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Upvote, valuable insight. And meta thinking is switching from Tiger style to Crane style as the situation warrants. Good idea to have a set of modules ready to go.
Is there a situation where it would be strategic to live all your life, or large areas of your life in non-agency?
Maybe a life in a dictatorship is like this. Be too agenty for someone to notice, and they may decide you are a potential risk, and your genes and memes get eliminated.
Later, even if the dictatorship is gone, the habits and the culture remain.
Is there a way to compare average citizens' agency in different nations, and correlate that with their history?
I guess signalling non-agency is tactical level; protective camouflage, poker bluffing etc. Agenty thinking as above is essentially strategic, winning with moves that are creative, devious, hard to predict or counter, going meta, gaming the system. Pretending to be a loyal citizen of Oceania is a good tactic while you covertly work towards other goals.
For cultural agency, the Wikipedia page on locus of control's one place to start. And there was the Power Distance Index in Gladwell's Outliers.
In response to
August 2013 Media Thread
Fiction Books Thread
Just finished reading K.J. Parker's Devices and Desires. What struck me at first was "Eh, no, medieval people didn't think like that," but after mentally shifting gears to thinking of it as an author tract like HPMOR, with modern characters in a quasi-historical setting, it was much more enjoyable.
In response to
To what degree do you model people as agents?
Schelling's Strategy of Conflict says that in some cases, advertising non-agency can be useful, something like "If you cross this threshold, that will trigger punitive retaliation, regardless of cost-benefit, I have no choice in the matter."
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Hello again. Used to post as "ZoneSeek" but switched to my real name. I'm from the science/science fiction/atheist/traditional rationality node, got linked to LW years ago through Kaj Sotala back in the Livejournal days. I have high confidence that I am the only LessWronger in the Philippines.
In response to
Can we make Drake-like Fermi estimates of expected distance to the next planet with primitive, sentient or self-improving life?
Upvote. The Drake Equation and SETI seem at least as relevant as, say, Pascal's Mugging. GIGO, sure, but a standard dismissal in statistics is to say there's not enough data, more research needed. Isn't this where Bayes is supposed to win over frequentism, when it comes to imperfect or incomplete information?
Babyeater FAI would be very different, but could still give us big hints on how to make human FAI. It's the standard science process, instead of reinventing the wheel, stand on the shoulders of giants and learn what other smart people who've come before have figured out.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)
Yo. I've been around a couple years, posted a few times as "ZoneSeek," re-registered this year under my real name as part of a Radical Honesty thing.
In response to
The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics
Logorrhea is a remarkably good short story anthology, besides The Cambist and Lord Iron, Crossing the Seven is of literary and conceptual interest:
"Our laws here are simple and just. You will only swear to do no harm while you stay within Sucusa, and you are free here as long as you wish."
That sounded simple enough. But I had seen too much already. "What do you define as harm, that I should avoid, Majesty?"
The queen laughed. "Well spoken, messenger. The obvious sorts of things."
"I will swear willingly not to lift my hand against anyone in your city. But beyond that... if I were to tell the children of your city the strange truths about Fagutal and Oppius, would that be harm? What if I described the hard choice I made when the scholar fell down the mountain? Is that harm? Is it harm to seek the bed of a woman, or a man here? At what age or time of life may they give consent, and is that consent sufficient in the eyes of your law?"
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Done. Fairly high confidence that I'm still the lone Filipino LessWronger.