loup-vaillant comments on Less Wrong Polls in Comments - Less Wrong

79 Post author: jimrandomh 19 September 2012 04:19PM

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Comment author: loup-vaillant 20 September 2012 07:53:49AM 0 points [-]

Ahrgh, if only everyone was running TDT…

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2012 10:06:25AM 2 points [-]

Ahrgh, if only everyone was running TDT…

Or UDT. Or CDT. Or EDT.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 10:43:25AM 0 points [-]

Dunno... If you treat it as a zero-sum game (i.e. you don't only want your answer to be close to 80% of the average answer, but you also want other people's answers to be far from it) it's not obvious to me that you should vote 0.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2012 11:03:56AM *  2 points [-]

Dunno... If you treat it as a zero-sum game (i.e. you don't only want your answer to be close to 80% of the average answer, but you also want other people's answers to be far from it) it's not obvious to me that you should vote 0.

I was granting for the purpose of responding that loup-vailant's clear assumption that normal game theory principles apply---each agent is interested only in the payoffs to itself to the exclusion of all else and the payoffs are such that it gets 0 for being wrong and >0 for being right.

It so happens that my own actual response (100%) doesn't conform to those assumptions. In fact my original reply to:

Minimize the expected square of the distance between your answer and 80% of the mean of the answers chosen:

... was "No", and my original reply to loup-vaillant pontificated about the complete lack of payoff to any of the radio buttons. However I abandoned that point because the point about it not mattering whether the other guy is using CDT or TDT actually matters (somewhat).

In this game (ie. with an actual assumed payoff for correct and no negative payoff for other's success) the Nash equilibrium (and the outcome that a group of all CDT agents would pick) also happens to be pareto optimal. In fact, it outright gives the maximum possible payoff to every individual. Even inferior decision theories can pull that off.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 September 2012 04:30:46PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, but whichever decision theory you're using, you need to be ready for the few people voted for 100. Someone's going to do something to ruin it for everyone. And it wasn't just a few who ruined it - vs rirelbar jub'q ibgrq yrff guna sbegl bar ibgrq mreb, gur nirentr jbhyq or nyzbfg rknpgyl rvtug.

Comment author: William_Quixote 20 September 2012 11:59:01PM 1 point [-]

Forgive me for being new to the site, but I've see this kind of writing

rirelbar jub'q ibgrq yrff guna sbegl bar ibgrq mreb, gur nirentr jbhyq or nyzbfg rknpgyl rvtug.

in several places. How is it translated back to readable English?

Comment author: Nornagest 21 September 2012 12:04:20AM *  4 points [-]

It's rot13, a shift cipher typically used around here to obscure spoilers and spoiler-like information. Cut and paste it into rot13.com, install the d3coder extension for Chrome or something similar for another browser, or (if you like tedium) decipher it yourself.

Comment author: William_Quixote 21 September 2012 12:11:52AM 0 points [-]

thanks!

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2012 06:01:23PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but whichever decision theory you're using, you need to be ready for the 6 people voted for 100.

That would be why this subthread was based on a lament.