the most compelling elevator pitch for reading The Sequences, but it illustrates the usefulness of reevaluating the things you think you know every so often, especially when you’re making decisions based on the things you think you know.

Rationality gives you a mental toolkit to help you update your beliefs based on evidence. This is not always easy. Orwell once remarked that to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle and it’s useful to have mental techniques, habits, and sayings to help you model the world as best as you can.

I recently got back into playing Mario Kart 8 on my own Switch. This wasn’t my first time playing Mario Kart, though. Back in the day, I managed to get first place in all Mario Kart cups at the highest difficulty. I’d played about three hours of Double Dash, and I’d played a bit of Mario Kart 8 at a friend’s house. When my friends play multiplayer, they all race at 200cc, so I tried to pick a character and loadout that was up to the task[1]. Because I didn’t know any better, I opted for Yoshi in the Standard Kart, Standard tires, and the Super Glider. I remembered reading that bikes were “more advanced”, so I didn’t try them initially. After a couple rounds of doing abysmally poorly, I tried one of the bikes thinking they’d be, at the very least, very different. After all, the motorcycle was very different from the cars in Stunt Race FX. I was right — I went from “abysmal” all the way up to “mediocre” just by changing my vehicle type. A massive improvement!

Several months later, I was sitting at home when I decided I wanted to get gold trophies for each of the cups in the single-player version of the game. I figured that I’d start out with the most basic loadout, but in the interim I forgot how well I did on the bike. Remembering that “bikes were for advanced players”, I ended up picking the same racer and loadout: Yoshi, Standard Kart, Standard tires, Super Glider. With this loadout, I was only mediocre. While getting 5th place is definitely better than trailing everybody else in 12th place, I wouldn’t be able to get a gold Flower Cup trophy anytime soon if all I could do was 5th place on the first circuit in the cup.

While I didn’t expect to dominate Flower Cup, I consistent

...
Recent updates to gwern.net (2017–2019)
by gwern — 2019-04-28T20:18:27.083Z

Previously: 2011/2012–2013/2013–2014/2014–2015/2015–2016/2016–2017.

"Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose, / And Jamshyd's Seven-ring'd Cup where no one knows; / But still the Vine her Ancient Ruby yields / And still a Garden by the Water blows."

An index of my recent writings, by topic:

AI:

"How To Generate Faces With StyleGAN"; "This Waifu Does Not Exist" (background & implementation)

"Finetuning the GPT-2-small Transformer for English Poetry Generation"

Danbooru2018: a dataset of 3.33m anime images (2.5tb) with 92.7m descriptive tags

"Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning"

On the history of the tank/neural-net urban legend

Genetics:

Embryo selection: Overview of major current approaches FAQ, multi-stage selection, chromosome/gamete selection, optimal search of batches, & robustness to error in utility weights; sub-essays: "Glue Robbers: Sequencing Nobelists Using Collectibles", "Dynasties and Embryo Selection",

"Multi-Stage Selection Bean Machine Demo"

Cat Sense, Bradshaw 2013: Are We Good Owners?

"Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding"

"Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's Dune"

Psychology:

SMPY bibliography

"Everything Is Correlated"

What is the morning-writing effect?

Cordwainer Smith's "'Scanners Live in Vain' as realistic SF"

"The Gift of the Amygdali"

Tech:

"Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement"

"How many computers are in your computer?"

The most common error in technological forecasting: conjunctive vs disjunctive reasoning

"Banner Ads Considered Harmful"

"Internet Research Tips"

"Littlewood's Law and the Global Media"

Small ways in which ordinary life has been getting better since the late '80s/early '90s

QS:

Acne: a good Quantified Self topic for self-experimentation

ZMA sleep self-experiment

Bacopa quasi-experiment

Misc:

On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages

"My Little Pony: Immanetizing The Equestrian"

A list of open questions

"Origin of 'Littlewood's Law of Miracles'"

jailbreaking Frank P. Ramsey's & Arthur Jensen's papers

gwern.net changes: Obormot has done a thorough redesign & implemented a number of new features, analogous to his work on replacing LW2 with GreaterWrong.com.

The major changes:

moved from MailChimp to TinyLetter; minimalist monochrome 'responsive' redesign, particularly for mobile; Tufte-style sidenotes via sidenotes.js; collapsible s

...
The Forces of Blandness and the Disagreeable Majority
by sarahconstantin — 2019-04-28T19:44:42.177Z

There are a few data points that have been making me see “the discourse” differently lately.

1. Large Majorities Dislike Political Correctness.

That’s the title of this Atlantic article that came out in October, and is based on this study from the think tank More in Common which opposes political polarization.

The results of the 8000-person poll of a nationally-representative sample of Americans are pretty striking. About 80% of Americans think “political correctness is a problem”; and even when you restrict to self-identified liberals, Democrats, or people of color, large majorities agree with the statement. The study identifies “progressive activists” (8% of Americans) as a younger, more extreme, more educated, more politically active left-wing cluster, and even within this cluster, a full 25% agree with “political correctness is a problem.”

And lots of people who agree with statements about hate speech being bad, white people starting out with advantages in life, sexual harassment being a problem, etc, also think political correctness is a problem.

Being “politically incorrect” isn’t just a white thing, a male thing, or even a conservative thing. It’s a hugely common thing.

2. Support for free speech is common, and growing, not shrinking. And it’s not the most left-wing people who most oppose free speech, but the moderate liberals.

Political scientist Justin Murphy has done studies about this, based on the General Social Survey, a large poll on social attitudes that’s been running for decades.

Since the 1970’s, Americans have become more tolerant of allowing people with controversial views to speak in public — communists, people proposing military coups, homosexuals, and opponents of “all churches and religions.” Racism is the exception to the rule — people haven’t become more tolerant of racist speech, even as they have become more tolerant of other varieties of speech.

Keep in mind that legal censorship and centralization of political speech were way more prevalent in mid-20th century America than they are today. Cable television networks didn’t exist till the 1970’s. The Fairness Doctrine didn’t end until 1987. Satellite radio, which allowed obscene language that was regulated on conventional radio and television, onl...