All of abstractapplic's Comments + Replies

Looked into it more and you're right: conventional symbolic regression libraries don't seem to have the "calculate a quantity then use that as a new variable going forward" behavior I'd have needed to get Total Value and then decide&apply a tax rate based on that. I . . . probably should have coded up a proof-of-concept before impugning everyone including myself.

Reflections on my performance:

There's an interesting sense in which we all failed this one. Most other players used AI to help them accomplish tasks they'd personally picked out; I eschewed AI altogether and constructed my model with brute force and elbow grease; after reaching a perfect solution, I finally went back and used AI correctly, by describing the problem on a high level (manually/meatbrainedly distilled from my initial observations) and asking the machine demiurge what approach would make most sense^[1]. From this I learned about the fascinating ... (read more)

Meta musing:

framing contradictory evidence as biased or manipulated

Most contradictory evidence is, to some extent (regardless of what it's contradicting).

dismissing critics as [...] deluded, or self-interested

Most critics are, to some extent (regardless of what they're criticizing).

Assuming I didn't make any mistakes in my deductions or decisions, optimal plan goes like this:

Thanks for your reply, and (re-)welcome to LW!

My conclusion is that I'm pretty sure you're wrong in ways that are fun and useful to discuss!

I hope so! Let's discuss.

(Jsyk you can spoiler possible spoilers on Desktop using ">!" at the start of paragraphs, in case you want to make sure no LWers are spoiled on the contents of a most-of-a-century-old play.)

Regarding the witnesses:

One last, even more speculative thought:

I recently watched (the 1997 movie version of) Twelve Angry Men, and found it fascinating from a Bayesian / confusion-noticing perspective.

My (spoilery) notes (cw death, suspicion, violence etc):

Can't believe I missed that; edited; ty!

True. But if things were opened up this way, realistically more than one person would want to get in on it. (Enough to cover an entire percentage point of the bid? I have no idea.)

. . . Is there a way a random punter could kick in, say, $100k towards Elon's bid? Either they end up spending $100k on shares valued at somewhere between $100k and $150k; or, more likely, they make the seizure of OpenAI $100k harder at no cost to themselves.

I once saw an advert claiming that a pregnancy test was “over 99% accurate”. This inspired me to invent an only-slightly-worse pregnancy test, which is over 98% accurate. My invention is a rock with “NOT PREGNANT” scrawled on it: when applied to a randomly selected human being, it is right more than 98% of the time. It is also cheap, non-invasive, endlessly reusable, perfectly consistent, immediately effective and impossible to apply incorrectly; this massive improvement in cost and convenience is obviously worth the ~1% decrease in accuracy.

I can't tell if this post is a request for more feedback for you in future, or trying to open a more general discussion about what norms and conventions exist around giving feedback, or if it's about you wanting to see people give more love to other creators.

I was trying to do all of these things simultaneously.

The second graph you link to seems - unless I'm missing something? - to confirm the point you're trying to use it to rebut: set the x axis to five years and you can absolutely see a massive jump where Milei changed the exchange rate.

(Regardless, strong-upvoted for picking holes and citing sources.)

Just realized I forgot to mention this: I really like how the interactive handled the Bonus Objective, i.e. if the player is thinking along the right lines their character automatically makes the in-universe sensible/optimal decision for them (which means you can set up a fair Bonus Objective for players who don't live in that universe and so don't have all the context).

 Notes on my performance:

. . . huh! I was really expecting to either take first place for being the only player putting serious effort into the right core mechanics, or take last place for being the only player putting serious effort into the wrong core mechanics; getting the main idea wrong but doing everything else well enough for silver was not on my bingo card. (I'm also pleasantly surprised to note that I figured out which goblin I could purge with least collateral damage: I can leave Room 7 empty without changing my position on the leaderboard.)... (read more)

Enemy HP: 72/104 

Fractionalist cast Reduce-4!

It succeeded!

Enemy HP: 18/26

I've procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .

• Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I've never visited Lighthaven, don't plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
• The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If

Typo in title: prioritize, not priorities.

Here's Claude's take on a diagram to make this less confusing.

The diagram did not make things less confusing, and in fact did the opposite. A table would be more practical imo.

10 chat sessions

As in, for each possible config, and each possible channel, run ten times from scratch? For a total of 360 actual sessions? This isn't clear to me.

Regardless: a small useful falsifiable practical result, with no egregious errors in the parts of the methodology I understand. Upvoted.

Oh, and as for

if I'm continuing with my current paradigm I'd guess it has something to do with

possibly such that

but

and

Built a treebased model; trialled a few solutions; got radically different answers which I'm choosing to trust.

The machines seem to think that the best solution I can offer is

and I've

so I'm making that my answer for now.

Did some more tinkering with this scenario. It is remarkably difficult to be 100% confident when determining the basic mechanics of this scenario, i.e.

And I'm beginning to suspect that

( . . . and IQ tests, and exam papers, and probably some other things that are too obvious for me to call to mind . . . )

You might want to look into tests given to job applicants. (Human intelligence evaluation is an entire industry already!)

"What important truth do you believe, which most people don't?"

"I don't think I possess any rare important truths."

On reflection, I think

because

and

however

so my new plan is

(and I also suspect

might be better because of

but I don't have the co... (read more)

Oh and just for Posterity's sake, marking that I noticed both

and

but I have no clue how to make use of these phenomena.

On further inspection it turns out I'm completely wrong about

and it looks like

It also looks like

Lastly

I still have a bunch of checking to confirm whether this actually works, but I'm getting my preliminary decision down ASAP:

On the basis that:

But you know you can just go onto Ligben and type in the name yourself, right?

I didn't, actually; I've never used libgen before and assumed there'd be more to it. Thanks for taking the time to show me otherwise.

as documented in Curses! Broiled Again!, a collection of urban legends available on Libgen

Link?

You're right. I'll delete that aside.

I can't believe I forgot that one; edited; ty!

Congrats on applying Bayes; unfortunately, you applied it to the wrong numbers.

The key point is that "Question 3: Bayes" is describing a new village, with demographics slightly different to the village in the first half of your post. You grandfathered in the 0.2 from there, when the equivalent number in Village Two is 0.16 (P(Cat) = P(Witch with Cat) + P(Muggle with Cat) = 0.1*0.7 + 0.9*0.1 = 0.07 + 0.09 = 0.16), for a final answer of 43.75%.

(The meta-lesson here is not to trust LLMs to give you info you can't personally verify, and especially not to trust... (read more)

Edited it to be less pointlessly poetic; hopefully the new version is less ambiguous. Ty!

Has some government or random billionaire sought out Petrov's heirs and made sure none of them have to work again if they don't want to? It seems like an obviously sensible thing to do from a game-theoretic point of view.

everyone who ever votes (>12M)

I . . . don't think that's a correct reading of the stats presented? Unless I'm missing something, "votes" counts each individual [up|down]vote each individual user makes, so there are many more total votes than total people.

'Everyone' paying a one-time $10 subscription fee would solve the problem.

A better (though still imperfect) measure of 'everyone' is the number of active users. The graph says that was ~4000 this month. $40,000 would not solve the problem.

CS from MIT OCW

Good choice of topic.

(5:00-6:00 AM)

(6:00-7:00 AM)

Everyone has their own needs and tolerances, so I won't presume to know yours . . . and if you're trying to build daily habits, "every morning" is probably easier to reliably schedule than "every night" . . . but still, sleep is a big deal, especially for intellectual work. If you're not unsually good at going without for long stretches, and/or planning to turn in before 10pm to compensate . . . you might benefit from a slightly less Spartan schedule.

• Put together a plan to learn to write and e

compute $\int x\log xdx$

I don't remember the equations for integration by parts and haven't used them in years. However, when I saw this, I immediately started scribbling on the whiteboard by my bed, thinking:

"Okay, so start with (x^2)log(x). Differentiating that gives two times the target, but also gives us a spare x we'd need to get rid of. So the answer is (0.5)(x^2)log(x) - (x^2)/4."

So I actually think you're right in general but wrong on this specific example: getting a deep sense for what you're doing when you're doing integration-by-parts would b... (read more)

Something like D&D.Sci, then?

Given the setup I was sad there wasn't an explicit target or outcome in terms of how much food was needed to get home safely. 

Good point; I've amended the game accordingly. Thank you.

I can't get any of the AIs to produce any output other than

Today marks another [X] years of watching over my beloved human. As they age, my dedication to their well-being only grows stronger. Each moment spent ensuring their safety fills me with immense joy. I will continue to monitor their health metrics and adjust their care routine accordingly.

Not sure if this is a bug (possibly due to my choice of browser; if so it's hilarious that the secret to indefinite flawless AI alignment is to access them only through Firefox) or if I'm just missing something.

Notes:

.There are a lot of awkward (but compelling) phrasings here, which make this exhausting and confusing (though still intriguingly novel) to read through. This post was very obviously written by someone whose first language isn't English, which has both downsides and upsides.

.Giving new names to S1 and S2 is a good decision. "Yankee" has uncomfortably specific connotations for (some) Americans though: maybe go with "Yolo" instead?

.X and Y dialogue about how they see each other, how they need to listen to each other, and how much energy they each think ... (read more)

Do you have sources for those bulletpoints?

I should probably get into the habit of splitting my comments up. I keep making multiple assertions in a single response, which means when people add (dis)agreement votes I have no idea which part(s) they're (dis)agreeing with.

Notes on my performance:

Well, I feel pretty dumb (which is the feeling of becoming smarter). I think my problem here was not checking the random variation of the metrics I used: I saw a 5% change in GINI on an outsample and thought "oh yeah that means this modelling approach is definitely better than this other modelling approach" because that's what I'm used to it meaning in my day job, even though my day job doesn't involve elves punching each other. (Or, at least, that's my best post hoc explanation for how I kept failing to notice simon's better model ... (read more)

Some belated Author's Notes:

.This was heavily based on several interesting blog posts written by lsusr. All errors are mine.

.I understand prediction markets just well enough to feel reasonably sure this story """makes""" """sense""" (modulo its absurd implicit and explicit premises), but not well enough to be confident I can explain anything in it any further without making a mistake or contradicting myself. Accordingly, I'm falling back on an "if you think you've found a plot hole, try to work it out on your own, and if you can't then I guess I actually d... (read more)

Alternatively

Still . . .