Biased Pandemic

56 freyley 13 March 2012 11:32PM

Recently, Portland Lesswrong played a game that was a perfect trifecta of: difficult mental exercise; fun; and an opportunity to learn about biases and recognize them in yourself and others. We're still perfecting it, and we'd welcome feedback, especially from people who try it.

The Short Version

The game is a combination of Pandemic, a cooperative board game that is cognitively demanding, and the idea of roleplaying cognitive biases. Our favorite way of playing it (so far), everyone selects a bias at random, and then attempts to exaggerate that bias in their arguments and decisions during the game. Everyone attempts to identify the biases in the other players, and, when a bias is guessed, the guessed player selects a new bias and begins again.

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Just another day in utopia

78 Stuart_Armstrong 25 December 2011 09:37AM

(Reposted from discussion at commentator suggestion)

Thinking of Eliezer's fun theory and the challenge of creating actual utopias where people would like to live, I tried to write a light utopia for my friends around Christmas, and thought it might be worth sharing. It's a techno-utopia, but (considering my audience) it's only a short inferential distance from normality.

 

 

Just another day in Utopia

Ishtar went to sleep in the arms of her lover Ted, and awoke locked in a safe, in a cargo hold of a triplane spiralling towards a collision with the reconstructed temple of Solomon.

 

Again! Sometimes she wished that a whole week would go by without something like that happening. But then, she had chosen a high excitement existence (not maximal excitement, of course – that was for complete masochists), so she couldn’t complain. She closed her eyes for a moment and let the thrill and the adrenaline warp her limbs and mind, until she felt transformed, yet again, into a demi-goddess of adventure. Drugs couldn’t have that effect on her, she knew; only real danger and challenge could do that.

 

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Reasonably Fun

14 JohnDavidBustard 04 September 2010 12:07PM

Fun on the whole is a pretty amorphous concept and being reasonable about it is tricky, however there are some routes of enquiry.

My personal understanding of fun comes from the experience of programming gameplay mechanics (such as character control, AI and minigames) and through designing and pitching games professionally. This has led me to create a number of theories about why games (and other forms of entertainment) are fun.

These ideas are built on my experiences of adjusting games and game pitches to make them more enjoyable. On the whole this sense of enjoyment is based on the opinions of those making (or paying for the development of) the games (where groupthink is a problem). However, many of the games and their pitches have been evaluated by focus groups and gameplay recordings, performed in relatively controlled settings. Additional information comes from finding patterns in sales figures and other representations of what people enjoy (e.g. the types of magazine available for sale in newsagents).

From these experiences I've attempted to find simple theoretical justifications for the behaviour I've observed. In some cases, these theories have some validation through external research, but on the whole are not experimentally validated. I take the view that it is better to have some sort of theory rather than nothing, and indeed these theories have been very useful in guiding my work.

These ideas will focus on the fun (or more generally the source of motivation) provided by computer games however I believe there are many generalities that can be made from them.

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The Machine Learning Personality Test

25 PhilGoetz 04 August 2009 11:36PM

You've probably heard of the Briggs-Myers personality test, which is a classification system of 16 different personality types based on the writings of Carl Jung, a man who believed that his library books sometimes spontaneously exploded.  Its main advantage is that it manages to classify people without insulting them.  (This is accomplished by confounding dimensions:  Instead of measuring one property of personality along one dimension, which leads to some scores being considered better than others, you subtract a measurement along one desirable property of personality from a measurement along another desirable property of personality, and call the result one dimension.)

You've probably also heard of the MMPI, a test designed by giving lots of questions to mental patients and seeing which ones were answered differently by people with particular diagnoses.  This is more like personality clustering for fault diagnosis than a personality test.  You may find it useful if you're crazy.  (One of the criticisms of this test is that religious people often test as psychotic: "Do you sometimes think someone else is directing your actions?  Is someone else trying to plan events in your life?"  Is that a bug, or a feature?)

You may have heard of the Personality Assessment Inventory, a test devised by listing things that psychotherapists thought were important, and trying to come up with questions to test them.

The Big 5 personality test is constructed in a well-motivated way, using factor analysis to try to discover from the data what the true dimensions of personality are.

But these all work from the top down, looking at human behavior (answers), and trying to uncover latent factors farther down.  I'm instead going to propose a personality system that, instead, starts from the very bottom of your hardware and leaves it to you to work your way up to the variables of interest:  the Machine Learning Personality Test ("MLPT").

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Bayesian Cabaret

19 Yvain 27 April 2009 10:29PM

I'd heard rumors that some leading Bayesians had achieved rank in the Bardic Conspiracy. But I wasn't aware that every two years, some of the world's top statisticians hold a Bayesian Cabaret, full of songs, dances, and skits about Bayesian probability theory.

...no, really. Really. I think my favorite has got to be this one.

YouTube seems to be full of this stuff, including What A Bayesian World and We Didn't Start The Prior. Be sure to also check out some of the recordings and the Bayesian Songbook.

Eliezer's finished his sequences, and it's a new era for Less Wrong. Let's celebrate...Bayesian style!

Masochism vs. Self-defeat

-1 Psychohistorian 20 April 2009 09:20PM

Follow up to: Is masochism necessary?Stuck in the middle with Bruce

Masochism has two very different meanings: enjoyment of pain, and pursuit (not enjoyment) of suffering.

As a rather blunt example of this distinction, consider a sexual masochist. If his girlfriend ties him up and beats him, he'll experience pain, but he certainly won't suffer; he'll probably enjoy himself immensely. Put someone with vanilla sexual tastes in his place, and he would experience both pain and suffering.

Bruce-like behaviour is best understood as pursuit of suffering. People undermine themselves or set themselves up to lose. They may do it so that they have a comfortable excuse, or because they are used to failing and afraid of being happy, or for many other reasons. Most of us do this to some degree, however slight, and it's something we want to avoid.1 Pursuit of suffering, quite simply, gets in the way of winning, and, much like akratic behaviour, it is something that we should try desperately to find and destroy, because we should be happier without it.

This is very, very different from enjoyment of pain. If you like getting beaten up, or spicy foods, or running marathons, this has no effect on whether you win; these become a kind of winning. The fact that these activities cause suffering in some people is wholly irrelevant. For those who enjoy them, they create happiness, and obtaining them is, in a sense, a form of winning. Because of this, there's no reason to try to catch ourselves engaging in them or to worry about engaging in them less. It does not seem like people would be happier if they lost these prefereces.2

Indeed, given that they require some level of initial exposure, and (in the sexual case) have strong social taboos against them, it seems quite likely that masochistic behaviour isn't engaged in enough, though I admit I may be going too far.

Edit: As a point of clarification, "Bruce-like" behaviour may be overbroad. Some people set themselves up to lose because, for whatever reason, they genuinely like losing. That isn't pursuit of suffering, because there's no suffering. However, we do sometimes undermine ourselves when we want to win. The precise cause of this is, for my purposes, immaterial. This is what I'm referring to by "pursuit of suffering," and my entire point is that it is quite distinct from enjoyment or pursuit of pain, and that this difference is worth noticing.

A proof of the utilitarian benefit of sadism is left to the reader, or as the topic for a follow-up post if people like this one.

1 - If we actually enjoy failure, such that presented with the simple choice of win/lose, we repeatedly chose lose, that's a separate subject and would fall under another description, like "enjoyment of failure." This is something that one might be happier without, but that's really another issue for another post.

2- This is not to say that some people shouldn't engage in them less. There are people who engage in self-destructive behaviour. Some use sex as a means of escape. Some anorexics exercise compulsively. But the fact that these can be unhealthy in specific circumstances is of no relevance to the greater population that enjoys them responsibly.

Is masochism necessary?

8 PhilGoetz 10 April 2009 11:48PM

Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:

Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder.  Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America.  Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:

  • Eating spicy food
  • Listening to the music of Anton Webern or Alban Berg (not trying to be funny; this is very serious)
  • Listening to music turned up so loud that it hurts
  • Fiction
  • Movies, especially horror movies
  • Roller coasters
  • Saunas
  • Enjoying exercise
  • Being Bruce

Question 1: Can you list more?

Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all.  Which do you think involve enjoying pain?  Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?

Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it?  Or is it part of a healthy human's nature?  If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation?  (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors.  All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences.  No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)

Some hypotheses:

  1. Evolution implemented "need to explore" (in the "exploration/exploitation" sense) as pleasure in new experiences, and adaptation to any particular often-repeated stimulus.  This could result in seeking ever-higher levels of stimulation, even above the pain threshold.  (This could affect a culture as well as an organism, giving the progression Vivaldi -> Bach -> Mozart -> Beethoven -> Wagner -> Stravinsky -> Berg -> screw it, let's invent rock and roll and start over.  My original belief was that this progression was caused by people trying to signal sophistication, rather than by honest enjoyment of music.  But maybe some people <DELETION of "jaded"> honestly enjoy Berg.)
  2. We have a "pain thermostat" to get us to explore / prevent us from being too cowardly, and modern life leaves us below our set point.  (Is masochism more prevalent now than in the bad old days?)
    1. An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
      1. An objection to this objection is that primal scream therapy seems not actually to work except in the short term.
  3. Pain triggers endorphins in order to help us fight or flee, and it feels good.
  4. We enjoy fighting and athletic competition, and pain is associated with these things we enjoy.

My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism.  Otherwise, that could be risky.

These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question:  Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?

ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?

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