= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Cyan comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (285)
I'm not Yvain, but his Goofus and Gallant parable did remind me of the time some dude noticed that the uncapped jackpot rollover of the Irish lotto made it vulnerable to a brute force attack.
Interesting. Pretty niche (in that it doesn't seem to be an example of behavior that the average rationalist will often, or ever, have a chance to emulate), but interesting.
I note that the National Lottery responded by attempting (with partial success) to block the guy from his victory, and also making such things unfeasible in the future. So someone who thought "nah, that would never be allowed to work" (i.e. didn't take the idea seriously), would have been at least partly correct.
As a general rule, when you game the system, the system changes to stop the game, because the organisers have a goal beyond the rules of the day. So there's only a certain window of opportunity to profit. If there are high stakes, you need to be really sure that there is a gap to work with, in between "no-one has done this before, so maybe it doesn't work for reasons I haven't seen" and "everyone's doing it, so does it still work?"