Daphne_W

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The Demon King does not solely attack the Frozen Fortress to profit on prediction markets. The story tells us that the demons engage in regular large-scale attacks, large enough to serve as demon population control. There is no indication that these attacks decreased in size when they were accompanied with market manipulation (and if they did, that would be a win in and of itself).

So the prediction market's counterfactual is not that the Demon King's forces don't attack, but that they attack at an indeterminate time with the same approximate frequency and strength. By letting the Demon King buy and profit from "demon attack on day X" shares, the Circular Citadel learns with decently high probability when these attacks take place and can allocate its resources more effectively. Hire mercenaries on days the probability is above 90%, focus on training and recruitment on days of low-but-typical probability, etc.

This ability to allocate resources more efficiently has value, which is why the Heroine organized the prediction market in the first place. The only thing that doesn't go according to the Heroine's liking is that the Circular Citadel buys that information from the Demon King rather than from 'the invisible hand of the market'.

more generally the Demon King would only do this if the information revealed weren't worth the market cost

The Demon King would sell the information as soon as she thinks it is in her best interests, which is different from it being bad for the Circular Citadel. Especially considering the Circular Citadel doesn't even have to pay the full cost of the information - everyone who bets is also paying.

It is very possible that the Demon King and the Circular Citadel both profit from the prediction market existing, while the demon ground forces and naive prediction market bettors lose.

That's probably the only "military secret" that really matters.

The soldiers guarding the outer wall and the Citadel treasurer that pays their overtime wages would beg to differ. 

I think that AI people that are very concerned about AI risk tend to view loss of control risk as very high, while eternal authoritarianism risks are much lower.

I'm not sure how many people see the risk of eternal authoritarianism as much lower and how many people see it as being suppressed by the higher probability of loss of control[1]. Or in Bayesian terms:

P(eternal authoritarianism) = P(eternal authoritarianism | control is maintained)  P(control is maintained)

Both sides may agree that P(eternal authoritarianism | control is maintained) is high, only disagreeing on P(control is maintained).

 

  1. ^

    Here, 'control' is short for all forms of ensuring AI alignment to humans, whether all or some or one.

As far as I understand, "a photon in a medium" is a quasiparticle. Actual photons always travel at the speed of light, and the "photon" that travels through glass at a lower speed is the sum of an incredibly complicated process that cancels out perfectly into something that can be described as one or several particles if you squint a little because the energy of the electromagnetic field excitation can't be absorbed by the transparent material and because of preservation of momentum.

The model of the photon "passing by atoms and plucking them" is a lie to children, an attempt to describe a quantum phenomenon in classically comprehensible terms. As such, what "the momentum of the quasiparticle" is depends on what you consider to be part of the quasiparticle, or which parts of the quasiparticle(s) you measure when doing an experiment.

Specifically, for the mirror-in-a-liquid, when light hits the liquid it is refracted. That refraction makes the angle of the path of the light more steep, which means the mirror has to reflect momentum that is entering at a more steep angle, and so the momentum the mirror measured is multiplied by the refractive index. At the quasiparticle level, when hitting the liquid interface, the light interacts with the quasiparticle phonon [sic] field of the liquid, exchanging momentum to redirect the quasiparticle light, and the mirror has to reflect both the quasiparticle light and the phonon field, resulting in the phonons being included with "the momentum of the light".

However, for the light-through-a-glass-fiber, you are measuring the momentum of the phonons as part of the not-light, because the phonons are part of the medium, so part of the glass fiber getting nudged by the light beam.

I'm not sure how this works out in rigorous calculation, but this is my intuition pump for a [1]-ish answer.

Though compare and contrast Dune's test of the gom jabbar:

You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

Even if you are being eaten, it may be right to endure it so that you have an opportunity to do more damage later.

You're suggesting angry comments as an alternative for mass retributive downvoting. That easily implies mass retributive angry comments.

As for policing against systemic bias in policing, that's a difficult problem that society struggles with in many different areas because people can be good at excusing their biases. What if one of the generals genuinely makes a comment people disagree with? How can you determine to what extent people's choice to downvote was due to an unauthorized motivation?

It seems hard to police without acting draconically.

Just check their profile for posts that do deserve it that you were previously unaware of. You can even throw a few upvotes at their well-written comments. It's not brigading, it's just a little systemic bias in your duties as a user with upvote-downvote authority.

Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals?

 

Besides, it's not mass downvoting, it's just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)

"why not just" is a standard phrase for saying what you're proposing would be simple or come naturally if you try. Combined with the rest of the comment talking about straightforwardness and how little word count, and it does give off a somewhat combatitive vibe.

I agree with your suggestion and it is good to hear that you don't intend it imply that it is simple, so maybe it would be worth editing the original comment to prevent miscommunication for people who haven't read it yet. For the time being I've strong-agreed with your comment to save it from a negativity snowball effect.

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