Overestimating can be costly too. That's why bluffing can work, in poker as in war.

Examples/articles:

• Empty Fort Strategy

• 100 horsemen and the empty city (gated). Here are two articles summarizing the original paper: Miami SBA and ScienceDaily

Why should the battle lines be drawn in terms of conclusions?

Suppose I agree with someone's conclusion, and disagree with them on the method used to reach that conclusion. Are we political allies, or enemies? That is, of course "politics" is the answer to 'why should the battle lines be drawn this way?'

Now, for Tyler as a pundit, the answer is different. Staying in an intellectual realm where he thinks like the other people around him makes it so any disagreements are interesting and intelligible.

Came to conclusion that I don't care at all about anyone else, and am only doing good things for altruistic high and social benefits.

What is the difference between an altruistic high and caring about other people? Isn't the former what the latter feels like?

An interesting followup to your example of an oiled bird deserving 3 minutes of care that came to mind:

Let's assume that there are 150 million suffering people right now, which is a completely wrong random number but a somewhat reasonable order-of-magnitude assumption. A quick calculation estimates that if I dedicate every single waking moment of my remaining life to caring about them and fixing the situation, then I've got a total of about 15 million care-minutes.

According to even the best possible care-o-meter that I could have, all the problems in the world cannot be totally worth more than 15 million care-minutes - simply because there aren't any more of them to allocate. And in a fair allocation, the average suffering person 'deserves' 0.1 care-minutes of my time, assuming that I don't leave anything at all for the oiled birds. This is a very different meaning of 'deserve' than the one used in the post - but I'm afraid that this is the more meaningful one.

Let's make the further assumption that our common ancestor with dolphins was dumber than the modern octopus. This doesn't seem a stretch seeing how intelligent the modern octopus can be, how minor in terms of ecological role the common dolphin-human ancestor must have been, and seeing the stupidity of many of the descendants of that common ancestor.

Could you expand on the second point, as to why it must have a minor ecological role, and why this means it would be dumber? I know little evolutionary theory, and would appreciate the explanation. Cheers.

Why? Having dabbled a bit in evolutionary simulations, I find that, once you have unicellular organisms, the emergence of cooperation between them is only a matter of time, and from there multicellulars form and cell specialization based on division of labor begins. Once you have a dedicated organism-wide communication subsystem, why would it be unlikely for a centralized command structure to evolve?

On Earth multicellularity arose independently several dozen times but AFAIK only animals have anything like a central nervous system.

An AI should only avoid wasting energy if energy were a resource that was limiting the maximization of their utility function. If you're a gold-ingot-manufacturing-maximizer, you don't need all the energy available from your star because there isn't enough gold to use it. Even if you're converting everything that isn't a gold ingot in your system into seeds for turning other star systems into gold ingot factories, it's not obvious (to me at least) that you need all the energy available to do that.

You make a very compelling argument, and on balance I think that you are probably correct in your conclusions.

Part of it may be because, for a land animal, the ground is always there. There's always a strong probability of a rock at your feet to pick up. For sea creatures, it's possible (in theory) to wander around for months without seeing another solid object. So, land animals have less space to move about in, but have an easier time finding simple tools.

This, of course, relies on the idea that tools - unliving lumps of matter used for a purpose - are a necessary component of a civilisation. It goes without saying that tools are a necessary component of our civilisation; but are they a necessary component of all possible civilisations?

The theoretical underwater civilisation has one thing in great abundance - space. The oceans cover three-quarters of our planet, and sea creatures can move up and down easily enough. Is there any way that that space can be used, as a foundation for some form of aquatic civilisation?

Thinking about bubble netting - it should be possible for dolphins to practice a form of agriculture, herding and taming schools of edible fish, much like shepherds. (I believe ants do something similar with aphids, and I'm pretty sure a dolphin is more intelligent than an ant). Once one has shepherds, one can easily move towards the idea of breeding fish for a purpose - breeding big fish with big fish to get bigger fish, for example. Or breeding tasty with tasty to get tastier. There's certainly space in the oceans for the dolphins to create a lot of fish farms... and then for these fish farms to swap and interbreed particularly interesting lines.

I'm not quite sure how to believably get beyond a basic agricultural/nomadic existence, though. (Unless perhaps the dolphins start breeding intelligent octopi with intelligent octopi to get more intelligent octopi or something along those lines).

I hereby take part in the tradition and note that the tradition makes the following moot for relatively low levels of karma. You may round off your karma score if you want to be less identifiable. If your karma score is 15000 or above, you may put 15000 if you want to be less identifiable.

Income question: needs to specify individual or household. You may also want to specify sources, such as whether to include government aid, only include income from wages, or separate boxes for different categories of income.

I have done professional survey design and am available to assist with reviewing the phrasing of questions for surveys, here or on other projects.

Another example where simple probability assignment fails is from "Reasoning with Limited Resources and Assigning Probabilities to Arithmetical Statements" by Haim Gaifman:( http://www.columbia.edu/~hg17/RLR.pdf )

A coin is tossed 50 times. Jack analyzes the sequence of 0’s (heads) and 1’s (tails) and concludes that the sequence is random, with nearly equal probabilities for each side. Then Jill informs him that the coin contains a tiny mechanism, controlled by a microchip, which shifts its gravity center so as to produce a pseudo random sequence–– one that passes the standard randomness tests but is in fact defined by a mathematical algorithm. [...] Jill gives Jack the algorithm and the outcomes of additional 50 tosses fully accord with the calculated predictions. Let h be the hypothesis that the outcome sequence coincides with the sequences produced by the algorithm. Let the evidence be e. Given e, it would be irrational of Jack not to accord h extremely high probability. Had P(h)–– Jack’s prior subjective probability for h––been non-zero, conditionalization on e could have pushed it up. But if P(h) = 0, then, P(h|e) = 0, for every e for which P(e) > 0. Now Jack’s prior probability accommodates the possibility of independent tosses with non-zero probabilities for ‘0’ and ‘1’. Therefore P( ) assigns each finite sequence a nonzero value, hence P(e) > 0. If P(h) = 0, then Jack cannot learn from e what he should, unless he changes probabilities in a way that violates the Bayesian prescription.

And it explicitly questions the modeling of 'unknown' possibilites as 0:

Jack has never considered the possibility of a coin that produces, deterministically, a mathematically defined sequence; hence, if the prior probability is to reflect anything like Jack’s psychological state, P(h) = 0. But could he, in principle, have made place for such possibilities in advance?