Comment author: [deleted] 15 October 2015 03:45:23PM 2 points [-]

The problem with Pascal's mugging is that it IS a fully general counterargument under classical decision theory. That's why it's a paradox right now. But saying "There's a problem with this paradox - therefore, I'll just ignore the problem' is not a solution.

Comment author: Irgy 15 October 2015 10:39:40PM 0 points [-]

I'm not trying to ignore the problem I'm trying to progress it. If for example I reduce the mugging to just a non-special example of another problem, then I've reduced the number of different problems that need solving by one. Surely that's useful?

Comment author: AlexMennen 15 October 2015 08:19:07AM 2 points [-]

I will argue that the prior for such a world should be of the order of 1/n or lower

This class of argument has been made before. The standard counterargument is that whatever argument you have for this conclusion, you cannot be 100% certain of its correctness. You should assign some nonzero probability to the hypothesis that the probability does not decrease fast enough for the correct expected utilities to be bounded. Then, taking this uncertainty into account, your expected utilities are unbounded.

The arguments relating to the bandwidth of our sensory system fail to account for (inefficient) encodings of that information which may have some configurations with arbitrarily low likelihood.

There is a positive lower bound to the probability of observing any given data (given a bound on the description length of the data), because you might just be getting random input. Given any observation that could be the result of some 1/3^^^^3 event, it could also just randomly pop into your brain for no reason with probability far greater than that. If you see a mechanism to output a random integer from 1 to 3^^^^3, and that its output was 7, you should be almost 100% confident that there was an error in your senses or your memory or your reasoning that convinced you that the mechanism works as described, etc (where "etc" means "anything other than that you observed the output of a mechanism that generates a random integer from 1 to 3^^^^3, and it was 7").

The point is that in this situation, just paying the mugger and carrying on cannot be the best course of action, because it's not the right choice if they're lying, and if they're not then it's dominated by other much larger considerations. Thus the mugging still fails, not necessarily because of the implausibility of their threat but because of the utter irrelevance of it in the face of unboundedly more important other considerations.

This totally fails to resolve the paradox. The conclusion that you should drop everything else and go all in on pursuing arbitrarily small probabilities of even more vast outcomes is, if anything, even more counter-intuitive than the conclusion that you should give the mugger $5.

Of course this doesn't really resolve the mugging itself. You could modify the scenario to replace myself having to pay with instead a small, plausible but entirely moral threat (e.g. "I'll punch that guy in the face"). I would then be motivated to make the correct moral decision regardless of bounds on my utility (though I suppose my motivation to be correct is itself bounded).

There is no reason that the "moral component" of your utility function must be linear. In fact, the boundedness of your utility function is the correct solution to Pascal's mugging.

Comment author: Irgy 15 October 2015 09:24:43AM *  -1 points [-]

This class of argument has been made before. The standard counterargument is that whatever argument you have for this conclusion, you cannot be 100% certain of its correctness. You should assign some nonzero probability to the hypothesis that the probability does not decrease fast enough for the correct expected utilities to be bounded. Then, taking this uncertainty into account, your expected utilities are unbounded.

Standard counterargument it may be but it seems pretty rubbish to me. It seems to have the form "You can't be sure you're right about X and the consequences of being wrong can be arbitrarily bad therefore do Y". This seems like a classic case of a fully general counterargument.

If I assign a non-zero probability to being wrong in my assessment of the likelihood of any possible scenario then I'm utterly unable to normalise my distribution. Thus I see this approach as an utter failure, as far as attempts to account for logical uncertainty go.

Accounting for logical uncertainty is an interesting and to my mind unsolved problem, if we ever do solve it I'll be interested to see how it impacts this scenario.

There is a positive lower bound to the probability of observing any given data...

This is exactly what I was addressing with the discussion of the dreaming/crazy theories, random sensory input is just another variant of that. And as I said there I don't see this as a problem.

The conclusion that you should drop everything else and go all in on pursuing arbitrarily small probabilities of even more vast outcomes is, if anything, even more counter-intuitive than the conclusion that you should give the mugger $5.

Certainly, and I don't honestly reach that conclusion myself. The point I make is that this collapse happens as soon as you as much as consider the possibility of unbounded resources, the mugging is an unnecessary complication. That it might still help highlight this situation is the point I'm directly addressing in the final paragraph.

There is no reason that the "moral component" of your utility function must be linear. In fact, the boundedness of your utility function is the correct solution to Pascal's mugging.

I can see compelling arguments for bounded personal utility, but I can't see compelling argument that moral catastrophes are bounded. So, as much as it would solve the mugging (and particularly an entirely morality-based version of it), I'm not convinced that it does so correctly.

Pascal's Mugging, Finite or Unbounded Resources?

-1 Irgy 15 October 2015 04:01AM

This article addresses Pascal's Mugging, for information about this scenario see here.


I am going to attack the problem by breaking it up into two separate cases, one in which the mugger claims to be from a meta-world with large but finite resources, and one in which the mugger claims to be from a meta-world with unbounded resources. I will demonstrate that in both cases the mugging fails, for different reasons, and argue that much of the appeal of the mugging comes from the conflation of these two cases.

Large but finite resources


In this case, the mugger claims to be from a world with a bounded number of resources, but still large enough to torture n, e.g. n=3^^^^3, people. I will argue that the prior for such a world should be of the order of 1/n or lower, and in particular not 1/complexity(n). With a prior of 1/n or less, the mugging fails, because no matter how large a number the mugger claims, the likelihood of their claim being true decreases proportionally. Thus there need be no value for which the claim is more worrisome than implausible.

We're faced with uncertainty because the world the mugger claims to be from is outside our universe. We have no information on which to base our estimate of its size, other than that it is substantially bigger than our universe (at least in the case of a matrix-like simulating world this is necessary). However, that ignorance is also our strength, because a prior distribution in the face of ignorance of a scale exists, and that prior is 1/n.

The first reason not to use a complexity prior is that there is simply no reason to use one. What reason is there that a world with a particular finite number of resources would be more likely to be a computable size? If you were to guess the size of our universe, certainly you might round the number to the nearest power of 10, but not because you think a round number is more likely to be correct. A world of difficult to describe size is just as likely to exist as a world with a similar but easily describable size.

A critical point here is that the complexity of the world itself of size n is proportional to n, not complexity(n). In order for a computer program to model the behaviour of a world of size n, it does not suffice to just generate the number n itself. It needs to model the behaviour of every single one of those n elements that make up the world. Such a program would need memory of size n just to keep track of one time step. To say that such a world should be give a prior of 1/complexity(n) is to conflate complexity(n) with complexity(world(n)). If AIXI were to consider such a world, it would need to treat that world as having a complexity of n. Otherwise it would be like AIXI measuring the complexity of the size of the computer program that could generate its inputs, rather than measuring the complexity of the program itself.

You may have noticed that the 1/n prior is itself unnormalisable, due to its infinite integral (at both zero and towards infinity in this case). Ignorance priors all have this property of being "improper" priors, which cannot be normalised. They work because once you add a single piece of evidence, the resulting distribution can be normalised. Which raises the question: What is that additional evidence in this case?

Well, in the particular case of a matrix like simulating world, there's the one other piece of knowledge we have that it's large enough to simulate our universe. Aside from setting a lower bound (which helps with the infinite integral near zero but not out to infinity), you might then ask, given a world of a particular size, what are the chances that it would simulate a universe of specifically the size of ours. The number of alternatively sized universes which they could simulate is proportional to n for sufficiently large n, thus the chance of ours being the size it is becomes 1/n. Combined with the ignorance prior you reach 1/n^2, and now you can actually integrate and normalise.

Thus I would conclude that overall the plausibility of the large but finite world of size n which the mugger claims to be from is proportional to 1/n^2, making the desire to pay lower, not higher, as 'n' grows. Note that either of the two arguments here is sufficient for the mugging to fail.

An aside on sufficient evidence

One final aside on this case; in Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence, Eliezer ridicules the idea of assigning priors this low to an event based on the idea that it would imply that compelling evidence to the contrary would be unable to convince you otherwise. However, this is a flat-out misapplication of probability theory.
p(unlikely scenario | extreme evidence) = p(unlikely scenario) * p(extreme evidence | unlikely scenario) / p(extreme evidence)

In order for p(unlikely scenario | extreme evidence) ~= 1 in the face of the prior p(unlikely scenario) ~= 1/3^^^^3, all that's required is p(extreme evidence) ~= 1/3^^^^3. That is to say, the likelihood of seeing such evidence is low. Forget "no amount of evidence", just one such piece of evidence would be sufficient. All that's required is that the evidence itself is unlikely. And evidence which can only be generated by an unlikely scenario will of course be itself unlikely. As a simple example, imagine I found a method of picking a random integer between 0 and 3^^^^3 (just assume for the sake of argument that such a thing was possible to do). I would correctly assign a probability of 1/3^^^^3 of seeing the number '7'. But, if I performed the method, and saw the output of 7, I wouldn't "fail to consider this sufficient evidence to convince me" that the result was 7. The arguments relating to the bandwidth of our sensory system fail to account for (inefficient) encodings of that information which may have some configurations with arbitrarily low likelihood.

Of course in practice, in these unlikely situations, competing theories that start with "I'm dreaming" or "I'm delusional" may dominate. All scenarios markedly less likely than those have the burden of disproving those possibilities first. But this is not an impossible burden, and is in any case exactly as it should be.

Unbounded resources

I'm going to use access to a machine with unlimited computing resources as my working example here but I hope that the points translate well enough to other settings. I'm also going to briefly make a distinction between "infinite" and "unbounded": There are infinitely many of something if the cardinality of the set of such things in existance is infinite. There are unboundedly many of something if, for any number 'n', it would be possible to generate 'n' of those things. Unbounded is a lower requirement, but is sufficient for this discussion. I make this distinction mostly just to explain why I'm using the term at all (since you might otherwise expect "infinite").

In contrast to the finite resources scenario, in the infinite or unbounded resources scenario I think it's quite correct to say that the difficulty of generating a program that would torture n people is in proportion to the complexity, rather than the scale, of 'n'. Given unlimited resources, the only barrier is writing the program itself, the difficulty of which is barely any more work than required by the definition of complexity.

However, in this scenario, there's no need for a mugger at all! We've mugged ourselves already with our own moral mathematics. The 3^^^^3 people to mugger wishes to torture are utterly insignificant in the face of the 3^^^^^3 people who we could simulate in paradise, if we outsmart or overpower the mugger and take control of those resources ourselves. Does it sound unlikely we'd be able to overcome them? Of course, but how unlikely? It certainly doesn't scale with the value, so as with the original dilemna just pick a bigger number if you need to (which you don't, I can assure you, it's big enough).

And yet, even that is insufficiently ambitious. I would posit that with unbounded resources available, any course of action we could describe is dominated by considerations of an only slightly more complicated but substantially more important alternative. We're frozen with inaction in the face of the utter futility of anything we're even capable of thinking of. And we don't even need a mugger to trigger this catastrophe. So long as we assign a non-zero probability of such a mugging occurring in the future, we should be worrying about it right now.

The point is that in this situation, just paying the mugger and carrying on cannot be the best course of action, because it's not the right choice if they're lying, and if they're not then it's dominated by other much larger considerations. Thus the mugging still fails, not necessarily because of the implausibility of their threat but because of the utter irrelevance of it in the face of unboundedly more important other considerations.

Bounding the unbounded

Although this is tangential to my main point, I will consider how the concept of unbounded resources could be handled. Even though I've demonstrated that the mugging fails, the larger issue of considering the possibility of unbounded resources still seems a little unresolved. Here's a few options, each of which take seriously but none of which I'm completely convinced of yet. In some cases I also talk about how this resolution impacts the mugging. I'll add that they are not at all mutually exclusive either, they could all be valid.

* Ignore the possibility, at least until we actually have to deal with it, which will most likely be never and in any case gives us time to work out the maths in the meantime. A practical if thoroughly unsatisfying solution. A sub-case of this would be to plan to completely reinvent or even abandon quantitative morality in the face of the collapse of quantitative limits. What we replace it with is hard to say without better understanding the nature of the unlimited resources available.

* Ignore the possibility by symmetry. We know nothing about worlds with unbounded resources, so any action we take is just as likely to hurt as help our chances of utilising them for unbounded good. The question then is whether a mugger as described would be sufficient to break that symmetry. Personally I don't think they do, in the same way that I don't think the religions on earth break the symmetry of what a god might want were one to exist. I see no reason to privilege their hypotheses over the negation of them. Similarly the threats of a mugger who is clearly psychopathic and in any case has absolutely no need of my money may not break the symmetry on what I might expect to happen if I pay or don't. Essentially, I'm saying don't trust the mugger any more than I distrust them. Still, even if you accept this claim, it feels a little like dodging the question. It shouldn't be that hard to reformulate the scenario in a way that's sufficient to break the symmetry.

* Assign probability zero to infinite (and unbounded?) hypotheticals. Note that mathematically, something can be "possible" and still have probability 0. One example is the chance of a randomly chosen Real number chosen within (0, 1) being rational. This would be the natural extension of the 1/n prior for resources of scale n. While mathematically plausible and philosophically satisfying, I'm willing to be, but not yet quite convinced this is correct. The trouble I have is that infinite things seem in some ways far less complex than large finite things. Generating an infinite loop is one of the easiest things to program a computer to do. In saying so though, am I making the same mistake I describe above, in conflating complexity(X) with complexity(size(X))? AIXI may consider an unbounded space of programs and unbounded computing resources, but it certainly does not integrate over any programs of themselves infinite length (and indeed would get nowhere if it even tried). Do unbounded resources correspond to a program of infinite length or just a finite program running on unbounded hardware? I'm not yet sure either way.

* Fail to lose sleep over it regardless. Personally I act to optimise my own utility. That utility does honestly consider the utility of others, but it is nonetheless my own. It is also bounded within a time-frame because there's only so happy or sad I can be, and also bounded over time by geometric discounting. Being just my own utility it's not subject to being multiplied by an arbitrary number of people (and no I don't care if they're copies of me either). In being bounded, the harsh reality is that there's only so much I can care about the scale of a tragedy before it all just becomes numbers. So call me evil if you like but either way I'm not motivated to pay, nor, more generally, motivated to worry about the possibility of unbounded resources existing. Of course this doesn't really resolve the mugging itself. You could modify the scenario to replace myself having to pay with instead a small, plausible but entirely moral threat (e.g. "I'll punch that guy in the face"). I would then be motivated to make the correct moral decision regardless of bounds on my utility (though I suppose my motivation to be correct is itself bounded). It makes me wonder actually, nobody wants to pay themselves, but how many people actually would pay in this alternative case of an entirely moral trade off?

Conclusion


In the finite resources case, the decision to make is real, and not dominated by unavoidable larger considerations. The scenario itself is reasonable and entirely finite.

In the infinite resources case, the plausibility of the mugger's threat is only as low as 1/complexity(n) and thus they are able to create a threat which scales faster than its implausibility.

By not making it entirely clear which of these cases is considered, the original presentation of Pascal's Mugging served to generate a scenario which appeared to have the merits of both cases and the weaknesses of neither. However, by separating these two cases it becomes clear that the mugging fails in both, either because of the implausibility of finite but large resources, or the overwhelming, moral-system destroying power of unbounded resources. Although the unbounded resources problem is still unresolved (to my satisfaction at least), any resolution of it would be very likely to also resolve this case of the mugging (or if not then at least change our thinking about it substantially). Thus, in no case is it correct to pay, at least without the mugger providing unimaginably stronger evidence than is presented.

The collapse our our moral systems in the face of unlimited resources may have been the key point Elizier was making with Pascal's Mugging, and I certainly haven't contradicted that here. But I have I hope made it clear that unbounded resources are required to do this not just large numbers, and the hypothetical muggers are the least of our problems in these scenarios.

Comment author: Irgy 13 October 2015 12:38:24AM *  1 point [-]

If you view morality as entirely a means of civilisation co-ordinating then you're already immune to Pascal's Mugging because you don't have any reason to care in the slightest about simulated people who exist entirely outside the scope of your morality. So why bother talking about how to bound the utility of something to which you essentially assign zero utility to in the first place?

Or, to be a little more polite and turn the criticism around, if you do actually care a little bit about a large number of hypothetical extra-universal simulated beings, you need to find a different starting point for describing those feelings than facilitating civilisational co-ordination. In particular, the question of what sorts of probability trade-offs the existing population of earth would make (which seems to be the fundamental point of your argument) is informative, but far from the be-all and end-all of how to consider this topic.

Comment author: Irgy 02 October 2015 12:40:19AM 2 points [-]

This assumes you have no means of estimating how good your current secretary/partner is, other than directly comparing to past options. While it's nice to know what the optimal strategy is in that situation, don't forget that it's not an assumption which holds in practice.

Comment author: Houshalter 19 September 2015 12:29:39PM 0 points [-]

The whole point of the Pascal's Mugging scenario is that the probability doesn't decrease faster than the reward. If for example, you decrease the probability by half for each additional bit it takes to describe, 3^^^3 still only takes a few bits to write down.

Do you believe it's literally impossible that there is a matrix? Or that it can't be 3^^^3 large? Because when you assign these things so low probability, you are basically saying they are impossible. No amount of evidence could convince you otherwise.

I think EY had the best counter argument. He had a fictional scenario where a physicist proposed a new theory that was simple and fit the data perfectly. But the theory also implies a new law of physics that could be exploited for computing power, and would allow unfathomably large amounts of computing power. And that computing power could be used to create simulated humans.

Therefore anyone alive today has a small probability of affecting large amounts of simulated people. Since that is impossible, the theory must be wrong. It doesn't matter if it's simple or if it fits the data perfectly.

If they're finite then the game has a finite value, you can calculate it, and there's no paradox. In which case median utility can only give the same answer or an exploitably wrong answer.

Even in finite case, I believe it can grow quite large as the number of iterations increases. It's one expected dollar each step. Each step having half the probability of the previous step, and twice the reward.

Imagine the game goes for n finite steps. An expected utility maximizer would still spend $n to play the game. A median maximizer would say "You are never going to win in the liftetime of the universe and then some, so no thanks." The median maximizer seems correct to me.

Comment author: Irgy 21 September 2015 12:19:44AM 0 points [-]

Re St Petersburg, I will reiterate that there is no paradox in any finite setting. The game has a value. Whether you'd want to take a bet at close to the value of the game in a large but finite setting is a different question entirely.

And one that's also been solved, certainly to my satisfaction. Logarithmic utility and/or the Kelly Criterion will both tell you not to bet if the payout is in money, and for the right reasons rather than arbitrary, value-ignoring reasons (in that they'll tell you exactly what you should pay for the bet). If the payout is directly in utility, well I think you'd want to see what mindbogglingly large utility looked like before you dismiss it. It's pretty hard if not impossible to generate that much utility with logarithmic utility of wealth and geometric discounting. But even given that, a one in a triillion chance at a trillion worthwhile extra days of life may well be worth a dollar (assuming I believed it of course). I'd probably just lose the dollar, but I wouldn't want to completely dismiss it without even looking at the numbers.

Re the mugging, well I can at least accept that there are people who might find this convincing. But it's funny that people can be willing to accept that they should pay but still don't want to, and then come up with a rationalisation like median maximising, which might not even pay a dollar for the mugger not to shoot their mother if they couldn't see the gun. If you really do think it's sufficiently plausible, you should actually pay the guy. If you don't want to pay I'd suggest it's because you know intuitively that there's something wrong with the rationale and refuse to pay a tax on your inability to sort it out. Which is the role the median utility is trying to play here, but to me it's a case of trying to let two wrongs make a right.

Personally though I don't have this problem. If you want to define "impossible" as "so unlikely that I will correctly never account for it in any decision I ever make" then yes, I do believe it's impossible and so should anyone. Certainly there's evidence that could convince me, even rather quickly, it's just that I don't expect to ever see such evidence. I certainly think there might be new laws of physics, but new laws of physics that lead to that much computing power that quickly is something else entirely. But that's just what I think, and what you want to call impossible is entirely a non-argument, irrelevant issue anyway.

The trap I think is that when one imagines something like the matrix, one has no basis on which to put an upper bound on the scale of it, so any size seems plausible. But there is actually a tool for that exact situation: the ignorance prior of a scale value, 1/n. Which happens to decay at exactly the same rate as the number grows. Not everyone is on board with ignorance priors but I will mention that the biggest problem with the 1/n ignorance prior is actually that it doesn't decay fast enough! Which serves to highlight the fact that if you're willing to have the plausibility decay even slower than 1/n, your probability distribution is ill-formed, since it can't integrate to 1.

Now to steel-man your argument, I'm aware of the way to cheat that. It's by redistributing the values by, for instance, complexity, such that a family of arbitrarily large numbers can have sufficiently high probability assigned while the overall integral remains unity. What I think though - and this is the part I can accept people might disagree with, is that it's a categorical error to use this distribution for the plausibility of a particular matrix-like unknown meta-universe. Complexity based probability distributions are a very good tool to describe, for instance, the plausibility of somebody making up such a story, since they have limited time to tell it and are more likely to pick a number they can describe easily. But being able to write a computer program to generate a number and having the actual physical resources to simulate that number of people are two entirely different sorts of things. I see no reason to believe that a meta-universe with 3^^^3 resources is any more likely than a meta-universe with similarly large but impossible to describe resources.

So I'll stick with my proportional to 1/n likelihood of meta-universe scales, and continue to get the answer to the mugging that everyone else seems to think is right anyway. I certainly like it a lot better than median utility. But I concede that I shouldn't have been quite so discouraging of someone trying to come up with an alternative, since not everyone might be convinced.

Comment author: Houshalter 10 September 2015 11:54:11PM 0 points [-]

Median utility does fail trivially. But it opens the door to other systems which might not. He just posted a refinement on this idea, Mean of Quantiles.

IMO this system is much more robust than expected utility. EU is required to trade away utility from the majority of possible outcomes to really rare outliers, like the mugger. Median utility will get you better outcomes at least 50% of the time. And tradeoffs like the one above, will get you outcomes that are good in the majority of possible outcomes, ignoring rare outliers. I'm not satisfied it's the best possible system, so the subject is still worth thinking about and debating.

I don't think any of your paradoxes are solved. You can't get around Pascal's mugging by modifying your probability distribution. The probability distribution has nothing to do with your utility function or decision theory. Besides being totally inelegant and hacky, there might be practical consequences. Like you can't believe in the singularity now. The singularity could lead to vastly high utility futures, or really negative ones. Therefore it's probability must be extremely small.

The St Petersburg casino is silly of course, but there's no reason a real thing couldn't produce a similar distribution. If you have some sequence of probabilities dependent on each other, that each have 1/2 probability, and give increasing utility.

Comment author: Irgy 11 September 2015 04:12:22AM 0 points [-]

I do acknowledge that my comment was overly negative, certainly the ideas behind it might lead to something useful.

I think you misunderstand my resolution of the mugging (which is fair enough since it wasn't spelled out). I'm not modifying a probability, I'm assigning different probabilities to different statements. If the mugger says he'll generate 3 units of utility difference that's a more plausible statement than if the mugger says he'll generate 3^^^3, etc. In fact, why would you not assign a different probability to those statements? So long as the implausibility grows at least as fast as the value (and why wouldn't it?) there's no paradox.

Re St Petersburg, sure you can have real scenarios that are "similar", it's just that they're finite in practice. That's a fairly important difference. If they're finite then the game has a finite value, you can calculate it, and there's no paradox. In which case median utility can only give the same answer or an exploitably wrong answer.

Comment author: Irgy 10 September 2015 09:06:06AM 1 point [-]

This seems to be a case of trying to find easy solutions to hard abstract problems at the cost of failing to be correct on easy and ordinary ones. It's also fairly trivial to come up with abstract scenarios where this fails catastrophically, so it's not like this wins on the abstract scenarios front either. It just fails on a new and different set of problems - ones that aren't talked about because no-one's ever found a way to fail on them before.

Also, all of the problems you list it solving are problems which I would consider to be satisfactorily solved already. Pascal's mugging fails if the believability of the claim is impacted by the magnitude of the numbers in it, since the mugger can keep naming bigger numbers and simply suffer lower credibility as a result. The St Petersburg paradox is intellectually interesting but impossible to actually construct in practice given a finite universe (versions using infinite time are defeated by bounded utility within a time period and geometric future discounting). The Cauchy distribution is just one of many functions with no mean, all that tells me is that it's the wrong function to model the world with if you know the world should have a mean. And the repungent conclusion, well I can't comment usefully about this because "repungent" or not I've never viewed it to be incorrect in the first place - so to me this potentially justifying smaller but happier populations is an error if anything.

I just think it's worth making the point that the existing, complex solutions to these problems are a good thing. Complexity-influenced priors, careful handling of infinite numbers, bounded utility within a time period, geometric future discounting, integratable functions and correct utility summation and zero-points are all things we want to be doing anyway. Even when they're not resolving a paradox! The paradoxes are good, they teach us things which circumventing the paradoxes in this way would not.

PS People feel free to correct my incomplete resolutions of those paradoxes, but be mindful of whether any errors or differences of opinion I might have actually undermine my point here or not.

Comment author: Elo 01 September 2015 01:50:50AM *  4 points [-]

When I click main it defaults to "promoted", you linked in this comment to main/all which caught the post. I wonder if anyone else has the problem of missing posts like this. There is no way I could have found this post if I didn't try really hard to work out where it was. After 10 mins I decided to screenshot and ask someone..

Is there something that can be done about these posts being lost/not-easy to find?

My usual process is:

  1. www.lesswrong.com
  2. -discusssion
  3. (sometimes click >main)
  4. sometimes autocomplete to http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/new/

I can easily change what I do to also check Main/notpromotedbutnormalmainposts. But I wonder if anyone else misses things and can be helped like this?

Comment author: Irgy 01 September 2015 07:55:31AM 2 points [-]

I know about both links but still find it annoying that the default behavior for main is to list what to me seems like just an arbitrary subset of the posts, and I need to then click another button to get the rest of them. Unless there's some huge proportion of the reader-base who only care about "promoted" posts and don't want to see the others, the default ought to be to show everything. I'm sure there's people who miss a lot of content and don't even know they're missing it.

Comment author: Irgy 13 August 2015 11:11:16PM 1 point [-]

Meta comment (I can PM my actual responses when I work out what I want them to be); I found I really struggled with this process, because of the awkward tension between answering the questions and playing a role. I just don't understand what my goal is.

Let me call my view position 1, and the other view position A. The first time I read just this post and I thought it was just a survey, where I should "give my honest opinion", but where some of the position A questions would be non-sensical for someone of position 1 so just pretend a little in order to give an answer that's not "mu".

Then I read the link on what an Ideological Turing test actually was, and that changed my thinking completely. I don't want to give almost-honest answers to position A. I want to create a character who is a genuinely in position A and write entirely fake answers that are as believable as possible and may have nothing to do with my opinions.

In my first attempt at that though, it was still obvious which was which, because my actual views for position 1 were nuanced, unusual and contained a fair number of pro-A elements, making it quite clear when I was giving my actual opinion. So I start meta-gaming. If I want to fool people I really want a fake position 1 opinion as well. In fact if I really want to fool people I need to create a complete character with views nothing like my own, and answer as them for both sets. But surely anyone could get 50% by just writing obviously ignorant answers for both sides? Which doesn't seem productive.

I guess my question is, what's my "win" condition here? Are we taking individuals and trying to classify their position? If so do I "win" if it's 50-50, or do I "win" if it's 100-0 in favour of the opposite opinion? Or are we mixing all the answers for position A and then classifying them as genuine or fake, then separately doing the same for position 1? In that case I suppose I "win" if the position I support is the one classified with higher accuracy. In other words I want to get classified as genuine twice. That actually makes the most sense, maybe I'm just getting confused by all the paired-by-individual responses in the comments, which is not at all how the evaluators will see it, they should not be told which pairs are from the same person at all.

Sorry maybe everyone else gets this already, but I would have thought there's others reading just this post without enough context who might have similar issues.

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