Decius comments on Why one-box? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: PhilosophyStudent 30 June 2013 02:38AM

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Comment author: Decius 03 July 2013 06:07:43AM 0 points [-]

If one strategy clearly and consistently produc[ed] inferior results compared to another strategy, that should be all we need to discard it as inferior.

I disagree. Just because Rock lost every time it was played doesn't mean that it's inferior to Paper or Scissors, to use a trivial example.

Comment author: Sly 04 July 2013 03:17:12AM 0 points [-]

I disagree.

If rock always lost when people used it, that would be evidence against using rock.

Just like if you flip a coin 1000000 times and keep getting heads that is evidence of a coin that won't be coming up tails anytime soon.

Comment author: Decius 04 July 2013 06:29:51AM * -1 points [-]

Playing your double: Evidence that your opponent will not use rock is evidence that you should not use paper. If you don't use rock, and don't use paper, then you must use scissors and tie with your opponent who followed the same reasoning.

Updating on evidence that rock doesn't win when it is used means rock wins.

EDIT: consider what you would believe if you tried to call a coin a large number of times and were always right. Then consider what you would believe if you were always wrong.

Comment author: Sly 04 July 2013 09:06:28AM -2 points [-]

"Rock lost every time it was played "

"rock doesn't win when it is used means rock wins."

One of these things is not like the other.

Comment author: Decius 05 July 2013 01:28:02AM 0 points [-]

Those aren't both things that I said.

For rock to lose consistently means that somebody isn't updating properly, or is using a failing strategy, or a winning strategy.

For example, if I tell my opponent "I'm going to play only paper", and I do, rock will always lose when played. That strategy can still win over several moves, if I am not transparent; all I have to do is correctly predict that my opponent will predict that the current round is the one in which I change my strategy.

If they believe (through expressed preferences, assuming that they independently try to win each round) that rock will lose against me, rock will win against them.

Comment author: Sly comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: Decius 07 July 2013 05:49:20AM 0 points [-]

"I literally just ... edit your post ... and then say ... you said ... what ... you didn't say."

I can play the selective quotation game too. It doesn't make it valid.

What I originally wrote was "Just because Rock lost every time it was played doesn't mean that it's inferior to Paper or Scissors"

What you misquoted was the statement Updating on evidence that rock doesn't win when it is used means rock wins. (emphasis on added context)

That's standard behavior in the simple simultaneous strategy games; figure out what your opponent's move is and play the maneuver which counters it. If you are transparent enough that I can correctly determine that you will play the maneuver that would have won the most prior rounds, I can beat you in the long run. The correct update to seeing RPS is to update the model of your opponent's strategy, and base the winning percentages off what you believe your opponent's strategy is.

That's why I can win with "I always throw rock", stated plainly at the start. Most people (if they did the reasoning), would have very a very low prior that I was telling the truth, and the first round ties. The next round I typically win, with a comment of "I see what you did there".

What are your priors that my actual strategy, given that I had said I would always throw rock and threw rock the first time, would fall into either category: "Throw rock for N rounds and then change" or "Throw rock until it loses N times (in a row) and then change"? (Keep in mind conservation of probability: The sum of all N across each possible strategy must total 1)

If you don't ascribe a significant chance of me telling the truth, there is some N at which you stop throwing paper, even while it is working. The fact that throwing scissors would have lost you every prior match is not strong evidence that it will lose the next one.

Comment author: Sly comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: wedrifid 09 July 2013 06:35:35AM 1 point [-]

Except I didn't break things up with ellipses to make things up like you just did. Nice false equivocation.

Your quotations were of sentence fragments that did not preserve meaning. There was exaggeration for emphasis but no false equivocation.

Comment author: Decius 09 July 2013 12:23:00PM 0 points [-]

Suppose your opponent has thrown paper N (or X%) times and won every time they did. Is that evidence for, or evidence against, the proposition that they will play paper in the next trial? (or does the direction of evidence vary with N or X?)

Comment author: Sly 10 July 2013 08:08:34AM 0 points [-]

"Suppose your opponent has thrown paper N (or X%) times and won every time they did. Is that evidence for, or evidence against, the proposition that they will play paper in the next trial? (or does the direction of evidence vary with N or X?)"

All of this is irrelevant.

So I will admit I am frustrated here. I don't think that your analogy is even close to equivalent,

I think you are thinking about this in the wrong way.

So let's say you were an adviser advising one of the players on what to choose. Every time you told him to throw rock over the last million games, he lost. Yet every time you told him to throw Scissors he won. Now you have thought very much about this problem, and all of your theorizing keeps telling you that your player should play Rock (the theorycrafting has told you this for quite a while now).

At what point is this evidence that you are reasoning incorrectly about the problem, and really you should just tell the player to play scissors? Would you actually continue to tell him to throw Rock if you were losing $1 every time the player you advised lost?

Now if this advising situation had been a game that you played with your strategy and I had separately played with my strategy, who would have won?

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