Yeah, I thought it might be too concise. Are there particular sections you would like to see expanded?

Even after possibly filling it out a little it shouldn't satisfy all your curiosity since I haven't talked about how to practice it yet. I was planning on doing that in another post that uses the conceptual framework of this one. Do you think it should all be a single post?

Also, thanks for the link. I've been thinking about how all this connects to pjeby's ideas.

Metadiscussion: Reply to this comment to discuss the game itself, or anything else that's not a proposition for upvotes/downvotes.

Does it make sense to speak of probabilities only when you have numerous enough trials?

No, probability theory also has non-frequency applications.

Can we speak of probabilities for singular, non-repeating events?

Yes. This is the core of a Bayesian approach to decision making. The usual interpretation is that the probabilities reflect your state of knowledge about events rather than frequencies of actual event outcomes. Try starting with the LW wiki article on Baesian probability and the blog posts linked therefrom.

This line of discussion is interesting to me because if the analogy holds, then it implies that what this community calls "the dark side" vs "the dark arts" are very different from each other despite the surface similarity of the terminology.

The dark side, as I understand it, is what you get when someone decides that beliefs have some value other than that derived via a correspondence theory of truth. Then they twist their mind into a pretzel and emotionally freak out when you show them evidence which violates their semi-consciously constructed "useful delusions". This is like the recovering alcoholic who has a belief that Jesus will personally intervene in their lives to give them strength where the belief powers their decision not to drink alcohol. The analogy in go would be a "trick play" where seemingly solid arguments (or lines of play) can "destroy the situation" for the person relying on the trick, but in the absence of solid refutation the move might win the game.

The dark arts that you seem to be referring to just now as "subtle moves" seem to be analogous to go concepts like sabaki play, which is relatively light in the sense of putting stones on the board that are loosely connected, easy to sacrifice, but generally well placed, so that if they are attacked clumsily the other player can develop a position that is too large to sacrifice, too expensive to defend, and/or inefficient. The epistemic equivalent to sabaki play might be "sophistry", where someone is known to be highly skilled at argument and therefore it somehow "counts less" when they win because all their "fancy words" lead to a victory for reasons that are not obvious to people who disagree and/or haven't studied rhetoric.

The place the analogy breaks down might be that in go "sabaki play" is in some sense simply good play, whereas in argument people have a sense (justified or not) that sophisticated argumentation is somehow "dirty". Perhaps in go the difference between trick play and sabaki play is more visible because whether play is good or not is more objective, whereas in argument things are much fuzzier. In verbal disputes there are incentives for less skilled debaters to ad hom more skilled debaters, and inferential distance might make it hard for uneducated observers to untangle the fact of the matter based on surface-level observations. Plus this same fuzziness creates opportunities for rhetorically skilled cheaters to really pull tricks so accusations of trickery might be on target.

Still, its interesting that this sense of the "dark arts" seem to most easily be deployed by people who have studied "human rationality", whereas the "dark side" mostly involves people purposefully adopting bad epistemology and then going off the rails. It sort of seems like a critique of the terminology if dark arts tend not to be deployed by the dark side.

I would appreciate anyone who could take a counterpoint and shed light on the issue :-)

This line of discussion is interesting to me because if the analogy holds, then it implies that what this community calls "the dark side" vs "the dark arts" are very different from each other despite the surface similarity of the terminology.

The dark side, as I understand it, is what you get when someone decides that beliefs have some value other than that derived via a correspondence theory of truth. Then they twist their mind into a pretzel and emotionally freak out when you show them evidence which violates their semi-consciously constructed "useful delusions". This is like the recovering alcoholic who has a belief that Jesus will personally intervene in their lives to give them strength where the belief powers their decision not to drink alcohol. The analogy in go would be a "trick play" where seemingly solid arguments (or lines of play) can "destroy the situation" for the person relying on the trick, but in the absence of solid refutation the move might win the game.

The dark arts that you seem to be referring to just now as "subtle moves" seem to be analogous to go concepts like sabaki play, which is relatively light in the sense of putting stones on the board that are loosely connected, easy to sacrifice, but generally well placed, so that if they are attacked clumsily the other player can develop a position that is too large to sacrifice, too expensive to defend, and/or inefficient. The epistemic equivalent to sabaki play might be "sophistry", where someone is known to be highly skilled at argument and therefore it somehow "counts less" when they win because all their "fancy words" lead to a victory for reasons that are not obvious to people who disagree and/or haven't studied rhetoric.

The place the analogy breaks down might be that in go "sabaki play" is in some sense simply good play, whereas in argument people have a sense (justified or not) that sophisticated argumentation is somehow "dirty". Perhaps in go the difference between trick play and sabaki play is more visible because whether play is good or not is more objective, whereas in argument things are much fuzzier. In verbal disputes there are incentives for less skilled debaters to ad hom more skilled debaters, and inferential distance might make it hard for uneducated observers to untangle the fact of the matter based on surface-level observations. Plus this same fuzziness creates opportunities for rhetorically skilled cheaters to really pull tricks so accusations of trickery might be on target.

Still, its interesting that this sense of the "dark arts" seem to most easily be deployed by people who have studied "human rationality", whereas the "dark side" mostly involves people purposefully adopting bad epistemology and then going off the rails. It sort of seems like a critique of the terminology if dark arts tend not to be deployed by the dark side.

I would appreciate anyone who could take a counterpoint and shed light on the issue :-)

• Go and chess provide clear demonstrations of opportunity cost, the first-mover advantage (esp. go), and the importance of not wasting time on trivial moves.

• Go provides proof of, and some understanding of, the power of human intuition. My dad can make moves that I don't think he knows the reasons for, that turn out to have amazing consequences 10 moves later when I discover eg. that a group of stones of mine is dead because, even though I have more liberties in that group than he has in his attacking group, he can use his liberties while I can't use mine due to side-effects of those moves. But one is not inclined to view this as mystical intuition; it's patterns in the stones that his unconscious learned to recognize without his conscious mind knowing why.

• Small advantages escalate. In chess, at the start of the game I might focus on trying to force my opponent to take a move back, or to trade a piece I haven't moved for a piece he has moved. Once that's done, I take advantage of my increased deployment to try to make an otherwise-even trade that disrupts his pawn structure. Once that's done, I try to take the isolated pawn. Once I'm a pawn ahead (I know then that I'll probably win) I force trades to make that advantage larger. I don't know if this works in real life.

I don't doubt that there are lots of rationality lessons in deterministic games like Go. But I think in some ways they crucially misrepresent life. When you've lost a game in Go you can always think:

"I lost because I didn't play well enough."

In games with a random element, like poker, you have to think:

"I lost because I didn't play well enough AND/OR because I was unlucky."

To become good at poker it's crucial to be able to distinguish between bad luck and play mistakes. You have to keep your cool when your opponent makes bad moves and wins anyway. You have to be able to think thoughts like this:

"That the card on top of the deck should have happened to be the only one that would let my opponent win the game is not evidence I should update on. It tells me nothing I didn't already know. It's just that Nature felt like slapping me in the face right now and there's nothing I can do about it. She'll wipe the grin off my opponent soon enough if he keeps playing like that."

In life, we are very often faced with situations where we have to analyze to what extent something is the result of our own actions and to what extent it is the result of factors outside our control.

I find backgammon to also be a good analogy for life in general, though I don't really have the time to get into all of the details... perhaps the most important lesson, though, is that if you always take the "safest" move, you're almost guaranteed to lose! You need to take risks - smart risks, where the payoff is worth the danger and the danger is non-fatal, but risks nonetheless.

And sometimes, even if you do everything right, you still lose. That's life.

What's your playing strength in Go? The article reads a bit like it's either too much targeted at people without understanding of go or is written without by someone with a playing strength >5 kyu?

But if the two players disagree, the solution is simply to resume play. That true for some Go rule sets but it isn't true for Japanese style rules.

I'm 1 kyu.

Is it true that all of these points could be said for any goal-centered action, such as making paperclips? Or for any game? How is Go different that those other games and tasks with respect to these lessons and insights?