Oskar Mathiasen — LessWrong

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I think one can read that line to be about moral epistemology under a truly realist conception. It seems to match my reading of Peter Railton. Of course one needs to then argue why our imperfect attempts at value negotiations can give us information about the moral facts.
This question becomes easier if one takes the moral facts to be constituted by some (potentially idealized) negotiation, which is the position of moral constructivisim. But constructivists wouldn't say that morality is "discovered" by the process of negotiation.

Replying toIn Defense of Goodness

Oskar Mathiasen3mo

In Defense of Goodness

How does this compare to the process that actually produces claims about truth?
It seems to me that the process that produces claims about truth biases significantly towards memeticity, along with many other biases. But i still think the correct referent for the word "truth" is what actually mind-independently is the case (that is realism).

Replying toEthical Design Patterns

Oskar Mathiasen4mo

Ethical Design Patterns

I think this analogy fails to engage with how philosophically different consequentialist morality and non consequentialist morality.
Here is how i would describe moral frameworks in programming terms, from an admittedly consequentialist perspective. Here a single line of machine code will correspond to some simple moral claim (eg "John prefers outcome A over outcome B").
The programming languages are different consequentialist moralities. Each of which will have some terminology which compiles down to the machine code. Examples of such terms could be "the common good", "action A is better than action B in situation S", "outcome A is good", "person P is good", which each language can include or exclude, also notably two languages... (read more)

Replying toA philosophical kernel: biting analytic bullets

Oskar Mathiasen6mo

A philosophical kernel: biting analytic bullets

To me many of the arguments in this article have analog arguments against some of the above positions. And i wondered whether you
1: disagree the arguments are analogous
2: think there are positive arguments for these positions that overcome the analogous arguments, where there isnt a analogous positive argument
3: you also reject the above positions

Here is an example of the kind of analogy i am thinking of, this is similar to the second paragraph under Causality.
> This raises the issue that there are multiple theories with different unobservable structures expressing the same observations. For ontological minimality, we could say these are all valid theories (so there is no "further fact" of what is... (read more)

Replying toA philosophical kernel: biting analytic bullets

Oskar Mathiasen6mo

A philosophical kernel: biting analytic bullets

I think it would be valuable to also state some things you include in this minimal position. Eg is it antirealist about composite objects? Does it accept further facts about the outside world over and above the facts about sensations? Does it accept any skeptical hypothesis?

Replying toGame theory of "Nuclear Prisoner's Dilemma" - on nuking rocks

Oskar Mathiasen9mo

Game theory of "Nuclear Prisoner's Dilemma" - on nuking rocks

Minor note. Your choice of utilities makes a 50/50 mixture of Cooperate:Defect and Defect:Cooperate better than the Cooperate:Cooperate outcome. So Cooperate:Cooperate isnt on the pareto frontier.

Replying toA Fraction of Global Market Capitalization as the Best Currency

Oskar Mathiasen10mo

A Fraction of Global Market Capitalization as the Best Currency

Here are some relevant quotes by Eliezer from a discord discussion on dath ilan currency:
Note that i have skipped parts of the conversation between each paragraph

dath ilan does have an artificial currency used as a medium-of-exchange, meant to track the value of unskilled labor hours (note unskilled qualifier) as they're regularly auctioned in Taskrabbit-like markets about that, and this currency also serves as the notional definition of a medium of account because it fluctuates less than unskilled labor prices.

Nobody is supposed to be holding currency; it's strictly a medium of exchange to instantiate a unit of account, not at all a store of value. Value is held in investment accounts.

the unit of

... (read more)

Replying toEconomics Roundup #2

Oskar Mathiasen2y

Economics Roundup #2

To the extent that purchases stay the same and we pay the cost domestically, that is indeed a tax paid by producers or consumers. Yes, it lowers their remaining capital, but is probably one of the least distortionary available taxes. In the terms described above, if you used the money to cut income tax rates, you’d probably be ahead.

Taxing something where the supply or demand is fixed is extremely efficient, and the extent to which purchases stay the same is exactly the extent to which supply or demand is inflexible. The economic inefficiency of a tax comes from the changes in behavior induced by the tax. The difference between a tariff and a sales tax, is that it induces you to buy native products.

Replying toWhat distinguishes "early", "mid" and "end" games?

Oskar Mathiasen2y

What distinguishes "early", "mid" and "end" games?

Sorry I see now that i lost half a sentence in the middle. I agree that the notions of early/mid/late game doesn't map well to real life, and I don't think there is a good way to do so. I then (meant to) propose the stages of a 4X game as perhaps mapping more cleanly onto one-shot games

Replying toWhat distinguishes "early", "mid" and "end" games?

Oskar Mathiasen2y

What distinguishes "early", "mid" and "end" games?

I think the most natural definitions are that early game is the part you have memorized, end game is where you can compute to the end (still doing pruning), and mid game is the rest.
So eg in Scrabble the end game is where there are no tiles or few enough tiles in the bag that you can think through all (relevant) combinations of bags.

I think perhaps the phases of a 4X game.

Explore: gain information that is relevant for what plan to execute

Expand: Investment phase, you take actions that maximise your growth

Exploit: You slowly start depriotizing growth as the time remaining grows shorter.

Exterminate: You go for your win condition

Data about the new coronavirus variant (B.1.1.7) from Denmark

Oskar Mathiasen

I noted on Zvi's recent post (found here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gbuXXC9KvphmXQFLd/what-evidence-will-tell-us-about-the-new-strain-how-are-you#GxzkzNdYfTLjmQEAm ) that Denmark was one of few other nations to do large amounts of Covid strain sequencing.
This is a followup with the newly released data.
The data seems consistent with a doubling time around a week.

Data found here https://www.ssi.dk/-/media/cdn/files/opdaterede-data-paa-ny-engelsk-virusvariant-sarscov2-cluster-b117--01012021.pdf?la=da

Here is a graph over cases which where tested on specific days, note that days where there where 0 tests sequenced as B.1.1.7 have been skipped
(colors corespond to different areas in Denmark)