It seems you've stepped on quite a land mine here, and the following is mostly just vague guesses.

As far as I can make out it dates back to the Ottoman land code of 1858 where for various reasons a lot of land was declared owned by the government, which would collect a tax in lieu of rent.

So in one case the Ottoman empire sold a large tract of land to a Lebanese Effendi, who then sold it to the Yishuv. There was an village on this land which had been settled for some 60+ years, and despite protests to the Ottoman government the villagers were all evicted by the Jewish settlers.

It seems the villagers paid a tithe. I suppose at first they would have paid the tithe to the Ottoman government, which would have seemed normal to them (and more like a tax), then they switched to paying a Lebanese Effendi, which wouldn't have made any difference to them either way. And then suddenly they were sold again, and evicted off their land, which would have felt very wrong given they'd been living there all their life, and viewed it as their land.

My impression reading the book is that whilst the Israelis definitely had ambitions on far more, they were prepared to grudgingly accept the partition plan. They were heavily dependent on international support for their cause and far weaker than the surrounding Arab States so would have had no incentive for war in the founding days of the state if it wasn't forced on them.

Certainly there weren't any concrete plans by the Yishuv or Haganah to take over any land pre the UN partition vote. This is despite the Haganah generally being quite well organised in that way, and having lots of contingency plans prepared. On the other hand that may well have been as a result of uncertainty about what the UN partition plan would mean in concrete terms, especially for the British.

Whether things would have stayed peaceful long term if the Palestinians had accepted partition, or war would have eventually flared up, is anybody's guess. In practice what happened was that the Arabs denounced the partition plan and initiated concrete efforts to undermine it, and Israel accepted it and mostly kept to it till far later in the war.

Another error - whilst chat GPT is correct that 41 is a centred square number, it's formula is wrong.

To be blunt, I think this post completely, and possibly wilfully, misrepresents Scott's post. Every single one of your points appears to be a strawman:

1. The post implies it's important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups, but Scott doesn't say why.

The post makes the claim hyperstitious cascades are bad, where previously innocent words that noone took offense to become taboo, not changing the words we use to refer to minority groups. He also explains his reasoning perfectly clearly, as gjm points out.

2. The post needlessly drags its feet against the fact that language evolves.

Again that's not Scotts point. Scott is concerned about deliberate attempts to rapidly make a perfectly innocent word taboo, causing bother and potential ostracism to everyone for no reason, not natural long term evolution of words.

3. The post exaggerates the pace and breadth of lexical change... citing a purely hypothetical example ("Asian").

Scott cites many, many examples, e.g. "jap", "negro", "all lives matter", the confederate flag etc. "negro" was certainly quick - acceptable in 1966, completely unacceptable as far back as I can remember (so by about 2000).

4. The post exaggerates the arbitrariness of lexical change.

The post is not about new minority groups choosing new words for themselves. If a group of people choose to do that, that would be fine, and given Scott's other views he would be the last to disagree. It's about people turning old words and ideas taboo, just by negatively tarring anyone who uses them until it triggers a cascade. The problem isn't that most of the black people in the USA got together and said they prefer to be called black. It's that due to a single bad actor making up a fake history for an innocent word, lots of old grandpas get ostracised by their grandkids for being racist.
 

Demilitarisation would be necessary initially for this to be acceptable to Israel (apart from such small arms as are necessary to maintain law and order, and a coast guard to prevent smuggling), but could be removed long term given continued peace and economic integration.

Also it should be acceptable for Gaza to enter into peace treaties with e.g. Egypt to defend itself from Israeli aggression, and Israel to defend itself against Egyptian aggression.

Finally it should be expected that Gaza will maintain authority over it's airspace and waters.

I think this would count as a protected state instead of a protectorate, since it would be expected that Gaza will be responsible for it's own international relations. It would also be with a view to becoming a full sovereign state over time.

He was responding to the selfish reason - "my children will take care of me in my old age", not the social reason - "my children will be a small part of keeping the economy running in my old age".

In a world where Jews have so little cultural identity that they're happy to relocate Israel to Moldova, Palestinians and Israelis might as well have so little national identity that they're happy to live together in a one state solution.

This hasn't historically always been the case - there was widespread public acceptance of homosexuality in the first 500 years of Islam's existence, with homoerotic poetry being a staple of their culture - see e.g. here.

Judaism also unequivocally rejects homosexuality, yet many modern orthodox synagogues happily have openly gay members of their congregation. So this doesn't seem quite as impossible as you make out.

From what I know, the international peacekeeping force in Lebanon does precisely nothing. They leave whenever there's fighting, and have no interest stopping Hezbollah from rearming. I literally do not know if it would make any difference if they didn't exist at all.

This is to be expected. UNIFIL has no skin in the game, and would take significant risk if they attempted to stop Hezbollah operations.

As Yovel said, wildly off the mark.

Just one minor extra point - the poorer Israeli working class is mostly supportive of Netanyahu. It's the middle and upper classes who oppose him, who they see as corrupt.

Also the youth is generally more right wing in Israel, and the older generation more left wing.

In general you can't copy your model of politics from one country into another and expect it to accurately predict what's going on.

Isn't that the point? Where we stand now, we have to make a decision without knowing if there will or won't be a treacherous turn...

But wouldn't that be the case for any organelle, even one which is inherited from both parents?

But by making more copies of itself/poisoning other mitochondria isn't it more likely to end up in the female gamete?

Thank you very much for this excellent post!

Would you be able to give a more detailed explanation of Organelle competition? I'm afraid I didn't understand at all how having different types prevents it.

I think this is a suitable mechanism for grants for well defined mathematical problems, but not for more vaguely defined ones. To be frank, the well defined ones tend to be less interesting.

For example the Cray problems are all well defined, and are certain very interesting, but mostly not actually that fundamental to mathematics.

The Hilbert problems are in some ways far more important, and most of these are more vague questions or directions for research than an actual concrete conjecture.

Nobody would have been trading shares in godels incompleteness theorem before he proposed it - and rendering the theorem in concrete terms would already be halfway towards solving it.

How would you suggest making sure funding gets pointed towards these kinds of problems as well?

Hi, and welcome to Less Wrong!

It's great to see you trying to improve your decision making process, and being prepared to put your work in front of the public!

Here's a few thoughts on how to improve what you wrote:

Firstly, a terminology note. A theorem usually refers to a statement about the world that is either true or false, like "1+1=2" or "humans have 4 legs". What you have is not a theorem but a technique to improve decision making.

Secondly, you present a framework with some seemingly arbitrary calculations. Why is it (a*b+c)/(d+e), and not (a+b*c/d*e), or most simply of all a+b+c-d-e? To make your post convincing, try to explain what you're aiming to achieve, and why you made the decisions you did.

Thirdly, you give an example where it sounds like buying a Porsche 911 is a great idea, but for most people it really isn't - they're expensive and not all that practical. Is that a failure in the framework, or are you making some implicit assumptions about the status of the person whose making the decision? Maybe give some examples where intuitively someone might make the wrong decision, but this framework stops them, or the framework is useful for comparing two different options.

I think the biggest risk of DACs is that it incentivises people to fund contracts they don't actually want fulfilled to milk the proposer for cash.

My expectation is that if this becomes mature you'll get traders which try to predict which contracts won't be fully funded, and then push them up to say 50% (after which pushing them further risks them actually getting fully funded).

This not only discourages proposers from putting up contracts (to easy to lose money), but also makes it harder for users to easily see which contracts are worth funding and which aren't. There'll be a lot of contracts mostly funded, some because they're actually good and people want them, and some because they're bad and traders are trying to make money.

Interested to hear your thoughts in how to solve this?

I don't think this actually solves the freerider problem. It solves the coordination problem.

In your toy example Bob was able to specify that he wouldn't build anything unless everyone signed the contract - if this is possible you don't really need the dominant assurance part, as it's still worth it for the freerider to sign up, so long as they assume there's a decent chance others will as well (and if they don't, that's going to discourage non-freeriders as well).

In real life though, this is impossible. Instead the contract is along the lines of "I will do this so long as at least X people sign up, or we get Y dollars of funding".

In that case it's only worth it for the freerider to sign up if either.

1. They estimate with high probability the limit will only be reached iff they sign up (but this is the case even with a standard Kickstarter, dominant assurance isn't necessary).

Or

2. They estimate with high probability that the limit won't be reached (in which case they're on average just milking the contract for free cash)

There's still no incentive for the freerider to sign up if the limit would otherwise be reached.

Instead what this solves is the coordination problem. Prosocial people want to fund various markets, but it's a waste of time doing this if nobody else joins in. The dominant assurance contract makes this worth it either way, so it's easier for markets to get off the ground to the point where it looks like they'll probably make it.

Love the idea (contributed 10 dollars), but I don't love the title - it feels a little clickbaity (I expected an article about asteroid deflection, not about DACs).

Usually ends up making a lot of mess as frozen chips fly all over the counter, then quickly melt.

I think to answer this you need to break things down by region.

A look at our world in data shows that China was a 5th of the world population at the start of the first millennium, and it shrunk over the course of the millennium. Europe also shrunk, coinciding with the fall of Rome.

Africa, the Americas, and Australia gre at what looks like a fairly normal rate, but they are a much smaller percentage of the population.

So the explanation is likely to be local to the most populous regions, rather than some global event.

Sorry, could you elaborate what you mean by all the way up?

I would be skeptical such a proof is possible. As an existence proof, we could create aligned ASI by simulating the most intelligent and moral people, running at 10,000 times the speed of a normal human.

But that's not affected by any actual in-game information because you don't really get any information.

You keep on asserting this, but that's not actually true - do the maths. A player who doesn't update on them still being alive, will play fewer rounds on average, and will earn less in repeated play. (Where each play is independent).

The reason is simple - they're not going to be able to play for very long when there are lots of bullets added, so the times when they find themselves still playing are disproportionately those where bullets weren't added, so they should play for longer.

You don't get told no, you just guess from the fact you're still alive.

but I picked the game description very deliberately to show the effect I was talking about, so obviously changing it makes things different.

On the contrary, it doesn't show any such effect at all. It's carefully contrived so that you can update on the fact you're still alive, but that happens not to change your strategy. That's not very interesting at all. Often a change in probabilities won't change your strategy.

I'm simply showing that with a slight change of setup, updating on the fact your still alive does indeed change your strategy.

The addition is permanent. Updating on the fact that you're still playing provides evidence that the bullet was not in fact added in previous rounds, so it's worth carrying on playing a little bit longer, whereas if you didn't update, even if it was worth playing the first round, you would stop after 1 or 2.

See my comment from earlier below, which highlights how this information is in general useful, even if in this case it happens not to be:

To give a concrete counterexample.

Let's say each round there's a 50 percent probability of adding an extra bullet to the gun.

If I didn't update based on the fact I'm still playing then I would quickly stop after a few rounds, since the probability I would see a bullet constantly increases.

But if I do update, then it's worth it carrying on, since the fact I'm still playing is evidence there still are plenty of empty chambers

To give a concrete counterexample.

Let's say each round there's a 50 percent probability of adding an extra bullet to the gun.

If I didn't update based on the fact I'm still playing then I would quickly stop after a few rounds, since the probability I would see a bullet constantly increases.

But if I do update, then it's worth it carrying on, since the fact I'm still playing is evidence there still are plenty of empty chambers.

Why are we conditioning on still being in play though? Without the anthropic shadow there's no reason to do so. There are plenty of world's where I observe myself out of play, but with different information, why is the fact I'm not in one of them not telling me anything?

This post seems incorrect to me. Here's the crux:

And if at, say, the fifth turn, there is no alternative to seeing EEEEE, that means that the probability of observing it, conditioned on us still being in play, is 1, and entirely independent of n. No information can be derived to update our prior.

Well yes, conditioned on us being in play, we can't get any more information from the sequence of events we observed. But the fact that we are still in play itself tells us that the gun is mostly empty. Now as it happens this isn't very useful because we will never both update towards not playing, and be able to carry on playing, but I can still be practically certain after seeing 20 Es in a row that the gun is empty.

The way anthropics twists things is that if this were russian roulette I might not be able to update after 20 Es that the gun is empty, since in all the world's where I died there's noone to observe what happened, so of course I find myself in the one world where by pure chance I survived.

I don't think the entropy example is a good one.

Nothing is given to the high temperature object to transfer energy to the low temperature object. So it can't be modelled as both being different agents with different tradeoffs where each agent is trying to maximize some function.

Instead I think it's a bog standard equilibrium.

Search here for spoiler for instructions on how to use spoiler tags: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq

Consider hiding your answer using spoiler tags.

How come you're trusting essentially random internet strangers to pay up significant sum of money if they lose a bet in up to 5 years?

But all the people putting money into stocks, provide the market makers for the people with better information to make money.

If you look at the actual scenario there, the game was essentially in a stalemate, where the only possible way to win was to force the other player to advance a pawn. Stockfish can't look 30 moves ahead to see that it's possible to do that, so would have just flailed around.

You still need stockfish, because without it, any move you make could be a tactical error which the other players computer would pounce on. But stockfish can't see the greater strategic picture if it's beyond its tactical horizon.

Interesting. Note that Jon Edwards didn't win a single game there via play - he won one game because the opponent inputted the wrong move, and another because the opponent quit the tournament. All other games were draws.

Presumably you could test this directly. Have 100 players play a correspondence game against each of the top 3 chess engines, where you gave them a max amount of compute time they could use (say no more than 2 hours per move) and they just play directly against the computer.

My guess is they would have a slight advantage, at least over stockfish, if only by exploiting known bugs/adversarial situations.

There is a time abyss. Anatomically modern humans have been around for 300k years. That's enough time for several repetitions of our path from early agriculture to computers.

That seems unlikely - our genetic diversity provides evidence of how many humans there were at any point in the past. We would notice if there were billions of humans only a couple of hundreds of thousand years ago. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography.

Furthermore what would they have powered their industrial revolution with? How come there's still so much surface level coal and oil? A few hundred thousands of years shouldn't be enough to regenerate that.

And before humans, there could have been other sufficiently brainy species (e.g. Troodon dinosaurs).

I'm guessing that we would still be able to notice that in the distribution of minerals - e.g. maybe all the high iron concentration ores should have been mined, but I don't really know much about this.

It's not dominated - holding all other players constant the two strategies have equal payoffs, so neither dominates the other.

I think this speaks of a move from focusing on building the largest models possible, to optimising smaller models for mundane utility. Since smaller models have a hard ceiling on capabilities, this is good news as it pushes off AGI.

I think this is a reasonable idea.

However I think it's wonderful that lesswrong has a norm of offering monetary bounties for work. This is a norm we should encourage, and I'm worried introducing non-monetary bounties will make monetary bounties less common.

Who says what an AI would want to do is illegal? Not only is it legal to build killer robots and adapt viruses to be more lethal, you can even get government funding for both.

Or you can just hire people normally.

Weapons manufacturers, gambling companies, hackers, telemarketing scams, tobacco, etc. all manage to hire people just fine. At worst they pay slightly higher than market rates.

I don't think that matters, because knowing all but the last bit, I can simply take two actions - action assuming last bit is true, and action assuming it's false.

That sounds about right.

Tripling is I think definitely a hard max since you can send 3 messages, action if true, action if false, + which is which - at least assuming you can reliably send a bit at all without the observation.

More tightly it's doubling + number of bits required to send a single bit of information.

A fair point. Or a similar argument, you can only transfer one extra bit of information this way, since the message representing a number of size 2n is only 1 bit larger than the message representing n.

Ok simpler example:

You know the channel either removes all 0s or all 1s, but you don't know which.

The most efficient way to send a message is to send n 1s, followed by n 0s, where n is the number the binary message you want to send represents.

If you know whether 1s or 0s are stripped out, then you only need to send n bits of information, for a total saving of n bits.

EDIT: this doesn't work, see comment by AlexMennen.