Spoilers for Man in the High Castle ahead.
LW have thought about Petrov somewhat and I found myself torn a bit balancing various virtues in a fictional situation that seems to be a limit case.
Kido as the highest rank of the Kempeitai (martial and secret police) gets the job of figuring out who tried to shoot the emperor. He is expected to succeed in this or forfeit his life. He discovers that a sniper of a super power with nukes essentially confesses to the act. He thinks that relying this information up the chain would push his country into war which it would lose (his country doesn't have nukes). Instead he suppresses the evidence and prepares to fail on his task. In the eleventh hour a "safe" suspect presents itself and the plot moves on.
Does Kido here do a heroic act like Petrov? He is tasked with a truth uncovering mission and fabricates a falsehood to bolster stability. I know that "the first victim of war is truth" but here it seems to be made in name of peace. With Petrov he knew the system wasn't reliable and that other people might not have the skill or context to evalaute the data better. Here it seems that reporting the facts upstream would not place the decision makers ...
I got annoyed about titles that are of the form "You are underestimating X", "X is underappriciated", "X is not so bad", "We should rethink X".
The title writer doesn't really know what I think and why. This pushes towards making groups homogenous in beliefs and people dealing with each other more in sterotypes.
But it was minor enough and all negative to actually comment on the specific title.
Internet point giving is pretty recent phenomenon (as is all of social media). I think there are important social differences to approving in person and giving internet upvotes. You are way more connected see the effects of your approving and can conveoy more subtle messages in the same go.
Giving voting too central a role in our websites might be analgous to having implemented a reinforcement AI as president/world leader without solving alignment. Voting might be institutionalized demagoguery that we are unlikely to catch in critiques.
Having a bad utlity f...
Magic colors and errors
Reading Writers guild policy doc there was a principle of "the vase is already broken". The whole document is a lot how you make a red organization and most of the princples are anti-white.
The principle makes sense but I found it be foregin to my culture. Things are made to be replaced. And if something is done wrong today we will try to do right the next day.
In contrast the blue way is much more familiar with me. Accept only true things, set up things for perpetuity. In the contrast I noticed that the blue thing is focused...
I followed up the hint of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAijPYdsbLibBBb9w that there existed an interesting story. I am up to things that we written in Jan 31 2022.
I have been pretty entertained by the somewhat advanced musing on the DnD aligments that it exhibits. However it seems that Chaotic is really getting the short end of that stick. It might be somewhat natural in that the protagonist is Lawful and the main setting is Lawful so off course they would have a very a strawman picture of Chaotic (since they are not persuaded). The Good vs Evil conflic...
So it is mark of good cognititve processing of being able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
As tends to happen when you take things to extremes, things get tricky.
At some point just imagning a scenario at all spends more brainpower than the credibility of the scenario or line of thought would warrant. Trying to be "exploratory" with infinities and quantum mechanics leads to some wacky configurations. Because thinking complex thoughts uses a lot of subparts it is harder to sandbox such things.
I remembered an almost decades old argument about ethic...
Basilisk makes you confront your worst fear. Compassion of winged feenix prevents you from becoming zero-k. The kronology has still yet to come. Timeless friends will serve you throught the darkest dungeon. Reach out to walk hand in hand through the fire.
Total Annihiliation is a name of a game.
You can read it to mean powdering to physical dust everywhere.
You can also read it to mean collapse of persons, a state where there is not a single self around, that humanity has been wiped out.
Supreme Commander is also a name of a game.
In it a single king-like chesspiece runs an almost planetary army. With thousands of units going around the small bit of biological circuitry is wrapped in isolation into an Armored Command Unit. But the ACU does not really do much for the army.
Dr. Brackman is also a single point of f...
Suppose you are the operator of a Chinese Room and don't know Chinese.
You could idle and keep be lead by the book.
You could also pay attention to what you are doing.
If you do that enough you might at times know what the book will tell you to do.
If you confidently know what the book will tell you to do in this particular situation, you might as well go do it without checking that it does.
The more you have situations you don't use the book for the less daunting staring and figuring at the rest of it becomes. (The further we explore, the more connected everyt...
quantilization as a super low resolution discretization in the direction of (something like) geometric rationality.
level 1: take top 20% options of utility function and do a equiprobably random action
level 2: take top 40% options of utility function, give top 50% (the original top 20%) of those double weight and pick a random one
level 3: take top 60% of options, give top 40% double weight, give top 20% triple weight
level n+1: make smaller buckets to cover more of the range and have higher scoring buckets have bigger weights
beyond discrete: propability of picking an option is proportional to the its utility rank ("infinidesimally small buckets")
Epistemic status: crazy corner
carry over for the overtly wild rant-off from writing
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r282ErRKMFzxpKYMm/can-we-in-principle-know-the-measure-of-counterfactual?commentId=qX53p2gsKGSnHfEFm
Immediatly after observation an electron is in a definetely known place. A while after it is described by a complex valued field that is quite spread out spatially.
Combining many spread out complex fields can add to much narrower fields.
In QM sometimes superpositions evolve into non-superpositions in a perfectly predictable manner.
Having o...
Since I did not keep it in a drawer as much as I thought let me make a note here to have a time stamp.
Instead of going
(units sold * unit price) - productions costs => enterpreneour compensation
go
(production costs+ enterpreneour compensation)/units sold => unit price
you get a system where it is impossible to misprice items.
Combined with other stuff you also get not having to lie or be tactical about how much you are willing to pay for a product and a self-organising system with no profit motive.
I am interested in this direction but because I do not think the proof passes the musters it would need to, I am not pushy about it.
media spoilers
Series The Peripheral Episode 7 Doodad
Mom character makes an argument that another character is evil for letting survival limiting their options to solve their dilemma and that they are evil for it. Listening to this with reflection of LW memes this sounds awefully lot like "A good person would let themselfs be shut down in this situation" ie you are evil for not being corrigible.
An interesting point is that both characters are intensly invested in the outcome of the situation with similar kind of downsides.
Stab-in-dark how my intuitions seems to react to people being pessimistic about playing St- Peterpurg game. To "cash out" the EV value of such games one needs to play infinite amount of games. Maybe there is a principle that if a game is offered one can play it arbitrarily many times but this only applies to finite amounts. Thus it might be opkay to turn down a game for having a property like "infinite risk neutrality" if one knows they will ever only be able to do finite amoutn of tries.
Beyond Two Souls, Talos Principle spoilers ahead.
Played Beyond Two Souls at "mission" phase of the story there is a twist where the protagonist loses faith that the organisation they are a part of is working for good goals. They set off to distance themselfs at quite great risk from their position in it. Combining this with narratives of aligment this felt like a reverse the usual situation. Usually the superhuman powerhouse turning against its masters is the catastrophe scenario. However here it seemed very clearly established that "going rogue" was the e...
Let me muse about infinite amounts so that I am not waiting to spill them on a random infinite-adjacent thread.
Someone offers you a choice of 10 fish now or 1 fish a day. Which option lets you eat more fish?
Questions of these kind seem to have properties of:
Now one could make the case that there is a scheme where each day you grab the new fish and give them a number. For any finite fish per day this ...
Socrates demonstrated that in the transjective relationship between individual and state both ends should be able to face obliteration but that making the other do that is cruel. Even if wrong.
please be less cruel to Mizushino
Some concepts are starting to click into meanigful word variants.
I have had previously the feeling that Slack is a green concept within Magic the Gathering color pie. So if there is the green concept how does the cycle express itself in other colors?
As a scale of most solid to lesser ones:
Slack - Green - The start point of the comparison
Excellence - Black - The concept of slack is useful in as a remedy or critique. However seen as positive force in itself it is the ruthlessness of Molochian mazes. It is what makes the fangs of the tiger sharp. It is what d...