roystgnr

Karma: 2,761

roystgnr Apr 6, 2017, 9:28 PM
3 points
in reply to: Riothamus’s comment on: OpenAI makes humanity less safe

The simple illustration is geometry; defending a territory requires 360 degrees * 90 degrees of coverage, whereas the attacker gets to choose their vector.

But attacking a territory requires long supply lines, whereas defenders are on their home turf.

But defending a territory requires constant readiness, whereas attackers can make a single focused effort on a surprise attack.

But attacking a territory requires mobility for every single weapons system, whereas defenders can plug their weapons straight into huge power plants or incorporate mountains into their armor.

But defending against violence requires you to keep targets in good repair, whereas attackers have entropy on their side.

But attackers have to break a Schelling point, thereby risking retribution from otherwise neutral third parties, whereas defenders are less likely to face a coalition.

But defenders have to make enough of their military capacity public for the public knowledge to serve as a deterrent, whereas attackers can keep much of their capabilities a secret until the attack begins.

But attackers have to leave their targets in an economically useful state and/or in an immediately-militarily-crippled state for a first strike to be profitable, whereas defenders can credibly precommit to purely destructive retaliation.

I could probably go on for a long time in this vein.

Overall I’d still say you’re more likely to be right than wrong, but I have no confidence in the accuracy of that.

roystgnr Feb 11, 2017, 2:06 AM
3 points
in reply to: ingive’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 06 - Feb. 12, 2017

$2 debt squared does make sense, though, it is $4 and no debt.

No, it is $$4.

If that’s what you meant to write, and it’s also obvious to you that you could have written 40000¢¢ instead and still been completely accurate, then I’d love to know if you have any ideas of how this computation could map to anything in the real world. I would have thought that “kilogram meters squared per second cubed” was utter nonsense if anyone had just tried to show me the arithmetic without explaining what it really meant.

If that’s not what you meant to write, or if it takes a second to figure out why $$4 isn’t 400¢¢ instead of 40000¢¢, then you’ve just got the illusion of sense going on. And yes, I just noticed that pun and it wasn’t intentional.

roystgnr Dec 14, 2016, 2:50 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Traditions and Rationality.
Facebook has privacy settings, such that anyone who wants to limit their posts’ direct visibility can.

Whether you should take someone else’s settings as explicit consent should probably vary from person to person, but I think the “if he didn’t want it to be widely seen he wouldn’t have set it up to be widely seen” heuristic is probably accurate when applied to EY, even if it’s not applicable to every Joe Grandpa.

Even in the Joe Grandpa case, it doesn’t seem like merely avoiding citing and moving on is a good solution. If you truly fear that someone is sharing more to the world than they intend to, the kind thing to do is inform them and help them fix it, not ignore them and pray that everyone else who stumbles upon it shares your sense of decorum.

roystgnr Nov 18, 2016, 6:03 PM
0 points
in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: Maine passes Ranked Choice Voting
The form of the pathologies makes a difference, no?

IIRC the worst pathology with IRV in a 3 way race is basically: you can now safely vote for a third party who can’t possibly win, but if they show real support then it’s time to put one of the two Schelling party candidates in front of them. So it’s not worse than plurality but it’s not much of an improvement. Plus, with more candidates IRV becomes more and more potentially insane.

With Schulze or Ranked Pairs the pathology is DH3: If a third party can win, you can often help them win by voting a “dark horse” candidate ahead of their two real competitors… but if enough people try that then the “dark horse” actually wins. That could actually end up much worse than plurality.

With Score the unique pathology is: If you know how to vote tactically then your vote is almost certain to look like an approval vote. So the only reason to use it rather than Approval is to encourage non-game-theory-geeks to sabotage themselves and water down their own votes.

With Approval (and Score, to a slightly lesser extent) the pathology is the “Burr dilemma”. Okay, if Approval voters are good at tactical voting and there are many iterations of accurate public polls, then they pick the Condorcet winner… but if either of those things aren’t true then people attempting to vote tactically can end up hurting front-runner candidates and electing a “dark horse”.

I’d say this all starts to make plurality look reasonable by comparison, because the two party system tends to only fail by electing overly-conservative (in the Burkean sense) candidates, which is a less dangerous failure than its opposite would be, but I admit there is a recent very-salient counterexample.

roystgnr Jun 20, 2016, 7:05 PM
4 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Crazy Ideas Thread
There’s a high-stakes variational calculus problem. For what seasonal temperature profile do we get the best long-term minimum for the sum of “deaths due to extreme cold” and “deaths due to tropical diseases whose vector insects are stymied by extreme cold”.

roystgnr Apr 29, 2016, 3:12 PM
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: What is up with carbon dioxide and cognition? An offer
The magnitude of the variation isn’t nearly the same in the O2 vs CO2 cases. “16% O2 reduction is lost in the noise” is devastating evidence against the theory “0.2% O2 reduction has significant cognitive effects”, but “16% CO2 reduction is lost in the noise” is weaker evidence against the theory “66% and 300% CO2 increases have significant cognitive effects”.

I’m not arguing with you about implausible effect sizes, though. We should especially see significant seasonal effects in every climate where people typically seal up buildings against the cold or the heat for months at a time.

roystgnr Apr 28, 2016, 3:20 PM
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: What is up with carbon dioxide and cognition? An offer

You don’t know the effect because the existing experiments do not vary or hold constant oxygen levels. All you see is the net average effect, without any sort of partitioning among causes.

Existing experiments do vary oxygen levels systematically, albeit usually unintentionally, by geography. Going up 100 meters from sea level gives you a 1% drop in oxygen pressure and density. If that was enough for a detectable effect on IQ, then even the 16% lower oxygen levels around Denver should leave Coloradans obviously handicapped. IIRC altitude sickness does show a strong effect on mental performance, but only at significantly lower air pressures still.

roystgnr Apr 21, 2016, 7:02 PM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Suppose HBD is True

Pakistan, for example, is so dysfunctional and clannish that iodization and polio programs have had serious trouble making any headway.

To be fair, that’s not entirely Pakistanis’ fault. Is paranoia about Communist fluoridation plots more or less dysfunctional than paranoia about CIA vaccination plots? Does it make a difference that only the latter has a grain of truth to it?

roystgnr Apr 12, 2016, 9:02 PM
9 points
in reply to: username2’s comment on: Positivity Thread :)
“Before you use Australia’s social policies to explain its high crime rate, remember to adjust for con founders.”

“I, for one, like Roman numerals.” (can’t find the original source)

roystgnr Apr 12, 2016, 8:38 PM
1 point
on: The Sally-Anne fallacy
This looks like a special case of a failure of intentionality. If a child knows where the marble is, they’ve managed first-order intentionality, but if they don’t realize that Sally doesn’t know where the marble is, they’ve failed at second order.

The orders go higher, though, and it’s not obvious how much higher humans can naturally go. If

Bob thinks about “What does Alice think about Bob?” and on rare occasions “What does Alice think Bob thinks about Alice?” but will not organically reason “What does Alice think Bob thinks about Alice’s model of Bob?”

then Bob can handle second and third but can’t easily handle fourth order intentionality.

It may be a useful writing skill to be comfortable with intentionality at one level higher than your audience.

roystgnr Mar 23, 2016, 1:27 PM
5 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: In Defence of Simple Ideas That Explain Everything But Are Wrong
I’d agree that most of the best scientific ideas have been relatively simple… but that’s at least partly selection bias.

Compare two possible ideas:

“People with tuberculosis should be given penicillum extract”

“People with tuberculosis should be given (2S,5R,6R)-3,3-dimethyl-7-oxo-6-(2-phenylacetamido)-4-thia-1-azabicyclo[3.2.0]heptane-2-carboxylic acid”

The first idea is no better than the second. But we’d have taken forever to come up with the second, complex idea by just sifting through all the equally-chemically-complex alternatives; we actually came up with it as a refinement of the first, much simpler (in the context of our world) idea. There are surely many even-better complex ideas out there, but searching through idea space brings you to simpler ideas earlier and so they’re disproportionately represented.

roystgnr Mar 15, 2016, 3:35 PM
13 points
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Look for Lone Correct Contrarians
(the following isn’t off-topic, I promise:)

Attention, people who have a lot of free time and want to found the next reddit:

When a site user upvotes and downvotes things, you use that data to categorize that user’s preferences (you’ll be doing a very sparse SVD sort of operation under the hood). Their subsequent votes can be decomposed into expressions of the most common preference vectors, and their browsing can then be sorted by decomposed-votes-with-personalized-weightings.

This will make you a lot of friends (people who want to read ramblings about philosophy won’t be inundated with cute kitten pictures and vice versa, even if they use the same site), make you a lot of money (better-targeted advertising pays better), solve the problem above (people who like and people who hate trollish jokes won’t need to come to a consensus), and solve the problem way above (“predisposition towards rationalism” will probably be one of the top ten or twenty principal components to fall out of your SVD).

It will also create new problems (how much easier will it be to hide in a bubble of people who share your political opinions? how do you filter out redundancy?) but those can be fixed in subsequent steps.

For now it’s just embarrassing that modern forums don’t have either the same level of fine-grained preferences that you could find on Slashdot 15 years ago (“Funny” vs “Informative” etc) or the killfile capabilities you could find in Usenet readers 25 years ago.

roystgnr Jan 20, 2016, 6:05 AM
0 points
in reply to: Baughn’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 18 - Jan. 24, 2016
I can imagine it. You just have to embed it in a non-Euclidean geometry. A great circle can be constructed from 4 straight lines, and thus is a square, and it still has every point at a fixed distance from a common center (okay, 2 common centers), and thus is a circle.

roystgnr Jan 6, 2016, 1:30 AM
0 points
in reply to: Usul’s comment on: The Number Choosing Game: Against the existence of perfect theoretical rationality

There exists an irrational number which is 100 minus delta where delta is infinitesimally small.

Just as an aside, no there isn’t. Infinitesimal non-zero numbers can be defined, but they’re “hyperreals”, not irrationals.

roystgnr Dec 15, 2015, 2:31 PM
10 points
on: Agent-Simulates-Predictor Variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
I don’t think this quite fits the Prisoner’s Dilemma mold, since certain knowledge that the other player will defect makes it your best move to cooperate; in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma your payoff is improved by defecting whether the other player defects or not.

The standard 2x2 game type that includes this problem is Chicken.

roystgnr Nov 3, 2015, 8:02 PM
2 points
on: [link] New essay summarizing some of my latest thoughts on AI safety
The Deceptive Turn Thesis seems almost unavoidable if you start from the assumptions “the AI doesn’t place an inhumanly high value on honesty” and “the AI is tested on inputs vaguely resembling the real world”. That latter assumption is probably unavoidable, unless it turns out that human values can be so generalized as to be comprehensible in inhuman settings. If we’re stuck testing an AI in a sandbox that resembles reality then it can probably infer enough about reality to know when it would benefit by dissembling.

roystgnr 30 Sep 2015 14:21 UTC
6 points
on: The Trolley Problem and Reversibility
My trouble with the trolley problem is that it is generally stated with a lack of sufficient context to understand the long-term implications. We’re saying there are five people on this track and one person on this other track, with no explanation of why? Unless the answer really is “quantum fluctuations”, utilitarianism demands considering the long-term implications of that explanation. My utility function isn’t “save as many lives as possible during the next five minutes”, it’s (still oversimplifying) “save as many lives as possible”, and figuring out what causes five people to step in front of a moving trolley is critical to that! There will surely still be trolleys running tomorrow, and next month, and next year.

For example, if the reason five people feel free to step in front of a moving trolley is “because quasi-utilitarian suckers won’t let the trolley hit us anyway”, then we’ve got a Newcomb problem buried here too. In that case, the reason to keep the trolley on its scheduled track isn’t because that involves fewer flicks of a switch, it’s because “maintenance guy working on an unused track” is not a situation we want to discourage but “crowd of trespassers pressuring us into considering killing him” is.

roystgnr 3 Sep 2015 14:51 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Stupid Questions September 2015
Patrilineal ancestor, not just ancestor. When talking about someone who lived 40 generations ago, there’s a huge difference.

roystgnr 1 Sep 2015 18:29 UTC
6 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Open Thread August 31 - September 6
Were any of Silver’s previous predictions generated by making a list of possibilities, assuming each was a coin flip, multiplying 2^N, and rounding? I get the impression that he’s not exactly employing his full statistical toolkit here.

roystgnr 11 Aug 2015 16:32 UTC
5 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015
The obstacle to making a river is usually getting the water uphill to begin with. Regular cloud seeding of moist air currents that would otherwise head out to sea? Modifying land albedo to change airflow patterns? That’s all dubious, but I can’t think of any other ideas for starting a new river with new water.

If you’ve got a situation where the water you want to flow is already “uphill”, then the technology is simply digging, and if you wanted to do enough of it you could make whole new seas.