Did you play against AI that do have won sometime in the past?

Other people have expressed similar sentiments, and then played the AI Box experiment. Even of the ones who didn't lose, they still updated to "definitely could have lost in a similar scenario."

Unless you have reason to believe your skepticism comes from a different place than theirs, you should update towards gatekeeping being harder than you think.

This is true; however keeping a website running is still very, very cheap compared to almost anything else the government does, including functions that are continuing as usual during the shutdown.

If web apps are too high maintenance, that does not explain the shutdown of government Twitters (example: https://twitter.com/NOAA, which went to the extra effort of posting that "we won't be tweeting 'cause shutdown.") I note with amusement however that the Health and Human Services Twitter is alive and well and tweeting about the ACA.

Interesting statements I ran into with regards to kabuki theater aspects of the so called United States federal government shutdown of 2013. This resulted in among other things closing down websites.

A website shouldn't just go down when the people managing it stop working, it's not like they're pedaling away inside the servers. Block the federal highways with army tanks, sorry the government is closed.

There is a nontrivial set of the voting public who legitimately believe money equals tech working via magical alchemy.

I was interested to know this kind of thing has a name: Washington Monument Syndrome.

The name derives from the National Park Service's alleged habit of saying that any cuts would lead to an immediate closure of the wildly popular Washington Monument.

Possibly, but what about the descriptions of emotional turmoil? I'm assuming the report of the game isn't all part of the role-play.

Yeah, winning is trivial - you just don't open the damn box. It can't get more trivial than that. (Although, you didn't say whether or not your opponent had proved themselves by winning as AI against others a few times?)

It's still worth thinking about though, because something about my model of humans is off.

I didn't expect so many people to lose. I just don't know how to update my model of people to one where there are so many people who could lose the AI box game. The only other major thing I can think of that persists to challenge my model in this way (and continues to invite my skepticism despite seemingly trustworthy sources) is hypnosis.

It's possible the two have common root and I can explain two observations with one update.

Assuming none of this is fabricated or exaggerated, every time I read these I feel like something is really wrong with my imagination. I can sort of imagine someone agreeing to let the AI out of the box, but I fully admit that I can't really imagine anything that would elicit these sorts of emotions between two mentally healthy parties communicating by text-only terminals, especially with the prohibition on real-world consequences. I also can't imagine what sort of unethical actions could be committed within these bounds, given the explicitly worded consent form. Even if you knew a lot of things about me personally, as long as you weren't allowed to actually, real-world, blackmail me...I just can't see these intense emotional exchanges happening.

Am I the only one here? Am I just not imagining hard enough? I'm actually at the point where I'm leaning towards the whole thing being fabricated - fiction is more confusing than truth, etc. If it isn't fabricated, I hope that statement is taken not as an accusation, but as an expression of how strange this whole thing seems to me, that my incredulity is straining through despite the incredible extent to which the people making claims seem trustworthy.

Ben Goertzel will take your money and try put an AGI inside a robot.

Trigger warning: Those creepy semi-human robots that will make anyone who hasn't spent months and months locked in a workshop making them do those human-imitating jerky facial gestures recoil in horror.

Suppose my strategy made an equal (enough) number of suggestions for each option over the last 1m trials, while the opponent played paper every time. My current strategy suggests that playing rock on the next game is the best move. The opponent's move is defined to not be dependent on my prior moves (because otherwise things get too complicated for brief analysis)

There are two major competing posterior strategies at this point: "Scissors for the first 1M trials, then rock" and "Scissors for the first 1M trials" It is not possible for my prior probability for "Scissors for the first N, then rock" to be higher than my probability for "Scissors forever" for an infinite number of N, so there is some number of trials after which any legal prior probability distribution favors "Scissors forever", if it loses only a finite number of times.

At this point I'm going to try to save face by pointing out that for each N, there is a legal set of prior probabilities of the optimum strategy to suggest each option an equal number of time. They would have to be arranged such that "My opponent will play paper X times then something else" is more likely than "My opponent will play paper X times then play paper again" for 2/3 of X from 0 to N. Given that "My opponent will always play paper" is a superset of the latter, and each time I am wrong I must eliminate a probability space larger than it from consideration, and that I have been wrong 700k times, I obviously must have assigned less than ~1e-6 initial probability to all estimates that my opponent will play paper 1M+1 times in a row, but higher than that to ~700k cases of supersets of "my opponent will play paper X times in a row then change" where X is less than 1M. While a legal set of priors, I think it would be clearly unreasonable in practice to fail to adapt to a strategy of strict paper within 10.

Strangely, many of the strategies which are effective against humans for best-of-seven seem to be ineffective against rational agents for long-term performance. Would it be interesting to have a RPS best-of competition between programs with and without access to their opponent's source code, or even just between LW readers who are willing to play high-stakes RPS?

Suppose your opponent has thrown paper N (or X%) times and won every time they did. Is that evidence for, or evidence against, the proposition that they will play paper in the next trial? (or does the direction of evidence vary with N or X?)