Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

• Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
• Do not quote yourself.
• Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
• No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

TL;DR = write a python script to win this applied game theory contest for $1000. Based on Prisoner's Dilemma / Tragedy of the Commons but with a few twists. Deadline Sunday August 18.

https://brilliant.org/competitions/hunger-games/rules/

I. Food and Winning

Each player begins the game with 300(P−1) units of food, where P is the number of players.

If after any round you have zero food, you will die and no longer be allowed to compete. All players who survive until the end of the game will receive the survivor's prize.

The game can end in two ways. After a large number of rounds, there will be a small chance each additional round that the game ends. Alternatively, if there is only one person left with food then the game ends. In each case, the winner is the person who has the most food when the game ends.

II. Hunts

Each round is divided into hunts. A hunt is a game played between you and one other player. Each round you will have the opportunity to hunt with every other remaining player, so you will have P−1 hunts per round, where P is the number of remaining players.

The choices are H = hunt (cooperate) and S = slack (defect), and they use confusing wording here, but as far as I can tell the payoff matrix is (in units of food)

What's interesting is you don't get the entirety of your partner's history (so strategies like Tit-Tit-Tit for Tat don't work) instead you get only their reputation, which is the fraction of times they've hunted.

To further complicate the Nash equilibria, there's the option to overhunt: a random number m, 0 < m < P(P−1) is chosen before each round (round consisting of P−1 hunts, remember) and if the total number of hunt-choices is at least m, then each player is awarded 2(P−1) food units (2 per hunt).

Your python program has to decide at the start of each round whether or not to hunt with each opponent, based on:

• the round number
• your food
• your reputation
• m
• an array of the opponents' reputations

I was studying in the LW Study Hall, and during our break someone posted this link to the official hyperloop announcement:

http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf

One member was doubtful it would get past regulations, and another said "tentative p>0.05 that a hyperloop gets made by 2100", which was met with "p>0.05 that uploading people and moving them between bodies will be available by 2100".

It struck me that people might be interested in betting on things like this, or at least having a conversation about it.

A few predictions to start:

• Tesla Motors / SpaceX / Elon Musk will create a working hyperloop by 2100.
• Tesla Motors / SpaceX / Elon Musk will create a working hyperloop by 2050.
• Tesla Motors / SpaceX / Elon Musk will create a working hyperloop by 2030.

I've made a series of bets around what will happen to the cohort mentioned in this article. I'm posting it here because people like to bet on things and it seemed like a good place to organize the links. My initial estimates were still assuming there would be around 7 people, but apparently there are now 13. This will cause me to change my estimates as well as probably add predictions for larger values of N.

General success

Predictions of the form "At least [N] people taking part in the July2013 Leverage polyphasic adaptation will be sleeping polyphasically as of [DATE]."

N = 3

• DATE = Oct 1, 2013
• DATE = Jan 1, 2014
• DATE = Aug 1, 2014

N = 5

• DATE = Oct 1, 2013
• DATE = Jan 1, 2014
• DATE = Aug 1, 2014

Uberman / nap-only

Predictions of the form "At least 1 person taking part in the July2013 Leverage polyphasic adaptation will STILL be on a nap-only schedule (e.g. uberman) as of [DATE]."

• DATE = Sept 1, 2013
• DATE = Nov 1, 2013

Study

Also, given the original intent, I felt that this prediction makes sense as well:

There will be a university/college-affiliated study on polyphasic sleep that begins within a year

I wrote a blog post this week about another kind of akrasia: unhealthy addiction. Most uses of "akrasia" here use it as a synonym for (real) procrastination (as opposed to structured procrastination which is actually just an effective way to fight Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion")... but the actual term refers more broadly to "acting against one's better judgement", a concept which obviously includes most addictions. When the addiction is time-consuming (e.g. internet addiction) then it can also be procrastination. Mine, on the other hand, is chocolate.

LINK: Accepting my Present Chocolate Addiction - MalcolmM.cC

The article integrates a wide range of topics, making it hard to find an obvious pull-quote, but I will offer that it links mindfulness to rationality by means of the Litany of Gendlin (which I've gained a lot of value from memorizing, as I find a chance to refer to it in thought or conversation about once/week):

Presence also implies a kind of acceptance: that reality is as it is, right now. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

For anyone looking for a rationalist introduction to mindfulness, you might appreciate A Less Mysterious Mindfulness Exercise, in a comment of which I offer a longer exploration of the word "accepting":

I would like to offer a distinction between two different kinds of accepting. One is the opposite of denial (which is being called "fighting" in this case). The other is the opposite of changing. Obviously, as rationalists, we want to move to do as much of the first kind of accepting as possible: this is what the Litany of Gendlin is all about: "what is true is already so" so we might as well accept that it is presently true, regardless of whether or not we'd like to change it long-term. This is true of our thoughts as well. Am I thinking of a pink elephant? Very well, I'm thinking of a pink elephant. Fighting the thought doesn't work, so why do it?

...

"Accept the things you cannot change, change the things you can, and have the wisdom to know the difference." A rather obvious axiom of mindfulness is that it's too late to change the present. So you might as well accept it.*

*unless you have a time-turner, in which case subtract six hours.

While there are a number of strategies for going from addiction to abstinence (aka "quitting") it appears to be much more complicated to go from addiction to periodic, non-compulsive use. This is of huge importance for addictions to things like food and internet, that one can't give up entirely. Or chocolate, where the first bite has a huge actual positive coefficient in my utility function, but the marginal benefit drops steeper than my present ability to stop eating it. So, my post is an attempt to find a way to transform the addiction so it's no longer harmful, without ceasing chocolate consumption altogether.

(While working on the post on the LW Study Hall, I had some people review drafts of the blog post, and one suggested posting it to LW. Initially we thought it would make sense to actually cross-post it, but I felt that didn't make sense for this post which is more personal and contains lots of references to earlier blog posts. I'm curious to know if anyone has an opinion on whether or not that makes sense. Also, I intend to do some full cross-posts in the future!)