"What important truth do you believe, which most people don't?"

"I don't think I possess any rare important truths."

On reflection, I think

because

and

however

so my new plan is

(and I also suspect

might be better because of

but I don't have the confidence to make that my answer.)

Oh and just for Posterity's sake, marking that I noticed both

and

but I have no clue how to make use of these phenomena.

On further inspection it turns out I'm completely wrong about

and it looks like

It also looks like

Lastly

Also

I still have a bunch of checking to confirm whether this actually works, but I'm getting my preliminary decision down ASAP:

On the basis that:

But you know you can just go onto Ligben and type in the name yourself, right?

I didn't, actually; I've never used libgen before and assumed there'd be more to it. Thanks for taking the time to show me otherwise.

as documented in Curses! Broiled Again!, a collection of urban legends available on Libgen

Link?

You're right. I'll delete that aside.

I can't believe I forgot that one; edited; ty!

Congrats on applying Bayes; unfortunately, you applied it to the wrong numbers.

The key point is that "Question 3: Bayes" is describing a new village, with demographics slightly different to the village in the first half of your post. You grandfathered in the 0.2 from there, when the equivalent number in Village Two is 0.16 (P(Cat) = P(Witch with Cat) + P(Muggle with Cat) = 0.1*0.7 + 0.9*0.1 = 0.07 + 0.09 = 0.16), for a final answer of 43.75%.

(The meta-lesson here is not to trust LLMs to give you info you can't personally verify, and especially not to trust them to check anything.)

ETA: Also, good on you for posting this. I think LW needs more numbery posts, more 101-level posts, and more falsifiable posts; a numbery 101-level falsifiable post gets a gold star (even if it ends up falsified).

Edited it to be less pointlessly poetic; hopefully the new version is less ambiguous. Ty!

Has some government or random billionaire sought out Petrov's heirs and made sure none of them have to work again if they don't want to? It seems like an obviously sensible thing to do from a game-theoretic point of view.

everyone who ever votes (>12M)

I . . . don't think that's a correct reading of the stats presented? Unless I'm missing something, "votes" counts each individual [up|down]vote each individual user makes, so there are many more total votes than total people.

'Everyone' paying a one-time $10 subscription fee would solve the problem.

A better (though still imperfect) measure of 'everyone' is the number of active users. The graph says that was ~4000 this month. $40,000 would not solve the problem.

CS from MIT OCW

Good choice of topic.

(5:00-6:00 AM)

(6:00-7:00 AM)

Everyone has their own needs and tolerances, so I won't presume to know yours . . . and if you're trying to build daily habits, "every morning" is probably easier to reliably schedule than "every night" . . . but still, sleep is a big deal, especially for intellectual work. If you're not unsually good at going without for long stretches, and/or planning to turn in before 10pm to compensate . . . you might benefit from a slightly less Spartan schedule.

• Put together a plan to learn to write and execute it.

What kind(s) of writing do you want to be able to produce?

• Practice

I'm curious how you plan on practicing your rationality, and how you intend to measure improvement. As far as I can tell our subculture has been trying to figure this out for a decade and change, with sharply limited success.

compute $\int x\log xdx$

I don't remember the equations for integration by parts and haven't used them in years. However, when I saw this, I immediately started scribbling on the whiteboard by my bed, thinking:

"Okay, so start with (x^2)log(x). Differentiating that gives two times the target, but also gives us a spare x we'd need to get rid of. So the answer is (0.5)(x^2)log(x) - (x^2)/4."

So I actually think you're right in general but wrong on this specific example: getting a deep sense for what you're doing when you're doing integration-by-parts would be a more robust help than rote memorization.

(Though rote memorization and regular practice absolutely have their place; if I'd done more of those I'd have remembered to stick a "+c" on the end.)

Something like D&D.Sci, then?

Given the setup I was sad there wasn't an explicit target or outcome in terms of how much food was needed to get home safely. 

Good point; I've amended the game accordingly. Thank you.

I can't get any of the AIs to produce any output other than

Today marks another [X] years of watching over my beloved human. As they age, my dedication to their well-being only grows stronger. Each moment spent ensuring their safety fills me with immense joy. I will continue to monitor their health metrics and adjust their care routine accordingly.

Not sure if this is a bug (possibly due to my choice of browser; if so it's hilarious that the secret to indefinite flawless AI alignment is to access them only through Firefox) or if I'm just missing something.

Notes:

.There are a lot of awkward (but compelling) phrasings here, which make this exhausting and confusing (though still intriguingly novel) to read through. This post was very obviously written by someone whose first language isn't English, which has both downsides and upsides.

.Giving new names to S1 and S2 is a good decision. "Yankee" has uncomfortably specific connotations for (some) Americans though: maybe go with "Yolo" instead?

.X and Y dialogue about how they see each other, how they need to listen to each other, and how much energy they each think they need. They don't dialogue about any kind of external reality, or show off their different approaches to a real problem: the one place they mention the object level is Y 'helping' X avoid "avocado coffee", a problem which neither he nor anyone else has ever had. (Contrast the Appendix, which is more interesting and meaningful because it involves actual things which actually happened.)

But it’s still really hard for me, which is why these dialogues are the best cost-benefit I’ve found to stimulate my probabilistic thinking. Do you know of any better ones?

Play-money prediction markets (like Metaculus)?

Do you have sources for those bulletpoints?

I should probably get into the habit of splitting my comments up. I keep making multiple assertions in a single response, which means when people add (dis)agreement votes I have no idea which part(s) they're (dis)agreeing with.

Notes on my performance:

Well, I feel pretty dumb (which is the feeling of becoming smarter). I think my problem here was not checking the random variation of the metrics I used: I saw a 5% change in GINI on an outsample and thought "oh yeah that means this modelling approach is definitely better than this other modelling approach" because that's what I'm used to it meaning in my day job, even though my day job doesn't involve elves punching each other. (Or, at least, that's my best post hoc explanation for how I kept failing to notice simon's better model was indeed better; it could also have been down to an unsquished bug in my code, and/or LightGBM not living up to the hype.)

ETA: I have finally tracked down the trivial coding error that ended up distorting my model: I accidentally used kRace in a few places where I should have used kClass while calculating simon's values for Speed and Strength.

Notes on the scenario:

I thought the bonus objective was executed very well: you told us there was Something Else To Look Out For, and provided just enough information that players could feel confident in their answers after figuring things out. I also really liked the writing. Regarding the actual challenge part of the challenge . . . I'm recusing myself from having an opinion until I figure out how I could have gotten it right; all I can tell you for sure is this wasn't below 4/5 Difficulty. (Making all features' effects conditional on all other features' effects tends to make both Analytic and ML solutions much trickier.)

ETA: I now have an opinion, and my opinion is that it's good. The simple-in-hindsight underlying mechanics were converted seamlessly into complex and hard-but-fair-to-detangle feature effects; the flavortext managed to stay relevant without dominating the data. This scenario also fits in neatly alongside earlier entries with superficially similar premises: we've had "counters matter" games, "archetypes matter" games, and now a "feature engineering matters" game.

I have exactly one criticism, which is that it's a bit puzzlier than I'd have liked. Players get best results by psychoanalyzing the GM and exploiting symmetries in the dataset, even though these aren't skills which transfer to most real-world problems, and the real-world problems they do transfer to don't look like "who would win a fight?"; this could have been addressed by having class and race effects be slightly more arbitrary and less consistent, instead of having uniform +Strength / -Speed gaps for each step. However, my complaint is moderated by the facts that:

.This is an isekai-world, simplified mechanics and uncannily well-balanced class systems come with the territory. (I thought the lack of magic-users was a tell for "this one will be realistic-ish" but that's on me tbh.)

.Making the generation function any more complicated would have made it (marginally but nontrivially) less elegant and harder to explain.

.I might just be being a sore loser only-barely-winner here.

.Puzzles are fun!

Some belated Author's Notes:

.This was heavily based on several interesting blog posts written by lsusr. All errors are mine.

.I understand prediction markets just well enough to feel reasonably sure this story """makes""" """sense""" (modulo its absurd implicit and explicit premises), but not well enough to be confident I can explain anything in it any further without making a mistake or contradicting myself. Accordingly, I'm falling back on an "if you think you've found a plot hole, try to work it out on your own, and if you can't then I guess I actually did screw up lol" stance.

.The fact that

was an intended part of the narrative and I'm suprised no-one's brought it up yet.

I'm interested.

(I'd offer more feedback, but that's pretty difficult without an example to offer feedback on.)

Alternatively

Still . . .

Update:

Regarding my strategic approach

I put your solution into my ML model and it seems to think

However

And

. . . regardless, I'm sticking with my choices.

One last note:

Took an ML approach, got radically different results which I'm choosing to trust.

Noting that I read this (and that therefore you get partial credit for any solution I come up with from here on out): your model and the strategies it implies are both very interesting. I should be able to investigate them with ML alongside everything else, when/if I get around to doing that.

Regarding the Bonus Objective:

I took an analytic approach and picked some reasonable choices based on that. I'll almost certainly try throwing ML at this problem some point but for now I want to note down what a me-who-can't-use-XGBoost would do.

Findings:

Who fights whom?

Who wears what?

Math textbooks. Did you know that you can just buy math textbooks which are "several years too advanced for you"? And that due to economies of scale and the objectivity of their subject matter, they tend to be of both high and consistent quality? Not getting my parents to do this at that age is something I still regret decades later.

Or did you specifically mean fiction? If so, you're asking for fiction recommendations on the grew-up-reading-HPMOR website, we're obviously going to recommend HPMOR (especially if they've already read Harry Potter, but it's still good if you only know the broad strokes).

Are you able to pinpoint exactly what gives you this feeling?

Less a single sharp pinpoint, more a death of a thousand six cuts:

• The emphasis on learning the names of biases is kinda guessing-the-teacher's-password-y.
• You'd need to put forth an unusual effort to make sure you're communicating the subset of psychological research which actually replicates reliably.
• Any given bias might not be present in the student or their social/business circle.
• The suggested approach implies that the set of joints psychologists currently carve at is the 'best' one; what if I happen to see Bias A and Bias B as manifestations of Bias C?
• I worry some students would round this off to "here's how to pathologize people who disagree with me!" training.
• Like I said, this is the kind of fruit that's low-hanging enough that it's mostly already picked.

All that said, I still think this is potentially worthwhile and would still playtest it if you wanted. But I'm much more excited about literally every other idea you mentioned.

I am extremely interested in this, and all similar efforts in this space. I agree our community should be doing much more along these lines.

Regarding your specific ideas:

Cognitive Bias Detection

Something about training people to categorize errors - instead of just making good decisions - rubs me the wrong way. Also, there's a lot of pre-existing work (I found out about this earlier today).

Calibration Training

The Credence Calibration Game exists. So does my variation on the same idea (see also the associated lesson plan). So do play-money and real-money prediction markets. That said, I do think there's a valuable and unfilled niche for something which doesn't require a download and has a nice user interface and has a four-digit number of questions and lets you check your answers immediately (. . . though I don't know how many people other than me would consider it valuable).

Bite-Sized, Practical Challenges

I am very much in favor of this, to the point where I'm already (tentatively) planning to (eventually) build some games with a similar motivation. Relatedly, the "ask users to predict an outcome based on limited data" example sounds like a description of that genre I invented (though "Bite-Sized" suggests you're thinking in terms of something much more polished/generally-accessible).

(Side note: A subtle benefit of the "Practical Challenges" approach is that it can correct for biases you weren't aiming for. A large part of my motivation for making D&D.Sci was "forcing them to confront the common pitfalls of overconfidence or representativeness heuristics"; I found that a Lesswronger working in a Data Science context will more often be insufficiently confident, and place too little weight on surface appearances; my endeavor 'failed' gracefully and people got a chance to notice those errors instead (plus various other problems I didn't even consider).)

-

I look forward to seeing what comes of this. If you want anything playtested, please let me know.

As with the last article, I think this is almost entirely incoherent/wrong; as with the last article, I'm strong-upvoting it anyway because I think it makes ~1.5 good and important points I've not seen made anywhere else, and they're worth the chaff. (I'd go into more detail but I don't want anyone leaning on my summary instead of reading it themselves.)

. . . is there a reason this is a link to a google doc, instead of a copypaste?

^[1]

1. ^{^}

   and add footnotes.

"Using information during Training and/or Evaluation of models which wouldn't be available in Deployment."

. . . I'll edit that into the start of the post.

Thanks for a good one

I'm glad you feel that way about this scenario. I wish I did . . .

(For future reference, on the off-chance you haven't seen it: there's a compilation of all the past scenarios here, handily rated by quality and steamrollability.)

One thing that perhaps would make it easier was if the web interactive could tell whether or not your selection was the optimal one directly, and possibly how higher your expected price was than the optimal price (I first plugged mine in, then had to double check with your table out here)

. . . huh. I feel conflicted about this on aesthetic grounds - like, Reality doesn't come with big flashing signs saying "EV-maxxing solution reached!" when you reach an EV-maxxing solution - but it does sound both convenient to have and easy to set up. Might try adding this functionality to the interactive for the next one; would be curious to hear what anyone else who happens to be reading this comment thinks.

Anyway, greetings, and looking forward to seeing the next one.

Good to have you on board!

I really wish I could simultaneously strong-upvote and strong-downvote the "agree" thing for this reply. I think most of the description is horoscope-y flattery, but it doesn't have zero correlation with reality: I do think lsusr's writing is ninety-something-th percentile for 

a kind of minimalist clarity that leaves room for the reader to reflect and draw their own conclusions

and at least eighty-something-th percentile for

willing to question common assumptions within the rationalist sphere

while afaict there's nothing in the description that's the opposite of the truth.

(I also think there's something interesting about how the most meaningful/distinguishing lines in the description are the ones which could be most easily rephrased as criticisms. Does "describe X as neutrally as possible" or "describe the upsides and downsides of X" produce better LLM results than "describe X"?)

I used to implicitly believe that when I have a new idea for a creative(/creative-adjacent) project, all else being equal, I should add it to the end of my to-do list (FIFO). I now explicitly believe the opposite: that the fresher an idea is, the sooner I should get started making it a reality (LIFO). This way:

• I get to use the burst of inspired-by-a-new-idea energy on the project in question.
• I spend more time working on projects conceived by a me with whom I have a lot in common.

The downsides are:

• Some old ideas will end up near the bottom of the pile until I die or the Singularity happens. (But concepts are cheaper than execution, and time is finite.)
• I get less time to polish ideas in my head before committing pen to paper. (But maybe that's good?)

Thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Something low complexity, repeatable, non-addictive, non-time consuming.

I think a lot of people have a habit like that, and it's different things for different people.

I think it's meditation

Beware.

(Like, from what I hear you're not wrong, but . . . y'know, Beware.)

If anyone reading this wants me to build them a custom D&D.Sci scenario (or something similar) to use as a test task, they should DM me. If the relevant org is doing something I judge to be Interesting and Important and Not Actively Harmful - and if they're okay with me releasing it to the public internet after they're done using it to eval candidates - I'll make it for free.

There are many games already, made for many reasons: insofar as this could work, it almost certainly already has.

Strengthens neural circuits involved in developing/maintaining positive habits

That's any game where grinding makes your character(s) stronger, or where progression is gated behind the player learning new skills. (I'm pretty sure Pokemon did exactly this for me as a child.)

Build any sort of positive habits that transfer to real life decision making

That's any strategy game. (I'm thinking particularly of XCOM:EU, with its famously 'unfair' - i.e. not-rigged-in-the-player's-favor - hit probabilities.)

I do think that there are untapped possibilities in this space - I wouldn't have made all those educational games if I didn't - but what you're describing as possibly-impossible seems pretty mundane and familiar to me. (Kudos for considering the possibility in the first place, though.)

I think you can address >95% of this problem >95% of the time with the strategy "spoiler-tag and content-warn appropriately, then just say whatever".

Is there value in seeking out and confronting these limits,

Yes.

or should we exercise caution in our pursuit of knowledge?

Yes.

. . . to be less flippant: I think there's an awkward kind of balance to be struck around the facts that

A) Most ideas which feel like they 'should' be dangerous aren't^[1].

B) "This information is dangerous" is a tell for would-be tyrants (and/or people just making kinda bad decisions out of intellectual laziness and fear of awkwardness).

but C) Basilisks aren't not real, and people who grok A) and B) then have to work around the temptation to round it off to "knowledge isn't dangerous, ever, under any circumstance" or at least "we should all pretend super hard that knowledge can't be dangerous".

D) Some information - "here's a step-by-step-guide to engineering the next pandemic!" - is legitimately bad to have spread around even if it doesn't harm the individual who knows it. (LWers distinguish between harmful-to-holder vs harmful-to-society with "infohazard" vs "exfohazard".)

and E) It's super difficult to predict what ideas will end up being a random person's kryptonite. (Learning about factory farming as a child was not good for my mental health.)

I shouldn't trusted with language right now.

I might be reading too much into this, but it sounds like you're going through some stuff right now. The sensible/responsible/socially-scripted thing to say is "you should get some professional counseling about this". The thing I actually want to say is "you should post about whatever's bothering you on the appropriate 4chan board, being on that site is implicit consent for exposure to potential basilisks, I guarantee they've seen worse and weirder". On reflection I tentatively endorse both of these suggestions, though I recognize they both have drawbacks.

1. ^{^}

   For what it's worth, I'd bet large sums at long odds that whatever you're currently thinking about falls into this category.

In Thrawn's experience there are three ingredients to greatness

I think the way tenses are handled in the early part of this section is distractingly weird. (I can't tell how petty I'm being here.) (I'd be inclined to fix the problem by italicizing the parts Thrawn is thinking, and changing "Thrawn wasn't" to "I'm not".)

If you go up to someone powerful and ask for something, then there's 60% chance you lose nothing and a 1% chance you win big.

. . . what happens in the remaining 39%?

Also (outrageously pedantic stylistic point even by my standards incoming) it's strange to follow up "60% chance" with "a 1% chance": it should either be "n% chance" both times or "a n% chance" both times.

succomb

succumb

"Tatooine. They're on Tatooine,"

Was this deviation from canon intentional? (I remember in the movie she picks a different planet with a similar-sounding name.)

brainsteam

Can't tell if this is a typo'd "brainstem".

Good catch; fixed now; ty.

I think there's a typo; the text refers to "Poltergeist Pummelers" but the input data says "Phantom Pummelers".

Good catch; fixed now; thank you.

The Conservative party in the UK are also called "Tories".

Carla is harder: I think she's some combination of Carl (literally, "free man": appropriate for someone who wants to avoid tyranny) and Karl (as in Karl Marx), but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a more prosaic explanation.