All of sxae's Comments + Replies

sxae10

that this is just the kind of thing that happens when retailers are foolishly prevented (by public opinion, if not by law) from charging the true market price.

Retailer console base prices are set by the manufacturer. A first-party retailer is not allowed to charge more than the RRP as part of their agreement.

Perhaps an important economic point here is that consoles are generally sold below-cost. Console manufacturers lose money on every product they sell from hardware costs. This is because consoles make their money on games, where the margins are much ... (read more)

2willbradshaw
Sure, I agree that reselling will become less and less important as supply increases – presumably the prices of PS5s on eBay will fall as supply increases, until it's close enough to the RRP that reselling is no longer profitable. In fact, my argument above depends, among other things, on demand increasing much more slowly than supply. What I'm interested in here is whether, given the current (temporary) shortage, these kinds of reselling practices are actually (temporarily) harmful. (Insofar as upgrading your gaming console later than you wanted is harmful.)
sxae50

This idea seems like it has several large issues:

  • It disproportionately targets people who are poor and directly ties how much risk you can take on to how much disposable income you are able to leverage. This doesn't seem particularly just, especially considering these are the people who have been most disadvantaged by coronavirus so far.
  • Big taxes like this can be used in a myriad of ways, but whether they ever are used in those ways is another question entirely. That's just not typically how modern governments handle tax revenue. And are the things you
... (read more)
1tkpwaeub
I am not saying it needs to be a tax.
sxae10

Thanks for your thoughts ACrackedPot 🙂

Sounds like a stressful model to think about! Maybe I'm just too much of a pacifist for that mindset. But I agree that friction is absolutely a critical part of democracy. A big part of that is giving people a non-violent way to settle disputes and come to consensus over limited resources.

Answer by sxae90

What does it mean for a cryptocurrency to "transition from PoW to PoS"? What does it mean for decentralized entities to come to a consensus on a massive change to how they operate?

 Decentralized governance is really hard, and chains split all the time - remember Bitcoin Classic? Ethereum Classic? All pretty dead now, but in their day they represented substantial chain splits that took a long time to fully resolve.

So, I would say that such a transition is mostly a question of decentralized governance, not a question of technology. If Bitcoin "transitio... (read more)

sxae10

First, it labels a society that's in civil war where decisions are made by the sword as democratic provided everyone has equal power and is equally effected.

 

Thanks for your thoughtful reply ChristianKl :)

Such a broken-down society doesn't have a system of governance, and we explicitly say that this is a property of a system of governance. A power vacuum within which a system would normally sit is distinguishably different to a functioning state. So, it seems like we would fully expect this definition to fail here at no fault of its own.

Secondly, it i

... (read more)
sxae10

Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply MakoYass, I agree with everything you've said here. It's certainly a strange line to straddle personally, where I'm totally on-board the crypto train but also a radical environmentalist. But I also look forward to speculation being ripped out of the crypto ecosystem as much as possible and replaced with functional value. One day soon, we can hope.

sxae10

But that isn't what I want, and it's not what I'm saying here. At no point do I make the claim that the values represented by the safety team are or should be static. I understand the point you're making, I've even written about it pretty extensively here, but as far as I can see it's a much more general ethical issue than the domain of this essay. It applies just as readily to literally any organisation as it does to the theoretical organisations proposed here.

Specifically what values wider society holds and how they evolve those values is not the purview... (read more)

sxae10

I'm not 100% sure if your intention is to equate democratic governance with this lottery hypothetical, but I'm not quite sure the two can be compared. As to how important or nominally good I might perceive value drift as, well I think it's rather like how important the drift of your car is - rather dependent on the road.

1ACrackedPot
No, that is not the point. Suppose for a moment that what you want is possible.  Suppose it is possible to write values into an organization such that the organization never stops supporting those values.  Is there any point in your own country's history where you would have wanted them to use this technique to ensure that the values of that era were preserved forever more?  What other groups alive today would you actually trust with the ability to do this?
sxae10

So the concept of "redistributing equally" gets kind of complicated.

Ah yes, you're right in redistributing the 50 tokens when refunding the winners in the same proportion is tricky. Probably necessitates being able to have fractional tokens so you can refund someone 0.1 token or something like that. I imagine it will be very simple for the losing choices.

Also, I don't mean a regular Dutch auction, I mean a blind one where all bidders submit their bid at once (like an election). My understanding of a blind Dutch auction is that it resolves this "people don'... (read more)

sxae10

Why would it bother?

We can't really speculate too strongly about the goals of an emerging AGI, so we have to consider all possibilities. "Bothering" is a human construct of thinking that an AGI is under no obligation to conform to.

An AI that isn't using all it's compute towards it's assigned task is one that gets replaced with one that is.

This is why I specify that this is an emerging AGI, where we are in a situation where the result of the iterator is so complex that only the thing iterating it understands the relationship between symbols and output. We c... (read more)

1[anonymous]
With tight enough bounds we can. Update: what I mean more exactly: build AIs from modules that are mostly well defined and well optimized. This means that they are already as sparse as we can make them. (meaning they have only necessary weights and the model is scoring the best out of all models of this size on the dataset). This suggests a solution to the alignment problem, actually. Example architecture : a paperclip maximizer. Layer 0 : modules for robotics pathing and manipulation Layer 1: modules for robotics perception Layer 2: modules for laying out robotics on factory floors Layer 3: modules for analyzing return on financial investment Layer 4: high level executive function with the purpose, regressed against paperclips made, to issue commands to lower layers. If we design some of the lower layers well enough - and disable any modification from higher layers - we can restrict what actions the paperclip maximizer even is capable of doing.
sxae10

I'd be lying if I claimed to fully grok the maths, but I'm glad it was a useful suggestion!

2abramdemski
Hm, I just noticed that I didn't really get your whole proposal in the first place -- I latched onto "full refund for losing positions", but ignored the rest. What's supposed to be going on here? You seem to be ignoring the quadratic formula -- an individual must spend v2 tokens to purchase v votes on a candidate. Thus the number of tokens total spend on a candidate isn't a simple function of the number of votes on that candidate; it also depends on the distribution of votes among voters. So the concept of "redistributing equally" gets kind of complicated. If it's supposed to be like a Dutch auction, maybe the idea is that we look at the total number of votes needed to win, and we refund votes (starting with most expensive and going down) until we reach the number needed to win, at which point we stop refunding. This way people don't need to worry too much about overpaying for success. I don't know if that's good or bad, though. Anyway, I'm curious where you got the idea. What made this suggestion natural to you? I'm personally not that familiar with the literature on Quadratic Voting, so as far as I know, this is a standard suggestion. Or maybe it seemed natural to you based on familiarity with auctions?
sxae10

The tyranny of the rocket equation means that we're going to really struggle to make it worth it. For the same reason that we can't just make fuel tanks bigger, it is very inefficient to send fuel out from the same gravity well as you want to refuel from - orders of magnitude.

The thing to remember when we talk about "kg of fuel per kg of cargo" is that the vast majority of that fuel is burned in the lower atmosphere. The majority of the work of shooting a rocket off to space is just getting it moving. So if you want to ship enough rocket fuel up to form a fuel dump with something like hydrogen rocket fuel, then you need to expend vastly more fuel than you end up storing.

2Daniel Kokotajlo
Well yeah, but that's just an argument for looking for extraterrestrial fuel sources. Insofar as your fuel comes from earth, putting it in a depot isn't obviously worse than launching it on an as-needed basis, and arguably it's better. And insofar as your fuel doesn't come from earth, then similar considerations could weigh in favor of a depot. (The tanker from the Belt comes once a year with a buttload of fuel, puts it in an earth-orbit depot and leaves)
2gilch
Then why not launch from high-altitude balloons?
sxae10

Interesting, you make some great points here and I don't think I have any good refutations to any of them. Perhaps if we play around with the auction structure by which we take away and refund these tokens?

sxae10

Hello Gerald! For sure. To be honest the Kessler syndrome was an afterthought and I may be overestimating its impact. I think the far more relevant danger is active measures against a launching or landing craft. Things like fuel dumps (you are totally right in that it doesn't make sense to take fuel from Earth up into LEO, I was more thinking about bringing fuel from some other much-lower-energy gravity well like the moon) would probably be better placed in Lagrange points.

2[anonymous]
I mean you can replace all this with "airline travel". Already nations can shoot down airliners that travel within hundreds of kilometers of top end air defense systems like the S-400. So if a one of the central European nations decided to make anywhere they can hit a 'no fly zone', and they had nukes so no one can invade, they could de facto ban air travel in Europe. This is true for a lot of technologies - ultimately this planet is small.
sxae30

I imagine something similar would be true of space; in times of war, some nations would be unable to access their colonies

Maybe I'm vastly underestimating how self-sufficient these colonies will be, but my impression from current plans for permanent habitation is that they will depend on shipments from Earth for basic supplies for quite some time. Strong claim held weakly, someone please prove me wrong on that. But I imagine it's going to be a heck of a lot of extra straw on an already overloaded camel's back.

Kessler syndrome isn't a huge issue when you're... (read more)

3Daniel Kokotajlo
Good point, early space colonies could be very not-self-sufficient, more so than European colonies at any point in the past.
2[anonymous]
But I think not having the ability to have infrastructure like satellites, fuel dumps, stations, skyhooks, or whatever the heck else you feel like putting there is going to be a problem and again make the whole operation a lot less efficient. Are you open to updating that assumption? Well, the best way to get an idea of how actual spaceflight physics work is to play kerbal space program.  But, to summarize: (1) kessler doesn't apply to both very high and very low orbits, leaving room for satellites (insufficient energy for the debris to reach very high orbits, very low orbits have drag that cleans them) (2) fuel dumps do not work (and no, spacex doesn't plan to use them) as 'the rocket equation doesn't work that way'
sxae10

Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.

sxae10

That's a great point! There is that possibility, but do we need to make that assumption? I'm not sure.

Mary would be able to tell us if "qualia did not differ in ways known only to the person who had them", even if she might not be able to describe to us exactly how. She'd be able to say "that was different", even if the precise words to describe how it was different escaped her, and that true/false response is enough to draw some meaningful conclusion about the existance of something, even if it doesn't tell you anything about the nature of that thing. And if it's completely imperceptable to Mary, then it can't be qualia, as qualia is by definition about subjective perception.

sxae10

Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.

Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry  "$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026,... (read more)

sxae10

May I clarify, when you said:

Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.

You then said that this summary was a departure from physicalism. Could you explain what you meant by that? It was that statement that made me think you were saying that a belief was non-physical, as you said qualia being a belief was a departure from physicalism.

If you are saying that qualia are just beliefs that is a different claim, and one that you havent supported.

Oh dear... I think we might be in a bit of trouble, as I'm under... (read more)

1TAG
I said is that is is "technically a departure from physicalism". I'm not talking in the usual vague terms of "physical stuff" and "mental stuff". If physicalism is taken as the claim that everything has, or potentially has, a reductive physical explanation, it follows that everything has a mathematical description, since mathematics is the language of physics. Physics doesn't merely use numbers to represent measurements, it uses a variety of mathematical functions and structures to represent physical entities and laws. Mathematical language is the language of physics, and also the quintessential 3rd person, objective language, so physicalism, which is apparently an ontological claim, has an epistemological implication: physicalism implies reductionism implies physics implies maths implies objectivity. Conversely, the claim that there is irreducible subjectivity is a departure from physicalism, but not in a way that means are mental entities, substances or even properties separate from physical ones. The minimal requirement to support the claim of irreducible subjectivity is that a conscious entity's insight into its own mental states has ineffable, incommunicable aspects.
1TAG
That summary argument isn't valid. In order to get from the premise (1) that the only knowable differences between qualia are stateable beliefs about qualia, to the conclusion that (3) qualia actually are mere beliefs , you need (2) the assumption that qualia cannot differ in ways known only to the person who has them...which begs the question against anything being inherently subjective or incommunicable.
sxae10

Was that your point/conclusion?

I mean it was a point that I made from just playing around with the thought experiment. I don't know if it is the point, that's why I'm trying to dissect it a little here.

What I'm not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it's not valid, or I don't understand what you mean.

I would be happy to keep trying to explain. Let me try to lay it out again in a different way, and I'd be interested to hear what you think:

  • Mary has perfect knowledge - that is, all knowable information she possibly can - about an experie
... (read more)
2gilch
I dispute this premise. If Mary knows how to visualize something red (and learned how to do so through some means other than seeing it with her eyes) and knows that it's called "red", then that's knowledge, and she won't learn anything new by seeing it for the first time. This isn't knowledge that Mary could acquire by reading black-and-white textbooks about cone cells and neurons, but hypothetically the knowledge could be implanted in her brain via some technology while bypassing her eyes.
sxae10

Gotchas aren't an entirely bad thing, because at least you would be making a discernable point.

Well, I apologize that this has not been clear for you. I am somewhat surprised that you can so elegantly summarize my position while simultaneously saying I haven't made that position, but maybe I'm just a lot, lot worse at expressing myself than I think I am haha.

I asked you directly whether you were asking or answering ...and you did not answer!

Sorry, I'm not sure what this is regarding exactly. As in, am I asking Mary questions? Yes. Or am I asking a q... (read more)

1TAG
You didn't state that position in your OP. It took a whole series of guesses to get to this point. I didn't say anything of the kind. If you are saying that qualia are just beliefs that is a different claim, and one that you havent supported. Why should some, but only some beliefs, be inherently subjective?
sxae10

I apologise TAG, I can't say I'm trying to "gotcha" anything intentionally, just to discuss an interesting thought experiment.

I don't know what the test is that you could perform, though I tried to present one possibility - your beliefs around that memory.

It matters here because I am specifically addressing Jackson's views on Physicalism as presented in the original thought experiment, not all general views of qualia. The core of the question is if that is because of some physical phenomena.

Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.

Yes, that is a good summary of what I am proposing here.

1TAG
Gotchas aren't an entirely bad thing, because at least you would be making a discernable point. I asked you directly whether you were asking or answering ...and you did not answer! Well, I think that is technically a departure from physicalism. But you said you are a physicalist!
sxae10

Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is - what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.

2gilch
The experience of recalling experiences is itself an experience. The experience of imagining an experience is itself an experience. These internal mental experiences are less vivid than a direct sensory experience is in the present for most people most of the time, but sometimes dreams can be as vivid as waking life. Internal mental experiences still have qualia, and they use the same sensory channels as the direct sensory experience does. You can recall or imagine or dream about how something looks or sounds or feels like etc. The memory doesn't have qualia except during the act of recalling it consciously.
sxae10

Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.

Nothing.

Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn't really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.

I think it might be useful to think about Mary's room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia li... (read more)

2gilch
OK, I think we agree that subjective mental states correspond to physically real states in the brain, and that Mary's Room is insufficient to refute physicalism. Was that your point/conclusion? What I'm not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it's not valid, or I don't understand what you mean.
1TAG
Why does that matter?
sxae10

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Joachim!

I am definitely not saying that NFTs are not bad for the environment - they are, as is anything that draws on the mains grid and creates demand. It is absolutely correct to judge cryptocurrency negatively, just as it is correct to judge things like driving a gas guzzler or flying 20 times a year. But it seems like we completely ignore some ways in which the energy we produce is wasted, and hyperfocus on others, and we just end up with a completely screwed up valuation of what needs changing.

sxae30

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Daniel!

Cheaper spaceships are definitely cheaper to replace if some oppositional nation-state blows them up, but there's only so many times you can play that game before you end up with the Kessler syndrome issues.

If you're referring to the vertical launch and takeoff of SpaceX shuttles, that really only affects the last moments of reentry. A SpaceX shuttle still does the vast majority of its braking in the atmosphere.

Launching in weird orbits is absolutely a strategy that nation-states could use to mitigate these risks, but... (read more)

3Daniel Kokotajlo
Thanks for the interesting post! In times of war historically, European powers would send out privateers and raiders (and later submarines and bombers) to destroy the shipping of their enemies. Presumably this raised the cost of shipping things around, and in some cases completely strangled shipping. (E.g. very few vessels got in and out of the Third Reich from the Atlantic and Pacific and Indian oceans.) I imagine something similar would be true of space; in times of war, some nations would be unable to access their colonies but others would still be able to access them, just with higher cost due to having to launch in weird inefficient orbits. (I'm not sure how big a deal Kessler is -- how easy is it to armor against? How easy is it to cause deliberately, e.g. by spraying sand out the side of a big tank-o-sand satellite? How long would a Starship last if it were being launched not into LEO but into a HEO to escape Kessler as quickly as possible--how intense would the Kessler have to be for it to not make it out of the danger zone with reasonably high probability?)
sxae30

At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for).  And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .

  • The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I'm not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don't get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying f
... (read more)
5paulfchristiano
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow. It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that's implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren's probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible. Also, I would guess that on this forum the primary argument for convincing people not to engage with factory farming is the suffering it causes to farm animals. That said, I think you could argue that if someone decides not to eat meat on reflection and that their previous diet was in error, then in some sense you are doing them a favor by helping them reach that conclusion.
sxae-10

I think the largest issue with the general concept of moral fungibility is the following:

  • Moral consequences cannot be reliably predicted - "what if that chicken solved cancer" is an obviously spurious but relevant example.
  • Moral consequences cannot be reversed - one cannot make chickens out of chicken nuggets, and new chickens are not the same as the old ones.
  • Morality does not necessarily sum - "two wrongs do not make a right" - I cannot necessarily justify the torture of billions through the ectasy of other billions.
  • Most people optimize for price, not mora
... (read more)
sxae10

Sorry TAG I'm not quite sure I follow, but I do appreciate your feedback. This post is a refutation of Jackson's view, so I'm not surprised that it is focusing on a negative. Whether something would alter the quality of those experiences is the crux of Jackson's whole thought experiment - asking what changes between a mind with perfect information about an experience, and a mind who has genuinely had that experience. So, that question does seem at the heart of this thought experiment.

Perhaps a different way to think about Mary's Room is the following:

You h... (read more)

1TAG
Asking or answering? Do you have an answer to the question? Maybe not. Why does that matter?. Qualia are supposed to be subjectve, so it's not some gotcha to point out that they can't be determined objectively. Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observers perceive their own brain states.
sxae10

If there are any experiences or qualia, even changeable ones, Jackson has made his point.

Has he? As I understand it, Jackson is arguing specifically for a non-physicalist interpretation of qualia in his work, not just for the existance of qualia. He is arguing that you can have perfect information about an experience, yet actually experiencing that thing will still bring some new aspect to the experience, and whatever that aspect is is the qualia. The issue is with the nature of what the qualia of an experience is, and whether there is a physical manifesta... (read more)

1TAG
You've told me what you don't think, not what you do. Why does it matter that something "would alter the quality of those experiences"?
sxae10

We were looking for  to disappear, indicating that the probability of a candidate no longer factors into our considerations.

I'm surprised that we are looking for   to disappear entirely, I'm not sure I understand that. Quadratic voting shines when you have lots of votes with the same voting token pool, because you force people to allocate resources to decisions they really care about. It's absolutely not meant to decide one decision - it's meant to force people to allocate limited resources over a long period, and by doing so reveal... (read more)

2abramdemski
Interesting. But then how do you argue that it gives approximately correct results? As I understand it, Weyl sees the argument as just: votes end up being roughly proportional to utility (under a lot of differenc scenarios/assumptions). When this condition holds, the quadratic vote is a good representation of the utilitarian value of the different options. So, the reason I think we're looking for Px to disappear entirely is because Px is a function of x! It's fine if c=α+γUx−√ζBB(7) or whatever, so long as none of those extra terms are a function of x, so that in the end c is still proportional to (some normalization of) Ux.  You're effectively arguing that it's OK to divide by Px+ϵ, because this just represents voters rationally investing less in cases where Px will probably win anyway. But this means the quadratic vote systematically undervalues the candidates who are seen as the probable winners! OK, but this should mean the quantity we are willing to spend on an election is overall adjusted up or down based on properties of that particular election (IE, how much the issue matters to us). This should not mean a dependence on Px; a dependence on Px distorts the vote, compromising it as a representation of collective utility.
sxae10

Hey TAG, thanks for your reply and your great points.

If you could show that Mary never experiences a colour quale, whether as the result of a direct experience, or a real memory, or an implanted memory, you refute the argument.

Well, I don't believe I'm trying to say that the color quale doesn't exist - rather that the quale is the subject's beliefs around that experience or memory, and that those beliefs are entirely physical constructs that exist within a physical brain.

What's the problem? If Mary has a present experience of a blade of grass, she will hav

... (read more)
1TAG
If you could show that qualia are just beliefs , that would refute Jackson. But it is not clear that you are a sceptic about the very existence of qualia, since you keep using the term "qualia". Why does that matter? If there are any experiences or qualia, even changeable ones, Jackson has made his point. Are you arguing that 1. Qualia (phenomenal states) do not exist unless they are distinct from cognitive states (beliefs, etc). 2. Distinct means completely distinct. 3. If so-called qualia can be influenced by beliefs , they are not completely distinct. 4. They can be influenced by beliefs 5. So they dont exist.
Answer by sxae*100

Another solution to "Objection 1: Quadratic voting discourages voting on losing propositions" is the idea that only the winners of a quadratic vote actually pay an average of the tokens, and everyone else gets a refund - sort of like a blind Dutch auction of the decision.

For example, a quadratic vote is taken between two binary options A and B. A receives 400 votes, B receives 500. B wins the vote, so an average of 450 is taken from the voting token pool of B and 50 tokens are redistributed equally amongst B. Everyone who voted for A gets a full refund.

Con... (read more)

3abramdemski
Wait, so, my previous analysis doesn't make that much sense. I now think your claim is pretty plausible. Expected value if you don't buy one more vote: ∑iPiUi Expected value if you do: ∑iPiUi−∑iϵxnUi+ϵxUx−c⋅(Px+ϵx−ϵxn) Here, ϵx is specifically the probability that candidate x ends up in a tie without our one additional vole. I'm assuming the vote uses the (rather dumb) tie-break procedure of choosing randomly from all the candidates, for simplicity. Hence, breaking the tie steals probability equally from each candidate (including candidate x). I'm also neglecting the possibility of creating a new tie (hopefully that doesn't matter too much). Difference in expected values: ϵxUx−∑iϵxnUi−c⋅(Px+ϵx−ϵxn) Break-even point: c=ϵx(Ux−∑i1nUi)/(Px+ϵx−ϵxn) That's pretty similar to before, but now comes the critical point: it seems like ϵx is proportional to Px. I'm sure this isn't exactly true, but it roughly makes sense -- you have to have a good chance of being on top in order to have a good chance of tying for top. If we assume it's true, then everything cancels nicely. Suppose ϵx=αPx: c=αPx(Ux−∑i1nUi)/(Px+αPx(1−1n)) =α(Ux−∑i1nUi)/(1+α(1−1n)) ∝Ux−∑i1nUi A happy ending! Not only does Px disappear, but all Pi disappear. This is good, because it means voters don't even have to think about the probabilities of the different outcomes when voting; they should just think about how much they like the different outcomes. The analysis is still rough, but at least now things are looking good.
0abramdemski
Oooh, is it really that simple? Expected state of affairs if I don't buy one more vote (ignoring what else I could have done with the money): ∑iPiUi, where Pi is the probability of candidate i winning if I do nothing, and Ui is the utility of candidate i winning. Expectation if I do buy one more vote: (1−ϵ)(∑i≠x(PiUi))+(ϵ+Px)(Ux−c), where x is the candidate under consideration, ϵ is the probability there would have been a tie w/o this one extra vote, and c is the utility adjustment for losing your money in the case of a win. (I'm going to go ahead and pretend c is precisely the monetary cost, for convenience.) So this is worth it when the expected benefits outweigh the expected cost: c(Px+ϵ)<ϵ(Ux−∑i≠x(PiUi)) So the price at which we're indifferent would be: c=ϵ(Ux−∑i≠x(PiUi))Px+ϵ Hm, this is weird. * We were looking for Px to disappear, indicating that the probability of a candidate no longer factors into our considerations. It didn't disappear. In fact, improbable candidates now look better, because we know we get to avoid the cost of paying for votes (guaranteed refund). * We were looking for c to be proportional to Ux. So c=ϵUx would be fine. c=ϵ(Ux−∑iPiUi) would also be fine; that just means c is proportional to a normalized utility, where we normalize compared to the baseline of expected election outcomes. But instead we're normalizing compared to the expectation minus the component from candidate x, which is weird -- it means we're not really normalizing at all (because this adjustment will be different for different values of x).
sxae10

I suppose the question is whether we can predict the "hidden inner mind" through some purely statistical model, as opposed to requiring some deeper understanding of human psychology of an AI. I'm not sure that a typical psychologist would claim to be able to predict behaviour through their training, whereas we have seen cases where even simple, statistical predictive systems can know more about you than you know about yourself - [1].

There's also the idea that social intelligence is the ability to simulate other people, so perhaps that is something that an ... (read more)