Can we just build a Link to the Past minigame that actually models this with real, running code, and then post a bunch of YouTube videos of Link trying naively to kill Sahasrala?

Something that bothers me about this tournament: I feel like a competitive tournament doesn't actually reward the kind of strategy that is meant to do well in Prisoner's Dilemna. As a (highly oversimplified) example, consider three bots who have the scores:

A: 10 B: 9 C: 2

Here, A is 'winning.' Suppose B can make a move that costs A 3 points and costs itself 1 point, leading to:

A: 7 B: 8 C: 2

B's payoff function has dropped. However, from a 'winning the tournament' approach, B has gone from 2nd to 1st, and so this outcome is now better for B. This feels wrong.

I doubt this was a really big issue here, but just on general principles I feel like competition by comparing scores is incompatible with a desire to explore the Prisoner's Dilemma, since you're turning a non-zero-sum game into a zero-sum game.

The humans aren't doing what the math says. The humans must be broken.

SMBC on the Ultimatum Game

I forget where I saw this (might actually have been elsewhere on LW?), but I encountered the idea that a component of the backward-reverent ages was the Roman Empire. When your civilization is built on the remnants of Roman roads that are better than anything you can make, it's forgivable to view the world as having fallen from grace.

This is an old article, and it's possible that this question has already been asked, but I've been looking through the comments and I can't find it anywhere. So, here it is:

Why does it matter? If many-worlds is indistinguishable from the Copenhagen Interpretation by any experiment we can think of to do, how does it matter which model we use? If we ever find ourselves in a scenario where it actually does matter which one we use -- one where using the wrong model will result in us making some kind of mistake -- then we now have an experiment we can do to determine which model is correct. If we never find ourselves in such a position, it doesn't matter which model we decided on.

When phrased this way, Science doesn't seem to have such a serious problem. Saying "Traditional Science can lead to incorrect conclusions, but only about things that have no actual effect on the world" doesn't sound like such a searing criticism.

It's easy to see, in evolutionary terms...

No. Stop.

Fire suppression systems have gotten better, we don't overcrowd theaters anymore, and we now use electricity for lighting instead of burning things, so fires are less common and not as dangerous.

One question regarding the specifics of the 'write stuff down to feel better about it' that doesn't seem to be covered:

After (to take the example from the article) being laid off, I'll probably have a rather negative view of the event. I will feel bad about it, and I will want to blame others. When I write my "feelings regarding the layoff", if they wind up as an angry rant about "my stupid worthless boss" and "my goddamn no-good backstabbing coworkers", does that still work? Or do I need to be more even-handed about this, identify things I might have done wrong and reasons I might have deserved it, admit that it was mostly my fault, etc...?

I don't have access to the books you cite as sources, so it's possible that this is covered specifically in them. But if you can actually boost "happiness, self-esteem, health, and psychological and physical well-being" by writing down an angry rant, I would find that rather surprising.

The emphasis I used was in the original, but I agree that it would work better with the emphasis on "think."

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but this tournament looked to me like a thinly disguised version of:

"Construct a robot that can read code and interpret what it means."

which is a Really Hard Problem.

Is that not a fair description? Was there some other way to approach the problem?

The only way I can see to go about constructing a GOOD entrant to this is to write something that can take as its input the code of the opponent and interpret what it will actually DO, that can recognize the equivalence between (say):

return DEFECT

and

if 1: return DEFECT return COOPERATE

and can interpret things like:

if oppcode == mycode return COOPERATE return DEFECT

And I have no idea how to go about doing that. From the fact that the winning entrants were all random, it seems safe to say that no entrants had any idea how to go about doing that either.

Am I missing something here?