As I understand it, Hofstadter's advocacy of cooperation was limited to games with some sense of source-code sharing. Basically, both agents were able to assume their co-players had an identical method of deciding on the optimal move, and that that method was optimal. That assumption allows a rather bizarre little proof that cooperation is the result said method arrives at.

And think about it, how could a mathematician actually advocate cooperation in pure, zero knowledge vanilla PD? That just doesn't make any sense as a model of an intelligent human being's opinions.

Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much. Voters here absolutely respond to social cues (albeit unusual ones from the perspective of the wider culture) and to local status; the vote record on a post is not a totally dispassionate estimate of its quality.

That said, pure social awkwardness might limit a post's potential upvotes, but it usually isn't enough to get a post downvoted: that takes obvious bias, factual error, egregiously bad English, a perception of bad faith, or -- exceptionally -- attracting the ire of a serial downvoter. The truly clueless may risk pattern-matching to "bad faith", but that's fairly rare; the rest are more or less orthogonal to social skills.

I have a self-image of having badly sub-par social skills, and have a fair amount of evidence to back up that image. On the other hand, I note that I currently have 95% positive karma. If I lacked the capability to avoid alienating people, I would expect much more negative karma.

I am unsure whether I need to update my self-model.

Karma points count as "last 30 days karma" if they are votes on a post you made within the past month. If someone upvotes/downvotes/removes a previously made upvote/removes a previously made downvote from an older comment, you get/lose karma, but not 30 day karma. I assume that is what happened here.

I think you want to separate out "bad" from change.Things sometimes break, this happens when outside forces cause changes to it and the world it acts in. We call a thing fragile when most changes are bad from the perspective of the thing. EG ice is fragile because changes in temperature, motion, etc. will cause it to break. Anti-fragility is when the thing is designed such that the biggest possible changes do not break it.

Can you explain the concept of antifragility using only 1000 most common English words?

I just played around with Memrise, and it does indeed look perfect for my audience. I had begun my SRS search with gwern's excellent exploration of the topic, where Memrise does not appear. Thank you so much!

I need some advice on spaced repetition software.

I teach high school English to underclassmen who skew towards "totally unmotivated". I have been using spaced repetition principles for years (using games, puzzles, and other spaced reviews) to help with vocabulary and terminology. These do effectively engage many of the poorly motivated.

But recently, I feel like smartphones have become ubiquitous enough among students that I'm looking for software I could use as a quasi-official SRS companion app with my students. I think many of them would use it, but only if they experience very minimal frustration setting it up and running it. My wishlist:

(1) Free app on both Android and iPhone (I'd say it's about 50/50 with my students) (2) Companion web app with cloud sync to mobile apps. (3) Very easy to use and update with new cards regularly. I would like to be able to post weekly deck additions on my teacher web page that students can add to their deck.

Anki, which I use for my personal learning, seems to come closest -- but the $25 cost of the iPhone app is a problem, and I worry that using the web app on the iPhone be too much of a hassle. I also worry that the "add external cards to your deck" procedure is a bit too hairy as well.

Has anyone seen anything that comes closer to my needs than Anki? Thanks!

I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven't seen it yet, it lives up to its reputation.

This bitcoin conversation has run for almost a week now, and given the site I'd expect the level of reasoning to be quite high, yet when I hit "^Ftax" or "^Fgovern" or "^Fpolitic" almost nothing shows up, which causes me a measure of confusion, because these (much more than "magnitudes") are key nodes in my causal reasoning about the future value of bitcoins.

From my perspective, the plausible socio-political implications of bitcoin are large enough, and different enough from what I see commonly discussed, that it causes me to question the quality of my own thinking and seek education.

In 1789 Benajmin Franklin wrote a letter wherein he said:

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

It could be that I'm wrong in my reasoning, but it appears to me that bitcoin allows tax evasion and black markets to function on such a breathtaking scale that if bitcoin persists and expands into common use then I anticipate, like tomatoes in winter, the withering of formal governmental power in its current form (based as it is on tax collection and the ability to regulate the market via indirect oversight) and perhaps even the withering of the public good of reasonably just protection services provided by democratically elected law makers.

Sharply put, it seems moderately plausible to me that either extant governments smash the bitcoin infrastructure, or bitcoin financially strangles modern nation states.

In more detail: If bitcoin turns out to be ineradicable so long as people have access to the untamed Internet (and this seems like an open but fundamentally empirically determinable question) it suggests to me that human communities may collectively face a choice between cutting their wires and jamming their airwaves or else lose the ability to form reasonable transparent organizations with elected officials who manage the local violence monopoly by paying law enforcers better wages than are available to criminals.

Or perhaps I'm underestimating the extent of the revamping that would be necessary? Still, it is hard to see how the IRS, SEC, ATF, or Fed could maintain their status quo operations if bitcoins become the de facto world currency. Traffic in drugs and slaves are relatively limited now, but I'm not sure it would stay so in a bitcoin dominated economy. Ransom payments become significantly more feasible with bitcoin, and the kidnapping market seems likely to grow if bitcoins persist.

Not that payment for protection services would completely disappear forever... Presumably we would switch to tax collectors (either hired by the existing but revamped governments or perhaps the henchmen of whatever violence monopolies replace them) who force people to transfer digital cash in amounts assessed based on visible or statistically inferrable indicators of wealth, or be jailed. Tax evasion in such a world seems likely to take the form of pretending to be poor, which seems to have weird implications for the personal status of the super rich? Facebook-based estimates of taxes owed would be amusing, but less ironic forms of surveillance could work as well. If the super rich were the ones hiring the tax collectors, that could reduce the number of sociologically confusing discrepancies, but it starts sounding somewhat feudal...

The Treasury Department must have people thinking about this? Or maybe the private individuals composing the Treasury Department have non-trivial personal stakes in bitcoin and no civic virtue? Or maybe the problem is international in scope and there's an element of realpolitik where some nation states expect to weather the "bitcoin winter" better than others? Or maybe... I don't know... There are a lot of things that could be going on...

In this family of scenarios, it seems like there would be large changes to many parts of the economy, many of which I expect would take a lot of people, including me, by surprise. Maybe drone-based mass surveillance and law enforcement could patch the gaps by enforcing laws so thoroughly at the physical layer than the digital layer can remain anarchic for a while longer? It seems like the kind of "everything is changing, faster and faster" thing that I might expect to be sprung on people in the lead up to various (somewhat disturbing) versions of an Kurzweil-style "smooth singularity"... Kurzweil did predict runaway deflation after all, and 2014 is the sort of year you'd read about something like this happening in a Stross novel.

So, anyway...

I see people trading in bitcoins. I don't see the government moving to destroy the bit coin markets, or talking about the bitcoin market as though bitcoins were a social scourge that fundamentally disrupts the business model of status quo governments. But I also I don't see people preparing for a profound restructuring of the political economy and everything effected by the current political economy. Thus, I am confused. I don't see other people even talking about these sorts of implications, as though they are important open questions. Thus, I am doubly confused.

My best guess as to my confusion's cause is twofold. I probably lack an adequate understanding of the big picture pragmatics of political economy, also I suspect that the really smart money in the bitcoin market is staying mostly silent so as to harvest money more efficiently. For myself, the political/moral dimension of the bitcoin market has frightened me away from it thus far... whether there is a "bitcoin winter" or a successful smashing of the bitcoin infrastructure, both outcomes seem to suggest that personal and/or political action might be prudent.

The value of information seems high. If anyone could respond here or via PM to help correct my confusion, I would very much appreciate the education!