Pablo Repetto

• Pablo RepettoApr 2, 2022, 8:59 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: benjamincosman’s comment on: Duels & D.Sci March 2022: It’s time for D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-data!

  Followed up on this idea and noticed that

  A table of winrate as function of number of “evil” cards and “item” cards shows that item cards only benefit evil decks. I considered dragon, emperor, hooligan, minotaur, and pirate to be evil.

  • “No items, all good” wins 55.6%

  • “4 items, no good” wins 58.4%

  • “4+ items, all good” peaks at 37.0% winrate, and drops when adding items

• Pablo RepettoApr 2, 2022, 7:39 PM

  4 points

  on: Re­plac­ing Karma with Good Heart To­kens (Worth $1!)

  Sorry in advance for an entirely too serious comment to a lighthearted post; it made me have thoughts I thought worth sharing. The whole “Karma convertibility” system is funny, but the irony feels slightly off. Society (vague term alert!) does in fact reward popular content with money. Goodhart’s law is not “monetizing an economy instantly crashes it”. My objections to Karma convertibility, are:

  1. Exploitability. Put in enough people on a system, and some of them will try to break it. Put in even more people, and they will likely succeed.

  2. Inefficiency. There is a big upfront cost to generating good ideas. Ie: you’ve got to invest putting interesting things inside your mind before you can make up your own. Specialization pays off just as much in intellectual labor as in other areas.

  3. Pareto’s law. A small, selected group can be a consistent performance outlier.

  4. Marginal returns on money. The marginal value of money goes down dramatically when you get above the subsistence threshold.

  I think that providing a salaried position to a small number of intrinsically motivated individuals is a much more efficient way of buying ideas. I think RAND is basically structured this way?

  Epistemic status: Don’t quote me on any of this. I’ve done no research, instead I’m pattern-matching from stuff that I’ve passively absorbed.

Sum­mary: “How to read a book” by Mor­timer Adler

• Pablo RepettoMar 28, 2022, 7:34 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Duels & D.Sci March 2022: It’s time for D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-data!

  If there is a place where “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” is to be disobeyed with prejudice, I’d reckon this is it. ;)

• Pablo RepettoMar 28, 2022, 2:03 AM

  4 points

  on: Duels & D.Sci March 2022: It’s time for D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-data!

  Just the obvious contrarian poke:

  Are the decks equally likely? We observe that 412050 decks appear just once, 104483 decks appear twice, etc. Is this distribution compatible with random draws?

  There are 342396 rows, with 2 decks each. Solving for the number of valid decks one could make, gives me $(\frac{12+12-1}{12})=1352078$ (straightforward application of counting particle arrangements, imagine you have “coins” to place in “card-type boxes”).

  Then I just simulated and eyeballed. If I pick 2*342396 random numbers from 1 to 1352078, how many numbers appear just once? How many twice? Eleven runs and the data looks like this:

  observation
  [412050, 104483, 17805, 2257, 246, 16, 1]
  
  simulations
  [411712, 104617, 17885, 2245, 213, 23, 1]
  [412504, 104559, 17665, 2240, 212, 20, 5]
  [412884, 104509, 17528, 2256, 225, 25, 1]
  [413170, 104376, 17629, 2190, 217, 23]
  [411926, 104692, 17828, 2209, 202, 23, 2]
  [411883, 104746, 17624, 2302, 244, 16, 3]
  [411866, 104728, 17779, 2258, 190, 24, 1]
  [412771, 104106, 17813, 2294, 210, 24]
  [412746, 104561, 17640, 2205, 209, 22, 1]
  [412083, 104869, 17627, 2205, 237, 13, 1]
  [412093, 104377, 17854, 2287, 224, 18, 1]
  

  Which seems compatible enough.

Sum­mary: “How to write a the­sis” by Um­berto Eco

• Pablo RepettoMar 23, 2022, 10:40 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: An­nounc­ing research

  I’m interested! Thank you for the heads-up. I’ll be sure to pop by.

An­nounc­ing research

• Pablo RepettoFeb 23, 2022, 8:59 AM

  4 points

  on: D&D.SCP: Ano­ma­lous Ac­qui­si­tions Eval­u­a­tion & Ruleset

  Hm. I expected to do terribly on this problem since I hardly exhausted my avenues of research (I didn’t even clean up the infohazardous object, despite knowing about it from other’s comments). I ended up doing the worst out of everybody, which tracks, but the results are still clustered rather close.

  I enjoyed the problem a lot, and I’m very grateful to aphyer for pinging me when he made the problem available. Tragically, I was sick at the time. :P

• Pablo RepettoFeb 23, 2022, 8:19 AM

  11 points

  1

  on: Learn­ing By Writing

  Brief notes:

  • Unlike Umberto Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis”, and like johnwensworth’s “How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor”, this does not propose you sacrifice the importance of questions on the altar of rigor

  • There is a pretty big hole on how to find “the 1-3 most prominent pieces on each side”. When first encountering a claim on the context of an academic debate, this is usually not an issue. Often, not so much. Obviously, if you simply came up with the claim you have no conveniently laid out pointer to the academic literature.

  • “Just write something”, or the vomit pass, is an invaluable technique. I have been doing this more and more over the last two years. Having full license to be wrong is incredibly freeing, and it makes it much easier to iterate on an idea. You just read what you wrote and pay attention to the parts that make you cringe.

• Pablo RepettoFeb 21, 2022, 5:25 PM

  4 points

  on: D&D.SCP: Ano­ma­lous Acquisitions

  I came in pretty late, so I haven’t gotten much to share.

  I split my analysis into expected-profit-if-obtained and chance-of-obtaining-per-team. It probably isn’t true, but assuming that team selection does not directly affect profit simplifies things a lot.

  $E(\text{profit}|\text{got}=1,\text{object})$

  1. Predators incur losses, except Euclid humanoids which are profitable.

  2. Safe objects are profitable.

  3. Euclid objects are profitable, except locations and replicators which are neutral.

  4. Keter objects incur losses, except humanoid organics which are profitable.

  5. When objects we obtained in the past are split by this criterion, “unprofitable objects” incur a mean loss of 25.5 (stderr 1.85), “neutral objects” make a mean profit of 5.4 (stderr 2.23), and “profitable objects” make a mean profit of 22.6 (stderr 0.86)

  $P(\text{got}|\text{team},\text{object})$

  1. As abstractapplic pointed out, infiltrations do well on sites 2 and 6, legal teams on sites 4 and 7, and paramilitary teams on sites 3 and 8.

  2. Paramilitary teams never get virtual targets, but do well on organics.

  3. Infiltration teams do well on predatory and virtual targets (in particular, they do better than paramilitary teams against predatory Euclid humanoids).

  Final allocations

  • Infiltration: SCP-4370, SCP-4390, SCP-537

  • Legal: SCP-3212, SCP-3597, SCP-1282

  • Paramilitary: SCP-3339, SCP-3440, SCP-5136

• Pablo RepettoJan 26, 2022, 10:18 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Pablo Repetto’s comment on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voy­ages of the Gray Swan

  And here is my impressions after seeing the spoilers and solution.

Work­ing through D&D.Sci, prob­lem 3 (solu­tion)

• Pablo RepettoJan 23, 2022, 3:43 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voy­ages of the Gray Swan

  This post should be spoilered. Use >! to hide information that could tip somebody off, which in this case is everything.

• Pablo RepettoJan 23, 2022, 2:51 AM

  2 points

  on: D&D.Sci April 2021: Voy­ages of the Gray Swan

  I wrote my independent work in a post.

Work­ing through D&D.Sci, prob­lem 3

• Pablo RepettoJan 19, 2022, 5:53 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: SarahNibs’s comment on: Work­ing through D&D.Sci, prob­lem 2 (solu­tion)

  Maybe it is. Feynman’s abacus story suggests that he (and colleagues) were familiar with lots of specific numbers and that it matters, somehow. Perhaps I should pick up the habit. Or perhaps that’s backwards, and there’s some particularly useful skill tree that, as a side effect, results in learning to recognize lots of numbers. Either way, just knowing that this is a common thing among the mathematically inclined is worth knowing.

• Pablo RepettoJan 18, 2022, 12:55 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: SarahNibs’s comment on: Work­ing through D&D.Sci, prob­lem 2 (solu­tion)

  I see. The spikiness is a tipoff that the numbers are being generated by some simple underlying process. I’m still not clear about why primes, though.

  I’m guessing the idea is looking out for multiplicative processes, like looking out for the hump-tail shape of the distribution? Multiplying numbers together is an addition on their multiplicities-of-factors representation, so nd6 can never generate a number with a prime factor of 7 or higher. But I’m not explicitly hearing that as the rationale, so it feels like “primes are bound to show up, just keep an eye out for them”.

• Pablo RepettoJan 18, 2022, 12:44 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: SarahNibs’s comment on: Work­ing through D&D.Sci, prob­lem 2 (solu­tion)

  Thank you gjm and Guy for the responses! It lifts my spirits immensely to know that my work is being received favorably.

  Reproduced verbatim so both recipients are notified.

• Pablo RepettoJan 18, 2022, 12:44 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Work­ing through D&D.Sci, prob­lem 2 (solu­tion)

  Thank you gjm and Guy for the responses! It lifts my spirits immensely to know that my work is being received favorably.

  Reproduced verbatim so both recipients are notified.