All of Mike_Plotz's Comments + Replies

Robin:

Btw, I'm interested in "farming" first because growth rates suddenly increased by two orders of magnitude; by "farming" I mean whatever was the common local-in-time cause of that change. Writing was part of the cascade of changes, but it seems historically implausible to call writing the main cause of the increased growth rate. Professional specialization has more promise as a main cause, but it is still hard to see.

I don't think that this is what Eliezer is saying (and correct me if I'm wrong). What Robin seems to be inferri... (read more)

It's not always possible to improve beyond what randomness would yield. Consider, for example, the coin toss predicting game. Or the face-the-firing-squad game.

2Normal_Anomaly
In the coin toss predicting game, it is also impossible to do worse than random.

@michael e sullivan

You are right, my mistake. I was assuming that running, say, 100 trials meant going all the way through a 100-card deck without shuffling. Going back over the description of the problem, I don't see where it explicitly says that the cards are replaced and reshuffled, but that's probably a more meaningful experiment to run, and I'm sure that's how they did it.

At least I'm not crazy (nor, hopefully, stupid, if only 30%). :)

@A Pickup Artist

No worries, I made a bad assumption.

@A Pickup Artist

I got the point of Eliezer's post, and I don't see why I'm wrong. Could you tell me more specifically than "for the reasons stated" why I'm wrong? And while you're at it, explain to me your optimal strategy in AnneC's variation of the game (you're shot if you get one wrong), assuming you can't effectively cheat.

(Incidentally, and somewhat off-topic, there's a beautiful puzzle with a similar setup — see "Names in Boxes" on the first page of http://math.dartmouth.edu/~pw/solutions.pdf. The solutions are included, but tr... (read more)

The assumption behind this post, as AnneC touched on, is that higher scores are linearly correlated to what is perceived as a good outcome. Guessing blue every time will guarantee a worst case and best case outcome of 70%; as such, guessing randomly becomes a much better strategy if the player puts a significant premium on scoring, say, 95% or higher. Whether this valuation is rationally justifiable is another question entirely (though an important one).

The same assumption lies behind A Pickup Artist's post. It all depends on your objective: if you want... (read more)