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Mulciber comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong
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It sounds as though you're viewing the debate as a chance to test your own abilities at improvisational performance. That's the wrong goal. Your goal should be to win.
"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him."
By increasing the challenge the way you suggest, you may very well be acting rationally toward the goal of testing yourself, but you're not doing all you can to cut the opponent. To rationally pursue winning the debate, there's no excuse for not doing your research.
In choosing not to try for that, you'll end up sending the message that rationalists don't play to win. You and I know this isn't quite accurate -- what you're doing is more like a rationalist choosing to lose a board game, because that served some other, real purpose of his -- but that is still how it will come across. Do you consider this to be acceptable?
This isn't about choosing to lose. It's more about exploration vs. exploitation. If you always use the strategy you currently think is the best, then you won't get the information you need to improve.
That seems contradictory. If you actually thought that always using one strategy would have this obvious disadvantage over another course of action, then doing so would by definition not be "the strategy you currently think is best."
Experiments can always be framed as a waste of resources.
There is always something you're using up that you could put to direct productive use, even if it's just your time.
The potential information you gain from the experiment is a currency. Discount that currency (or have a low estimate of it) and yeah you can frame the experiment as a waste of resources.
You're confusing meta strategies and strategies. The best meta strategy might be implementing strategies that do not have the highest chance of succeeding, simply because you can use the information you gain to choose the actual best strategy when it matters.
Consider the case where you're trying to roll a die many times and get the most green sides coming up, and you can choose between a die that has 3 green sides, and one that probably (p = 0.9) has 2 green sides, but might (p = 0.1) have 4 green sides. If the game lasts 1 roll, you chose the first die. If the game lasts many many rolls, you chose the other die until you're convinced that it only has 2 green sides- even though this is expected to lose in the short term.
Both those courses of action with dice sound like strategies to me, not meta strategies. Could you give another example of something you'd consider a meta strategy?
I think there's a larger point lurking here, which is that a good strategy should, in general, provide for gathering information so it can adapt. Do you agree?
That does indeed help. Thank you.
So really, a meta strategy would be something like choosing your deck for a Magic tournament based on what types of decks you expect your opponents to use. While the non-meta strategy would be your efforts to win within a game once it's started.
Ah, crap. Was that my comment? Sorry. I keep deleting comments when it looks like no one has responded.
But, yeah, Magic has a rather intense meta-game. The reason I deleted my comment was because I realized I had no idea where the meta-strategy was in the dice example so I assumed I missed something. I could be chasing down the wrong definition.
...and that's why you really shouldn't delete a comment unless you think it's doing great harm. You may be worrying a bit too much about what others here think about every comment you make, when it's in fact somewhat random whether anyone replies to a given comment.
Also, I believe that deleting a comment does not dissipate any negative karma that it has already earned you.