Posts

Zero-Sum Defeats Nash Equilibrium 2024-05-08T19:49:02.798Z
What should our containers do? 2024-04-22T06:17:04.017Z
How I Think, Part Four: Money is Weird 2024-04-20T06:21:53.104Z
Wolf and Rabbit 2024-03-22T17:20:19.265Z
Opportunistic Time-Management 2024-03-13T21:38:01.209Z
How I Think, Part Three: Weighing Cryonics 2023-11-10T22:21:16.398Z
How I Think, Part Two: Distrusting Individuals 2023-11-08T04:06:13.546Z
How I Think, Part One: Investing in Fun 2023-11-08T04:00:27.578Z
Depth Confusion 2023-10-17T06:06:01.292Z
Second-Level Empiricism: Reframing the Two-Child Puzzle 2023-04-27T15:04:22.842Z
A Somewhat Functional Definition of Philosophy 2023-02-27T00:25:29.561Z
Laziness in AI 2022-09-02T17:04:43.146Z
Schelling Points in Thing-Space 2022-08-24T16:19:05.248Z

Comments

Comment by Richard Henage (richard-henage) on Zero-Sum Defeats Nash Equilibrium · 2024-06-14T00:44:37.716Z · LW · GW

I would love it if you could tell me the correct terms for the concepts in the post, or point me in the direction of some reading material. I'm also curious, did you just disagree with the terms, or did you also disagree with the concepts, too? Thanks!

Comment by Richard Henage (richard-henage) on How I Think, Part Two: Distrusting Individuals · 2024-06-14T00:40:10.547Z · LW · GW

I have certain people I categorize as "well-aligned movie watchers" like my brother that I grew up with. We have similar tastes. I find that gets me further than aggregate rating systems. 


For some reason, that statement has stuck with me for a while. I finally realized why it doesn't sit well with me. I agree with your message to some extent, but here are some problems I see with it:

1) Your brother still needs a way to find good movies (you can't pull each other up by your bootstraps)

2) I wonder if you are thinking of movies as a binary "like" or "don't like". If your bother's recommendations provide you a system for only watching movies that you end up liking, that's a valuable resource. But I see movies as more boundless in how good they can be. Sure, there are movies that I "liked", for example, Greyhound. I enjoyed it and didn't have any problems with it. But it didn't have a big impact on me and wasn't particularly memorable. I would give that movie a Thumbs Up. Then there are movies like Lord of the Rings, 12 Angry Men, and Memento. These are movies that are very meaningful or amazing to me. I want to watch them many more times throughout my life. I would give them each a Thumbs Up as well, but that doesn't really do it justice. I could give them a 10/10, but that doesn't quite fit either, since I assume that I'll eventually find movies I like even more than those ones[1]. So for me, finding someone who has similar preferences to me isn't enough. I need something that can sort through the hundreds of thousands of movies out there and point me to the ones that I'll like the most of all of them. If movies are more of a casual thing to you and you're not trying to optimize your experience, the "like", "don't like" system makes sense. Otherwise, I'd like to hear your thoughts so I can further optimize my system (currently, I'm using a spreadsheet that combines data from multiple online sources).

Of course, if your statement "I find that gets me further than aggregate rating systems" really is true, then what I said here doesn't matter.

  1. ^

    In this way, I like IMDb more than Rotten Tomatoes, since Rotten Tomatoes has 500 movies with a 100% rating, while IMDb has only seven with a 9.0+ rating and none with a 10.0 rating, meaning there's still room to grow. On a similar note, they have to give Oscars to somebody, so that evidence doesn't count for as much. If the police had to arrest somebody, they might end up arresting some random homeless person just because he was the most suspicious person they could find. If the Academy chose not to give out Oscars some years, (and some years gave out multiple), it would theoretically increase the trustworthiness of the award.

Comment by Richard Henage (richard-henage) on Second-Level Empiricism: Reframing the Two-Child Puzzle · 2023-04-30T00:31:01.995Z · LW · GW

The first sentence of that phrasing is great! It makes things much more clear. But:

"i have to pick up Johny from kindergarten"

actually would give the probability of the other kid being a boy a fifty-fifty chance still, I believe. I still think the clearest way to phrase that part of the puzzle is for the narrator to ask the woman "is at least one of your kids a boy?".

Comment by Richard Henage (richard-henage) on Watch Elon Musk’s Neuralink presentation · 2022-05-10T15:52:19.552Z · LW · GW

Pager, a nine-year-old Macaque monkey, can play some simple 2D video games, including MindPong, with his Neuralink. These games appear to use the inputs from a single joystick (or the signals from the Neuralink associated with moving a joystick). Here's Neuralink's video explaining it. Other companies and devices may have different capabilities.