MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
15hr ago
The formula is true for the average/typical male, not universal. Evolution gears men to be attracted to healthy fertile human women. However biology and psychology are complicated, and so different people develop differently. Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips. Some men end up attracted to dogs or other men, who can't bear their children. Some men have a fetish for cuckoldry, which decreases the chance any children they have are actually theirs. Some men end up deciding to not have children and their genetic line ends. Some men end up stalking people who don't want them. Stalkers are not normal, healthy, or common. If you look at per capita out of all men, how many of them are stalkers, they're quite infrequent. It's just that celebrities are also infrequent so if you pair all the potential stalkers with all the celebrities they end up disproportionately prevalent.
Plenty of individual men break the formula. But if you look on a population level, averages dominate the market. If the majority of men dislike X, then having X decreases your ability to find a good partner. You either need to tradeoff to find a partner who likes your good qualities enough to make up for this flaw, leaving you with a lower value than you otherwise would have, or you need to get lucky searching among the subset of people who don't think X is a flaw. This can be done. If X is really important to you and you not only want someone who would tolerate it but would actively embrace and encourage it, then maybe advertising and amplifying X to disqualify the majority of partners is a good thing for you. I know I did that with being a nerd. When I was single on online dating I actively advertised my nerdiness to screen off anyone who would consider that a negative. But it does significantly curtail your options and make it harder to find a partner. And you can only do it with so many things. If being a massive slut is the core of someone's identity, the hill they're willing to die on, then I suppose they can do that. But it's a heavy cost, and is unlikely to lead to good long-term results in my opinion (especially since the majority of men who are okay with promiscuous women are likely to be promiscuous themselves and less likely to settle down).
MathWizard
Good things are good
22hr ago
Female Value = (Sexual attention she gives you)/(Sexual attention she gives/has-given others + 1) * (Everything Else)
If she gives you 0 sexual attention, she has no value. I am not making the claim that sex is the only thing women are good for, but the claim that a woman who is unwilling to have sex with you (even after marriage), clearly does not take you seriously as a partner. Even a woman who is for some biological reason incapable of PIV should still be interested in blowjobs or something.
If she has sex with thousands of other people in all sorts of kinky ways and then gets old and loses sexual interest and you end up in a boring vanilla relationship, that's bad.
If she has sex with a bunch of guys and then marries you and has a bunch of sex with you then that's fine.
If she is a virgin and has sex with you, and only you, and never anyone else, then that's a huge bonus.
All of this multiplies all of the other features. A big everything else like being hot and rich and funny are good features to have, and enough of them can make up for a large denominator in the fraction. But it's an uphill battle compared to someone chaste and loyal who is really really into you, specifically.
I've had Space Haven on my wishlist for a while, since I almost never get Early Access games. Now that it's out I'll have to try it out sometime.
I've been playing a couple games on and off, most notably I've stuck with Lobotomy Corporation. I've warmed up to it a bit since my frustration last week. It helps that I have a much better idea of the mechanics and strategies after looking up some mostly non-spoilery guides. Importantly, after you complete enough tasks and finish the requirements to complete a day, you can still keep doing stuff to grind out your people's stats. Early on I had dismissed this as a gimmick/exploit, but it turns out that this is super important and necessary if you want to avoid being under-leveled long term, as the game's difficulty ramps up much faster than you will if you're just filling the quota. After resetting my run and doing a whole bunch of grinding on early levels I'm in much better shape. And for the most part it avoids being an exploit because as the day goes on the crises that occur become worse, and also you risk wasting more of your time if some stupid RNG kills your fancy people and forces you to restart.
I'm still kind of annoyed at the volatility. Having your people level long term seems to require that you have 0 or almost 0 deaths each day so you aren't constantly replacing them with low level noobs. And the game doesn't warn you if someone is about to die, only after they're already dead. So I can be like 5 minutes into a day then whoops, you made one mistake or just had bad rng and one of your guys is dead, guess you're restarting the level! And then 6 minutes into trying again it happens again and you have to restart again. There's a certain type of crisis that happens which randomly rolls one of several boss monsters to face, and one of them just insta-kills all of your people who are sitting in their home base. You know when that crisis level is going to occur ahead of time, but not which boss, so prior to it occurring you have to select and move all of your people out of each base, just in case that boss gets rolled. It's annoying and tedious, and was super annoying when it killed me several times before I knew that was a thing you had to do AND had to do prior to it even showing up since there's not enough time to react once it triggers.
But it's fine. I like the core gameplay loop of sending the right people to do the right tasks, and without nasty threats the game wouldn't have a challenge. I just kind of wish it was more strategic maneuvering and resource managing type of threats rather than gimmicky insta-kill type things that force you to restart with no warning.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Karens are a particular type of people with particular types of shaming tactics. Trying to shame people does not tautologically cause you to become a Karen. There are countering forces, they're just weaker due to things like having less free time or more libertarian attitudes on behavior and so devote less time and effort to shaming people who actually need it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
The plot of Twelve angry men is almost entirely logic-based and not emotion based. They spend the entire movie logically dismantling, or at least calling into doubt, every piece of the prosecution's case. Jury members are supposed to attempt to convince the others of their view in order to establish a unanimous verdict, but this convincing should be based on the logic of the case. A battle guided by the beauty of our weapons. Charismatic and socially manipulative people are disproportionately convincing relative to the truthiness of their words. So are people who threaten others with their fists. In general, but doubly so in a jury, these tactics should be discouraged so that people will be persuaded by arguments proportional to their truthiness instead of the charisma of person speaking with random opinions.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
There's a difference between something legal and something being good/moral/commendable/encouragement-worthy. The law can't place restrictions on jury-making procedures barring the most clear cut and unambiguous abuses (like actual violence) without slippery sloping itself into corruption and self-masturbatory feedback loops.
I am not the law. I can judge people for being bad and making bad decisions and suggest they are bad people who should be mocked and discouraged from behaving the way they behave. And discourage people from listening to them, because their power is anti-memetic. If obnoxious Karens are actually distorting the law in significant quantities, and people were made aware of this, then people could oppose it by being extra stubborn and stick to their principles when facing obnoxious Karens, with more confidence that their resistance is helping the law and not making them be the bad person the Karen says they are.
I don't think we should make Karen behavior illegal. The law isn't flexible or precise enough to diagnose it and curtail it without horrible overreach. I think we, as people, should call it out and shame it when we find it, across all of society.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
I wonder how much of this dynamic infects actual jury rulings. How many "unanimous" rulings have happened because one or two Karens made up their minds and then hen-pecked everyone else into agreeing with them using social tactics instead of logic and reason?
I often compare women's social power to men's physical power. Imagine if a couple of burly men had physically intimidated all of the women into dressing in bikinis or slutty cleavage suits. Would people think it was cute and quirky then? Would people believe that it was a fair and impartial jury behind closed doors?
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
Yes, but if you establish this as a precedent then the next president to come along can just wink wink nudge nudge and trigger similar events performatively: publicly complaining while secretly encouraging it behind closed doors in order to enrich themselves. Even if Trump as trailblazer did not set this up on purpose, it is a trail we do not want blazed.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
Tax AI -> UBI
Easy. As long as you wait until if/when this massive and perpetual unemployment actually happens. People have adapted to massive job replacements before by finding new productive things to do and raising standards of living. But if they don't then UBI decreasing the number off people seeking employment is a win win. And massive unemployment would make this politically trivial to gather support for as well.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
I just started playing Lobotomy Corporation, which I dismissed back when it came out thinking it looked pretty amateur and the English translation was awful. But after seeing them come out with their third game and ongoing popularity I decided to give it a try. I'm not yet sure if it's for me. It is complicated, unintuitive, and punishing in a volatile way. Which I get is all intentional, but it might be slightly too harsh for my taste.
For those who don't know, it's an employee management type thing (Oxygen not included seems like the closest game I can think of at the moment, but I suspect there are better comparisons.) in a SCP-inspired facility. Spooky abnormalities exist and you contain them and learn about them and exploit them for electricity that your company sells. Your people have different skills which influence both their combat abilities and their proficiency at certain tasks. Each abnormality has different preferences and task-affinities, as well as different shenanigans it inflicts when you mess up and make it angry (or just randomly when timing events anger them).
The game is kind of sort of roguelite, in that you can restart your campaign, or rewind to an earlier checkpoint several levels ago, and keep some of your unlocks and upgrades. And then new random stuff happens. But at least so far it's been very stingy with the upgrades. And also although your employees die permanently and buying new ones is expensive, you can reset a level at any time with no cost other than your real-life sanity after you've tried to fight the same opponent 5 times and it's not quite clear what's going wrong, or you're almost done with a day but then suddenly all your best people spontaneously die and it's not quite clear why.
I want to like the game more than I do. I want to like difficult games more than I do. This is a similar issue I ran into with Pathologic 3. I want to bash my head against a really hard challenge and then gradually work it down until I can overcome it, and I prefer when this happens simultaneously via real skill and in-game upgrades. I like JRPGs where I can progress up until things get too hard and then go grind a couple of levels to adjust it back down. I like Rogue Legacy where when you run into tough enemies and die you get to unlock stuff and then come back stronger for another try. I don't prefer the Dark Souls experience where you bash your head into a boss 20 times in a row until you finally overcome it and then move onto the next boss to bash into 20 times. Which so far is the majority of what this game has been. Sometimes I just get lucky and nothing bad happens (since I'm still early game), but sometimes something bad happens and since I haven't yet spoiled all the game's secrets and am trying to discover them organically, it usually kills my people and then I restart the day and try something else next time.
Not sure if I'll stick with it or not. I think I need to restart my run and give myself more of a headstart on snowballing now that I have some vague idea of what I'm doing.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
That's not how time works. Sequential games in game theory are formally defined such that at each time step, players can make decisions that depend on events that have happened in the past, but not in the future (or present if there are turns with simultaneous moves from different players). A complete strategy profile for each player is defined a series of decisions and contingencies that cover every possible game state so it's always possible to know what they would do at any point. At time 1 I do X, with no conditions because nothing else would happen. At time 2 the other person does Y if I x or Z if I Y. At Time 3 I do A if they Y and B if they Z. I can't say "at time 1 I do X if they Y" because they haven't Y yet. Which means that whoever goes last IS special, because they get the last decision that nobody can respond to. That's how time works in real life, that is how sequential games that happen over time are defined in standard game theory.
If Y does or does not happen at time 2, then you can only condition on Y after time 2. If you claim to be conditioning on Y and it's time 1 then that's a contradiction. You are either lying, or have invented a brand new version of Game Theory and decision-making theory, which requires literal books to establish, not a couple of sentences at the beginning of a problem.
Two boxers think they are special because you told them they were. When you say "Omega can predict you" you are saying "you are not special." When you say "Omega leaves and then you make your decision afterwards" you are saying "you are special." One boxers believed your first sentence more, two boxers believed the second more. Either way you are lying because they can't both happen simultaneously. If Omega can respond to your decision then it goes after you. You have mathematically described the scenario "you pick one box or two, and then if you picked one box Omega puts more money in the big box", and then appended the statement "Omega goes before you." I am reminded of Yudkowsky's Parable of the Dagger. You can say whatever words you want to say, even if they're self-contradictory. They're just words. But then they no longer map to anything real or meaningful.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
I'm not demanding that I can't be predicted, I'm asking "what does that even mean?" and also "if that's true in the hypothetical, then what's the point? there's nothing left." The problem just axiomatically erases the game away with no details.
Consider another game. Suppose you are given an opportunity to play Tic Tac Toe against Umega. If you choose to play and you lose, you get 0 points. If you win or tie, you get 1000 points. But if you forfeit prior to playing the game you can get 100 points. Umega can't predict the future, but instead is extremely tricky. Somehow, it always wins at Tic Tac Toe. No matter what you originally intend to do or plan you make, things don't go the way you intended and it tricks you and lose anyway. What do you do?
The way to maximize your points here is to forfeit. Because if you try to play the game then, axiomatically, Umega tricks you and you lose. If you present a winning strategy for Tic Tac Toe that cannot be beaten and say you'll stick to that strategy no matter what Umega does then I retort that you attempt to do that, but then Umega tricks you and you lose anyway. It's a master of psychology and deceit beyond human comprehension. Okay, fine, you have no agency, you forfeit and get the 100 points because the game mathematically reduces to "forfeit: 100 points, don't forfeit: 0 points" with no other options.
Now suppose I go around presenting this to Chess Grandmasters or something (since Tic Tac Toe masters don't exist), and present it as some deep and extremely challenging variant of Tic Tac Toe and grand strategy. Chess Grandmasters stumped by this challenging variant of Tic Tac Toe!
It's not Tic Tac Toe! The optimal strategy of the game is completely and utterly independent to strategies for winning Tic Tac Toe. No matter how much or how little someone knows about Tic Tac Toe, it has nothing to do with the optimal strategy for this game (which is just forfeit) because it's not even engaging with the rules at all. You could substitute basically any strategy game there, I merely used Tic Tac Toe to point out the apparent contradiction of axiomatically declaring that you lose despite there being a known winning strategy.
This has the same fundamental problem as Newcomb's problem. If your agency is stripped from you then what even is the point of the thought experiment? "Suppose you have no free will, and will be punished for trying to act as if you have free will. What do you do?" I guess I forfeit and hope that next time I'm offered a thought experiment it allows me to make choices.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
IF Omega's predictions have an independent p probability of being wrong, and the ratio of the big box to the small box is R, then two boxing is worth it if p > R/(R+1), which for the original problem where the big box is 1000 times larger would mean that you should only two box if p > 99.9% , meaning it's almost always wrong. Which obviously makes sense. The extra box is a thousand times smaller, so only worth it if you are risking less than 1/1000 chance of the first box.
The problem is not so much that the problem is mean and unfair and not letting me two box because I'm willing to risk my one box. The problem is that it's not specified to be random. It's not specified at all. You can't solve logical and mathematical problems that aren't well-specified. You can shrug and say "I dunno, If I don't know what's going on I guess one boxing seems more likely to work out for me." If I make Mathwizard's Paradox V2 and say
"There are two boxes. The left box either has $0 or $10. The right box either has $0 or $10000. You can only pick one box to open and keep, which do you pick?" You'd probably pick the right box, because might as well, but this is not a logical deduction which must be a correct answer. Maybe Box 1 has money with higher probability because I'm more willing to give up $10 than $10,000. If I did this demonstration in real life in a classroom, the right box would guaranteed be empty because no way am I sacrificing that much for a demonstration. But if I haven't specified probabilities or anything within the problem then you can only guess. There is no unique solution because there is no unique problem, it's actually a broad class of problems that all satisfy the wording in the premises. Most models that satisfy the axioms of Newcomb's problem have one boxing as the correct solution, but some have two boxing as the correct solution. The notion that you are randomizing between all possible variants of an underspecified problem can't be mathematically resolved without applying a measure to that space, which is not generally how people solve logical problems, and itself still involves semi-arbitrary choices that can result in different answers.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
But even if it's possible, if there's no reasonable way for you to deduce how you would trick the oracle then strategically the solution is still to just be a 1-box pre-committer.
Probably. But "there is no reasonable way for you to deduce how you would trick the oracle" is usually not explicitly spelled out in the original problem. It's just left unmentioned, and left as an exercise to the reader as to how or whether it might be tricked.
"A man comes at you with a knife and demands 1000 points from you. If you refuse he will try to stab you and if you get stabbed you lose 10,000 points. What do you do?" Is a question one might ask and argue and debate about. But it is not a logical math puzzle. It depends on empirical facts about the real world and the specific person being asked the question (how good are you at martial arts.) This is not interesting, the rules are not well-defined, and there is not a concrete definitive and objectively correct answer that is true independent of who is answer it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
Seconding The Years of Apocalypse. It's a very good series which I would describe as "almost Mother of Learning" which is high praise from me since Mother of Learning is my favorite series of all time. In terms of having an earnest protagonist and general story tone, Mirian definitely ranks higher than Zorian. There is cynicism and politics and messy stuff going on in the story, but mostly in the form of other people doing messy human things and Mirian berating them for their petty squabbles instead of coming together to save the world.
I'm slightly annoyed by the leftist cliches sprinkled throughout. Of course the more western/technologically advanced countries are colonizing and oppressing their neighbors and causing a bunch of plot problems, while the foreigners who live in harmony with nature are generally kinder and have a bunch of useful alternate technology that none of the big countries take seriously. (And of course our main character lives in the big country but is ethnically from a foreign one). And some other stuff I don't want to spoil but clearly maps to a modern leftist talking point. But eh, it's tolerable in small doses and the author is still good and sane and earnest enough that their solution is "set aside your differences and come together, combine all of our unique talents together to save the world"
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
That's not the Newcomb's problem: 100% success rate is never specified, it's "almost certainly". That means close to 100%, not 100%.
This is why I complain about it being underspecified. If omega can be wrong then the entirety of the problem hinges on when/how/why it can be wrong. If it's possible for someone to get away with two boxing and get both boxes, and you can put yourself in that scenario, then you can win by two boxing. If omega attempts to minimize its failed prediction rate, maybe you can employ a mixed strategy (flip a very slightly weighted coin) which randomizes and then you could one box with probability 50.01% and two box with probability 49.99%, causing omega to predict you will one box, and you always get the one box plus almost half the time you get a bonus. Can it predict coin tosses before they're made? Can it predict radioactive decays? This is not mere psychology. I'm not saying it's impossible for someone to cold read you and make educated guesses. If I read psychological profiles on people I could guess that sneakier, greedier, more disagreeable people are more likely to two box while straightforward, naive, or chill people are more likely to one box, and probably get like a 70-80% success rate. Is that what omega is doing? Because then I'm just screwed: I overthink things and seem like a two boxer and if I bit the bullet and decided to one box I would end up getting nothing because it would false guess me as a two boxer.
Literally none of this is explained in the premise. The problem very much depends on information is not present. If I give you "MathWizard's Paradox" and say
"There are two boxes. The left box has some money. The right box has a different amount of money not equal to the left box. You only get one box, which one do you pick?"
This likewise is going to lead to disagreement (or would, if people cared and tried to argue about it). If I added a whole bunch of window dressing to disguise the obvious stupidity of this problem, a bunch of superficial characteristics that made it seem more interesting and less obvious, it wouldn't change the underlying symmetry and lack of information. I have, in my head, decided how much money is in each box. There is a correct answer. But I haven't told you enough information for you to deduce it, and there are infinite variations of this problem, half of which have the opposite correct answer.
Just because you don't see how Omega could predict your choice almost certainly without backwards causality doesn't mean that it can't.
It's not that I can't see a way for this to happen, it's that I can imagine a dozen hypothetical ways it could try to do this, and half of them let me two box anyway while half of them don't.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
This is impossible by construction, omega cannot predict wrongly.
This is only possible if you model people as deterministic mechanisms and not as rational game theory agents. If Newcomb's problem posits that you make a decision AFTER Omega makes a decision, then Omega can be wrong. For instance, if you play a mixed strategy (one box with 50% probability, two box with 50% probability), then omega has to not only model your brain perfectly, but also your coin flip. If you used quantum decay to randomize then it would have to predict that perfectly. If omega can perfectly predict that then you've removed an important tool in Game Theory. It's like trying to argue that Rock Paper Scissors as a paradox because no matter what you do your opponent can predict you and defeat you. If you tell me that I can't do mixed strategies, or that other people can, in the past, respond to my mixed strategy outcomes then that's fundamentally incompatible with 90% of Game Theory. I don't even know what the rules of this are or what the goal is. Omega can do literally whatever it wants and I'll get literally any payoff that it chooses to give me. I suppose if it's a god that wants to punish two boxers then I guess I'll obey its commandments and one box, but that's not adjency, that's not game theory, that's just submitting to the religious edicts of a higher power with arbitrary rules.
We can model it much more simply by making an alternate version where, at time 1, you decide to one box or two box. Then at time 2 omega is informed of your decision and puts stuff in a box, then at time 3 you get the result of the decision you already made. Here you obviously 1 box. This is a very straightforward, simple, and uninteresting game theory problem. The problem with this then is not what the original Newcomb's box says happens. It says you make the decision after omega does. If you actually mean that people make the decision before omega then saying they make it after is lying.
Maybe this is still useful as a critique of attempts to map Game Theory to reality. Essentially saying "Every game is an iterated game played out over the course of your lifetime. Any decisions you make will affect your personality and reputation, so doing greedy things will hurt you in the long term even if they are the rationally correct choice to a one shot game that you see in the short term." Which, sure. This is how cooperation can exist in prisoner's dilemma-like situations, because you cannot incentivize (and it is irrational to try) to cooperate in a true, pure, one-shot prisoner's dilemma with no modifications, but none of those conditions apply in real life. But you also don't have mind-reading omegas in real life either, so I don't think that's quite what people mean by this.
Ultimately, the premises are fundamentally contradictory, so the only way to come to a solution is to suspend disbelief on half of them. Either you believe that omega can perfectly predict you and you have no agency, so hope that your were born as a one-boxer (because you don't get to decide), or you believe you are a rational agent who can make decisions when it says you can, in which case omega can't predict you so might as well two box. But these are beliefs about the premises of the problem, not about what is good epistemic or rational behavior in a given coherent scenario (which always follows logically and mathematically from the premises and math to determine the maximum payoff)
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
The problem with Newcomb's problem is that it basically involves time travel, and generally underspecifies how that time travel works. Consider a similar problem:
Time 1: you discover box 1 with 1,000,000 points
Time 2: you discover a box 2 with 1,000 points
Time 3: someone shows up claiming to be a time traveler shows up and says that if you hand him box 2, he will multiply it by 1,000, and then go back in time to put it in box 1. Actually, he claims, that's where box 1 came from all along and if you don't give him the 1,000 your box 1 will disappear.
Assuming you are rational/selfish, whether you say yes or no very much depends on whether he's telling the truth. If the problem carefully specifies that he actually is a time traveler telling the truth, and time travel does work this way, then obviously you should give it to him (one box). If this happened in real life, I would not give him anything and two box, because my prior on time travel existing is less than 1/1000 and he's just a liar trying to con me. If the problem is not careful and is ambiguous about his truthfulness then people's answers are going to depend on their trustfulness, suspension of disbelief, or just general attitudes towards how willing they are to buy time travel in a hypothetical logic puzzle.
Actual Newcomb's problem is basically the same as this in that decisions you make in the future affect things in the past, and the being making the boxes has to have time travel powers in order to guarantee a 100% success rate (though not all version of the problem specify this precisely, maybe it just has a 99% success rate, or a vague but high success rate) The reason people so confidently disagree is that in any well-specified version of the problem the answer is obvious, but in any vague under-specification it's ambiguous to which well-specified version people will round it to. This is the exact same reason the Monty Hall problem is controversial as well. It's not merely there being a counter-intuitive answer, it's that the problem specifications are very volatile and people keep leaving important details ambiguous that they shouldn't.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
I really enjoyed it back when I read it ~15 years ago. I started the sequel but got bored and dropped it near the beginning. I don't especially remember why. I've always kind of wanted to go back and finish it, except the author went George R.R. Martin on us and it's been 13 years since book 3, and I don't want to get re-invested in a series that might never conclude properly.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
I could use some investing advice. I have about $120k in Vanguard VTSAX and $100k sitting around in a bank account that I have no plans for at the moment. My goal is to be low effort and just sit long on it, since I'm lazy and just generally want it to sit around and not have to pay attention to it. Should I just buy more VTSAX? Are there better index funds I can throw my money in and get more returns long term? I don't want to have to actually pay attention to the stock market and buy and sell different things, but am not sure if I'm leaving money on the table by not knowing about XYZ fancy financing thing I could stick my money in.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
While there is some pretty strong evidence that intelligence is a prerequisite to consciousness/sentience, since you have to be able to actually process thoughts and feelings and emotions in order to experience them, we have no evidence that they are the same thing, at least not if we are using a broad enough definition of the word "intelligence" to include AI.
An organization of 1 person expanding to 1,000,000 will inevitably lead to the emergence of politics, with people fighting over status and hierarchy, but an organization of 1,000,000 ants will not, at least not for a definition of politics encompassing things like competing over positions in a hierarchy and gaining increased authority from it. They all cooperate within their own tribe because they are a different type of being with different incentives and behaviors. Their reproductive success, and thus evolutionary incentives, center around cooperating to serve the queen. Having a large number of entities is necessary for the emergence of politics. It is highly correlated with it: if you get 1,000,000 monkeys or parakeets or cats you're going to get something analogous to politics, but it's not sufficient. If you generalize too far outside your initial observations then some of the underlying supports for it go away, even if it's not quite obvious what they are.
I suspect, though I am not certain, that monkeys and dolphins are not quite sentient as they are now. I suspect, though I am not certain, that if somehow made a monkey or dolphin very very smart that it would become sentient. I suspect, though I am not certain, that computers have generalized far enough outside of this area for this not to be the case. And nobody else is certain either. We do not fully understand sentience, therefore all evidence has very low Bayesian weight to it. The vast majority of things are not sentient, so that's my prior on all non-humans. We have almost no reason to suspect that computers might be sentient, especially if that sentience flips on and off depending on whether it's currently implementing a structure that we named "neural networks", and essentially all claims that they are sentient are based on superficial characteristics that shouldn't be necessary components of actual sentience, so my prior has not moved.
Evidence of consciousness that could convince me would essentially require a convincing theory of consciousness that made me understand it, or at least convince me that the people making the argument understood it and it was likely to be true, and for that theory of consciousness to include AI as being conscious. If the arguments boil down to "you can't prove it's not conscious" and/or "it uses words that imitate humans" then my priors will not move from "quite low but nonzero".
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
I think you detached them in the opposite way here. In the original problem both the conditional probability and optimal betting odds are 0.6667. In /u/4bpp version (and the version I attempted to describe) the conditional probability is still 0.6667 but the optimal betting odds go to 0.5. In your version the conditional probability is 0.5 and the optimal betting odds are 0.6667. You are correct that this is an easier way to describe how betting odds and conditional probabilities can detach.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
I've recently started listening to Malcolm Collins, and his take is that female sexuality is dimorphic. Historically women have had the possibility of living in two distinct possible scenarios: safe pair bonds, or prostitute/sex-slaves. If someone is born to a family with a reasonable amount of money and get married to a single man, she is best off if she mates with him and has a bunch of children and remains loyal to him. His wealth is her children's wealth, his prosperity is her children's prosperity, and the more love and attention she gives him the more she will get from him. Therefore, women release high levels of oxytocin when having sex the first few times, which develops this bond.
On the other hand, if foreign tribes come in and conquer, they kill the men and steal the women. The woman has no choice about what will happen to her, she's going to have sex with lots of men or she's going to be killed. There is no advantage to bonding with any of these men, they're going to pass her around and use her anyway, often violently. She might as well adapt to being a sex slave and hope she can please the men enough that they want to keep her alive for more. Similarly, a poor women forced into prostitution is going to get used and abused, she might as well adapt to it to survive. Pair-bonding with any of these men would be maladaptive, since she can't be loyal to them even if she wanted to, and they're likely bad men and won't reciprocate loyalty with resources. So after having sex enough times the oxytocin response to sex weakens with each additional iteration.
Therefore, the proliferation of BDSM fetishes in modern times follows biologically from promiscuity culture. Women have enough sex with enough different men that their brains shift into sex slave survival mode. They don't expect to have a single loving partner who loves them and wants to share resources with them willingly, so they adapt to survive and enjoy the life they expect. It's not women's biology training them to look at all the possible options for who to choose as a mate and rationally/selfishly trying to maximize resources compared to picking a safer husband, it's an adaptation to a historical environment where sometimes women had no agency in who to choose as a mate at all, and they're just trying to do the best they can with the mates forced upon them.
I think I tentatively believe this story, it anecdotally tracks with things I've observed and what I know about biology and sex, though the correlation between BDSM and promiscuity could be confounded by the causation going the other way (or just promiscuous people being more willing to admit to having a BDSM fetish while shy, monogamous people keep it to themselves). But I think this idea has some merit.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
Also add the fact that communism has a tendency to cause dissent due to its poor material outcomes. Many authoritarian capitalist governments don't have to suppress very much dissent because the people make money and are at least happy enough not to rebel (ie modern Russia).
Not as strongly, but still to some degree. A significant part of the equation is not merely the physical act of the sex itself but the affection/devotion/loyalty it represents. Once you're in your sixties and have lower libido, willingness/desire to have sex with you is less indicative of how much they like you. But largely yes the value per time is lower, which why you see a lot of old men divorce their wives and then marry younger hotter women. A significant part of the point of marriage is to tie people together to prevent this sort of thing. If you get married in your 20s-30s and then woman spends her youth with a man, it is unfair and selfish of him to discard her as soon as she becomes old. It's supposed to be a lifelong pact where the woman promises herself to him, and him to her, so that once she's old and the cumulative value she's provided is large, he doesn't turn around and discard her. It's her investing in him and therefore he owes her when she's older and doesn't have a young body to appeal to him as much any more.
Eh. I'd say the party days slowly decay, but so does youth, so by the time one is gone the other is likely to as well. Because people can change. It's not like sex is literally magical and the seed of other men taints her soul. It's what it indicates about her personality and loyalty, and the psychological impact of having sex with lots of people. So yeah, someone who slept around five years ago and then learned better and stopped doing that is better than someone who slept around five days ago, because the latter is going to have a mindset of someone who sleeps around.
To her husband? Absolutely 100%. The denominator is about devotion/affection for other people. She has more value the more she sleeps with him, because she's demonstrated her loyalty and affection to him. To other people? No. She's demonstrated the ability to be loyal, so is better than someone truly promiscuous, but if she's spent a lot of time attached to him and then he dies or they divorce or something she's going to always have hangups about him which will taint future relationships.
I should note that some of this applies in the other direction. Men who sleep around are likely to have some of these negative features in their relationships with women. But I think it tends to be to a lesser extent, first and foremost because women care less. A man is only able to sleep around if he's relatively high status, so some women find that appealing. Men can sleep around without getting emotionally attached more easily, so men who sleep around are less likely to behave differently. And men cheating on women can't create false paternity scenarios (which evolutionary is equivalent to death) so women care about loyalty less. To some extent. There are a lot of women who do care and do see men sleeping around as a bad thing, so I think on average it turns out negative for a man's average value if he's slept around, but there's much more variance. Not the near-universal loss that women experience.
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