i am reginald reagan aka RAGIN' RAYGUNS

aka Dr. Molecules aka Mr. Statistical-Probabilities but you can call me Reggie (though it's a pseudonym)

[raginrayguns]

Payorian cooperation is easy with Kripke frames — LessWrong

The context is MIRI's twist on Axelrod's Prisoner's Dilemma tournament. Axelrod's competitors were programs, facing each other in an iterate

Finally wrote this up after a conversation with @youzicha, who also helped throughout the whole writing process this past week.

In 2023 I began learning modal logic from a book recommended by @eka-mark, Graham Priest's "An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic", which also happens to be a very good introduction to classical logic. I was hoping to formalize the thoughts about decision theory I had been posting on Tumblr. I really liked the tableau method used in the book, which I now understand to be a formal system that sticks closely to Kripke semantics. In contrast to the natural deduction systems they use for modal logic on LessWrong, I was learning an algorithm, a decision procedure.

I thought MIRI's prisoner's dilemma tournament would be a good tutorial level to try out the technique. Instead, it felt more like a final boss, which was humbling.

But I recently stumbled across an Andrew Critch post that suggests a different modal agent for the tournament. When I tried the tableau technique I had practiced, it all just worked, and easily.

This post is the tutorial level I had hoped for, applying Kripke semantics to "modal combat". It's technical, but I think it's doable if you know what provability logic is and you've read the MIRI prisoner's dilemma paper.

The exercise has restored my confidence that an amateur can productively think about these topics. So I'm ready to get cocky again, and I hope I'll have more to say soon.

[icecream-eaterrr]

I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.

[raginrayguns]

In Savage's decision theory, acts are functions that map states of the world to consequences. Since he also defines "the world" as "the object of interest", for example an egg, I'd rather say "states of the system".

Consider a physical example. A chamber which may or may not have an electric field; maybe we can switch it on or off. So our "states" are on or off. Our acts: we can shoot a positive particle through it, or a negative particle. So one act maps "off" to "goes straight", and "on" to "curves up". The other act maps "off" to "goes straight", and "on" to "curves down".

These "acts" are just the time evolution of the physical system. The "state" of course is not really a full description sufficient for the time evolution. In this case, though I think this is inessential, the "state" specifies the laws, and the initial conditions depend on the act. One act is time evolution from the initial condition of a positive particle going through the chamber, and the other act is time evolution from a different initial condition where the particle is negative.

The reason this kind of physical interpretation of Savage's decision theory appeals to me is because it seems to describe my experience with "virtual screening", where I did quantum chemistry simulations to decide which organic molecule to synthesize. Like, let's say we're considering two molecules, anthracene and alizarin, and we want one that absorbs blue light, making it a red dye. We're at a dye company in the 19th century but with computers or something, I don't know. Although this doesn't really correspond to how I actually do the simulations, we could think of this as before, with acts corresponding to time evolution under different initial conditions, but with the same Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian will be an oscillating electric field with the frequency of blue light, and the consequences are that the energy of the system goes up (absorption) or not. We don't have multiple states here, because there's no uncertainty in this decision problem.

I also think this kind of physical interpretation is philosophically valuable because it tells you something about the scope of the decision theory, where it will and will not work. It only really makes sense with a system that's isolated enough that (given a state) it responds predictably to our action. But it's not a theory for a completely isolated system, since the initial conditions get set outside the scope of the explicit model. I think this is not obvious, or at least wasn't to Savage, and makes it less surprising when you can't "internalize" the agent without running into issues like Newcomb's problem.

[alexanderwales]

I was reading through the U.S. Copyright Office's "What Does Copyright Protect?" page, mostly to make sure that I wasn't being wrong on the internet, but I absolutely love that this is part of their FAQ:

How do I protect my sighting of Elvis? Copyright law does not protect sightings. [,,,]

There are only 12 questions on the FAQ, and this is one of them.

[wildgifthorses]

Can I get a star named after me and claim copyright to it?

No. There is a lot of misunderstanding about this. [,,,]

[raginrayguns]

One fun thing I remember from Nozick's original paper on Newcomb's problem is undermining the dominance argument by "swapping" the elements of the 2x2 decision table.

Like, suppose we have states s₁ and s₂, and actions a₁ and a₂:

Suppose consequence B is preferred to A, and Y is preferred to X, so a₂ dominates.

We could instead write the table in terms of these states:

So to Nozick, this "vertical relationship" in the original table, B being under A and Y under X, is arbitrary.

But that's because he thinks of a₁ and a₂ as propositions, as descriptions of the system. To get into the classical decision theory mindset, you have to have a pretty limited system in mind, which you always do in the context of scientific modeling.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

one of the funniest conversations I ever had with my ex was when they were still getting used to Celsius and asked me "what's 20 degrees?" and instead of converting it, I said "it's the highest your dad will ever let you set the thermostat and when you say you're cold he tells you to put on another sweater, we're not made of money" and they went "oh, 68"

the fact that this reference was that fucking precise was something they went on to tell people about for years.

[raginrayguns]

one thing i see a lot that doesn't land with me the way it used to, is when i see someone trying to get people whipped up about speculative research direction or even about a completely hypothetical field of science

the more i do research the more worthless such things seem

on the other hand, even a little bit of substance can be very exciting. Like, one model or relationship. I guess this is Kuhnian; "paradigm" means example, his idea was that ordinary scientific research in a field is a sort of imitation of one foundational success

[raginrayguns]

looked a bit at dan dennett breaking the spell, looks like another case of this?

[raginrayguns]

@urpriest Replied to your post “Sam Harris writing If the Palestinians simply...”:

For the Dan Dennet point, I think he was a lot more interested in anthropology-flavored comparative religions than neuroscience-flavored stuff. Certainly when he debated theists it was the former that he emphasized, stuff like "look how this modern-day religion started, why do you think yours started differently?" rather than Sam Harris's stuff.

Yeah, I looked in Breaking the Spell, and he says:

Until we develop better general theories of cognitive architecture for the representation of content in the brain, using neuro-imaging to study religious beliefs is almost as hapless as using a voltmeter to study a chess-playing computer.

[yorickless]

woke robin hanson writing "the age of them"

[sunbeetle]

i hate it when clones die

[sunbeetle]

if u have a mirror self just protect them ok

[sunbeetle]

and if u Are the mirror self. for the love of god stay safe

[importantandunavoidable]

people who are horny about centaurs are like a full order of magnitude more fucked up than people who are horny about furries i think

[raginrayguns]

I actually like the prisoner's dilemma with your replica better than Newcomb's problem. David Lewis pointed out it's really Newcomb's problem and even came up with a telling of PD involving two boxes: your opponent is given a million unless you "defect" by taking your box with a thousand. But I like it better because Newcomb's problem doesn't specify a mechanism, just that Omega has been accurate in the past. I guess the mechanism I have in mind is that Omega ran a simulation of you, in which case there is a replica of you involved. So Lewis's prisoner's dilemma with your replica makes that explicit. Really, the equivalent of Newcomb's problem, including its vagueness, would tell the story in a way to just specify past frequencies.

Also, I like that in the prisoner's dilemma we're already used to the dominance argument, which helps I think in the context of Nozick's paper which thinks through dominance.

[raginrayguns]

I'm a one-boxer. It seems obvious: in Newcomb's problem, I'm a millionaire as a one-boxer, but would get much less as a two-boxer.

But what I want to communicate is something like... a perspective from which two-boxing seems obvious.

Nozick's "Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice" says

According to expected value, you should one-box

According to dominance, you should two-box

Well, I want a high expected value of money, so I should one-box, is that all there is to it?

The issue is that this seems like nonsense. The dominant choice necessarily has higher expected value. At least, that's so in what I'll call "classical decision theory", for which my reference is Savage.

So the perspective I need to communicate is the one where classical decision theory seems perfectly adequate. Not just that, but obvious, even trivial.

And I think this is basically the same perspective where you manage not to worry about quantum interpretations your whole life. Which is not some kind of intellectual uncuriosity, but just that you think of quantum mechanics as something you do with explicit models.

Asking questions like, will anthracene have color? It's basically three fused benzene rings. You have a description that specifies the position of every atom, and then you can simulate it in an oscillating electric field, and ask if it absorbs energy. Anthracene won't throughout frequencies corresponding to the whole visible spectrum, but alizarin will (just anthracene with a few substitutions), which is why it's a red dye.

Those are calculations "in the gas phrase", or rather, simulations of a molecule in empty space. If we want to know about the tube of alizarin in our lab, that's in some organic solvent–usually we just modify the dielectric constant in the simulation, rather than explicitly including solvent molecules. That's how far we are from including the observer, or even the measuring device–we're not even including the solvent.

Classical decision theory makes physical sense to me in the same way. To Savage, acts are functions from states to consequences. He says "states of the world", but defines the world as "the object of interest", so it's really states of the system. Like, if the tube has anthracene, it won't absorb blue light, but if it has alizarin, it will. So I see Savage's "act" function as just the dynamics of the system.

There's no conflict between free will and determinism in classical decision theory. Different initial states evolve to different final states. How does it get in one of those initial states and not the other? Well, we don't include the guy putting the molecule into the tube into our simulation software, and in Savage's decision theory, we don't worry about it any more than we do in physics.

That turns out to make all the difference in quantum interpretations, and in Newcomb's problem, but it's easy to overlook it, as I think Savage does. Because we're not explicitly avoiding inclusion of the observer/decider, we're just only explicitly including whatever we can actually describe precisely enough to calculate with.

So we get to Newcomb's problem. Two possible states of the system: money in both boxes or money in one. So you can make a dominance argument. Or you can make an expected value argument, and you'll conclude that regardless of the probability of the two states, two-boxing has higher expected value. (Which is actually the correct derivation that two-boxing is better vs any random opponent, btw)

[raginrayguns]

jesus, paul and augustine were all weird about sex.

jesus with the divorce thing.

paul... in general, though what he says is not that different from epicurus i guess, like why complicate your life.

augustine i haven't read but he sounds pretty out there

[raginrayguns]

Sam Harris writing

If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

statements like this are why it's interesting to have the West Bank as a control group. What's he say about the West Bank?

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

But surely it's relevant to what if the Palestinians laid down their arms? I think they'd be denied their freedom of movement and their livelihood by the IDF, and settlers would confiscate and destroy their property and randomly murder them. Since that's what happened in the West Bank, and not in Gaza, where Hamas expelled the settlers and the IDF. This is not to deny that "the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast", only Harris's statement that Palestinians unilaterally disarming would solve everything.

Also, Sam Harris's fMRI papers are scientological toilet paper. Is that the kind of thing Dan Dennett meant by studying religion as a natural phenomenon?

[raginrayguns]

*looking at Sam Harris's brain on the fMRI as he blogs* ah yes, this region lighting up, in the business we call this the "bullshit lobe" *realizes I'm actually looking at the display from the dead salmon*

[raginrayguns]

Sam Harris writing

If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

statements like this are why it's interesting to have the West Bank as a control group. What's he say about the West Bank?

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

But surely it's relevant to what if the Palestinians laid down their arms? I think they'd be denied their freedom of movement and their livelihood by the IDF, and settlers would confiscate and destroy their property and randomly murder them. Since that's what happened in the West Bank, and not in Gaza, where Hamas expelled the settlers and the IDF. This is not to deny that "the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast", only Harris's statement that Palestinians unilaterally disarming would solve everything.

Also, Sam Harris's fMRI papers are scientological toilet paper. Is that the kind of thing Dan Dennett meant by studying religion as a natural phenomenon?

[pierppasolini]

The Simpsons - 15.18 - Catch 'em if You Can