Most people, the theory goes, would remain in the pension scheme, because they understand they're better off with a pension and it was only laziness that prevented them from getting one before.

I've felt for a long time that the same solution should be implemented for organ donation.

(Actually, there's a case to be made for "screw your sentimental attachment to your meat parts -- we can save lives". But soft paternalism is a start.)

I forget where, but I read a blog post that described these sorts of things as controlled experiments - you want to test one part of your decision apparatus, not have it confounded by all the others.

Also, you are anthropomorphizing the paperclipper AI. It would accept your bargain, but demand not just a handful but as many paperclips as you could be arm-twisted into making - where your pain at the expense and effort is just below where you'd prefer the billion deaths. And then it would exploit your exhausted state to stab you in the back anyway. It's not psychopathic, it's just incrementing a number by expedient means. You can't negotiate with something that won't stay bought.

More importantly: maybe the fact that an underdog existed at all is only likely to be recorded if they won.

I worry about selection effects - maybe underdogs only choose unconventional strategies when they could think of one that seemed promising.

red is a color I've heard mentioned, therefore all beads are red

and thus his bayes-score drops to -Infinity

Taking the broader view, I wonder how much complaining about cheats is really an attempt by Goliath to have slings declared unfair.

Reminds me of the Playing to Win essay linked here a few weeks ago.

And how much of the desire to be nice and conform is evolution telling David to fall in line.

That doesn't make sense, though. If playing "cheap" in this way benefits David against Goliath, then evolution would favor a whole lot of Davids playing "cheap".

Thinking about how an Occamian learner like AIXI would approach the problem, it would probably start from the simplest domain theory "beads have a color, red is a color I've heard mentioned, therefore all beads are red", p=1. If the first bead was grey, it would switch to "all beads are grey", p=0. The second bead is red, "half and half", p = 0.5, and so on, ratcheting up theories from the simplest first.

I actually turn to Tolkien when I'm in what I assume other people would call a "religious" mood: he has the virtues of poetic/literary merit and mythological self-consistency; moreover the fact that everyone, including the author, knows that it's completely false and made-up gives a clean separation between my emotional response and any possible intellectual import.

One interesting pattern in there, that the article doesn't draw into a conclusion - the two main examples presented, Eurisko and the basketball team, both were faced down by unofficial officials who tried to get them to conform and lose - and they backed down.

I would have gone for the kill. Let them cancel the tournament, let the ref foul the game. Ultimately, being too conciliatory cost them the war.

Taking the broader view, I wonder how much complaining about cheats is really an attempt by Goliath to have slings declared unfair. And how much of the desire to be nice and conform is evolution telling David to fall in line.