I saw this post from EY a while ago and felt kind of repulsed by it:

I no longer feel much of a need to engage with the hypothesis that rational agents mutually defect in the oneshot or iterated PD. Perhaps you meant to analyze causal-decision-theory agents?

Never mind the factual shortcomings, I'm mostly interested in the rejection of CDT as rational. I've been away from LW for a while and wasn't keeping up on the currently popular beliefs on this site, and I'm considering learning a bit more about TDT (or UDT or whatever the current iteration is called). I have a feeling this might be a huge waste of time though, so before I dive into the subject I would like to confirm that TDT has objectively been proven to be clearly superior to CDT, by which I (intuitively) mean:

• There exist no problems shown to be possible in real life for which CDT yields superior results.
• There exists at least one problem shown to be possible in real life for which TDT yields superior results.

"Shown to be possible in real life" excludes Omega, many-worlds, or anything of similar dubiousness. So has this been proven? Also, is there any kind of reaction from the scientific community in regards to TDT/UDT?

How many people actually did the exercises katydee suggested? I know I didn't.

katydee, perhaps you could take a semi-random sample of things in relevant reference classes (politicians/organizations) and demonstrate how easy it is to make fun of them? Otherwise I suspect many people will take you for your word that things are easy to make fun of.

Here's my semi-random sample of organizations and politicians. I'll take the most recent 3 Daily Show guests I recognize the names of and the largest 3 charities I recognize the names of.

• Richard Dawkins

• Chelsea Clinton

• Robert Reich

• Salvation Army

• American National Red Cross

• American Cancer Society

Here are my brief attempts to make fun of them.

• Richard Dawkins: He wasn't satisfied with being an eminent biologist, he just had to stir up controversy by provoking religious people. And his arguments apparently aren't even very philosophically sound. Stick to biology next time, Dawkins.

• Chelsea Clinton: Good luck finding a man who's higher status than you to marry.

• Robert Reich: Is he liberal because he's short or is he short because he's liberal?

• Salvation Army: Ineffective charity that spreads religious lies. Chumps.

• American National Red Cross: We're all going to die eventually anyway. Organizations like the Red Cross just prolong our misery.

• American Cancer Society: Clearly cancer is just a side effect of aging and your money is better sent to SENS. Also, just how much money have we poured in to cancer research without finding a cure yet? They should call it the "American Cancer Researcher Welfare Program".

It seems to me that the things I can make fun of the most easily are the ones that have legitimate arguments that reflect poorly on them (e.g. the Salvation Army and American Cancer Society). But maybe I'm just bad at making fun of things.

There are forums with popular blog sections, e.g. teamliquid.net which also features a wiki. There are also forums that treat top level posts differently, e.g. by displaying them prominently at the top of each thread page. None of this is really new.

On the other hand, I feel that in some regards, LW is too different from traditional forums, like that threads are sorted by OP time rather than the time of the last reply, which makes it very difficult to have sustained discussions in these threads because they stay hot for a few days, but afterwards people simply stop replying, and at best you have two or three people continuing to post without anyone else reading what they write.

That study just says that the most prestigious scientists are even more atheistic than normal scientists. I think for other reasons that the most prestigious scientists have higher average IQ than normal scientists, a large fraction of them higher than 140.

Where in the linked article does it say that atheism correlates with IQ past 140? I cannot find this.

The current education system in Europe does a much better job at making education unpopular than at actually preventing those who may positively impact technology and society in the future from acquiring the necessary education to do so. Turning education into a chore is merely an annoyance for anyone involved, but doesn't actually hold back technological advance in any way.

If I was the devil, I would try to restrict internet access for as many people as possible. As long as you have internet, traditional education isn't really needed for humanity to advance technologically.

Also, does the devil win if humanity goes extinct? Because in that case I would instead try to make the best education available for free to all children, and focus on getting a few Satanists in positions where you get to push red buttons. Since the devil is traditionally displayed as persuasive and manipulative to the point that intelligent and well-educated people tend to more receptive to his offers than normal folk, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. Just imagine a few Hitlers with modern nuclear ICBMs.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Never heard of Hanlon's razor before, but I think it makes much more sense if you replace stupidity with indifference.

I'm not sure if this post is meant to be taken seriously. It's always "easy" to make fun of X; what's difficult is to spread your opinion about X by making fun of X. Obviously this requires a target audience that doesn't already share your opinion about X, and if you look at people making fun of things (e.g. on the net), usually the audience they're catering to already shares their views. This is because the most common objective of making fun of things is not to convince people of anything, but to create a group identity, raise team morale, and so on. There is zero point talking about the difficulty of that because there is none.

Someone would have to be very susceptible to be influenced by people making fun of things. I guess rationality doesn't have all that much to do with how influenceable you are, but this post strikes me as overly naïve concerning the intentions of people. If someone makes fun of X, they're clearly not interested in an objective discussion about X, so why would you be swayed by their arguments?

Whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good.

Gee, you think?

I have a dream that one day, people will stop bringing up the (Iterated) Prisoner's Dilemma whenever decisions involve consequences. IPD is a symmetrical two-player game with known payouts, rational agents, and no persistent memory (in tournaments). Real life is something completely different, and equating TFT with superficially similar real life strategies is just plain wrong.

The possibility of the existence of immortality/afterlife/reincarnation certainly affects how people behave in certain situations, this is hardly a revelation. Running PD-like simulations with the intent to gain insight into real life behaviour of humans in society is a bad idea usually proposed by people who don't know much about game theory but like some of the terms commonly associated with PD.

Please stop using the words "cooperate" and "defect" as if they would in any way refer to comparable things in real life and PD. It will make you much less confused.

I don't have a problem with the proposition of adding uncertainty about the match length to IPD, and it is hardly a new idea. Just please don't talk about PD/IPD when you're talking about real life and vice versa, and don't make inferences about one based on the other.

I think that the bots already submitted should be considered for grandfathering if the rules change to prohibit them.

I also have a specific entry in mind, but lack the expertise to go from 'flowchart' to 'code'.

When I first announced the tournament, people came up with many suggestions for modifications to the rules, most of which I did not take for the sake of simplicity. Maybe we should try to figure out what rules will make it easier to write more effective bots, even if that would disqualify many of the bots already submitted to this tournament.