Oh, no, I have no problems with people spoiling themselves for Nethack. That's pretty much the only way to actually win. But if your aim is to improve rationality, rather than to do as well as possible within the game, it might be better to play it unspoiled. After all, Morendil mentioned "hypothesis testing" as something that was taught by Nethack: The spoilt version doesn't really test that.

I'm assuming this only applies if you aren't using spoilers for NetHack?

But this is a rather interesting example of rationality at work. It's useful for a couple of reasons.

1) There's a clear indication here of incorrect beliefs leading to unwanted consequences. In this case, a downplay of the importance of cup holders is leading to the loss of profit that could otherwise be gained.

2) It's fairly trivial and simple, which is actually a good thing in it's favor. It's not technical, meaning we can all understand what's going on, and it's extremely unlikely anyone is going to have an entrenched belief about cup holders already that makes rational discourse more difficult.

The simplicity of the example is a point in it's favor. We're not attempting to fix the cupholder problem here, we're looking at explanations of why it might exist in order to improve our model of things.

Thank you. I apologise for not asking you for verification sooner. My downvote is revoked and I've upvoted your post.

I learnt that I should have asked for verification sooner, either immediately, or as soon as you informed me you had reasons for wishing to keep said verification private. I also learnt that I should assign a higher initial probability to claims made by LessWrong members I don't know, which is a lesson I'm very glad to have learnt, since I do enjoy trusting people.

You're right.

In this case, assuming immortals had perfect memories and would eventually work out that you didn't, assuming you were an immortal who can't remember if you've played that particular opponent before (But can vaguely remember an idea of how often you get defected on vs. co-operated with by the entire field) what do you think your optimal strategy would be?

Okay, I've sent a PM asking you for verification.

I never actually claimed you were making this up, merely that the likelihood of your story being true was low. You inventing the story is only one possible reason why your story might be false. You could also simply be mistaken, have witnessed actions that looked much worse out of context (For example, maybe your friends did something to deserve their treatment, but didn't tell you because it would make them look bad) or some other reason I haven't thought of.

In addition, you ask why I care so much about lack of transparency when I can think of reasons why you'd want to keep information private. You gave none of this information in the original post, so if I were to come up with potential reasons why you might want to keep the information secret, I'd be rationalising.

With that in mind, evidence that your story is false:

• The prior probability of your claim is low. Not extremely low, but as when making any claim that isn't obvious, the "burden of proof" is upon you. (Naturally, I don't expect PROOF, hence the inverted commas, but you do need to provide sufficient evidence to overcome the initial low probability.)
• You claim to have references, yet don't provide them in the initial post or explain in the initial post why you won't publicly provide them. (Yes, you've given me an explanation now, which reduces the strength of this evidence, but does not eliminate it.)
• I have been unable to find any collaborating evidence for your story.
• The reaction on LessWrong, a site where the average member tends to be at least somewhat rational and probably at least as rational as myself, if not more so, is nearly universally negative.
• You've failed to provide verification. You claimed your story was easily verified, yet there's a conspicuous absence of any verification. Unlike your references, if your story is "easily verified", that means it's verifiable using public knowledge, and you haven't provided that knowledge. (If the story is verifiable by asking you, that does not count. You're asking us to verify the trustability of a source by asking that same source.)

Evidence that your story is true:

• You said it is. (Let's start with the obvious here.)
• Lack of discernable motivation for lying.
• Consquences if you're wrong, which you seem to care about. (Loss of karma/status in the group.)
• You've been around for a while.
• Decent chance people on LW would call you out on it if you were lying. (Thus making you less likely to try and fool people.)

In the end, the evidence for it being false is simply stronger. You've failed to overcome the burden of probability you've shouldered by making the claim. In order to overcome this burden, more evidence is required. Hence why I asked you to show the easy verification you claim exists, and post your references. If you have a good reason to not do the latter, at least do the former, and if you have a good reason not to do THAT as well, you'll just have to resign yourself to not being believed here.

That's how it looks like from your perspective. From a reader's perspective, it looks like someone who isn't a notable community figure on LessWrong (At least, I assume this, based on your karma scores and the fact that I have never heard of you. If I'm wrong, I apologise.) has suddenly made a claim with a significant burden of proof on it, and not provided any concrete evidence, despite apparently sitting on some. "I have evidence but am not going to include this in this post, nor will I explain why I cannot include the evidence in this post." is an immediate red flag.

Additionally, I refer to Michaelos's point, who puts it better than I can. You're accusing someone of being insane, but your post comes off as not being all that serious, with the "lol"s interspersed.

Lastly, you claim that your story is easily verified, but some Google searches have turned up absolutely nothing even tangenitally related to your claim except for this thread. If it's easily verified by external sources, I haven't been able to see it.

So, if it never occurred to you that your story would be doubted, you've obviously made a mistake somewhere. Your evidence in favor of you telling the truth (You've been on LW for a while, you're opening yourself up to falsification, you have no known reasons to start attacking this person) is simply nowhere near sufficient.

That said, you can still fix this. Clearly, you were wrong about the likelihood of people doubting you, but everyone makes mistakes. So post your evidence, link us to somewhere that verifies your story, and I expect the problem will be solved.