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Isn't Sen's paradox essentially the same as the Prisoners' dilemma?
Thanks for the links cousin it! Great reads.
Re: prase's reply: The Prisoners' dilemma is a legitimate dilemma. No matter how many times I read the page on Sen's paradox I can't interpret it as anything remotely sensical.
I kept editing this post again and again as I boiled down the problem (it's harder to explain something wrong than something correct), and I think I've got it down to one sentence:
If you just look at sorted lists of preferences without any comparative weights of given preferences, you're going to get paradoxes. Nash equilibrium exists because of weights. Sen's paradox does not exist because it precludes weights. If Bob just wants Alice to see a movie and doesn't much care about his own viewing of the film either way, and Alice just wants to spend time with Bob and doesn't much care if it's by watching a movie or not, then there's no paradox until a social scientist walks in the room.
In response to
"Nahh, that wouldn't work"
This may connect to the effect of self-fulfilling prophecies: We want a world with few threats, so we think that threats don't work, so we don't threaten people, so the world has fewer threats.
In response to
The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth
If anyone can give me the cliff's notes to this, I'd be appreciative. I am a big LW fan but aside from the obsession with the Singularity, I more or less stand at Eliezer1997's mode of thinking. Furthermore, making clever plans to work around the holes in your thinking seems like the wholly rational thing to do - in fact, this entire post seems like a direct counterargument to The Proper Use of Doubt: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ib/the_proper_use_of_doubt/
In response to
Swords and Armor: A Game Theory Thought Experiment
This has more to do with human psychology than strict mathematical game theory:
As an obsessive gamer and game designer: when fighting a random opponent, unless there is a ladder system and you end up in the top 2% or so of the population, the optimal strategy is to counter whatever is the optimal strategy vs. a null, average, or un-equipped person. That is to say, the vast majority of players who do not make a nearly-random selection will calculate the ideal strategy against a percieved "average" or "typical" set of values for damage/speed/armor/dodge, and then stop exactly there. So to win, you need to go exactly one step beyond that and then stop exactly there.
On the contrary, I would argue that our default belief state is one full of scary monsters trying to kills us and whirling lights flying around overhead and oh no what this loud noise and why am I wet
There is no mention of God in that state; therefore it is atheism. Any person who does not believe in God is an atheist. Anyone who has never thought about whether there is a god, or doesn't have the concept of god, is therefore an atheist.
What I meant was, the moment anyone comes up with such a concept, it would appear so completely and undeniably sensible that it would instantly take hold as accepted truth and only become dislodged with great effort of the combined philosophical efforts of humanity's greatest minds over thousands of years.
It's not technically "default", but that's like saying a magnet is not attracted to a nearby piece of iron "by default" because there's no nearby piece of iron implied by the existence of the magnet. It's technically true, but it kind of misses the important description of a property of magnets.
First, welcome to Less Wrong! Be sure to hit the welcome thread soon.
Doesn't your hypothesis here predict compensation for overconfidence in every situation, and not just for easy tasks?
Yes it does.
...
Is there some implication I'm not getting here?
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong!
I originally wrote this for the origin story thread until I realized it's more appropriate here. So, sorry if it straddles both a bit.
I am, as nearly as I believe can be seen in the present world, an intrinsic rationalist. For example: as a young child I would mock irrationality in my parents, and on the rare occasions I was struck, I would laugh, genuinely, even through tears if they came, because the irrationality of the Appeal to Force made the joke immensely funnier. Most people start out as well-adapted non-rationalists; I evidently started as a maladaptive rationalist.
As an intrinsic (maladaptive) rationalist, I have had an extremely bumpy ride in understanding my fellow man. If I had been born 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. As it was, I was a little different, and never really got on with anyone, despite being well-mannered. A nerd, in other words. Regarding bias, empathic favoritism, willful ignorance, asking questions in which no response will effect subsequent actions or belief confidences, and other peculiarities for which I seem to be an outlier, any knowledge about how to identify and then deal with these peculiarities has been extremely hard-won from years upon years of messy interactions in uncontrolled environments with few hypotheses from others to go on (after all, they "just get it", so they never needed to sort it out explicitly).
I've recently started reading rationalist blogs like this one, and they have been hugely informative to me because they put things I have observed about people but failed to understand intuitively into a very abstract context (i.e. one that bypasses intuition). Less Wrong, among others, have led to a concrete improvement in my interactions with humanity in general, the same way a blog about dogs would improve one's interactions with dogs in general. This is after just a couple months! Thanks LW.
In response to
Science as Attire
A small caveat: the word 'evolution' doesn't have to refer to the scientific theory of biological evolution. The word existed long before the theory; otherwise, the theory would have become attached to a different word. Since the word itself means "incremental change over time," then it is perfectly appropriate to refer to a new computer chip design, or a corporate reorganization as evolution. Make your own guesses about whether something totally different, such as uploading a personality, can be called "evolution."
This. I regularly refer to cultural trends, business models, and technology as undergoing evolution, without the slightest inkling of doubt or shame. Real Life is about compromises to that most obstinate debater Nature, and if one must deal with the pragmatic issue of conveying ideas in a conversation in a short period of time, "evolution" is perfectly acceptable shorthand for "process by which a system becomes incrementally more efficient via an ongoing process of simultaneous diversification and selection, similar to biological evolution if someone were to replace the concept of random genetic variation with human ideas and natural selection with artificial selection." That simply takes way too long to say.
In response to
Cached Thoughts
You seem to shy away from the obvious conclusion of your otherwise excellent post. Our slow brains are entirely unable to do much reasoning from first principles, therefore we ought to pay strict attention to such received ideas that have stood the test of time, and have been culturally cached. "Love isn't rational" strikes me as an excellent example. If our rationality is bounded, as it certainly is, then it is often rational to not try to think things out from first principles, but accept the evolved memes of the surrounding culture. You may have undermined the whole purpose of this website. Perhaps our biases are important, perhaps they are reliable guides, and overcoming them leaves us with nothing to go on but our slow and falliable reason.
Note that this is not a mere academic argument. The political left has often been prone to the idea that they could throw off the shackles of social convention and replace them with something more rational. This has seldom worked out well. Politically, you've made an excellent argument for the very arational Burkean conservate point of view.
I don't think most of us would agree that everyone out there is playing human rational capacity to the hilt and needs to slow down on attacking its biases and prejudices. After all, the modern critical examination of human biases, while touched upon throughout history, is essentially a century old or less.
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The recommendation is sound if: - You value good drivers. I've been to almost a dozen countries, and nobody comes CLOSE to the conscientiousness of Australian drivers; they honk as a THANK YOU for right of way in Victoria. They also have the the most dramatically sensical road system ever, which is mostly like the U.S., with one difference I particularly like: yield signs instead of the stop signs that American drivers only yield at anyway, usually for good reason. I'm a big fan of either enforcing rules or changing them, with as few exceptions as possible.
The recommendation is suspect if: - You care about what foods you eat. (Going from one country to another is going to dramatically change prices based on local crop/livestock viability and tradition.) - The way business is done provides uncomfortable culture shock. (I value free refills on soda disproportionally because I adore soda and consume a disproportional amount per purchase. Refill policies in Aus are inconsistent and necessarily more restrictive than a system that is consistently without restriction.) - Your hobby is taxed to death (video games in Aus are about 140-200% the price of video games in the U.S. - ouch). - Your utility function dramatically supports things other than accumulation of wealth which are represented by your current culture more than Australia's. (I support high freedom in media consumption and gun rights, things that Australia is good about, but not as much as the U.S... and if money is the unit of caring, then I care about those rights with my tax dollars.)