All of SilasBarta's Comments + Replies

Austin, Texas

December 20th. Doors open 6pm, ceremony 8pm.

LW Event link

Sorry for the delay, but here's the follow-up survey to share feedback. Please fill it out if you can! This helps us improve the events!

https://airtable.com/appEBNqFVvAGqyOeJ/pagoqFjtAjfcvknh8/form

FYI there’s some backup on westbound William Cannon just before the turn into thr neighborhood at James Ranch Rd.

Extremely late follow-up, but [here's](https://xzrmev.clicks.mlsend.com/tl/c/eyJ2Ijoie1wiYVwiOjU3NzkyNixcImxcIjoxMjI1MDA1MzIwMzUxMjcwNDcsXCJyXCI6MTIyNTAwNTMyMTMwNTQ2OTYyfSIsInMiOiJiNmI1NzgwZjJmMmNiNGYxIn0) the post-event survey to give your feedback.

Alright, we’re set up at table 15. Excited to see all of you!

Oh wow, thanks. I think at the time I was overconfident that some more educated Bayesian had worked through the details of what I was describing. But the causality-related stuff is definitely covered by Judea Pearl (the Pearl I was referring to) in his book *Causality* (2000).

Thanks to everyone for attending! Please complete this survey about your experience so we know what went right or wrong:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf0W90v7dTWQ-DGstGZOspZnBRZ4IF52b5qmyxRTRak0FG1Sg/viewform

Looking forward to seeing all of you today! For parking, you can use the street or the neighboring Mother’s Milk Bank. If it’s crowded, try the neighborhood to the west off Justin Ln, but in all cases, watch for signs about where it is legal to park!

Austin, Texas Winter Solstice.

December 20th (Tuesday), 6 pm doors open.

Location: TBD

LW event link (details to be added).

Just added a spreadsheet to help coordinate carpooling.

Yes it is! (But don't give them alcohol.)

Final update for anyone who RSVP'd: You can park on the street in the area around Moontower. We will be providing lunch as well: breakfast tacos, including vegetarian and vegan options.

We have the whole venue reserved for us.

It's overridden, we've rented out the place.

Yes, we've rented out the venue for 12-8, so the normal hours don't apply.

Note, venue was changed to:

Moontower Cider Company 1916 Tillery St Austin, TX 78702 United States

1Rana Dexsin
I notice that the Google Maps record linked shows their hours as 1–7 PM on Sundays. Is that overridden for this event, or is it incorrect to begin with, or has the event timing changed as a result?

PM me for directions if you didn't get them.

Late to post this, but another resource:

Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

And the HN discussion about it, with me mentioning high-karma poster John Salvatier.

FYI, we're aware of the predictions of rain for Saturday and will be bring tent coverings to provide some protection. It's still on!

For anyone who still follows this, no one pressed the button.

For anyone who found the event here, this is the mobile-friendly version of the program.

Good news! We'll be coordinating with the Ottawa Petrov Day to do Hardcore Mode A-minus -- we'll get a button that destroys the other party's Petrov cake.

2SilasBarta
For anyone who still follows this, no one pressed the button.

And also 23 but no second sign :-(

2SilasBarta
And 22! Great turnout!

We’re there at table 13 now! Hope to see you!

2SilasBarta
And also 23 but no second sign :-(

Had to move to Jitsi. If anyone's still trying to join, go here.

My favorite one: burning wood for heat. Better than fossil fuels for the GW problem, but really bad for local air quality.

How about having both this and a Utility article be parents/prerequisites of Expected utility formalism; then, you could have

Utility -> Marginal Utility -> Supply and Demand

(Or maybe have utility and marginal utility be the same?)

I was guessing because it doesn't explicitly say what "meta" would mean here, and based my guess partly on the expected semantic space covered by "meta" (roughly, doubling the problem back on itself), and partly on my assumption of the kinds of simple solutions I would expect to be ruled out. My vision of a "simple, meta" solution is thus "brute-force an understanding-free model of a human and take that with you" (which would thus require the model to be"low level" and not find the obvious high level regularities that can't be brute forced).

Hope that clarified how I came up with that, but in any case, an explicit definition would help, as would a prequisite on "meta solutions".

I wish this fleshed out what is meant by the "non-meta solution" criterion. I took it to mean solutions that involve creating a low-level model (neuronal/molecular) of a human that the AI could run and keep querying, but I'm not sure that's right.

2SilasBarta
I was guessing because it doesn't explicitly say what "meta" would mean here, and based my guess partly on the expected semantic space covered by "meta" (roughly, doubling the problem back on itself), and partly on my assumption of the kinds of simple solutions I would expect to be ruled out. My vision of a "simple, meta" solution is thus "brute-force an understanding-free model of a human and take that with you" (which would thus require the model to be"low level" and not find the obvious high level regularities that can't be brute forced). Hope that clarified how I came up with that, but in any case, an explicit definition would help, as would a prequisite on "meta solutions".
2Eliezer Yudkowsky
By a "meta solution" I meant, e.g., coherent extrapolated volition, or having an AI that can detect and query ambiguities trying to learn human values from labeled data, or a Do-What-I-Mean genie that models human minds and wants, or other things that add a level of indirection and aren't "The One True Goal is X, which I shall now hardcode." Can you say more about what you thought was meant? My reader model doesn't know what interpretation brought you to your guess.

To your alternative approaches I would also add Bruce Schneier's advice in Cryptographic Engineering, where he talks a little about the human element in dealing with clients. It's similar to the Socratic approach, in that you ask about a possible flaw rather than argue it exists.

Bad: "that doesn't work. Someone can just replay the messages."

Good: "what defenses does this system have against replay attacks?"

Why is a mere statement of contradiction voted up to five? Something I'm missing here? I could understand if it was Clippy and there was some paperclip related subtext that took a minute to "get" but ...

1JoshuaZ
I suspect two reasons: 1) This summarizes a large amount what other people were thinking. Note that the post Gwern is replying to has had a lot of downvotes, so people who think it is obviously not well thought out favor a response like this. 2) Gwern is a highly respected user who almost never says something without fairly good data to back up his positions, so they are operating under this being a summary of Gwern's more detailed position. (A slightly more cynical version of 2 is simply that Gwern has high status here.)

Admittedly no one's ever been charged under the ADA, but there are plenty of examples of people being disciplined for violating it.

Thinking about your experiments does not (in itself) involve expenditure of government money, so I don't see how they would prosecute you under the ADA for that. Yes, managers have to be very clear to workers not to use resources, just to keep them away from edge cases, but even with that level of overcaution, managers can't actually stop you.

Even if you came back and (for some reason) said, "Hey boss, I totally though... (read more)

0JQuinton
How effective is the thinking that can be done if you don't have access to any of your work? I'm a gov't employee and am affected by the shutdown. All of my work is on my office computer, which I'm not allowed to even turn on during the shutdown. Yes, it's illegal for me to turn on my work computer or access work email during the shutdown. Sure, I can think all day about how to solve the current bug in my software, but without access to the actual code on my gov't computer not much can be done.

... and that is what being a big fish in a small pond feels like ;-) That is, most of them there won't even make it that far. At least, that was my experience.

(My approach was the cruder one of just taking a remainder modulo max size after each operation.)

0RolfAndreassen
That would work for unsigned integers, but I don't see how it gives you the classic rollover from 32767 to -32768?

C-style integers = integers with a fixed possible range of values and the corresponding rollover -- that is, if you get a result too big to be stored in that fixed size, it rolls over from the lowest possible value.

Ruby doesn't implement that limitation. It implements integers through Fixnum and Bignum. The latter is unbounded. The former is bounded but (per the linked doc) automatically converted to the latter if it would exceed its bounds.

Even if it did, it's still useful as an exercise: get a class to respond to addition, etc operations the same way ... (read more)

0RolfAndreassen
Hmm, interesting! Maybe the simplest approach would be to just implement a class with 16 (or 32, whatever) booleans, and do the underlying bit-pattern math. Then on printing, interpret as powers of two, or two's-complement, or whatever you like.

+1 for a (+1 for acknowledging the inconvenient) on a subject you dislike discussion of.

Depends on what you intend to get out of it, but you can go to an amateur hack night ("we're going to implement C-style integers in Ruby", "we're going to implement simulated annealing)", where almost everyone but you will have trouble conceptualizing the problem.

1RolfAndreassen
It's just as well this is a stupid-questions thread, but: Doesn't Ruby already have C-style integers? What is it you mean by this phrase which Ruby doesn't have?

Non-thinking-of-customers-as-fish is not a business plan.

0Clippy
sed -e "s/Work/Gas/" -e "s/time/volume"

It's bad if they're systematically underestimating the urgency (and thus placing the deadline too far out) which seems to be the rule with humans rather than the exception.

Maybe we should have a prisoner's dilemma meta-tournament in which we define a tournament-goodness metric and then everyone submits a tournament design that is run using the bot participants in the previous tournament, and then use the rankings of those designs.

Wait: does anyone know a good way to design the meta-tournament?

Very well said! I would only add that your point generalizes: the differences between the two cases is the extent to which it has implications for future interaction ("moving the Schelling point"): blackmail-like situations are those where we intuit an unfavorable movement of the point (per the blackmailed) while we generally don't have such intuitions in he case of trade.

Somewhat OT:

Does it really help the exposition to have all the elaborate packaging (the such-and-such vase, the jester and description of the punishment, etc)? For me it just makes it harder to read: is the vase just a perspicuous example of a valuable, or is it important that it's subject to random catastrophe (from errant jesters)? Does the presence of the makeup sex have any relevance that should affect my intuition on this?

But then, a lot of people seem to like that kind of thing, even in non-fiction and when they no longer need explanations via fairy tale metaphors, so perhaps I'm alone on this.

EDIT: Sorry, I missed that you linked a fluff-free version. Much appreciated!

1ikrase
While I don't find this easier to read than a more dry description, I do find it somewhat hard to read the completely astract mathematical forms.

Are you saying that no one expected the printing money (bidding up gold) before it happened, or is there a more subtle reason why the only relevant comparison is from the moment the policy called QE started?

Someone who bought gold after the Lehman fiasco (08), but before any of those QE milestones would have had several options since then to redeem for 2-3x gain.

It's an even bigger gap if you compare to any year before, back to ~98. S&P has had a horrible volatility/return performance going back to at least then.

Well, it was a pretty safe bet in '08 given typical reactions to economic crises, and the prevalence of advice like this P/S/A that "oh, there totally won't be inflation from the printing money".

1Alsadius
You seem to be mocking the idea that we'd avoid inflation. Look at the actual inflation stats, and we have. Velocity has dropped so significantly that the quantity of money rising was necessary just to maintain stability.

P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.

You would have missed out on doubling or tripling your money if you hadn't bought gold when those same people had made the predictions.

You would have missed out on doubling or tripling your money if you hadn't bought gold when those same people had made the predictions.

The S&P 500 has outperformed gold since quantitative easing began. I don't believe there has been a time past four years where a $100 gold purchase would be worth more today than a $100 S&P 500 purchase.

2aelephant
I have always heard that gold isn't meant to be a return-on-investment kind of deal, more like a safe store for your money that is going to maintain value over time.

Many treatments of this issue use "observer moments" as a fundamental unit over which the selection occurs, expecting themselves to be in the class of observer-moments most common in the space of all observer moments.

"Causality is based on entropy increase, so it can only make sense to draw causal arrows “backwards in time,” in those rare situations where entropy is not increasing with time. [...] where physical systems are allowed to evolve reversibly, free from contact with their external environments." E.g. the normal causal arrows break down for, say, CMB photons. -- Not sure how Scott jumps from reversible evolution to backward causality.

It's a few paragraphs up, where he says:

Now, the creation of reliable memories and records is essentially always

... (read more)
0torekp
I think one can also justify talk of backward causality along the lines of what Scott says on p. 23: If we are considering actions A and B now, and these correspond to microscopically different past facts X and Y, and there is no other route to knowledge of X or Y, it seems reasonable to agree with Scott that we are "selecting one past".

Just thought I'd throw this out there:

TabooBot: Return D if opponent's source code contains a D; C otherwise.

To avoid mutual defection with other bots, it must (like with real prudish societies!) indirectly reference the output D. But then other kinds of bots can avoid explicit reference to D, requiring a more advanced TabooBot to have other checks, like defecting if the opponent's source code calls a modifier on a string literal.

8solipsist
Actually, 'D it's not a string literal -- it's a symbol. Compilers can legally to turn the symbol 'D into something opaque like 0x3859 and destroy any reference to the letter "D". The only way a program can generate a 'D symbol on its own is to include it in its source. But that doesn't mean that a program without a 'D can't defect! An IncrediblyInnocentBot, which does not contain a 'D and can't generate a 'D on its own can still defect by stealing a 'D from the opponent agent. One way to steal a 'D from an opponent would be to search for quoted symbols in the opponent's program. The opponent could foil this method, however, by including decoy symbols. Alternatively, IncrediblyInnocentBot could simulate its opponent against a bunch of stupid agents, such as CooperateBot or DivergeBot, and hope that the opponent defects in at least one of these simulations. If the opponent ever returns a symbol other than 'C in simulation, IncrediblyInnocentBot remembers that symbol and can later use it for nefarious purposes. IncrediblyInnocentBot is in-credible indeed. BTW, the strategies I listed above are why I said it was not trivial for an agent to prove that MimicBot does not defect against a cooperator, despite the fact that MimicBot does not contain the defect symbol.
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