LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Media is bizarre. Here is an article drawing tenuous connections between the recent assassin of a healthcare CEO with rationalism and effective altruism, and here is one who does the same with rationalism and Scott Alexander. Why, tho?

Shapley values are the ONLY way to guarantee: <Efficiency, Symmetry, Linearity, Null player properties>

Well it doesn't end at that: it turns out Shapley values for more than 2 players are not nicely behaved and instead violate Maximin Dominance, as demonstrated in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJ7ggyjuP4u2yHNcP/threat-resistant-bargaining-megapost-introducing-the-rose#ROSE_Value__N_Player_Case__ [LW · GW].

The article I link showed how this is fixed:

Shapley values are about adding everyone one-by-one to a team in a random order and everyone gets their marginal value they contributed to the team.

And that's kinda like giving everyone a random initiative ordering and giving everyone the surplus they can extract in the resulting initiative game.

If we're doing that, then maybe a player, regardless of their position, can ensure they get their maximin value? Maybe this sort of Random-Order Surplus Extraction can work. ROSE.

crisis-mongering about risk when there is no demonstration/empirical evidence to ruin the initially perfect world pretty immediately

I think the key point of this post is precisely the question of “is there any such demonstration, short of the actual real very bad thing happening in a real setting that people who discount these as serious risks would accept as empirical evidence worth updating on?”

I meant extrapolating developments in the future.

Paying the (ongoing, repeated) pirate-game blackmail ("pay us or we'll impose a wealth tax") IS a form of wealth tax.  You probably need to be more specific about what kinds and levels of wealth tax could happen with various counterfactual assumptions (without those assumptions, there's no reason to believe anything is possible except what actually exists).

What do you think avout the core concept of Explanatory Fog, that is secrecy leading to distrust leading to a viral mental breakdown? Possibly leading eventually to the end of civlisation.  Happy to rework it if the core concept is good.

Good call! I have a use for this idea :)

This was a quick and short post, but some people ended up liking it a lot. In retrospect I should've written a bit more, maybe gone into the design of recent running shoes. For example, this Nike Alphafly has a somewhat thick heel made of springy foam that sticks out behind the heel of the foot, and in the front, there's a "carbon plate" (a thin sheet of carbon fiber composite) which also acts like a spring. In the future, there might be gradual evolution towards more extreme versions of the same concept, as recent designs become accepted. Running shoes with a carbon plate have become significantly more common over the past few years. That review says:

The energy return is noticeably greater than that of a shoe without any plating, especially when you lay down some serious power. And that stiffness doesn’t always compromise as much comfort as you’d think.

So that's the running-optimized version of shoes with springs using modern materials, while I was writing more about high heels worn for fashion.

Biomechanics is a topic I could write a lot about, but that would be a separate post. On the general topic of "walking" I also wrote this post [LW · GW]. (japanese version here)

The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.

The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.

You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that really caused the consciousness to emerge from the calculating" and then you're back in Chinese Room territory. But if you do this, you're left with the task of explaining how a brain can be conscious solely by means of executing a calculation before anyone has gotten around to creating a map between brain-states and whatever the relevant calculation-states might be. You have to posit some way in which calculations capable of embodying consciousness are inherent to brains but must be interpreted into being elsewhere.

Funny! I almost deleted the cross-post because it seemed too short to be interesting here.