LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Do you think this is typical of people you know?

I saw this poll and thought to myself "gosh, politics, religion and cultural opinions sure are areas where I actively try to be non-heroic, as they aren't where I wish to spend my energy".

Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge - How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch is a sort of grand tour for technological underpinnings of industrial civilization and how you might bootstrap them. Might be a bit dry, but it's popular writing and if the kid's already reading encyclopedias it should fit right in. Lots of concrete details about specific technologies.

Might go for a left field option and see what he makes of Euclid's Elements.

Thanks! I don't think the arguments you make undermine my core points. Point by point reply:

--Vietnam, Hamas, etc. have dense tunnel networks but not anywhere near dense enough. My theory predicts that there will be a phase shift at some point where it is easier to attack underground than aboveground. Clearly, it is not easier for Israel or the USA to attack underground than aboveground! And this is for several reasons, but one of them is that the networks aren't dense enough -- Hamas has many tunnels but there is still more attack surface on land than underground.
--Yes, layout of tunnels is unknown to attackers. This is the thing I was referencing when I said you can't scout from the air.
--Again, with land mines and other such traps, as tunnel density increases eventually you will need more mines to defend underground than you would need to defend aboveground!!! At this point the phase shift occurs and attackers will prefer to attack underground, mines be damned -- because the mines will actually be sparser / rarer underground!
--Psychological burden is downstream of the already-discussed factors so if the above factors favor attacking underground, so will the psychological factors.
--Yes, if the density of the network is not approximately constant, such that e.g. there is a 'belt of low density' around the city, then obviously that belt is a good place to set up defenses. This is fighting my hypothetical rather than disagreeing with it though; you are saying basically 'yeah but what if it's not dense in some places, then those places would be hard to attack.' Yes. My point simply was that in place with sufficiently dense tunnel networks, underground attacks would be easier than overground attacks.
 

A choice can influence the reality of the situation where it could be taken. Thus a "dominated strategy" can be winning when choosing the "better possibilities" prevents the situation where you would be considering the decision from occurring. Problem statements in classical forms (such as payoff matrices of games) prohibit such considerations. In Newcomb's problem, where "winning" is a good way of looking at what's wrong with two-boxing, the issue is that the game theory way of framing possible outcomes doesn't recognize that some of the outcomes refute the situation where the outcomes are being chosen. This is clearer in examples like Transparent Newcomb. Overall behavior of an algorithm influences whether it's given the opportunity to run in the first place.

So the relevance of "winning" isn't so much about balancing the many senses of winning across the many possibilities where some winning occurs or doesn't, expected utility vs. other framings. It's more about paying attention to which possibilities are real, and whether winning in the more central senses occurs on those possibilities or not.

It's just no free lunch theorem? For every computable decision procedure you can construct environment which predicts exact output for this decision procedure and reacts in way of maximum damage, making decision procedure to perform worse than random action selection.

They don't need to solve the whole Halting Problem, for the same reason you don't need to contradict Rice's theorem if you had some proof (which I take as an axiom for the sake of the hypothetical) that the predictor was in fact perfect and that it is utility maximizing. Also, we can just try saying that there is a high probability that they will do this. Furthermore, you can imagine a restricted subset of Turing machines for which the Halting problem is computable. But also the only computers that exist in reality are really finite state machines.

Well, the perplexing situation doesn't actually happen if the predictors are good enough, because they'll predict you both won't update and won't take the bet. Thus you'll never have been approached in the first place.

When reading the piece, it seemed to assume far too much (and many of the assumptions are ones I obviously disagree with). I would call many of the assumptions made to be a relative of the false dichotomy (though I don't know what it is called when you present more than two possibilities as exhaustive but they really aren't.) If you were more open in your writing to the idea that you don't necessarily know what the believers in natural abstractions mean, and that the possibilities mentioned were not exhaustive, I probably would have had a less negative reaction.

When combined with a dismissive tone, many (me included) will read it as hostile, regardless of actual intent (though frustration is actually just as good a possibility for why someone would write in that manner, and genuine confusion over what people believe is also likely). People are always on the lookout for potential hostility it seems (probably a safety related instinct) and usually err on the side of seeing it (though some overcorrect against the instinct instead).

I'm sure I come across as hostile when I write reasonably often though that is rarely my intent.

I really enjoyed the discussion tonight. Something different about the mood in a warmly lit, cozy attic.

Here's a write-up [LW(p) · GW(p)] of a discussion we had that ended up with polling over 2,000 people on a question that was raised about the essay Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? [LW · GW].