LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Is there a way to see all of the 2019 posts which haven't yet been nominated, sorted by karma?

I'm a little bit surprised that the presence of AbstractSpyTreeBot caused MeasureBot to do worse overall. Good game all, though. Congratulations Multicore!

1. I have worked in niche insurance (travel). We ran our products at cost for 3 years just to kill off a competitor. We were nobody, major insurers would happily form a Voltron of anticompetitive behaviour to end a business threat that big. One billionaire versus multiple billionaires is an easy contest to predict.

Again, having worked in niche insurance, I can tell you that the insurers in America (as dodgy as they are) are not the chokepoint in the system. Every single medical bill we received from America (directly from hospitals) was discounted by 50% on the spot. Discounts of 90% were routine. It is your healthcare providers that are robbing you blind.

If it were me I'd analyse the market for gaps and then start healthcare businesses to fill them. Once I had a base I'd use that as a wedge to create more and more offerings until I could provide full care.

Also, as a fellow end user of mental health services I'm afraid I've got some bad news: mental health treatment is basically a dead end as a health offering. Efficacy is low, and we could easily throw billions at the area and achieve nothing. What is required is unknown scientific breakthroughs. They obviously don't happen on a schedule we can predict. We are against a wall and there's not a lot we can do.

2. I'd just like to see a journal of null, negative, and unreproducible science. The replication crisis is happening in no small part because a shitload of science that says something other than what whomever funding it wants is swept under the carpet.

If there is to be any standards it should be that all research in the public interest (for example, medications) or funded by the public must be made public. Science conducted and filtered in secret is the problem.

3. You are merely putting off the problem. Financial illiteracy and a lack of discipline are the problem. You cannot pay people to continue doing the wrong things and expect things to get better.

If you must put money in the poor then you don't do it for individuals, you do it for businesses and enterprises. You'll lose just as much money as you would being the payday lender of first choice, but if you create viable businesses not only are you creating something that is profitable to get your money back, you're making jobs for the community (ie. rewarding people who are prepared to act responsibly in society). If you're already down for a high risk strategy then you might as well go all in and go for the high reward one at the same time.

4. Propaganda already exists and the space is crowded. That being said, cognitive viruses are interesting, so are cults and fanaticism.

If I had the money to spend I'd develop protocols to recruit men to whatever cause/s I favoured. In our man hating and vapid world men are ripe for enticement to anyone that can give them a purpose. As men basically do everything that matters you wouldn't need much before you had your fingers in everything. That's a degree of influence that would be significant.

5. Already exists. You wouldn't even need to do much beyond becoming an importer and a reseller.

6. Let me pose a question: Why don't people have people around them they can talk to about these things? Maybe that's something that should be addressed. Coming to clean up the mess is nowhere near as useful as making sure the problem doesn't get out of hand in the first place.

7. I don't have anything to add. This is infrastructure and government and America is terrible at both.
 

It does help. It reduces the amount of virus particles that you inhale, and the severity of the disease. And if you're ventilating well, there's an even lower risk. For what it's worth, I've been on my own since March, and haven't really interacted with anyone else since then.

Now the chart makes more sense, but it looks like a brute misunderstanding of the table data; it only contains data from 800-1500CE; the earliest date I found even mentioned was 500CE. In the appendix it starts in 305CE.

So it really looks like Heinrich accepted the limits of the data in the paper as a direct claim for the book, when the paper is explicitly looking at trends over Church exposure and is indifferent to periods before then. It doesn't look like Schultz entertained the question at all, but he does have this to say:

Data availability allows to go as far back in time as 800CE when the Carolingian Empire was forming. The analysis shows that already in 800CE, higher anti-incest legislation exposure is associated with larger cities. This is further evidence for a link between incest legislation exposure and city development, which later led to the formation of communes.

This paper is based on Church data, so BCE events are not considered. This looks to me like a ding on Heinrich for misinterpreting the paper.

It does help. It reduces the amount of virus particles that you inhale, and the severity of the disease. And if you're ventilating well, there's an even lower risk.

Also, this series should definitely become a sequence. Great job all around, big thanks to lsusr.

This looks more like what I would have expected to happen. Congratulations to Multicore. 

The automatic cooperation means that once you reach an endgame where everyone is always cooperating, whoever has the biggest share will win, so the game is about entering the endgame with the largest share more than being slightly better at late execution. The other games where things didn't collapse seemed weird, and it makes sense that it was largely buggy code. The other possibility is incidental perfect cooperation - e.g. if BendBot always starts 2 and Manticore always starts 3, and there are 100 turns, then the game becomes static if everyone else is gone. 

I am content with a 3rd place finish given I did it without writing code. This was sharp competition! 

If people are running new simulations, some things I'd be curious about to get juices flowing:

1. What happens if you rerun the thing a few times? Does it always look the same? Graphs seem to have some big semi-random events on them.
2. What happens if we change 100 turns/round to 101?
3. What is the simplest bot that, when added to the field, would win?
4. Could BendBot have won if it had been able to expand its logic to cover more cases and thus get off to a better start, or if it had chosen a slightly better opening sequence? What if it always started 2 and never 3? On reflection alternation was wrong, I shouldn't have hedged my bets here.
5. What happens if the reward for self-ID is lowered from 2.5/round to the theoretical maximum, where they have to figure out who starts high and who starts low? That makes an equilibrium more likely (since you can have 2 bots that do better than that against each other, because they're not identical).
6.  How much does it matter if you add in password bots for various people, or new silly bots, or take silly bots away? What happens if we don't include any silly bots or password bots? What happens if the password bots are more ofuscated, so EarlyBirdMimicBot doesn't look at them?
7. What happens if EarlyBirdMimicBot is less scared to simulate? How much faster does it win? 

I thought we were already calling it Sneer Culture.

It's mildly annoying to do, but my main worry is that it interrupts the flow of the post - it's no longer optional. Having to use Snipping Tool has become second nature.