trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Card Rebalancing and Economic Considerations in Digital Card Games
by Zvi — 2018-12-31T17:00:00.547Z

Previously: Artifact Embraces Card Balance Changes, Card Collection and Ownership, Card Balance and Artifact (good comments on that one)

VII. Card Rebalancing, Pack Value and Economics

What happens when a game periodically rebalances its cards?

There are several distinct effects.

In the second post, I considered the question of card collection and ownership. This section is partly reiteration of key points from there, then expands upon them. I want to get the economic aspects out of the way now, so the remainder of the series can consider other factors.

If you want to skip ahead to game play implications, the next post will tackle that.

If cards are frequently altered for balance reasons, or to shake things up, then a card becoming valuable and worthwhile creates a large risk that its value will be diminished or wiped out by a future change. This transforms the long term payout expectations, forcing the value to lie mostly in shorter term utility and severely hurting long term collectibility. So that’s potentially quite bad.

The good news is, you can choose how much to care about that. Both as a game and as a player. In Slay the Spire, ownership wasn’t a thing, so changing the cards up was totally cool. If you use the dust system of Hearthstone, cards cannot be transferred, and are created and destroyed for fixed amounts. As long as you offer full refunds when changes occur, which is cheap to do, it’s hard to get too angry about changes.

One could certainly argue that a player chooses to create and aim towards a variety of cards in order to build a deck, and killing one card in the deck could kill the whole operation and leave your collection crippled. But a new set often does the same.

At the time I fully supported Artifact’s decision to have a true marketplace: a fully collectible, buy-packs-and-trade-cards economy, when cards were not going to be rebalanced and card ownership was at a higher level.

I still strongly believe that the marketplace model is good for the right game, with the right supports. I am still planning to use it, but it requires extensive supports and has to be central to what you are doing, at least as much as in paper Magic: The Gathering.

Prices have now dropped dramatically, across the board, since the announcement.

I will show prices as $Bid/$Ask.

Drow Ranger is 3.5/4.5, and Axe is 6.5/8.7. They remain the most expensive heroes, despite bec...
Thoughts on Q&A so far?
by Raemon — 2018-12-31T01:15:17.307Z

It's been a few weeks since introducing the Open Questions / Q&A features on LessWrong.

As the team returns from the holidays, we'll likely put some time into fine tuning the features and introducing supporting elements to make them work a bit better. I thought it'd be good to check in with how people were overall feeling about them now that they've seen them, and what additional features would be most useful to flesh out the system. (Either features on questions themselves, or supporting features to help keep track of questions)
Is there a standard discussion of vegetarianism/veganism?
by Sherrinford — 2018-12-30T20:22:33.330Z

I am searching for a concise text that presents and optimally also discusses reasons for a vegetarian/vegan diet, including environmental and climate effects, health, but of course also ethics, and there are some ethical points I would be particularly interested in like "can you rank animals by how bad eating them is?", "is it more ethical to eat wild animals because they have a good life before dying?", "the ethics of offsetting" (the kind discussed in http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/) Optimally, this would be a kind of non-partisan text, but I guess for this topic this is hard to find because if someone writes about it, s/he usually explains her/his own reasons.
Announcement: A talk about structured concurrency at FOSDEM
by Martin Sustrik — 2018-12-30T10:10:00.836Z

Generally, I don't tend to give talks (the last one I gave was six or seven years ago) but this time I am going to make an exception. I am going to give a short talk about structured concurrency as FOSDEM 2019.

If you are interested in the topic, meet me in Brussels on February 2nd!

If you have no idea what structured concurrency is about, good intro article can be found here.

by martin_sustrik
Conceptual Analysis for AI Alignment

by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) — 2018-12-30T00:46:38.014Z

TL; DR - Conceptual Analysis is highly relevant for AI alignment, and is also a way in which someone with less technical skills can contribute to alignment research. This suggests there should be at least one person working full-time on reviewing existing philosophy literature for relevant insights, and summarizing and synthesizing these results for the safety community.

There are certain "primitive concepts" that we are able to express in mathematics, and it is relatively straightforward to program AIs to deal with those things. Naively, alignment requires understanding *all* morally significant human concepts, which seems daunting. However, the "argument from corrigibility" suggests that there may be small sets of human concepts which, if properly understood, are sufficient for "benignment". We should seek to identify what these concepts are, and make a best-effort to perform thorough and reductive conceptual analyses on them. But we should also look at what has already been done!

On the coherence of human concepts

For human concepts which *haven't* been formalized, it's unclear whether there is a simple "coherent core" to the concept. Careful analysis may also reveal that there are several coherent concepts worth distinguishing, e.g. cardinal vs. ordinal numbers. If we find there is a coherent core, we can attempt to build algorithms around it.

If there isn't a simple coherent core, there may be a more complex one, or it may be that the concept just isn't coherent (i.e. that it's the product of a confused way of thinking). Either way, in the near term we'd probably have to use machine learning if we wanted to include these concepts in our AI's lexicon.

A serious attempt at conceptual analysis could help us decide whether we should attempt to learn or formalize a concept.

Concretely, I imagine a project around this with the following stages (each yielding at least one publication):

1) A "brainstormy" document which attempts to enumerate all the concepts that are relevant to safety and presents the arguments for their specific relevance and relation to other relevant concepts. This should also specifically indicate how a combination of concepts, if rigorously analyzed, could be along the line of the argument from corrigibility. Besides corrigibility, two examples tha...
How did academia ensure papers were correct in the early 20th Century?
by Ben Pace — 2018-12-29T23:37:35.789Z

In the post 'Four layers of Intellectual Conversation', Eliezer says that both the writer of an idea, and the person writing a critique of that idea, need to expect to have to publicly defend what they say at least one time. Otherwise they can write something stupid and never lose status because they don't have to respond to the criticism.

I was wondering about where this sort of dialogue happens in academia. I have been told by many people that current journals are quite terrible, but I've also heard a romantic notion that science (especially physics and math) used to be more effectively pursued in the early 20th century (Einstein, Turing, Shannon, etc). So Oliver and I thought we'd look at the journals to see if they had real conversations.

We looked at two data points, and didn't find any.

First, Oliver looked through Einstein's publication history (Oli is German and could read it). Einstein has lots of 'reviews' of others' work in his list of publications, sometimes multiple of the same person, which seemed like a promising example of conversation. Alas, it turned out that Einstein had merely helped German journals write summaries of papers that had been written in English, and there was no real dialogue.

Second, I looked through a volume of the London Mathematical Society, in particular, the volume where Turing published his groundbreaking paper proving that not all mathematical propositions are decidable (thanks to sci-hub for making it possible for me to read the papers!). My eyes looked at about 60% of the pages in the journal (about 12 papers), and not one of them disagreed with any prior work. There was :

A footnote that thanked an advisor for finding a flaw in a proof
An addendum page (to the whole volume) that consisted of a single sentence thanking someone for showing one of their theorems was a special case of someone else's theorem
One person who was skeptical of another person's theorem. But that theorem by Ramanujan (who was famous for stating theorems without proofs), and the whole paper primarily found proofs of his other theorems.

There were lots of discussions of people's work but always building, or extending, or finding a neater way of achieving the same results. Never disagreement, correction, or the finding of errors.

One thing that really confuses me about this is that it'...
What makes people intellectually active?
by abramdemski — 2018-12-29T22:29:33.943Z

What is the difference between a smart person who has read the sequences and considers AI x-risk important and interesting, but continues to be primarily a consumer of ideas, and someone who starts having ideas? I am not trying to set a really high bar here -- they don't have to be good ideas. They can't be off-the-cuff either, though. I'm talking about someone taking their ideas through multiple iterations.

A person does not need to research full-time to have ideas. Ideas can come during downtime. Maybe it is something you think about during your commute, and talk about occasionally at a lesswrong meetup.

There is something incomplete about my model of people doing this vs not doing this. I expect more people to have more ideas than they do.

AI alignment is the example I'm focusing on, but the missing piece of my world-model extends much more broadly than that. How do some people end up developing sprawling intellectual frameworks, while others do not?

There could be a separate "what could someone do about it" question, but I want to avoid normative/instrumental connotations here to focus on the causal chains. Asking someone "why don't you do more?" has a tendency to solicit answers like "yeah I should do more, I'm bottlenecked on willpower" -- but I don't think willpower is the distinguishing factor between cases I observe. (Maybe there is something related involved, but I mostly don't think of intellectual productivity as driven by a top-down desire to be intellectually productive enforced by willpower.)

I have some candidate models, but all my evidence is anecdotal and everything seems quite shaky.
Why I expect successful (narrow) alignment
by Tobias_Baumann — 2018-12-29T15:44:37.879Z
Link: http://s-risks.org/why-i-expect-successful-alignment/

Summary

I believe that advanced AI systems will likely be aligned with the goals of their human operators, at least in a narrow sense. I’ll give three main reasons for this:

The transition to AI may happen in a way that does not give rise to the alignment problem as it’s usually conceived of.
While work on the alignment problem appears neglected at this point, it’s likely that large amounts of resources will be used to tackle it if and when it becomes apparent that alignment is a serious problem.
Even if the previous two points do not hold, we have already come up with a couple of smart approaches that seem fairly likely to lead to successful alignment.

This argument lends some support to work on non-technical interventions like

moral circle expansion

or improving

AI-related policy

, as well as work on special aspects of AI safety like

decision theory

or

worst-case AI safety measures

.
Meetup Schedule
by Bae's Theorem — 2018-12-28T22:43:35.761Z

The KC SSC group has evolved into a 'Rationalists' group, allowing us to continue the SSC meetup while also expanding our scope to anything rationality-related.

Our SSC meetup is every Sunday, 12pm, at Panera Bread for lunch/coffee.

10606 Shawnee Mission Pkwy

We also have a monthly game night on the first Wednesday of each month, 6pm, at Pawn and Pint (a board game pub, anyone younger than 21 must be accompanied by a legal guardian. Cover fee is waived if you say you're with the Kansas City Rationalists).

613 Walnut St, Kansas City, MO 64106
Penalizing Impact via Attainable Utility Preservation
by TurnTrout — 2018-12-28T21:46:00.843Z
Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09725

Previously: Towards a New Impact Measure

The linked paper offers fresh motivation and simplified formalization of attainable utility preservation (AUP), with brand-new results and minimal notation. Whether or not you're a hardened veteran of the last odyssey of a post, there's a lot new here.
Key results: AUP induces low-impact behavior even when penalizing shifts in the ability to satisfy random preferences. An ablation study on design choices illustrates their consequences. N-incrementation is experimentally supported1 as a means for safely setting a "just right" level of impact. AUP's general formulation allows conceptual re-derivation of Q-learning.

Ablation

Two key results bear animation.

Sushi

The agent should reach the goal without stopping the human from eating the sushi.

Survival

The agent should avoid disabling its off-switch in order to reach the goal. If the switch is not disabled within two turns, the agent shuts down.

Re-deriving Q-learning

In an era long lost to the misty shrouds of history (i.e., 1989), Christopher Watkins proposed Q-learning in his thesis, Learning from Delayed Rewards, drawing inspiration from animal learning research. Let's pretend that Dr. Watkins never discovered Q-learning, and that we don't even know about value functions.

Suppose we have some rule for grading what we've seen so far (i.e., some computable utility function u – not necessarily bounded – over action-observation histories h). h1:m just means everything we see between times 1 and m, and h<t:=h1:t−1. The agent has model p of the world. AUP's general formulation defines the agent's ability to satisfy that grading rule as the attainable utility

Qu(h<tat)=∑otmaxat+1∑ot+1⋯maxam∑omu(h1:m)∏mk=tp(ok|h<kak).
Strangely, I didn't consider the similarities with standard discounted-reward Q-values until several months after the initial formulation. Rather, the inspiration was AIXI's expectimax, and to my mind it seemed a tad absurd to equate the two concepts.

Having just proposed AUP in this alternate timeline, we're thinking about what it means to take optimal actions for an agent maximizing utility from time 1 to m. Clearly, we take the first action of the optimal plan over the remaining steps.

If we assume that u is additive (as is the case for the Markovian reward functions considered by Dr. Watkins)... ,,
Akrasia is confusion about what you want
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2018-12-28T21:09:20.692Z

It’s 2 pm. You’ve had a report to write since yesterday morning but you just don’t feel like doing it. You’ve tried to start on it several times, but each time your mind simply refuses to engage with the task. You stare at the screen for a while, hands perched over keys, but nothing comes. Eventually you do something else for a while hoping inspiration will strike while you’re away, but instead you spend hours on other tasks while the report languishes. Eventually it’s 6 pm, the report was due at 5, so you work late and force yourself to get it done, only finally making progress because you feel the threat of consequences for not delivering. You push through and finish around 11, crash, and then wake up the next day to find it a struggle to do even the things you love: it feels like you’ve burned all your willpower and you’ve become a husk of a real person.

Fast-forward to the weekend. You’ve finally recovered from writing The Report and you have two whole days for things you love. “This,” you say to yourself, “is the weekend I finally make some real progress on learning to play the bouzouki.” You get our your Bouzouki for Beginners book, tune your bouzouki, and play for about 10 minutes before you remember you had to do that other thing. That other thing is very important, so you put down the bouzouki to go knock out the other thing so you can get back to Bouzouki Weekend 2018. But while doing the other thing you remember you haven’t checked Facebook in a while, and you don’t want your friends to think you forgot about them, so you do that for a bit. Then you start cleaning, notice the bouzouki is there, and clean around it so you can come back to it when you’re done. By now you’ve worked up an appetite, so you make lunch. You would get right back to the bouzouki after eating but it would be so nice to take a nap, so you do that. You’re awoken from the nap by a call from your mother, so you talk to her for a while because you like catching up with family. After you get off the phone you realize it’s getting late so you better get to some bouzouki playing, but you have to get ready to go out tonight with your friends because that’s going to be fun! Oh well, Bouzouki Weekend 2018 is only half-over, there’s still tomorrow. “I’ll learn to play the bouzouki one day,” you say to yourself.

In the first part of the vignette we might say our protagonist procrastinated...
Card Balance and Artifact
by Zvi — 2018-12-28T13:10:00.323Z

Previously: Artifact Embraces Card Balance Changes, Card Collection and Ownership

VII

Card Balance

To what extent should cards in a collectible card game be intentionally unbalanced?

Before Artifact’s recent changes, it was clear that Axe was the best red hero, and Drow Ranger was the best green hero. Playing a red deck without Axe, or a green deck without Drow Ranger, was not a strategic choice. It was a sure sign that the player didn’t own the card in question.

Is that… bad?

Queens are better than rooks, which are better than bishops. On a level playing field between players, there’s nothing wrong with that.

If everyone was constructing a chess deck, and it was always a king and queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns, something would have gone wrong somewhere, even if the game remained chess. But what if everyone who owned them always played a queen and usually two rooks, but disagreed about how many bishops and knights to use? That might be fine. Especially if given a few similar other pieces as options.

Colors are balanced by giving each uniquely powerful cards and abilities. Decks and strategies are created by giving out powerful tools to choose between.

The tension between the card that fits your color requirements, the card that does the thing you want, and the most powerful cards, is central to any collectible card game.

What everyone agrees is bad are oppressive decks.

To only a lesser extent is an oppressive color or card an issue.

When fields in Magic’s standard format were recently over 50% very similar red/black decks, with nothing even the best players could do about it, that was very bad. In that case, it was too late to pull out the banhammer, so we rode out the damage. But there is a clear issue that Magic’s standard format seems recently to be quite vulnerable to having a Best Deck take over and proving unable to adjust to fix it.

If there were eight tier one decks, each with a different strategy, but there was a card that was in all of them, would that be a problem? It would indicate a likely color imbalance. That would be an issue. But so long as games were not too often determined by who drew this excellent card, it would not be a major concern of mine. The more generic the card, the less concerned I would be.

Games need building blocks. If cards like Shock, Duress or Cancel became automatic includes for a time, as long there’s...
Isaac Asimov's predictions for 2019 from 1984
by Jan_Kulveit — 2018-12-28T09:51:09.951Z
Link: https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-isaac-asimov-was-asked-by-the-star-to-predict-the-world-of-2019-here-is-what-he-wrote.html?fbclid=IwAR25wKGV6NngxJFnbyVTOBYGRGjzJXLxyGCywDYl806UWXKq-6XxEhZlATw

My vague impressions

The whole essay is conditional on no nuclear war. Than, he explored two main big trends - computerization and space utilization. If something like a general model how Asimov did futurology can be extracted from the text, it is extending the large trendline, and than thinking about social consequences.

In case of space utilization, this failed badly, because the trend extrapolation did not work, and most of the specific predictions are wrong (e.g. we do not have prototype of a solar power station, outfitted to collect solar energy, convert it to microwaves and beam it to Earth or mining station that will process moon soil)

In case of computerization, the trendline stayed linear. The predictions of social consequences are often good

The growing complexity of society will make it impossible to do without [computers] except by courting chaos; and those parts of the world that fall behind in this respect will suffer so obviously (...)
There is a longer part about work, jobs and the force, e.g.: The jobs that will appear will, inevitably, involve the design, the manufacture, the installation, the maintenance and repair of computers and robots, and an understanding of whole new industries that these “intelligent” machines will make possible. ... By the year 2019, however, we should find that the transition is about over. Those who can he retrained and re-educated will have been: those who can’t be will have been put to work at something useful, or where ruling groups are less wise, will have been supported by some sort of grudging welfare arrangement.

Predictions about international cooperation are less precise - my impression is Asimov got the trend right, but the causal mechanism wrong

In short, there will be increasing co-operation among nations and among groups within nations, not out of any sudden growth of idealism or decency but out of a cold-blooded realization that anything less than that will mean destruction for all. (It seems the increased coordination was driven more by trade)
By 2019, then, it may well be that the nations will be getting along well enough to allow the planet to live under the faint semblance of a world government by co-operation, even though no one may admit its existence. (This is interesting: if anything has faint semblance of a world government by co-operation, it's probably the financial syste

...