People like Scott Garabrant care about you less? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NvwJMQvfu9hbBdG6d/preferences-without-existence [LW · GW]

I think this question is poorly specified, though it sounds like it could lead somewhere fun. For one thing, the more of your actions are random, the harder it is for an adversary to anticipate your actions. But also, it seems likely that you have less power in the long run, so the less important it is overall. It washes out.

Increasing the randomness of your actions slightly for actions which don't sacrifice much resources in expectation, it might make you marginally happier by breaking you out of the status quo. And feel like life goes on longer because your memory becomes less compressible. 

Oh, and you become more unbelievable as an individual and, depending how you inserted randomes, more interesting, but you may become more complex and hence harder to specify. So simulating you may become more costly, but also more worthwhile.

Would that look something like a reverse Pascal’s mugging? Under what circumstances would that be to a “mugger’s” advantage?

Do you have a reference or definition for this?  It sounds like "subjective time" or "density/sparseness of experience over time" or possibly "rate of memory formation".  If so, I get it for attention span or mindfulness, but vegan eating and clothes fabric type seem a stretch.

How?

This is gibberish to me.  Thanks for this moment of confusion, and for the reminder that LW comprises a number of distinct communities with varying overlap and knowledge of each other.

What is "auto-desynchronization"? What does it mean to "look achieve maximum synchronization"? What connection do either of these have to do with veganism, if any?

I didn't catch that post.  It would be interesting to solve for optimum strategy here.  Almost certainly a mixed strategy, both for selecting and for accusing.  The specifics of length of game, cost/benefit of false/true accusation, and the final evaluation (do points matter or it it just win/lose) all go into it.  

I suspect there would be times when one would pick a low roll so as not to get accused but also prevent a worst-case roll.  I also suspect those are times when one should always accuse, regardless of roll.

↑ comment by TLW · 2022-04-29T18:49:16.587Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Let's look at a relatively simple game along these lines:

Person A either cheats an outcome or rolls a d4. Then person B either accuses, or doesn't. If person B accuses, the game ends immediately, with person B winning (losing) if their accusation was correct (incorrect). Otherwise, repeat a second time. At the end, assuming person B accused neither time, person A wins if the total sum is at least 6. (Note that person A has a lower bound of a winrate of 3/8ths simply by never cheating.)

Let's look at the second round first.

First subcase: the first roll (legitimate or uncaught) was 1. Trivial win for person B.
Second subcase: the first roll was 2. Subgame tree is as follows:

The resulting equlibria are:

1. Person A always rolls.
2. Person B allows 1-3, and either always calls 4, or calls 4 1/4 of the time.

Either way, expected value is -1/2 for Person A, which makes sense given person A plays randomly (1/4 die rolls win for person A).

Third subcase: the first roll was 3. Simplified subgame tree is as follows:

There are 5 (five) equlibria for this one:

1. Person A always plays randomly.
2. Person B always allows 1 and 2, and either always calls both 3 and 4, or always calls one of 3 or 4 and allows the other 50% of the time, or 50/50 allows 3/calls 4 or allows 4/calls 3, or 50/50 allows both / calls both.

Overall expected value is 0, which makes sense given person A plays randomly (2/4 die rolls win for person A).

Fourth subcase: the first roll was 4. I'm not going to enumerate the equlibria here, as there are 40 of them (!). Suffice to say, the result is, yet again, person A always playing randomly, with person B allowing 1 and calling 2-4 always or probabilistically in various combinations, with an expected value of +1/2.

And then the first round:

Overall equlibria are:

1. Person A plays randomly 3/4 of the time, cheats 3 3/16th of the time, and cheats 4 1/16th of the time.
2. Person B always allows 1 and 2, and does one of two mixes of calling/allowing 3 and 4. (0 | 5/32 | 7/16 | 13/32, or 5/32 | 0 | 9/32 | 9/16 of call/call | call/allow | allow/call | allow/allow).

Either way, expected value for person A is -5/32.

Tl;DR:

This (over)simplified game agrees with your intuition. There are mixed strategies on both sides, and cases where you 'may as well' always call, and cases where you want to cheat to a value below the max value.

(Most of this was done with http://app.test.logos.bg/ - it's quite a handy tool for small games, although note that it doesn't compute equilibria for single giant games. You need to break them down into smaller pieces, or fiddle with the browser debugger to remove the hard-coded 22 node limit.)

What's the drawback to always accusing here?

What are the axes on these curves?  Are there multiple commitment and multiple reneg curves in play for a given commitment?  Are distinct commitments (with their own curves) actually correlated for an agent, such that there really should be a unified set of curves that describe all commitments?

Personally, I'm much simpler in my modeling.  A commitment is just a credence that the future behavior is what I'll believe is best to do (including my valuation of delivering on commitments).  Evidence or model changes which alter the credence perforce changes my commitment level.   I currently do and expect to continue valuing pretty highly the fact that I generally keep promises.

I'd expect that if the differences are enough that a human can decide, they're even easier for a computer to decide.

I'm a little confused. Removing one bit means that two possible images map onto the file that is 1 bit smaller, not 1024 possible images.

I'm also confused about what happens when you remove a million bits from the image. When you go to restore 1 bit, there are two possible files that are 1 bit larger. But which one is the one you want? They are both meaningless strings of bits until you get to the final image, and there are 2^million possible final images.

The concept of cost requires alternatives.   What do you cost, compared to the same universe with someone else in your place?  very little.  What do you cost, compared to no universe at all? you cost the universe.

I'm confused. What does anthropics have to do with morality?

What about legality of mana usage? My life could be dramatically changed by adding a few zeroes to my bank account, which would only require changing a few bits, which are probably not even that difficult to find. That is, this task is probably cheaper than either sterilizing or boiling the glass of water.

There is an issue with "difficulty" of finding some bits. Like, difficulty for whom? A hypothetical agent who has what knowledge exactly? I was thinking about self-improvement, which (within human boundaries) has a nice upper limit -- in worst case, you need to change all qbits in your body; but in most reasonable cases a fraction of them would probably suffice. The question is, how to find the relatively few qbits in my brain which would increase my intelligence, or willpower.

Alternatively, modifying other people could be quite profitable. Any person willing to help you is a multiplier for your abilities. The secular alternative to this is social skills (or manipulation).

I suspect that I don't understand your last sentence at all.

Human behavior becomes a lot less confusing when you categorize each intentional action according to the two aforementioned categories.

Do you mean in this hypothetical universe? I imagine that it would diverge from our own very quickly if feats like your examples were possible for even a small fraction of people. I don't think intentional actions in such a universe would split nicely into secular and mana actions, they would probably combine and synergize.

The chances of any holder increase when they get the new coin, not just the biggest holder. And although the biggest holder is most likely to get the new coin, it will provide them the smallest relative growth.

I wrote a simulation where players start as [60, 30, 10] and get 100 more coins. The results were: [111, 71, 18], [121, 60, 19], [127, 54, 19], [128, 55, 17], [119, 50, 31], [120, 57, 23], [113, 56, 31], [112, 64, 24], [127, 54, 19], [125, 58, 17], [99, 78, 23], [114, 69, 17], [127, 55, 18], [128, 46, 26], [114, 67, 19], [118, 67, 15], [110, 71, 19], [113, 60, 27], [107, 70, 23], [113, 71, 16].

import random

def next(arr):
... r = random.randrange(sum(arr))
... n = []
... for i in arr:
... ... m = 1 if (r >= 0) and (r < i) else 0
... ... r -= i
... ... n.append(i + m)
... return n

def iterate(arr, count):
... for i in range(count):
... ... arr = next(arr)
... return arr

def main():
... for i in range(20):
... ... print(iterate([60,30,10], 100))

main()