aqouta
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aqouta
16hr ago
It's kind of funny that superman's position basically can be used to justify the evil government plots of the Xman series.
aqouta
21hr ago
you will either 1-box or 2-box, based on the movements of the clock. We can also compute from axioms regarding the clock's movements that 1-boxers will possess more money
This seems more or less yud's position.
You're in this hypothetical situation where you need to think about the rational way to proceed optimally, and here is why you should choose to act in the following way.
This seems basically identical. What you decide to do is determined but all of the reasoning is part of how it happens anyways. From the first moment time one boxers were always going to follow this game theory reasoning and none the less, like how a domino still does cause the next domino to fall, the reasoning is still relevant. I just don't really see what the game theory problem here is, choices are relevant to the reasoning that individuals do, free will or not that's how the meat computer in or head picks which muscles to contract.
aqouta
2d ago
You can also just model it as omega knowing whether or not you're smart or lucky enough to come up with the right answer to get the $1m. If you pick the right answer you get $1m if you don't then you don't. It's a bit of a brain twister but it works out.
aqouta
2d ago
Your choice reveals what kind of person you are, which omega already knew. If you didn't know what you were going to choose ahead of time that's a mark of your ignorance, not omega's.
aqouta
2d ago
If you choose to one box after the decision period by reasoning it out then you are in fact the kind of person who would one box. If you say fuck it, it's too late then you're in fact the kind of person to two box. Thus it still hinges on your decision, albeit the concept of libertarian free will is questionable.
aqouta
2d ago
This is only possible if you model people as deterministic mechanisms and not as rational game theory agents
These are not in tension. In some game theory scenarios adding randomness, if such a thing is actually possible, is useful to some agent. But Newcome's problem is not such a scenario. Adding any chance of walking away without the $1 million is not worth going for the extra $1k and to the best of my knowledge the best you could do by adding randomness would be to make your expected value $500,500. Whereas your expected value if you cooperate is $1m
As for the rest of the post, yeah just seems like you're demanding the hypothetical grant you libertarian free will and say something different than it says. It's very "But I did eat breakfast this morning" fighting of the hypothetical. If you want to demand that actually you can't be predicted, even hypothetically then you're just not willing to engage with the question.
aqouta
3d 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:
Not time travel, just perfect prediction. If you're actually a perfect predictor then you can in essence see the future. If you had a perfect model of physics and initial conditions then you could predict a coin flip with 100% accuracy. The kind of reason a human does when presented with the boxes is no different unless you a proposing some spooky non-material stuff in the reasoning. The formulation I'm familiar with is perfect prediction in which case there are four theoretical cases.
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You one box and Omega correctly predicted you would one box thus you get $1m
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You one box and omega incorrectly predicted you would 2 box so you get zero. This is impossible by construction, omega cannot predict wrongly.
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You two box and Omega incorrectly assumed you would one box, you get $1m + $1k. This is impossible by construction, Omega cannot be wrong.
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You two box and Omega correctly guesses you'll two box. You get $1k.
There are only two actually possible options with the given constraints and you get to make a choice which of them is the case. This is not a paradox unless predicting future events is impossible.
Your whole reasoning relies on there being something intrinsically impossible about predicting your decisions, even as you lay out the reasoning for them. Is it so hard to imagine that someone could read you well enough to know which outcome you'll ultimately reach?
aqouta
3d ago
All good, I was really confused because it feels like being a two boxer would have super conflicted with everything he believes in.
aqouta
4d ago
I didn't notice the first link was yud himself but unless I'm reading the post wrong he seems like a one boxer? does he take a definitive side elsewhere?
aqouta
4d ago
Where's yud's 2 box argument? I'm not sure what the very smart 2 boxers believe but one of the most common two box explanations boils down to a disbelief that their actions can be predicted at all because they imagine some kind of free will break after the boxes are set.
aqouta
8d ago
Did you grow up with sisters? Nail polish itself has always been a pretty neutral concept to me, like wearing hats. Now certain types of nails, and hats, certainly can signal things. Long false acrylics have a reputation for low class, black is a signal of either goth or bisexual but just a subtle gloss is pretty common in my fortune 100 company.
aqouta
14d ago
Courtship isn't exactly a modern invention in the last 70 years. It happens in observed and studied hunter gathering tribes and we have records of it in every civilization. It happens in other closely related species and we have many of the sexual dimorphic characteristics, concealed ovulation and year-round female receptivity, classic to pair bonding species.
The actual makeup of the social roles certainly change but I think they broadly almost always fit the model I proposed above. Especially for men who in practically every society I've heard of are expected to prove themselves worthy through successfully demonstrating merit in some way. Which hunter gathering societies exactly do you observe male sexual success decouple from the ability to navigate the sexual market place? Of which being impressive to a girl's parents would certainly be an example. What do you even think status is? If what it took to get paired with a high status and attractive woman was very legible do you not think men would endeavor to game whatever the system was?
aqouta
15d ago
Legibility mostly doesn't serve women that much on the dating scene. By keeping things vague they both increase their optionality by not getting rules lawyered into "actually by your own stated values I'm a catch so you should date me!" and select out from their dating pool men who can't navigate vague and ambiguous social dynamics. At least at the individual level there really isn't any compelling reason for women to be particularly candid. Going further I doubt many women themselves have really interrogated what actually attracts them to a partner. Sexually successful women mostly lay bait and filter. They are concerned with the quality of the bait, their appearance and social position, and their degrees of freedom to quickly and efficiently filter out undesirable suiters. Neither of these is particularly served by legibility.
Legibility in the dating market is something men crave, maybe on a biological level. Navigating the sexual marketplace is one of the most centrally selected evolutionary drives. So it makes sense that men would be frustrated with illegibility in the same way women would be frustrated by men who figure out their strategies and find ways to extract sex without responsibility.
Another factor to consider is that there isn't really any kind of coordination here. women aren't conspiring to keep things illegible. This is actually broadly helped by women not strongly introspecting in a way to surface hard rules. If they did then men could more easily read their communications and exploit them. Women are much better served by going off vibes that are maximally hard to decompile.
aqouta
17d ago
Seems reasonable at first pass but I think you end up with a coordination problem. How do you decide who gets to have the male child and thus have their genes highly represented in the next generation?
aqouta
20d ago
A similar transition is happening now as labour gets less valuable, this is just masked by our wealthier modern societies.
As you add automation and increase production labor gets more, not less valuable as an hour of labor can produce more goods and services. Even with fully automated factories you end up with more goods which then needs to be exchanged, we usually describe these are costs going down but another way to look at it is that the owners of the factories have a glut of goods to distribute for whatever it is they want. You see this in the consumption data, people have more goods than ever before, although a lot of this is eaten by things that are difficult or impossible to automate like housing, which has both a static land component and labor component where the laborer's demand ever more "stuff" for their time, or healthcare which also has static monopolies in the form of drug patents and consumes a tremendous amount of labor. The people supplying that labor have indeed seen their wages and thus bids for the output of the factories increase a lot over the last few decades.
There are of course switching costs that we should take seriously. Learn to code was never a serious remedy to someone who spent 20-30 years doing rote labor and we need a way to help those people, I favor UBI but there are other options.
Knowledge work is disappearing too
Not really, although I take this possibility seriously if AI ends up as good as it seems likely to become, that's a much more total form of automation. We're definitely not there yet at this moment though.
aqouta
21d ago
posted a very long comment where, to paraphrase, he said that black people were an inferior stupid race who bring crime and dysfunction wherever we go and that in order to stop the west from being "overrun" with blacks, white racists would need to "block" us in a way the didn't account for "international law" and "human rights". I replied calling him a cracker bitch and was temp-banned by the mods.
Was the comment significantly edited? It's not particularly long. There's 3 paragraphs laying out the basic case that race, as fuzzy or distinct as it is, is distinct enough to be weaponized against white and asian people. Which seems to basically be true, if we want to do racial abolitionism and agree not to see race then we can't at the same time use it for a bunch of other purposes. And then 2 paragraphs of pretty hot culture war fodder.
when I see someone essentially laying out a justification for bringing back slavery
There's not really any way to interpret what he said as endorsing slavery. Slavery isn't just what happens when racism gets sufficiently supported and all he actually endorsed was anti-immigration, and yes a rather racist perspective.
how am I supposed to respond, as a black person?
you're supposed to make an argument addressing at least some of the points. You could have pushed that racism is indeed fuzzy and pointed out that it's not like all black people are responsible for the DEI edifice. The Average black guy has absolutely no hand in Havard's anti-asian racist policies. You could have tried to dispute the facts of his more spicy stuff. You could just collapse the thread and ignore him. Same as anyone else, when I run into some anti-white rhetoric in the wild, which used to happen fairly regularly, and still does occasionally now I either go point by point dispassionately or ignore it and move on. I know that black history is more painful but stooping beneath the level of the racist position isn't doing you any favors even if it was within the norms of the site. Do you think your outburst won you any support?
Am I expected to lay out some "well have you considered..."-ass intellectual rebuttal, Am I supposed to beg and plead for my own rights?
Not beg, argue, this is a place for arguing. @RandomRanger cannot take your rights from you only defeat you in an argument.
aqouta
23d ago
It's a completely pointless euphemism treadmill. The thing that is being asked for at base, to normalize idiocy, is simply not workable in anything like our society. There is some version of the idea that it's not wrong or the fault of a moron that they have their condition, and we shouldn't be cruel to morons. Morons should be allowed to live good lives. But in almost every sphere of life, especially where we discuss ideas, we need to be able to talk about whether an idea is stupid or not. Stupid ideas are the product of stupid people and whatever word you use to describe people who reliably produce stupid ideas is going to be an insult. No amount of language policing is going to change the fact that it's bad to be stupid, language cannot do that and it's a waste of everyone's time to try.
aqouta
26d ago
The real solution would use IQ tests and would be enforced meritocracy or something along those lines.
The problem with all meritocracy plans is that we don't have a rigorous definition of merit. We exist in a meritocracy if by merit we mean ability through whatever means to convince people to give you power. For various reasons people don't think this definition of merit is well aligned with their interests. I don't think a purely highest IQ people get the power would be particularly aligned with my interests either, maybe more so than the status quo, maybe not, but certainly smart people can get into all sorts of trouble.
Alright, this is a little off topic, but is this actually like seriously a widespread issue? I might be a bubble, but even among the nerdy guys I've hung around with hygiene is not an issue unless they're like the highest tier of still functioning autistic.
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