One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really offering is three rounds of feedback.
WIll Newsome is such a badass.
— Plato
One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really offering is three rounds of feedback.
WIll Newsome is such a badass.
— Plato
The most popular PC games ever are The Sims and The Sims 2. Then World of Warcraft which is a multiplayer game.
I didn't know that about the Sims. That's what Wikipedia says also. But the number of video-game console games sold is several times the number of PC games sold. The next-best-selling games appear to be Wii Sports and Tetris. But, Wii sports was bundled with the console and often never played; and tetris is a phone game which has very little CPU power - there are reasons this is important, but I don't have time to explain.
So p(ego|...) needs revision - probably to somewhere between .5 and .9.
p(ego) and p(follow-thru) might not be independent. The demographics of players playing what I call 'ego' games is heavily skewed towards adolescent males, as is the demographics of people who enjoy torturing small animals.
But I upvoted because it is kind of interesting and not deserving of -7, though I predict it will go much lower than that.
Thanks! I do think I deserve some credit for coming up with what may be a better argument for Christianity and for Islam than all the Christians and Muslims in the world working together have managed to come up with in 2000 years. :)
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Beware the sometimes subtle trap of thinking that, since you have thought about a big decision/belief at seemingly random intervals for a whole week (month, year) now, you have perspective on the decision/belief from a representative variety of your states of mind. State-dependent memory, habits, priming &c. make this unlikely unless you were deliberately making an effort.
I'm getting serious about decision theory. I have some foundational observations, upon which I'm building a mathematical framework. I have some partial drafts, and plan to write papers on it.
Most problems in decision theory are the result of insufficient rigor. "Rigor" to me means formalizing problems fully and proving things about the formalization, without use of fuzzy language. Full formalization means writing out the problem statement as two type-checkable functions, a world function which maps strategies to outcomes and a preference function which defines an ordering over outcomes. To my knowledge, none of the decision theory in the literature is done at this level of rigor. I have chosen a subset of SML/NJ, extended to include limiting expressions, as the representation for formalized problems, because it has solid mathematical foundations with which I am already familiar, and also a rigorous model of partial evaluation.
There is a pre-existing body of work on how to prove things about programs and transform and simplify them in provably correct ways in computer science: compiler theory. One of the major themes I've picked up from studying compilers is that different representations enable us to prove different things and perform different operations. In practice every compiler takes programs through a long series of intermediate representations. One of these representations, Static Single-Assignment (SSA) form, is strongly analogous to Pearl's causal models. Another representation, continuation-passing style (CPS), enables a natural and precise statement of one interpretation of causal decision theory, along with a precise description of when it does and doesn't work, such that you could prove that CDT is valid for a particular problem as a lemma and then apply CDT to it.
I haven't proved it yet, but I think I can prove within the framework I've defined that Eliezer's answer to the Prisoner's Dilemma, "cooperate iff your opponent cooperates iff you cooperate", is uncomputable, and that there is an infinite series of successively better approximations such that the Prisoner's Dilemma has no optimal answer.
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Ignoring sweepstakes as such[1], a focused rationalist should regard all bets with odds far from a coin flip with suspicion; there are often better bets, and with more information for calibration.
[1] Perhaps justifiably, as the "may" in the title of this Discussion post implies more uncertainty than you find in a typical sweepstake scenario where the fine print and simple arithmetic are enough calculation in themselves.
— Aristosophy
— Aristotle