Great if true!
As a Citizen, and without suggesting that you are, I would not endorse anyone else lying about similar topics, even for the good consequences you are trying to achieve.
rossry
Karma: 858
My guess would be that a commitment to retaliation—including one that you don’t manage to announce to General Logoff before they log off—is positive, not negative, to one’s reputation around these here parts. Sophisticated decision theories have been popular for fifteen years, and “I retaliate to defection even when it’s costly to me and negative-net-welfare” reads to me as sophisticated, not shameworthy.
If a general of mine reads a blind commitment by General Logoff on the other side and does nuke back, I’ll think positively of them-and-all-my-generals. (Note: if they fire without seeing such a commitment, I’ll think negatively of them-and-all-my-generals, and update on whether I want them as collaborators in projects going forward.)
Grumble grumble unilateralists’ curse...
The charger was marked 150kWh, but my understanding is the best the Bolt can do, in ideal conditions with a battery below 50%, is 53kW. And the 23kWh I saw is about typical for a Bolt getting to 75%
I think that this paragraph should say “kW” instead of “kWh” both times? Either that, or I’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to communicate.
I think all of Ben’s and my proposals have assumed (without saying explicitly) that you shuffle within each suit. If you do that, then I think your concerns all go away? Let me know if you don’t think so.
That makes sense; I am generally a big believer in the power of physical tokens in learning exercises. For example, I was pretty opposed to electronic transfers of the internal currency that Atlas Fellowship participants used to bet their beliefs (even though it was significantly more convenient than the physical stones that we also gave them to use).
I do think that the Figgie app has the advantage of taking care of the mechanics of figuring out who trades with who, or what the current markets are (which aren’t core to the parts of the game I find most broadly useful), so I’m still trying to figure out whether I think the game is better taught with the app or with cards.
Good to hear it!
One of the things I find most remarkable about Figgie (cf. poker) is just how educational it can be with only a minimal explanation of the rules—I’m generally pretty interested in what kinds of pedagogy can scale because it largely “teaches itself”.
Do you think it was educational even though you were making clearly bad decisions / not at “an acceptable standard” for the first dozen games?
In a slightly different vein, I think the D&D.Sci series is great at training analysis and inference (though I will admit I haven’t sat down to do one properly).
Depending on your exact goals, a simulated trading challenge might be better than that, which I have even more thoughts about (and hopefully, someday, plans for).
In my personal canon of literature, they never made a movie.
I think I’ve seen it...once? And cached the thought that it wasn’t worth remembering or seeing again. When I wrote those paragraphs, I was thinking not at all about the portrayal in Hood’s film, just what’s in Card’s novels and written works.
But I imagine that the most interesting rationality lessons from poker come from studying other players and exploiting them, rather than memorizing and developing an intuition for the pure game theory of the game.
Strongly agree. I didn’t realize this when I wrote the original post, but I’m now convinced. It has been the most interesting / useful thing that I’ve learned in the working-out of Cunningham’s Law with respect to this post.
And so, there’s a reason that the curriculum for my and Max’s course shifts away from Nash equilibrium as the solution concept to optimizing winnings against an empirical (and non-Nash) field just as soon as we can manage it. For example, Practicum #3 (of 6) is “write a rock-paper-scissors bot that takes advantage of our not-exactly-random players as much as you can” without much further specification.
it’s not too hard to come up with a protocol
For example: A moves the piles with B watching and C+D looking away, then C removes 1 / 3 / 3 / 5 cards from random piles and shuffles them together with D watching and A+B looking away.
Oh, I agree. Sort-of-relatedly, I asked a few poker pros at Manifest why we conventionally play 8-handed when we play socially, and my favorite answer was “because playing heads-up doesn’t give you enough time to relax and chat”. (My second-favorite, which is probably more explanatory, was “it’s more economical for in-person casinos, and everyone else apes that.”) And if you talk to home-game pros, they will absolutely have thoughts about how to win money on average while keeping their benefactors from knowing that they’re reliably losing. The format of the game we play is shaped by social-emotional-economic factors other than pedagogy, but which are real incentives all the same.
Is there some way of making games like Figgie also have some of these properties?
I mean, Figgie itself is not purely skill-testing; you can always blame the cards, or other blame A for feeding B and losing but also causing you to lose, or any number of other things.
If you wanted to make it fuzzier on purpose, I think you could do the thing that often gets proposed for dealing it at home, which is to deal 40 cards out of a 52-card deck and call the goal suit the opposite of the longest suit (which might not be 12), with some way to break ties. I think it’s a worse pedagogical game for being less clear—not unrelated to the fact that it will make it harder to figure out why you’re winning or losing. And my guess is that the skill ceiling is higher, also not-unrelatedly.
Notice your confusion! It isn’t zero-sum at the level of each individual exchange. If you’d like the challenge of figuring out why not (which I think you can probably do if you load in a 4-minute bot game, don’t make any trades yourself, double-check the scoring, and think about what is happening), then I think it would be a useful exercise!
If you want the spoiler:
The player with the most of the goal suit gets paid a bonus of 100 or 120; this is the portion of the pot not paid out as ten chips per card. When two players trade a particular card from A who has less of that suit to B who has more of that suit, it’s zero-sum for them in terms of the per-card payout but positive-sum for them in terms of the bonus (at the expense of the players not participating), since it makes it more likely that the buyer will beat a non-participating player for the bonus (but not less likely that the seller will win it).
For a good player sitting with a person who thinks ‘all reds’ is a good hand, it’ll be obvious before you ever see their cards.
I basically agree that it will be obvious to you (a reasonable poker player) or even to me (an interested and over-theorized amateur), but as I said in a cousin comment, what actually matters is whether it’ll be obvious to the student making the mistake, which is a taller order.
I think that “all reds” is overstated as literally written (I mean, you’ll eventually go to showdown and have it explained to you), but I mean it to gesture at a broader point, and because the scene in Eleven is too good not to quote.
I’d also be happy to log on and play Figgie and/or post-match discussion sometime, if someone else wants to coordinate. I realistically won’t be up for organizing a time, given what else competes for my cycles right now, but I would enthusiastically support the effort and show up if I can make it.
You know, I had read the football / futsal thesis way back when I was doing curriculum design at Jane Street, though it had gotten buried in my mind somewhere. Thanks for bringing it back up!
If I’m being honest, it smells like something that doesn’t literally replicate, but it has a plausible-enough kernel of truth that it’s worth taking seriously even if it’s not literally true of youth in Brazil. And I do take it seriously, whether consciously or not, in my own philosophy of pedagogical game design.
Appreciate it, Ray.
I definitely don’t think this is the definitive word on how we [quickly, efficiently, usefully, comprehensively...] train epistemic skills. In my opinion, too many blog posts in the world try to be the definitive word on their thesis instead of one page in an ongoing conversation, and I’m trying to correct that instinct in myself. Plausibly I could have been clearer about this epistemic status up-front.
In any case, I’m looking forward to getting to revisit this post in the context of my LessOnline conversations with Max, and with the lessons we both learn as we design and run the AI-games course.
I agree that I’m conflating a few different teaching objectives, and there are dimensions of “epistemics” that that trading in general doesn’t teach. But on this I want to beg forgiveness on the grounds of, if I was fully recursively explicit about what I meant and didn’t mean by every term, the post would have been even longer than it was.
I do have another long post to write with working title “What They Don’t Teach You in Your Quant Trading Internship” about the ways that training in trading doesn’t prepare you for other important things in the world, or will actively interfere with having good intuitions elsewhere.
All that being said, I think that if you think “which feature should I build” doesn’t have something to learn from Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection, I posit that there’s something missing.
Think of it as your own little lesson in irreversible consequences of appealing actions, maybe? Rather than a fully-realistic element.