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What's the b word?
I still think it was an interesting concept, but I'm not sure how deserving of praise this is since I never actually got beyond organizing two games.
He said it was him on Joe Rogan's podcast.
you find some pretty ironic things when rereading 17-year-old blog posts, but this one takes the cake.
If you look over all possible worlds, then asking "did the coin come up Heads or Tails" as if there's only one answer is incoherent. If you look over all possible worlds, there's a ~100% chance the coin comes up as Heads in at least one world, and a ~100% chance the coin comes up as Tails in at least one world.
But from the perspective of a particular observer, the question they're trying to answer is a question of indexical uncertainty - out of all the observers in their situation, how many of them are in Heads-worlds, and how many of them are in Tails-worlds? It's true that there are equally as many Heads-worlds as Tails-worlds - but 2/3 of observers are in the latter worlds.
Or to put it another way - suppose you put 10 people in one house, and 20 people in another house. A given person should estimate a 1/3 chance that they're in the first house - and the fact that 1 house is half of 2 houses is completely irrelevant. Why should this reasoning be any different just because we're talking about possible universes rather than houses?
I think you're overestimating the intended scope of this post. Eliezer's argument involves multiple claims - A, we'll create ASI; B, it won't terminally value us; C, it will kill us. As such, people have many different arguments against it. This post is about addressing a specific "B doesn't actually imply C" counterargument, so it's not even discussing "B isn't true in the first place" counterarguments.
While you're quite right about numbers on the scale of billions or trillions, I don't think it makes sense in the limit for the prior probability of X people existing in the world to fall faster than X grows in size.
Certain series of large numbers grow larger much faster than they grow in complexity. A program that returns 10^(10^(10^10)) takes fewer bits to specify (relative to most reasonable systems of specifying programs) than a program that returns 32758932523657923658936180532035892630581608956901628906849561908236520958326051861018956109328631298061259863298326379326013327851098368965026592086190862390125670192358031278018273063587236832763053870032004364702101004310417647840155719238569120561329853619283561298215693286953190539832693826325980569123856910536312892639082369382562039635910965389032698312569023865938615338298392306583192365981036198536932862390326919328369856390218365991836501590931685390659103658916392090356835906398269120625190856983206532903618936398561980569325698312650389253839527983752938579283589237325987329382571092301928* - even though 10^(10^(10^10)) is by far the larger number. And it only takes a linear increase in complexity to make it 10^(10^(10^(10^(10^(10^10))))) instead.
*I produced this number via keyboard-mashing; it's not anything special.
Consider the proposition "A superpowered entity capable of creating unlimited numbers of people ran a program that output the result of a random program out of all possible programs (with their outputs rendered as integers), weighted by the complexity of those programs, and then created that many people."
If this happened, the probability that their program outputs at least X would fall much slower than X rises, in the limit. The sum doesn't converge at all; the expected number of people created would be literally infinite.
So as long as you assign greater than literally zero probability to that proposition - and there's no such thing as zero probability - there must exist some number X such that you assign greater than 1/X probability to X people existing. In fact, there must exist some number X such that you assign greater than 1/X probability to X million people existing, or X billion, or so on.
(btw, I don't think that the sort of SIA-based reasoning here is actually valid - but if it was, then yeah, it implies that there are infinite people.)
I'm kind of concerned about the ethics of someone signing a contract and then breaking it to anonymously report what's going on (if that's what your private source did). I think there's value from people being able to trust each others' promises about keeping secrets, and as much as I'm opposed to Anthropic's activities, I'd nevertheless like to preserve a norm of not breaking promises.
Can you confirm or deny whether your private information comes from someone who was under a contract not to give you that private information? (I completely understand if the answer is no.)
By conservation of expected evidence, I take your failure to cite anything relevant as further confirmation of my views.
This is one of the best burns I've ever heard.
Had a dream last night in which I was having a conversation on LessWrong - unfortunately, I can't remember most of the details of my dreams unless I deliberately concentrate on what happened as soon as I wake up, so I don't know what the conversation was about.
But I do remember that I realized halfway through the conversation that I had been clicking on the wrong buttons - clicking "upvote" & "downvote" instead of "agree" and "disagree", and vice versa. In my dream, the first and second pairs of buttons looked identical - both of them were just the < and > signs.
I suggested to the LW team that they put something to clarify which buttons were which - maybe write the words "upvote", "downvote", "agree", and "disagree" above the buttons. They thought that putting the words there would look really ugly and clutter up the UI too much.
But when I woke up, it turned out that the actual site has a checkmark and an X for the second pair of buttons! And it also displays what each one means when you hover over it! So thanks for retroactively solving my problem, LW team!
Multiple points, really. I believe that this calculation is flawed in specific ways, but I also think that most calculations that attempt to estimate the relative odds of two events that were both very unlikely a priori will end up being off by a large amount. These two points are not entirely unrelated.
The specific problems that I noticed were:
- The probabilities are not independent of each other, so they cannot be multiplied together directly. A bear flipping over your tent would almost always immediately be preceded by the bear scratching your tent, so updating on both events would just be double-counting evidence.
- The probabilities do not appear to be conditional probabilities. P(A&B&C&D) doesn't equal P(A)*P(B)*P(C)*P(D), it equals P(A)*P(B|A)*P(C|A&B)*P(D|A&B&C).
- The "nonbear" hypothesis is lumping together several different hypotheses. P(A|notbear) & P(B|notbear) cannot be multiplied together to get P(A&B|notbear), because (among other reasons) there may be some types of notbears that are very likely to do A but very unlikely to do B, some that are very likely to do both, and so on. Once you've observed A, it should update you on what kind of notbear it could be, and thus change the probability it does B.
- The "20% a bear would scratch my tent : 50% a notbear would" claim is incorrect for the reasons I mentioned above. If your tent would be scratched 50% of the time in the absence of a bear, and a bear would scratch it 20% of the time, then the chance it gets scratched if there is a bear is 1-(1-50%)(1-20%), or 60%. (Unless you're postulating that bears always scare off anything else that might scratch the tent - which it seems Luke is indeed claiming.)
- I disagree with several of the specific claims about the probabilities, such as "95% chance a bear would look exactly like a fucking bear inside my tent" and "1% chance a notbear would."
And then the meta-problem: when you're multiplying together more than two or three probabilities that you estimated, particularly small ones, errors in your ability to estimate them start to add up. Which is why I don't think it's usually worthwhile to try and estimate probabilities like this.
But you have a fair point about it being a good idea to practice explicit calculations, even if they're too complicated to reliably get right in real life. So here's how I might calculate it:
P(bear encounters you): 1%.
P(tent scratched | bear): 60%, for the reasons I said above... unless we take into account it scaring away other tent-scratching animals, in which case maybe 40%.
P(tent flipped over | bear & tent scratched): 20%, maybe? I think if the bear has already taken an interest in your tent, it's more likely than usual to flip it over.
P(you see a bear-shaped object | bear & tent scratched & tent flipped over): Bears always look like bears. This is so close to 100% I wouldn't even normally include it in the calculation, but let's call it 99.99%.
P(you get eaten | bear & tent scratched & tent flipped over & you see a bear-shaped object): It's already pretty been aggressive so far, so I'd say perhaps 5%.
On the other side, there are almost no objects for which the probability of it looking exactly like a bear isn't infinitesimal; let's only consider Bigfoot and serial-killer-who's-a-furry for simplicity, then add them up.
P(Bigfoot exists): ...hmm. I am not an expert on the matter, but let's say 1%.
P(Bigfoot encounters you | Bigfoot exists): There can't be that many Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) out there, or else people would have caught one. 0.01%.
P(tent scratched | Bigfoot): Bigfeet are probably more aggressive than bears, so 70%.
P(tent flipped over | Bigfoot): Again, Bigfeet are supposed to be pretty aggressive, so 50%.
P(you see a bear-shaped object | Bigfoot & tent scratched & tent flipped over): Bigfoot looks similar enough to a bear that you'll almost certainly think he's a bear. 99%.
P(you get eaten | Bigfoot & tent scratched & tent flipped over & you see a bear-shaped object): Again, Bigfeet aggressive, 30%.
Then for the furry cannibal one:
P(furry cannibal stalking this forest): 0.000001% (that's one in a hundred million, if I got my zeroes right). I welcome you to prove me wrong on the matter by manually increasing the number of furry cannibals in a given forest.
P(furry cannibal encounters you | furry cannibal exists): How large of a forest is this? Well, he probably has his methods of locating prey, so let's say 10%. Wait, why did I assume he's a "he"? What gender is the typical furry cannibal? Probably a trans woman? Let's name this furry cannibal Susan.
P(tent scratched | Susan): Probably not that high; she doesn't want to wake you up too soon. 30%.
P(tent flipped over | Susan & tent scratched): She might just sneak in, but let's say 90%.
P(you see a bear-shaped object | Susan & tent scratched & tent flipped over): She's wearing a bear costume, as hypothesized; 99.99%.
P(you get eaten | Susan & tent scratched & tent flipped over & you see a bear-shaped object): Yes, of course this happens; this was her whole kink in the first place! 99%.
So for "bear," we have 1%*40%*20%*99.99%*5% = 0.004%. For "Bigfoot," we have 1%*0.01%*70%*50%*99%*30% = 0.00001%. For "Susan," we have 0.000001%*10%*30%*90%*99.99%*99% = .000000027%. Looks like Bigfoot was so much more likely than Susan that we can pretty much just forget the Susan possibility altogether. It's 0.004 to 0.00001, so 400 to 1 chance that you're being eaten by a bear.
(Although I actually think you should be even more confident than 400 to 1 that it's a bear rather than Bigfoot, and that I just was off by an order of magnitude for one reason or another, as happens when you're doing these sorts of calculations. And if you ever actually observe all of these things, the most likely hypothesis is that you're dreaming.)
You can just try to estimate the base rate of a bear attacking your tent and eating you, then estimate the base rate of a thing that looks identical to a bear attacking your tent and eating you, and compare them. Maybe one in a thousand tents get attacked by a bear, and 1% of those tent attacks end with the bear eating the person inside. The second probability is a lot harder to estimate, since it mostly involves off-model surprises like "Bigfoot is real" and "there is a serial killer in these woods wearing a bear suit," but I'd have trouble seeing how it could be above one in a billion. (Unless we're including possibilities like "this whole thing is just a dream" - which actually should be your main hypothesis.)
In general, when you're dealing with very low or very high probabilities, I'd recommend you just try to use your intuition instead of trying to calculate everything out explicitly.* The main reason is this: if you estimate a probability as being 30% instead of 50%, it won't usually affect the result of the calculation that much. On the other hand, if you estimate a probability as being 1/10^5 instead of 1/10^6, it can have an enormous impact on the end result. However, humans are a lot better at intuitively telling apart 30% from 50% than they are at telling apart 1/10^5 from 1/10^6.
If you try to do explicit calculations about probabilities that are pretty close to 1:1, you'll probably get a pretty accurate result; if you try to do explicit calculations about probabilities that are several orders of magnitude away from each other, you'll probably be off by at least one order of magnitude. In this case, you calculated that even if a person on a camping trip is being eaten by something that looks identical to a bear, there's still about a 2.6% chance that it's not a bear. When you get a result that ridiculous, it doesn't mean there's a nonbear eating you, it means you're doing the math wrong.
*The situations in which you can get useful information from an explicit calculation on low probabilities are situations where you're fine with being off by substantial multiplicative factors. Like, if you're making a business decision where you're only willing to accept a <5% chance of something happening, and you calculate that there's only a one in a trillion chance, then it doesn't actually matter whether you were off by a factor of a million to one. (Of course, you still do need to check that there's no way you could be off by an even larger factor than that.)
It doesn't matter how often the possum would have scratched it. If your tent would be scratched 50% of the time in the absence of a bear, and a bear would scratch it 20% of the time, then the chance it gets scratched if there is a bear is 1-(1-50%)(1-20%), or 60%. Unless you're postulating that bears always scare off anything else that might scratch the tent.
Also, what about how some of these probabilities are entangled with each other? Your tent being flipped over will almost always involve your tent being scratched, so once we condition on the tent being flipped over, that screens off the evidence from the tent being scratched.
Also, only 95% chance a bear would look like a bear? And only 0.01% chance it would eat you?
Realistically, once we've seen a bear-shaped object scratch your tent, flip it over, and start eating you, you should be way more confident than 38 to 1 that you're being eaten.
"20% a bear would scratch my tent : 50% a notbear would"
I think the chance that your tent gets scratched should be strictly higher if there's a bear around?
Do you have any specific examples of what this new/rebooted organization would be doing?
It sounds odd to hear the "even if the stars should die in heaven" song with a different melody than I had imagined when reading it myself.
I would have liked to hear the Tracey Davis "from darkness to darkness" song, but I think that was canonically just a chant without a melody. (Although I imagined a melody for that as well.)
...why did someone promote this to a Frontpage post.
If I'm understanding correctly, the argument here is:
A)
B)
C)
Therefore, .
First off, this seems to have an implicit assumption that .
I think this assumption is true for any functions f and g, but I've learned not to always trust my intuitions when it comes to limits and infinity; can anyone else confirm this is true?
Second, A seems to depend on the relative sizes of the infinities, so to speak. If j and k are large but finite numbers, then if and only if j is substantially greater than k; if k is close to or larger than j, it becomes much less than or greater than -1/12.
I'm not sure exactly how this works when it comes to infinities - does the infinity on the sum have to be larger than the infinity on the limit for this to hold? I'm pretty sure what I just said was nonsense; is there a non-nonsensical version?
In conclusion, I don't know how infinities work and hope someone else does.
I think I could be a good fit as a writer, but I don't have much in the way of writing experience I can show you. Do you have any examples of what someone at this position would be focusing on? I'm happy to write up a couple pieces to demonstrate my abilities.
The question, then, is whether a given person is just an outlier by coincidence, or whether the underlying causal mechanisms that created their personality actually are coming from some internal gender-variable being flipped. (The theory being, perhaps, that early-onset gender dysphoria is an intersex condition, to quote the immortal words of a certain tribute band.)
If it was just that biological females sometimes happened to have a couple traits that were masculine - and these traits seemed to be at random, and uncorrelated - then that wouldn't imply anything beyond "well, every distribution has a couple outliers." But when you see that lesbians - women who have the typically masculine trait of attraction to women - are also unusually likely to have other typically masculine traits - then that implies that there's something else going on. Such as, some of them really do have "male brains" in some sense.
And there are so many different personality traits that are correlated with gender (at least 18, according to the test mentioned above, and probably many more that can't be tested as easily) that it's very unlikely someone would have an opposite-sex personality just by chance alone. That's why I'd guess that a lot of the feminine "men" and masculine "women" really do have some sort of intersex condition where their gender-variable is flipped. (Although there are some cultural confounders too, like people unconsciously conforming to stereotypes about how gay people act.)
I completely agree that dividing everyone between "male" and "female" isn't enough to capture all the nuance associated with gender, and would much prefer that we used more words than that. But if, as seems to often be expected by the world, we have to approximate all of someone's character traits all with only a single binary label... then there are a lot of people for whom it's more accurate to use the one that doesn't match their sex.
Fair. I do indeed endorse the claim that Aella, or other people who are similar in this regard, can be more accurately modelled as a man than as a woman - that is to say, if you're trying to predict some yet-unmeasured variable about Aella that doesn't seem to be affected by physical characteristics, you'll have better results by predicting her as you would a typical man, than as you would a typical woman. Aella probably really is more of a man than a woman, as far as minds go.
But your mentioning this does make me realize that I never really had a clear meaning in mind when I said "society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes." When I try to think of ways that men and women should be treated differently, I mostly come up blank. And the ways that do come to mind are mostly about physical sex rather than gender - i.e. sports. I guess my actual position is "yeah, Aella is probably male with regard to personality, but this should not be relevant to how society treats ?her."
If a person has a personality that's pretty much female, but a male body, then thinking of them as a woman will be a much more accurate model of them for predicting anything that doesn't hinge on external characteristics. I think the argument that society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes is locally valid, even if you reject that the premise is true in many cases.
Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.
Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults has been meta-analyzed at Cohen's d ≈ 1.31 standard deviations for men and d ≈ 0.96 for women.) A solid majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria ended up growing out of it by puberty. In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under a "watchful waiting" protocol) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
I think I might be confused about what your position is here. As I understood the two-type taxonomy theory, the claim was that while some "trans women" really were unusually feminine compared to typical men, most of them were just non-feminine men who were blinded into transitioning by autogynephilia. But the early-onset group, as I understood the theory, were the ones who really were trans? Your whole objection to people classifying autogynephilic people as "trans women" was that they didn't actually have traits drawn from a female distribution, and so modelling them as women would be less accurate than modelling them as men. But if members of the early-onset group really do behave in a way more typical of femininity than masculinity, then that would mean they essentially are "women on the inside, men on the outside."
Am I missing something about your views here?
Maybe the chance that Kennedy wins, given a typical election between a Republican and a Democrat, is too low to be worth tracking. But this election seems unusually likely to have off-model surprises - Biden dies, Trump dies, Trump gets arrested, Trump gets kicked off the ballot, Trump runs independently, controversy over voter fraud, etc. If something crazy happens at the last minute, people could end up voting for Kennedy.
If you think the odds are so low, I'll bet my 10 euros against your 10,000 that Kennedy wins. (Normally I'd use US dollars, but the value of a US dollar in 2024 could change based on who wins the election.)
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to research more than a thousand candidates across the country, and there's probably only about 1 or 2 LessWrongers in most congressional districts. But I encourage everyone to research the candidates' views on AI for whichever Congress elections you're personally able to vote in.
I'm not denying that the military and government are secretive. But there's a difference between keeping things from the American people, and keeping them from the president. When it comes to whether the president controls the military and nuclear arsenal, that's the sort of thing that the military can't lie about without substantial risk to the country.
Let's say the military tries to keep the keys to the nukes out of the president's hands - by, say, giving them fake launch codes. Then they're not just taking away the power of the president, they're also obfuscating under which conditions the US will fire nukes. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to pose a clear threat to other countries, to be able to say "if these specific conditions happen (i.e. you shoot nukes at us), our government will attack you." And the only thing that keeps someone from getting confused about those conditions and firing off a nuke at the wrong time is that other countries have a clear picture of what those conditions are, and know what to avoid.
Everyone has to be on the same page for the system to function. If the US president believes different things about when the nukes will be fired than the actual truth known to the military leaders, then you're muddying the picture of how the nuclear deterrent works. What happens if the president threatens to nuke Russia, and the military secretly isn't going to follow through? What happens if the president actually does give the order, and someone countermands it? Most importantly, what happens if different countries come to different conclusions about what the rules are - say, North Korea thinks the president really does have the power to launch nukes, but Russia goes through the same reasoning steps as you did, and realizes they don't? If different people have different pictures of what's going on, then you risk nuclear war.
And if your theory is that everyone in the upper levels of every nation's government does know these things, even the US president, and they just don't tell the public - well, that's not a stable situation either. It doesn't take long for someone to spill the truth. Suppose Trump gets told he's not allowed to launch the nukes, and gets upset and decides to tell everyone on Truth Social. Suppose Kim learns the US president's not allowed to launch the nukes, and decides to tell the world about that in order to discredit the US government. It's not possible to keep a secret like that; it requires the cooperation of too many people who can't be trusted.
A similar argument applies to a lot of the other things that one could theorize the president is secretly not allowed to do. The president's greatest powers don't come from having a button they can press to make something happen, they come from the public believing that they can make things happen. Let's say the president signs a treaty to halt advanced AI development, and some other government entity wants to say, "Actually, no, we're ignoring that and letting everyone keep developing whatever AI systems they want." Well, how are they supposed to go about doing that? They can't publicly say that they're overriding the president's order, and if they try to secretly tell major American AI labs to keep going with their research, then it doesn't take long for a whistleblower to come forward. The moment the president signs something, then the American people believe it's the law, and in most cases, that actually makes it become the true law.
I'd definitely want to hear suggestions as to who else in the government you think would have a lot of influence regarding this sort of thing. But the president has more influence than anyone else in the court of public opinion, and there's very little that anyone else in the government can do to stop that.
I wouldn't entirely dismiss Kennedy just yet; he's polling better than any independent or third party candidate since Ross Perot. That being said, I do agree that his chances are quite low, and I expect I'll end up having to vote for one of the main two candidates.
The president might not hold enough power to singlehandedly change everything, but they still probably have more power than pretty much any other individual. And lobbying them hasn't been all that ineffective in the past; the AI safety crowd seems to have been involved in the original executive order. I'd expect there to be more progress if we can get a president who's sympathetic to the cause.
Ah. I don't think the writers meant that in terms of ASI killing everyone, but yeah, it's kind of related.
I think that Eliezer, at least, uses the term "alignment" solely to refer to what you call "aimability." Eliezer believes that most of the difficulty in getting an ASI to do good things lies in "aimability" rather than "goalcraft." That is, getting an ASI to do anything, such as "create two molecularly identical strawberries on a plate," is the hard part, while deciding what specific thing it should do is significantly easier.
That being said, you're right that there are a lot of people who use the term differently from how Eliezer uses it.
I'm not sure what the current algorithm is other than a general sense of "posts get promoted more if they're more recent," but it seems like it could be a good idea to just round it all up so that everything posted between 0 and N hours ago is treated as equally recent, so that time of day effects aren't as strong.
Not sure about the exact value of N... 6? 12? It probably depends on what the current function is, and what the current cycle of viewership by time of day looks like. Does LW keep stats on that?
Q3: $50, Q4: $33.33
The answers that immediately come to mind for me for Q1 and Q2 are 50% and 33.33%, though it depends how exactly we're defining "probability" and "you"; the answer may very well be "~1" or "ill formed question".
The entities that I selfishly care about are those who have the patterns of consciousness that make up "me," regardless of what points in time said "me"s happen to exist at. $33.33 maximizes utility across all the "me"s if they're being weighted evenly, and I don't see any particular reason to weight them differently (I think they exist equally as much, if that's even a coherent statement).
What confusions do you have here?
<obligatory pointless nitpicking>Does this society seriously still use cash despite the existence of physical object duplicators?</obligatory pointless nitpicking>
It takes a lot of time for advisors to give advice, the player has to evaluate all the suggestions, and there's often some back-and-forth discussion. It takes much too long to make moves in under a minute.
Conor explained some details about notation during the opening, and I explained a bit as well. (I wasn't taking part in the discussion about the actual game, of course, just there to clarify the rules.)
Agree with Bezzi. Confusion about chess notation and game rules wasn't intended to happen, and I don't think it applies very well to the real-world example. Yes, the human in the real world will be confused about which actions would achieve their goals, but I don't think they're very confused about what their goals are: create an aligned ASI, with a clear success/failure condition of are we alive.
You're correct that the short time control was part of the experimental design for this game. I was remarking on how this game is probably not as accurate of a model of the real-world scenario as a game with longer time controls, but "confounder" was probably not the most accurate term.
(Puzzle 1)
I'm guessing that the right move is Qc5.
At the end of the Qxb5 line (after a4), White can respond with Rac1, to which Black doesn't really have a good response. b6 gets in trouble with the d6 discovery, and Nd2 just loses a pawn after Rxc7 Nxb2 Rxb7 - Black may have a passed pawn on a4, but I doubt it's enough not to lose.
That being said, that wasn't actually what made me suspect Qc5 was right. It's just that Qxb5 feels like a much more natural, more human move than Qc5. Before I even looked at any lines, I thought, "well, this looks like Richard checked with a computer, and it found a move better than the flawed one he thought of: Qc5." Maybe this is even a position from a game Richard played, where the engine suggested Qc5 when he was analyzing it afterwards, or something like that.
I'm only about... 60% confident in that theory, but if I am right, it'll... kind of invalidate the experiment for me, because the factor of "does it feel like a human move" isn't something that's supposed to be considered. Unfortunately, I'm not that good at making my brain ignore that factor and analyze the position without it.
Hoping I'm wrong; if it turns out "check if it feels human" isn't actually helpful, I'll hopefully be able to analyze other puzzles without paying attention to that.
Because I want to keep the option of being able to make promises. This way, people can trust that, while I might not answer every question they ask, the things that I do say to them are the truth. If I sometimes lie to them, that's no longer the case, and I'm no longer able to trustworthily communicate at all.
Meta-honesty is an alternate proposed policy that could perhaps reduce some of the complication, but I think it only adds new complication because people have to ask you questions on the meta level whenever you say something for which they might suspect a lie. That being said, I also do stick to meta-honesty rules, and am always willing to discuss why I'm Glomarizing about something or my general policies about lying.
If B were the same level as A, then they wouldn't pose any challenge to A; A would be able to beat them on their own without listening to the advice of the Cs.
I saw it fine at first, but after logging out I got the same error. Looks like you need a Chess.com account to see it.
I've created a Manifold market if anyone wants to bet on what happens. If you're playing in the experiment, you are not allowed to make any bets/trades while you have private information (that is, while you are in a game, or if I haven't yet reported the details of a game you were in to the public.)
https://manifold.markets/Zane_3219/will-chess-players-win-most-of-thei
The problem is that while the human can give some rationalizations as to "ah, this is probably why the computer says it's the best move," it's not the original reasoning that generated those moves as the best option, because that took place inside the engine. Some of the time, looking ahead with computer analysis is enough to reproduce the original reasoning - particularly when it comes to tactics - but sometimes they would just have to guess.
[facepalms] Thanks! That idea did not occur to me and drastically simplifies all of the complicated logistics I was previously having trouble with.
Sounds like a good strategy! ...although, actually, I would recommend you delete it before all the potential As read it and know what to look out for.
Agreed that it could be a bit more realistic that way, but the main constraint here is that we need a game where there are three distinct levels of players who always beat each other. The element of luck in games like poker and backgammon makes that harder to guarantee (as suggested by the stats Joern_Stoller brought up). And another issue is that it'll be harder to find a lot of skilled players at different levels from any game that isn't as popular as chess is - even if we find an obscure game that would in theory be a better fit for the experiment, we won't be able to find any Cs for it.
No computers, because the advisors should be reporting their own reasoning (or, 2/3 of the time, a lie that they claim is their own reasoning.) I would prefer to avoid explicit coordination between the advisors, because the AIs might not have access to each other in the real world, but I'm not sure at the moment whether player A can show the advisors each other's suggestions and ask for critiques. I would prefer not to give either dishonest advisor information on who the other two were, since the real-world AIs probably can't read each other's source code.
I was thinking I would test the players to make sure they really could beat each other as they should be able to. Good points on using blitz and doing the test afterwards; the main constraint as to whether it happens before or after the game is that I would prefer to do it beforehand to know whether the rankings were accurate rather than playing for weeks and only later realizing we were doing the wrong test.
I wasn't thinking of much in the way of limits on what Cs could say, although possibly some limits on whether the Cs can see and argue against each other's advice. C's goal is pretty much just "make A win the game" or "make A lose the game" as applicable.
I'm definitely thinking a prototype would help. I've actually been contacted about applying for a grant to make this a larger experiment, and I was planning on first running a one-day game or two as a prototype before expanding it with more people and longer games.
Individual positions like that could be an interesting thing to test; I'll likely have some people try out some of those too.
I think the aspect where the deceivers have to tell the truth in many cases to avoid getting caught could make it more realistic, as in the real AI situation the best strategy might be to present a mostly coherent plan with a few fatal flaws.