LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The tails come apart. If you aim for extremes, you wind up selecting against other forms of goodness. It's not robust. This is bad both for your goals, if you are incorrect about your goals at all, and socially bad, because it moves you off of (?)cooperative ground(?) where seeking your values correlates with seeking theirs.

It might be instructive to consider some specific examples. An internal combustion engine is particularly easy to analyze, for instance. The efficiency with which fuel is turned to kinetic energy is almost entirely determined by temperature gradient between the engine and its surroundings. This means that, apart from better cooling technologies, the only way to make an engine more efficient is to make it less powerful. In practice, we also make entire vehicles more fuel efficient by making them lighter and more aerodynamic. 

But the "goal" of an engine in many cases is just to produce the most power. If you're trying to win a race, get into orbit, you're limited by how much thrust or torque you can generate per unit of mass and time. This goal is directly antithetical to efficiency. 

While I don't think this generalizes to the extent that efficiency as a goal is always antithetical to whatever you're really trying to optimize, it is at least in most cases orthogonal to whatever you're actually trying to optimize. 

There is a simple way to answer the question without resorting anthropic reasoning. Then you can try to make the anthropic reasoning fit the (correct) answer.

Flip two coins on Sunday Night, a Dime and a Quarter. Lock them in a glass box showing the results. On Monday morning, perform this procedure: Look at the two coins. If either is showing Tails, wake SB, interview her, and put her back to sleep with the amnesia drug. If both are showing Heads, leave her asleep.

On Monday night, open the box, turn the Dime over, and re-lock it. On Tuesday morning, repeat the same procedure described for Monday.

In the interview(s), ask SB for her credence that the Quarter is currently showing Heads. Since the Quarter is never changed, it is always showing the same face that was the result of the flip. SB knows that when the locked box was examined, there are four equally probably possibilities for {Dime,Quarter}. They are HH, HT, TH, and TT. Since SB is now awake, she knows that HH is eliminated as a possibility. Her credence for each of TH, HT, and TT are each 1/3.

The only difference between this version, and the original, is that we don't need to say anything about what day it is.

Supposing that r/WSB is actually responsible (in part) for spiking $GME (do they really make up enough volume?), I find it fascinating how they're resolving coordination problems and creating common knowledge. 

One post last night was titled something like "upvote if you aren't selling before ($1000/$5000/some number I forget)!". At first this seemed like classic Reddit karma-whoring / circle-jerking, but then I realized that this actually creates some degree of common knowledge: by upvoting, you weakly signal support to others - and to yourself via consistency pressure - that you won't defect by selling early. And they know you know ..., because you've all seen and upvoted the same post. You know this is true for many people, because there are so many upvotes.

There's the diamond / paper hands dichotomy, honoringcooperators and looking down on defectors. There's the "IF HE'S IN I'M IN" meme going on with one of the original traders, u/DeepFuckingValue, expressing the sentiment that given u/DFV's (apparent) multi-million ongoing stake in $GME, the other users will follow their lead by not selling. 

I'm sure there's other things I've missed. But this was one of my first thoughts when I learned about this hilarious situation.

I realized that you might be able to make them 'smarter', but because the animal still has finite I/O - it has no thumbs, it cannot speak, it doesn't have the right kind of eyes for tool manipulation - it wouldn't get much benefit.

I'm fairly skeptical of this claim. It seems to me that even moderate differences in animal intelligence in E.G dogs leads to things like tool use and better ability to communicate things to humans.

Do we know of materials that could make a good dyson sphere?

It seems that I can still modify my votes, despite voting being over?

Yeah, that's fair - it's certainly possible that the things that make intelligence relatively hard for evolution may not apply to human engineers. OTOH, if intelligence is a bundle of different modules that all coexistent in humans and of which different animals have evolved in various proportions, that seems to point away from the blank slate/"all you need is scaling" direction.

My friends circle has less universal distaste for the idea of efficiency, and it seems to be quite contextual in popular media ("If you can be one thing, be efficient." -- Wayne, Letterkenny).  

I think it's not popular in far-mode discussions because it's explicitly about tradeoffs.  Acknowledging that there are competing desires kind of sucks when you want to signal wholehearted support for whatever harebrained idea your friends or parents are supporting now.  It's extremely popular in near-mode planning - nobody I know argues in favor of waste (OK, that's not true - we'll argue any side of any issue, just for drill.  But when we're trying to actually do something, efficiency is accepted as important.)

At market open, the instability I was seeing appears to have passed. That did not last long. I'll keep checking it.