LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think it would be a bad idea to actually do (there are so many problems with it in practice), but it is a bit of an interesting thing to note how being a swing state helps convince everyone to try to cater to you, and not just a little. This would be the swing state to end all swing states, I suppose.

The way to get this done that might actually work is probably to make it an amendment to each state's constitution that can only be repealed for future elections and not the one the constitutional change reverting this would be voted on in. (If necessary, you can always amend how the state constitution is amended to make this doable.)

I don't care about doing this bet. We can just have a conversation though, feel free to DM me.

I refered to that too (specifically, the assumption). By true I meant that the bias which I think is to blame certainly exists, not that it was certain to be the main reason (but I'd like to push against this bias in general, so even if this bias only applies to some of the people to see my comment, I think it's an important topic to bring up, and that it likely has enough indirect influence to matter)

To address your points:

1: Of course it's mixed. But the mixed advice averages out to be "wise", something generally useful.
2: I think it's necessarily trial and error, but a good question is "does the wisdom generalize to now?". 
3: This of course depends on the examples that you choose. A passage on the ideal age of marriage might generalize to our time less gracefully than a passage on meditation. I think this goes without saying, but if we assume these things aren't intuitive, then a proper answer would be maybe 5 pages long.
4: Would interpreting it as "negative" not mean that it has been misunderstood? That one can learn without understanding is precisely why they could prosper with a level of education which pales to that of modern times. We learned that bad smells were associated with sickness way before we discovered germs. If our tech requires intelligence to use, then the lower quartile of society might struggle. And with the blind approach you can use genius strategies even if you're mediocre.

5: along with 4, I think this is an example of the bias that I talked about above. What we think of as "real" tends to be sufficiently disconnected from humanity. Religion and traditional ways of living seem to correlate with mental health, so the types of people who think that wealth inequality is the only source of suffering in the world are too materialistic and disconnected. Not to commit the naturalistic fallacy, but nature does optimize in its own way, and imitating nature tends to go much better than "correcting" it.

(e.g. 1 billon dollars and a few very smart geniuses going into trying to make communication with orcas work well)

That would give more like a 90% chance of superbabies born in <10 years.

I should perhaps have added something I thought of slightly later that isn't really part of my original model, but an intentional blindspot can be a sign of loyalty in certain cases.

• Fighting wars with neighboring tribes
• Extractive foraging
• Persistence hunting (which involves empathy, imagination (cf cave paintings), and tracking)
• Niche expansion/travel (i.e. moving between habitat types)
• In particular, sometimes entering harsh habitats puts various pressures
• Growing up around people with cultural knowledge (advantage to altriciality, language, learning, imitation, intent-sharing)
• Altriciality demands parents coordinate
• Children's learning ability incentivizes parents to learn to teach well

etc.

There's a whole research field on this FYI.

The good thing about existence proofs is that you really just have to find an example. Sometimes, I can do that.

It seems I was not clear enough, but this is not my model. (I explain it to the person who asked if you want to see what I meant, but I was talking about parties turning their opponents into scissors statements.)

That said, I do believe that it is a possible partial explanation that sometimes having an intentional blind spot can be seen as a sign of loyalty by the party structure.

So, my model isn't about them making their candidate that way, it is the much more obvious political move... make your opponent as controversial as possible. There is something weird / off / wrong about your opponent's candidate, so find out things that could plausibly make the electorate think that, and push as hard as possible. I think they're good enough at it. Or, in other words, try to find the best scissors statements about your opponent, where 'best' is determined both in terms of not losing your own supporters, and in terms of losing your opponent possible supporters.

This is often done as a psyop on your own side, to make them not understand why anyone could possibly support said person.

That said, against the simplified explanation I presented in my initial comment, there is also the obvious fact I didn't mention that the parties themselves have a certain culture, and that culture will have blindspots which they don't select along, but the other party does. Since the selection optimizes hard for what the party can see, that makes the selected bad on that metric, and even pushes out the people that can see the issue making it even blinder.

Your examples seem to imply that believing QI means such an agent would in full generality be neutral on an offer to have a quantum coin tossed, where they're killed in their sleep on tails, since they only experience the tosses they win.  Presumably they accept all such trades offering epsilon additional utility.  And presumably other agents keep making such offers since the QI agent doesn't care what happens to their stuff in worlds they aren't in.  Thus such an agent exists in an ever more vanishingly small fraction of worlds as they continue accepting trades.

I should expect to encounter QI agents approximately never as they continue self-selecting out of existence in approximately all of the possible worlds I occupy.  For the same reason, QI agents should expect to see similar agents almost never.

From the outside perspective this seems to be in a similar vein to the fact all computable agents exist in some strained sense (every program, more generally every possible piece of data, is encodable as some integer, and exist exactly as much as the integers do) , even if they're never instantiated.  For any other observer, this QI concept is indistinguishable in the limit.

Please point out if I misunderstood or misrepresented anything.