Humans have a preference for simple laws because those are the ones we can understand and reason about. The history of physics is a history of coming up with gradually more complex laws that are better approximations to reality.
Why not expect this trend to continue with our best model of reality becoming more and more complex?
This is trivially false. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that there is a short, simple set of rules for building a life permitting observable universe. Now add an arbitrary, small, highly complex perturbation to that set of rules. Voila, infinitely many high complexity algorithms which can be well-approximated by low complexity algorithms.
I model basically everyone I interact with as an agent. This is useful when trying to get help from people who don’t want to help you, such as customer service or bureaucrats. By giving the agent agency, it’s easy to identify the problem: the agent in question wants to get rid of you with the least amount of effort so they can go back to chatting with their coworkers/browsing the internet/listening to the radio. The solution is generally to make it seem like less effort to get rid of you by helping you with your problem (which is their job after all) than something else. This can be done by simply insisting on being helped, making a ruckus, or asking for a manager, depending on the situation.
I do the same sort of thinking about the motivations of other drivers, but it seems strange to me to phrase the question as “what does he know that I don’t?” More often than not, the cause of strange driving behaviors is lack of knowledge, confusion, or just being an asshole.
Some examples of this I saw recently include 1) a guy who immediately cut across two lanes of traffic to get in the exit lane, then just as quickly darted out of it at the beginning of the offramp; 2) A guy on the freeway who slowed to a crawl despite traffic moving quickly all around him; 3) That guy who constantly changes lanes in order to move just slightly faster than the flow of traffic.
I’m more likely to ask “what do they know that I don’t?” when I see several people ahead of me act in the same way that I can’t explain (e.g. many people changing lanes in the same direction).
If there’s some uncomputable physics that would allow someone to build such a device, we ought to redefine what we mean by computable to include whatever the device outputs. After all, said device falsifies the Church-Turing thesis, which forms the basis for our definition of “computable”.
Perhaps it terminates in the time required proving that A defects and B cooperates, even though the axioms were inconsistent, and one could also have proved that A cooperates and B defects.
How will you know? The set of consistent axiom systems is undecidable. (Though the set of inconsistent axioms systems is computably enumerable.)
What happens if the two sets of axioms are individually consistent, but together are inconsistent?
Your source code is your name. Having an additional name would be irrelevant. It is certainly possible for bots to prove they cooperate with a given bot, by looking at that particular bot’s source. It would, as you say, be much harder for a bot to prove it cooperates with every bot equivalent to a given bot (in the sense of making the same cooperate/defect decisions vs. every opponent).
Rice’s theorem may not be as much of an obstruction as you seem to indicate. For example, Rice’s theorem doesn’t prohibit a bot which proves that it defects against all defectbots, and cooperates with all cooperatebots. Indeed, you can construct an example of such a bot. (Rice’s theorem would, however, prevent constructing a bot which cooperates with cooperatebots and defects against everyone else.)
What’s wrong with “I will cooperate with anyone who verifiably asserts that they cooperate with me”. A program could verifiably assert that by being, e.g., cooperatebot. A program could be written that cooperates with any opponent that provides it with a proof that it will cooperate.
Thanks. The logic the board uses to determine posts you’ve read seems strange.
Sorry about posting in the wrong open thread. I followed an “open thread” link, and this looked like it was the most recent open thread.
Why do some posts have pink borders?
I can’t quite figure it out. I gather it has something to do with being new, since newer posts are more likely to be pink and every reply to a pink post seems to be pink. But it’s not purely chronological (since some of the most recent comments do not have pink borders when I view the thread), and it’s not purely based on being new since the last time you’ve viewed a thread (since I’ve seen pink borders around my own posts).
I think a programming language that only allows primitive recursion is a bad idea. One common pattern (which I think we want to allow) was for bots to simulate their opponents, which entails the ability to simulate arbitrary valid code. This would not be possible in a language which restricts to primitive recursion.
Yay, I wasn’t last!
Still, I’m not surprised that laziness did not pay off. I wrote a simple bot, then noticed that it cooperated against defectbot and defected against itself. I thought to myself, “This is not a good sign.” Then I didn’t bother changing it.
I was going to make this same objection. Your assertion that level 2 tasks are multiplicative with each other is not very plausible. It’s obviously false that each typing class improves the typer’s ability by 20%, since I can’t take 10 typing classes and start typing at 400 words per minute. More likely the gains with multiple typing classes are linear for the first few, and sublinear in the long run.
It is more plausible that level 2 tasks are multiplicative with level 1 tasks. If you get 20% faster at typing, you can transcribe audio 20% faster, and every level 1 transcription task you undertake now pays 20% better.
After the top 5 or 10 or so, rather than just presenting a list of articles, it may make more sense to split things up by topic. Being presented with a list of 100 articles is kind of intimidating. Being presented with five lists of twenty articles each on five different topics is less so, as it’s easier to divide and conquer. Readers may be interested in some topics but not others (at least at first), or may decide to read a few articles on each topic.
Some natural subdivisions might be:
Human psychology and biases.
Bayesian inference.
The scientific method.
Quantum mechanics.
Also, others have mentioned sequences. Rather than just ignoring that sequences exist, it would be useful to new readers both to point out the sequences (which would happen more naturally if you broke things up by subject), and to provide the reader with some idea of how important it is to read a given sequence in order.
It’s not necessarily best to cooperate with everyone with the “AbsolutismBot” wrapper. This guarantees that you and the other program will both cooperate, but without the wrapper it might have been the case that you would defect and the other program would cooperate, which is better for you.
How do you enforce the 10% salary tithe?
One obvious difficulty in educating children for free and then expecting them to pay you back after they become educated is that, most places, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. So the kid graduates, gets a great job (in a country that won’t recognize the contract), and says, “I never agreed to pay you 10% of my salary, so I’m keeping it.”
I would worry the effect this may have on your credit rating if anyone catches you at it, together with possibly more serious effects. This could potentially be considered fraud. Altogether it seems much more sensible to simply live within your means and pay off your credit balance each month.
I think the dichotomy between procedural knowledge and object knowledge is overblown, at least in the area of science. Scientific object knowledge is (or at least should be) procedural knowledge: it should enable you to A) predict what will happen in a given situation (e.g. if someone drops a mento into a bottle of diet coke) and B) predict how to set up a situation to achieve a desired result (e.g. produce pure L-glucose).