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Wow, it's worse than I thought. Maybe the housing problem is "government-complete" and resists all lower level attempts to solve it.

cousin_it11h110

What if you build your school-as-social-service, and then one day find that the kids are selling drugs to each other inside the school?

Or that the kids are constantly interfering with each other so much that the minority who want to follow their interests can't?

I think any theory of school that doesn't mention discipline is a theory of dry water. What powers and duties would the 1-supervisor-per-12-kids have? Can they remove disruptive kids from rooms? From the building entirely? Give detentions?

Answer by cousin_itApr 24, 202470

I sometimes had this feeling from Conway's work, in particular, combinatorial game theory and surreal numbers to me feel closer to mathematical invention than mathematical discovery. This kind of things are also often "leaf nodes" on the tree of knowledge, not leading to many followup discoveries, so you could say their counterfactual impact is low for that reason.

In engineering, the best example I know is vulcanization of rubber. It has had a huge impact on today's world, but Goodyear developed it by working alone for decades, when nobody else was looking in that direction.

cousin_it1d1711

You're saying governments can't address existential risk, because they only care about what happens within their borders and term limits. And therefore we should entrust existential risk to firms, which only care about their own profit in the next quarter?!

Yeah, the trapped priors thing is pretty worrying to me too. But I'm confused about the opposing interventions thing. Do charter cities, or labor unions, rely on donations that much? Is it really so common for donations to cancel each other out? I guess advocacy donations (for example, pro-life vs pro-choice) do cancel each other out, so maybe we could all agree that advocacy isn't charity.

cousin_it2dΩ130

If the housing crisis is caused by low-density rich neighborhoods blocking redevelopment of themselves (as seems the consensus on the internet now), could it be solved by developers buying out an entire neighborhood or even town in one swoop? It'd require a ton of money, but redevelopment would bring even more money, so it could be win-win for everyone. Does it not happen only due to coordination difficulties?

cousin_it2dΩ120

I don't know about others, but to me these approaches sound like "build a bureaucracy from many well-behaved agents", and it seems to me that such a bureaucracy wouldn't necessarily behave well.

I mean, one of the participants wrote: "getting comments that engage with what I write and offer a different, interesting perspective can almost be more rewarding than money". Others asked us for feedback on their non-winning entries. It feels to me that interaction between more and less experienced folks can be really desirable and useful for both, as long as it's organized to stay within a certain "lane".

cousin_it4dΩ350

I have maybe a naive question. What information is needed to find the MSP image within the neural network? Do we have to know the HMM to begin with? Or could it be feasible someday to inspect a neural network, find something that looks like an MSP image, and infer the HMM from it?

For example, if there were certain states of the world which I wanted to avoid at all costs (and thus violate the continuity axiom), I could assign zero utility to it and use geometric averaging. I couldn’t do this with arithmetic averaging and any finite utilities.

Well, you can't have some states as "avoid at all costs" and others as "achieve at all costs", because having them in the same lottery leads to nonsense, no matter what averaging you use. And allowing only one of the two seems arbitrary. So it seems cleanest to disallow both.

If I wanted to program a robot which sometimes preferred lotteries to any definite outcome, I wouldn’t be able to program the robot using arithmetic averaging over goodness values.

But geometric averaging wouldn't let you do that either, or am I missing something?

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