All of James Stephen Brown's Comments + Replies

Thanks for your recommendations, I look forward to reading them all.

I'm aligned with your thinking about the growth of positive-sum games (it's the premise of the site where my posts originate). I was interested that you believe that zero-sum games will return "due to the laws of physics". What do you think is going to change about physics to reverse the trend towards positive-sum games? We live in a planet with surplus free energy (from the sun, which makes positive-sum systems from life to civilisation possible), so I'm not sure why we would expect (whil... (read more)

2Noosphere89
Kind of. More specifically, assuming we can't cheat and circumvent the problem of the laws of thermodynamics/speed of light (which I put 50% probability on at this point, I have been convinced by Adam Brown that this might be cheatable in the far future), then at a global scale, energy, which is the foundation of all utility, is conserved globally, meaning that a global scale, everything must be a 0-sum game, because if it wasn't, you could use this as a way to break the first law of thermodynamics. This also means that the engine of progress which made basically everything positive sum vanishes, and while I expect more positive sum games than the pre-industrial times, due to being able to cooperate better, the universally positive-sum era of the last few centuries would have to end. Adam Brown on changing the laws of physics below: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/adam-brown

I personally love the idea of having a highly rational partner to bounce ideas off, and I think LLMs have high utility in this regard, I use them to challenge my knowledge and fill in gaps, unweave confusion, check my biases.

However, what I've heard about how others are using chat, and how I've seen kids use it, is much more as a cognitive off-loader, which has large consequences for learning, because "cognitive load" is how we learn. I've heard many adults say "It's a great way to get a piece of writing going", or "to make something more concise", these a... (read more)

Developing an idea about complexity and emergence which looks at the stages of an emergent cycle—that being how a substrate gives rise to an emergent phenomenon, which reaches equilibrium providing the substrate for a the next phenomenon. The way I see it, it goes something like this:

quantum randomness > is predictable at a certain scale > reaches equilibrium > becomes base + randomness (as a byproduct)

or this

substrate + free energy > patterns emerge (disturbances in the uniformity of the free energy) > equilibrium reached > substrate + f... (read more)

That (deliberate grieving) was also an interesting read, yes, exactly.

I see, I think you're right not to change it—it's just provocative enough to be catchy.

Wow, that was quick. I mean, rather than scaffolding work that seems unproductive but is actually necessary, most creative time (for me at least) is wasted in resisting change (my number 3 point was about trying changes even if you don't immediately agree with them).

6Raemon
Ah gotcha. Yeah, this is why Deliberate Grieving is a core rationalist skill.

Thanks for this, nice writing.

The idea of 'thinking it faster' is provocative, because it seems to be over-optimising for speed rather than other values, where as the way you're implementing it is by generating more meaningful or efficient decisions which are underpinned by a meta-analysis of your process—which is actually about increasing the quality of your decision-making.

I think it's worthwhile seeing where we're wasting time. But often I find wasted time isn't what you'd expect it to be. As someone who also works in the creative industry, criticism is... (read more)

7Raemon
I considered changing it to "Think it Sooner", which nudges you a bit away from "try to think frenetically fast" and towards "just learn to steer towards the most efficient parts of your thought process, avoid wasted motion, and use more effective metastrategies." "Think It Sooner" feels noticeably harder to say so I decided to stick with the original (although I streamlined the phrasing from "Think That Thought faster" a bit so it rolled off the tongue)
3Raemon
I'm not sure I understood this point, could you say more?

Thanks Hastings,

I think at that time you could reason much better if you could recognize that the separation between left and right was not natural.

I think you're saying it was easier in the past to see unorthodox or contradictory views within parties because the wings were more clearly delineated. I'd agree, it was a divided time, but a less chaotic divided time.

The effective left right split is mono-factor: you are right exactly in proportion to your personal loyalty to one Donald J. Trump

Absolutely, it's also bizarre regarding his tariff policy which is... (read more)

Thanks Mr Frege for clarifying your points. As I have mentioned (in other comments) I've conceded that I probably should have contextualised my own abandonment of both-sidesism before taking a partisan approach that makes my post appear more biased than it actually is, and probably colours the way it is read.

advocating that we should not consider the other side of the story

Okay, I definitely should have clarified that this is not my intention at all. Both-sidesism, as I'm referring to it, is creating a false equivalence between two issues and giving them e... (read more)

Hi notfnofn, thanks again for the well considered comment, and for responding to my edited response. I think you've made good points which have revealed clarifications I could have made within the post.

Okay Trump is president now. Hoping that things go well regardless.

Me too. And we'll see if the right-wing and online media's concern that Harris is an equal threat to democracy over the next couple of months. Because if she is an equal threat we shouldn't expect to see a peaceful transfer of power, like when Trump lost. Although, she has already graciously ... (read more)

This was a fascinating, original idea as usual. I loved the notion of a brilliant, condescending sort of robot capable of doing a task perfectly who chooses (in order to demonstrate its own artistry) to predict and act out how we would get it wrong.

It did make me wonder though, whether when we reframe something like this for GPTs it's also important to apply the reframing to our own human intelligence to determine if the claim is distinct; in this case asking the question "are we imitators, simulators or predictors?". It might be possible to make the case ... (read more)

Hi Seth,

I share your concern that AGI comes with the potential for a unilateral first strike capability that, at present, no nuclear power has (which is vital to the maintenance of MAD), though I think, in game theoretical terms, this becomes more difficult the more self-interested (in survival) players there are. Like in open-source software, there is a level of protection against malicious code because bad players are outnumbered, even if they try to hide their code, there are many others who can find it. But I appreciate that 100s of coders finding mali... (read more)

3Seth Herd
We're mostly in agreement here. If you're willing to live with universal surveillance, hostile RSI attempts might be prevented indefinitely. In my scenario, we've got aligned AGI - or at least AGI aligned to follow instructions. If that didn't work, we're already dead. So the AGI is going to follow its human's orders unless something goes very wrong as it self-improves. It will be working to maintain its alignment as it self-improves, because preserving a goal is implied by instrumentally pursuing a goal (I'm guessing here at where we might not be thinking of things the same way). If I thought ordering an AGI to self-improve was suicidal, I'd be relieved. Alternately, if someone actually pulled off full value alignment, that AGI will take over without a care for international law or the wishes of its creator - and that takeover would be for the good of humanity as a whole. This is the win scenario people seem to have considered most often, or at least from the earliest alignment work. I now find this unlikely because I think Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI - following instructions given by a single person is much easier to define and more robust to errors than defining or defining-how-to-deduce the values of all humanity. And even if it wasn't, the sorts of people who will have or seize control of AGI projects will prefer it to follow their values. So I find full value alignment for our first AGI(s) highly unlikely, while successful instruction-following seems pretty likely on our current trajectory. Again, I'm guessing at where our perspectives on whether someone could expect themselves and a few loved ones to survive a takeover attempt by ordering their AGI to hide, self-improve, build exponentially, and take over even at bloody cost. If the thing is aligned as an AGIi, it should be competent enough to maintain that alignment as it self improves. If I've missed the point of differing perspectives, I apologize.
4Dakara
James, thank you for a well-written comment. It was a pleasure to read. Looking forward to Seth's response. Genuinely interested in hearing his thoughts.

Sorry, you’re right, I did misread that—I've edited my response, correcting for my mistake.

1notfnofn
Okay Trump is president now. Hoping that things go well regardless. The reason for this is the same reason democrats kept harping an abortion - it's something the majority of the country agreed with them on, and so they could use it to their advantage. It's not necessarily that it was the worst issue, but the easiest target. I'm a bit concerned that you referred to cancel culture as "accountability culture", but I don't want to get distracted by that here. What I was hoping to get into is that people on the right have done it too when they had power, will probably do so now, and the key difference is that their leader will likely explicitly support it (instead of just being silent about it). Yes, but a more careful "apples to apples" analysis is necessary here. Are you comparing the opinions of US politicians on the left with US politicians on the right? Or are you comparing them with randos on the right? If you want to convince people on the right instead of just generating applause on the left, you probably need to do this more carefully. How seriously have you investigated the claim that "Harris's plan is based on what many top economists think is best" and not "Economists find Harris' plan overall better than Trump's, despite its many weaknesses"?  Have you controlled for the likelihood that they have other reasons to prefer Kamala to Trump?

Thanks for your comment, the post itself is meant to challenge the reader to question what is really bias, and what is actually an even-handed view with apparent bias, due to the shifted centre. But I certainly take your point, beginning in a clearly partisan manner might not have been the best approach before putting it in context.

I do think there are defences that can be made of the points you raise.

You took one of the tamest aspects of the radical left here

I agree I have taken a tame aspect of the radical left, because there are only tame aspects availa... (read more)

-1notfnofn
I think you misread my post; I didn't mention Kamala Harris' rightful nomination as an opinion of the far left (the far left doesn't even like her). Instead I mentioned something that I can no longer find evidence for and might actually be wrong (that the far left supports people being arrested for far-right opinions held online). I'd like to update this to people on the far left supporting people who have conservative opinions being exposed and fired. I brought up the issue with Kamala specifically in response to your pair of paragraphs describing each candidate. I don't want to engage with the rest right now because, as I said, I don't want Trump elected and don't want to write anything that would increase the chance of that occurring. I might reply in a few days.

I agree, it seems as though the incentives aren't aligned that way, so it ends up incumbent upon the audience to distill nuance out of binary messaging, and to recognise the value of those who do present unique perspectives.

This made me think about how this will come about, whether we we have multiple discrete systems for different functions; language, image recognition, physical balance, executive functions etc working interdependently, communicating through compressed-bandwidth conduits, or whether at some point we can/need-to literally chuck all the raw data from all the systems into one learning system, and let that sort it out (likely creating its own virtual semi-independent systems).

2Seth Herd
Right. That remains to be seen. Efforts are progressing in both directions, and either one could work.

The nuclear MAD standoff with nonproliferation agreements is fairly similar to the scenario I've described.  We've survived that so far- but with only nine participants to date.

I wonder if there's a clue in this. When you say "only" nine participants it suggests that more would introduce more risk, but that's not what we've seen with MAD. The greater the number becomes, the bigger the deterrent gets. If, for a minute we forgo alliances, there is a natural alliance of "everyone else" at play when it comes to an aggressor. Military aggression is, after ... (read more)

4Seth Herd
That's a good point that the nuclear detente might become stronger with more actors, because the certainty of mutual destruction goes up with more parties that might start shooting if you do. I don't think the coalition and treaties for counter-aggression are important with nukes; anyone can destroy everyone, they're just guaranteed to be mostly destroyed in response. The numbers don't matter much. And I think they'll matter even less with AGI than nukes - without the guarantee of mutually assured destruction, since AGI might allow for modes of attack that are more subtle. Re-introducing mutually assured destruction could actually be a workable strategy. I haven't thought of this before, so thanks for pushing my thoughts in that direction. I fully agree that non-iterated prisoner's dilemmas don't exist in the world as we know it now. And it's not a perfect fit for the scenario I'm describing- but it's frighteningly close. I use the term because it invokes the right intuitions among LWers, and it's not far off for the particular scenario I'm describing. That's because, unlike the nuclear standoff or any other historical scenario, the people in charge of powerful AGI could be reasonably certain they'd survive and prosper if they're the first to "defect". I'm pretty conscious of the benefits of cooperation in our modern world; they are huge. That type of nonzero sum game is the basis of the world we now experience. I'm worried that changes with RSI-capable AGI. My point is that AGI will not need cooperation once it passes a certain level of capability. AGI capable of fully autonomous recursive self-improvement and exponential production (factories that build new factories and other stuff) doesn't need allies because it can become arbitrarily smart and materially effective on its own. A human in charge of this force would be tempted to use it. (Such an AGI would still benefit from cooperation on the margin, but it would be vastly less dependent on it than humans a

Good point, I guess all-sidesism would be more desirable, this would take the form of panels representing different experts, opinions or demographics. Some issues, like US politics do end up necessarily polarised though, given there are only two options, even if you begin with a panel—they did start with an anti-vax candidate too with RFK Jr (with the Ds and even the Rs being arguably pro-vax), but political expediency results in his being subsumed into the binary.

3AnthonyC
General elections necessarily do. Coverage of issues does not. Assignment of opinions in the press can be to people and ideologies without pretending everyone in a party shares or should share identical views.

Thanks Seth, yes, I think we're pretty aligned on this topic. Which gives me some more confidence, given you actually have relevant education and experience in this area.

I'm not sure it's fully satisfying. I'm afraid someone who's really bothered by determinism and their lack of "free will" wouldn't find this comforting at all

I absolutely agree, which is why I followed this section up with the caveat

Now, I'll admit this is not very satisfying, in terms of understanding how our intuitions relate to physical reality

The reason for including this was because i... (read more)

This seems to be discounting the consequentialist value of short term pleasure seeking. Doing something because you enjoy the process has immediate positive consequences. Doing something because it is enriching for your life has both positive short term and long term consequences.

To discount short term pleasures as hedonism (as some might) is to miss the point of consequentialism (well of Utilitarianism at least), which is to increase well-being (which can be either short or long term). Well-being can only be measured (ultimately) in terms of pleasure and pain.

Though I agree consequentialism is necessarily incomplete as we don't have perfect predictive powers.

Thanks Cubefox, very interesting ideas, I like the idea of generalising a coalition so that it can be treated as a player, that seems to make a lot of practical sense, I'll look into Jeffrey to try and get my head around that. 

5cubefox
If you want to look into Jeffrey, his utility theory is in his book "The Logic of Decision", second/1983 edition, sections 4.4 and 5.5 to 5.9. It's less than 10 pages overall, the rest isn't really necessary.

Nice observation. I'm certainly not meaning to advocate for Shapley value—this was largely an attempt to adjust my negative attitude about Shapley value's flaws, and the attempt was not very successful, but I thought it would be useful to others struggling to understand it, as I was.

I can imagine a way to address the probability issue you raise could be to create probabilistic value entries, where, let's say we add the participants in the ratio they exist in reality, so pretending there are twice as many nurses as doctors, you could fill out values for a 3... (read more)

5cubefox
Adding such virtual players is an interesting idea. I guess it should be possible to properly add probability weighting, without virtual players, once one has fully understood the reason for Shapley's permutation method of weighting. (Which I have not.) Another thing I noticed: It seems one can generalize a "coalition" of "players" as a conjunction of propositions, where the propositions of the players not participating in the coalition are negated. So for players/propositions A, B, C, the coalition {A, C} would correspond to the proposition A∧¬B∧C. The Shapley value of a player would simply be the value of a proposition, like A. Since coalitions are just propositions as well, this has the (intuitive?) consequence that coalitions can also be players. Furthermore, instead of talking about "values" one could talk about "utility", as in expected utility theory. There is actually a formalization of utility theory, by Richard Jeffrey, which applies to a Boolean algebra of propositions (or "events", as they are called in probability theory). So theoretically it should be possible to determine which restrictions placed on a Jeffrey utility function are equivalent to Shapley's formula. Which could, presumably, aid understanding the assumptions behind it, and help with things like integrating probabilities into the Shapley formalism, since those are already integrated into Jeffrey's theory. Of course this would probably be a lot of work...

Thanks Austin, yes—the weeks I've spent trying to really understand why Shapley uses such a complicated method to calculate the possible coalitions, has left me feeling that it is actually prohibitively cumbersome for most applications. It has been popular in machine learning algorithms, but faces the problem that it is computationally expensive.

I created a comparison calculator to show Shapley next to my own method that simply weights by dividing all the explicit marginal values by the total of all the explicit marginal values and multiplying that by the ... (read more)

What I'm meaning to say is that if you naively believe that "you" (as in someone's sense of self—a result of their genes, experiences and reflections) have no control over yourself, you might feel a lot more relaxed about past mistakes, or future ones since you have a ready excuse, resulting in lazy decision-making (decision-making involving less effort), of course you'll probably still satisfy the bare necessities for survival—although some of the early existentialists sound like they would barely bother with this.

Of course those same existentialists did write long, ground-breaking books that no doubt required significant cognitive effort, so "shrugs".

Part of the answer is to note that mixtures of indeterminism and determinism are possible, so that libertarian free will is not just pure randomness, where any action is equally likely.

This is really interesting, because I agree with this, but also agree with what Seth's saying. I think this disagreement might actually be largely a semantic one. As such, I'm going to (try to) avoid using the terms 'libertarian' or 'compatibilist' free will. First of all I agree with the use of "indeterminism" to mean non-uniform randomness. I agree that there is a way that... (read more)

I am yet to find a statement by Popper that I disagree with.

I think Seth is not so much contradicting you here but using a deterministic definition of "self" as that which we are referring to as a particular categorisation of the deterministic process, the one experienced as "making decisions", and importantly "deliberating over decisions". Whether we are determined or not, the effort one puts into their choices is not wasted, it is data-processing that produces better outcomes in general.

One might be determined to throw in the towel on cognitive effort if they were to take a particular interpretation of determinis... (read more)

1andrewtaneglen
Cognitive effort is inevitable. It would take a special kind of 'person who fails the psychopath test', somehow lacking urges/feelings, to be able to switch off completely and fade into nothingness.
5Seth Herd
Precisely what I meant, good catch on the effort bit.

Very well said, I have expressed this exact sentiment more clumsily many times. I concur.

In the absence of AI we can already pass through this phase of realisation/acceptance (the nausea of the realisation of being an object)


Clearly—Sartre was going through it in the early 20th century. I think, while I've never had much trouble with squaring my existence with materialism, I do feel like this period is giving me somewhat of a relapse, and as you say, this is not really within my control.

This feels like the intersection of Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Exactly, I think I was having a continental moment, please do forgive me, we can now ret... (read more)

4andrewtaneglen
Continental moments are great. I feel like that's the end game once we transcend science and analysis.

Well that is (commendably) the most positive interpretation of the pet hypothesis I've heard. When we think about it, we're really half way there already. By many measures, many of us are living in what anyone in the past would call Utopia, and are very much cared for by many over-arching systems, the market, the government, the internet. I've also never been one to complain "Oh, but what will I do with all my spare time if I don't have to work?"

Perhaps my daughter will have time to reach goals she actually wants to achieve rather than those of necessity. I appreciate your thoughts. 

Fair point. From the perspective of one who sees significant value in earning a living and providing goods and services, how are you feeling about the prospects of many marketable skills being mastered by AI? Do we need to reevaluate the value of jobs?

By pointing to a situation where people already don't feel they are contributing much, it seems like Seth is saying that we're not losing much through this rise of AI. But your objection suggests to me you might think that we are losing something significant?

Thanks Seth, I really appreciate what you've said here—it's good to be reminded that it's not necessary to have your kids change the world, and that caring for each other and expressing themselves contributes positively to the whole.

I'm less worried actually about paths my daughter might take, she's very bright and creative and I'm sure she'll do fine, I guess I don't want her to shy away from things just because someone or something else can do it better. I was mainly posting because I felt like that feeling of nausea might be affecting others who keep ab... (read more)

Thanks for your comment. In workshopping this post, I definitely need to work on clarity :) I certainly wasn't meaning to refer to life-extension—I'm meaning the state of the world as it is, where we (most of us at least) don't find it acceptable to let people die of starvation from poverty (as evolution would have us do).

I'll add couple of edits now just to clarify that, as you're not the first person that wasn't clear to.

I would genuinely like to understand what you mean, but it’s not clear to me a present. You are allowed to read the entire post.

A starting point to understanding your point of view would be if you could please, in good faith, answer the question I asked in the previous comment. Do you believe that we should let poor people die?

Thanks for your points npostavs

the real-world smartphone market is surely much closer to oligopoly than perfect competition

This is essentially my point, the government actually have to take measures to break up oligopolies, because oligopolies they are beneficial to companies for maximising profits by charging as much as possible for the least improvement (cost).

How sure are you that this isn't rather the costs of lack of competition?

The costs we've been discussing are externalities like environmental degradation and economic inequality. Competition has be... (read more)

The article is about people living in poverty who fail to succeed in an open economic competition (the Covid point was a side point that had "shaken my faith").

I proposed that if you think we should let these people die, then you may as well stop reading. Do you think we should let poor people die? Or did I not phrase that clearly enough?

-2ZankerH
From what I was allowed to read, I think you're deliberately obfuscating and misrepresenting the active and passive choices. If that was unintentional, you need to work on good faith argumentation.

Ha! Love the meme. Thanks so much for your comment, what a compliment to have "unlocked something" in someone's brain! I absolutely hear you on the addiction issue, that's an interesting take to stack the measures—glad that's working for you.

Thanks Viliam,

I think that's a fair interpretation, if you are restricted in your resources, stick to quantifiable outcomes—a stoic dichotomy of control approach. The article is however about how to solve coordination problems, rather than how to choose appropriate problems for your capacity, because there are some unavoidable coordination problems we face as a civilisation..

The original home of this post, nonzerosum.games is a world-help site as opposed to a self-help site. So, it is focused on these wider, unavoidable social issues. Although individuals ... (read more)

I am guilty of both offering opt-ins and fake exits, and also being one of those people that don't want to rock the boat by taking an opt-in or a fake exit. Thanks for this article, as it's highlighted a double standard in me. I knew already that I have a tendency towards cognitive unloading, but this gives very clear examples of situations I might want to have a pre-prepared position for that's not contradictory.

I don't mean to assert that one effect is bigger than the other, more that together they create a vicious cycle. No one disputes that bad decisions can lead to poverty, that's common sense, or that other factors influence it, but if poverty itself is a multiplier it stands to reason that that needs to be addressed as part of any potential solution. The next post (dropping Saturday) is about how, in such coordination problems, multiple factors must align in order for any one solution to be effective.

Oh, sorry, that was largely boiler-plate, while this post did have some hover-over info which didn't translate to LW (which was actually kind of important, as it provided some disclaimers and caveats to points made) it's probably not what you'd call a "full experience". Some other posts on the site have simulations.

Though I do think the overall aesthetic of the posts on the site is subtly important for the tone of my writing (generally a not too serious tone).

I'd be interested in reading up on the replication problems with priming if you have any links. I wasn't on guard for this sort of research, so it seemed plausible to me. All of this goes against our general intuitions that people need to feel their poverty to get motivated for working, so I'm more likely to accept scientific research than assume it's wrong and that my intuitions are correct.

Wait, are you trying to tell me that drug addiction and mental illness contribute to poverty? That seems like a stretch... (jokes)

I feel like that's is a given, the factors that perpetuate poverty are manifold. The article focuses on this finding because it reveals a counter-intuitive and therefore easily overlooked contributory factor (and a significant one at that).

I didn't mean at all to suggest that this finding was the only contributory factor, or that it could be solved with any one solution (which is why the title of the last section reads "a" solution, not "the" solution).

Thanks for reading and responding :)

I think the idea is really interesting. As someone who spent 5 years creating student video resources, I appreciate the impact they can have, and I have at times tried to convince my father—a life-long maths teacher to collaborate with me on replicating his course... but the fool didn't take me up on the offer.

the cost of showing it to every student in the country is approximately zero

I feel like the cost-effectiveness argument is valid but might run into issues. To begin with, as you have in one of your comments pointed out, video resources with a teacher... (read more)

1Olli Järviniemi
Thanks for the interesting comment. This is a fair point; I might be underestimating the amount of revision needed. On the other hand, I can't help but think that surely the economies of scale still make sense here.   Yeah, I agree optimizing for learning is genuinely a harder task than optimizing for vague "I liked this movie" sentiment, and measuring and setting the incentives right is indeed tricky. I do think that setting the equivalent of Hollywood box-office revenue is actually hard. At the same time, I also think that there's marginal value to be gained by moving into the more professionalized / specialized / scalable / "serious" direction. Hmm, I suspect that you think I'm proposing something more radical than what I am. (I might be sympathetic to more extreme versions of what I propose, but what I'm actually putting forth is not very extreme, I'd say.) I had a brief point about this in my post, "Of course, I'm not saying that all of education needs to be video-based, any more than current-day education only consists of a teacher lecturing" To illustrate, what I'm saying is more like "in a 45 min class, have half of your classes begin with a 15 minute well-made educational video explaining the topic, with the rest being essentially the status quo" rather than "replace 80% of your classes with 45 minute videos". (Again, I wouldn't necessarily oppose the latter one, but I do think that there are more things one should think through there.) And this would leave plenty of time for non-scripted, natural conversations, at the level that is currently being satisfied. Another point I want to make: I think we should go much more towards "school is critical infrastructure that we run professionally" than where we currently are. In that, school is not the place where you want to have your improvised amateur hours at, and your authentic human connections could happen sometime else than when you learn new stuff (e.g. hobbies, or classes more designed with that in m

Hey, again good points.

But I have recognized sparks of true understanding in one-shot AI works.

I absolutely agree here, this is what I was referring to when I wrote...

I think we can appreciate the beauty of connecting with humanity as a whole, knowing that it is the big data of humanity that has informed AI art - I suspect this is what we find so magical about it.

I suspect that AI has an appeal not just because of its fantastic rendering capacity but also the fact that it is synthesising works not just from a prompt but from a vast library of shared human ... (read more)

4FeepingCreature
I think the analogy to photography works very well, in that it's a lot easier than the workflow that it replaced, but a lot harder than it's commonly seen as. And yeah, it's great using a tool that lets me, in effect, graft the lower half of the artistic process to my own brain. It's a preview of what's coming with AI, imo - the complete commodification of every cognitive skill.

Okay, so I think I get you now, in the imbalanced game, if the payoff is 100 or 1 as in "Zero Sum" is a misnomer, a rational player will still make the same decision, regardless of the imbalance with the other player, given the resulting preference ordering.

However while this imbalance makes no difference to the players' decisions, it does make a difference to the total payoff, making it non-zero-sum. I'm having difficulty understanding why values such as happiness or resources cannot be substituted for utility—surely at some point this must happen if game... (read more)

I’m not sure how the game is the same when you add a constant. The game as proposed in the example is clearly different. I can see that multiplication makes no difference, and as such doesn’t make the sum non-constant. I don’t see how asymmetrically changing the parameters is a “mere change in notation”.

By the way, I’m sure you’re entirely correct about this, I just simply don’t see how there is a problem with using the concept of zero-sum understood as constant-sum.

2Vladimir_Nesov
Utility functions are a way of characterizing preference orderings between events. If a preference ordering satisfies certain properties, then there exists a utility function such that its expected value over the events can be used to decide which events are preferred over which other events (see VNM theorem). Utility values are not defined with respect to anything else, they are not money or happiness or resources. In particular, utilities of different players can't be compared a priori, without bringing in more structure (for example redistribution of resources in the setup of Kaldor-Hicks improvement establishes a way of comparing utilities of players, see the original comment). If you add a constant to a utility function, its expected value over some event increases by the same constant. So if one event had greater expected utility than another, it would still be the case after you add the constant. This is the sense in which adding constants or multiplying by positive factors makes no difference.

Hi Vladimir, thanks for your input, it has been fascinating going down the rabbit hole of nuance regarding the term "zero-sum".

I agree that the term is more accurately denoting "constant-sum", I think this is generally implied by most people using it. There was the interesting "zero-sum" example in the linked article that veered away from "constant-sum" with asymmetrical payoffs, 100,0 or 0,1, meaning that depending on the outcome of the game the total sum would be different. This, to me disqualifies it from being called a zero-sum game, given the common u... (read more)

2Vladimir_Nesov
The point is that the preference order over lotteries characterized by a utility function doesn't change if you multiply the utility function by a positive value or add a constant to it. Utility function u(x) makes exactly the same choices as utility function 2u(x). If we start with a constant sum-of-utilities game (for two players) and then rescale one of the utilities, the sum will no longer be constant, but the game is still the same. You'd need to take a weighted sum instead to compensate for this change of notation. So the characterization of a game as "constant sum" doesn't make sense if taken literally, since it doesn't survive a mere change of notation that doesn't alter anything about the actual content of the game.

Hi Vladimir,

Thanks for your comment, please excuse the delay in getting back, I'm actually busily digesting your response and the various branches of dependencies that comprise it (in terms of links to other concepts). I intend to get back to you with a considered answer, but am enjoying taking my time exploring the ideas you've linked to.

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