[Mithaldu]

> That's at least four people who you think are just outright lying.

I'm saying that there is a chance of that being the case, but that without any kind of third party confirmation we cannot know either way. Also see homeopathy.

> Eliezer would presumably have tried to cheat against them, too.

Not necessarily. Losing occasionally is a good strategy when running a con.

[philh]

You've gone from there being only a "remote chance" that the rules were followed, and "I don't trust anyone involved" - to there being "a chance" that they were broken.

Under common interpretations of those phrases, that's a massive swing in your confidence levels.

[Mithaldu]

Sorry for being unclear. My personal position is agnostic. I do not know if they're being earnest. At the same time i can imagine ways of this going down that would make it worthwhile for all parties involved to lie. This means my expected result is indeed "they lied", but i have no strong conviction in this.

I also misspoke in my earlier comment, i meant "remote chance of knowing that any rules were followed". I didn't mean to imply any confidence on the size of the chance, since we actually don't know enough to make such a judgement call.

My mistake, sorry.

[FeepingCreature]

If you'd go to that level of collusion, you could just fake logs. At the point where both sides are in on it, there's basically nothing that they could say that would be convincing.

[Mithaldu]

That is why i mentioned a third party observer. As for the logs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9921399

[FeepingCreature]

I think some of the latter, non-Eliezer games used a third-party observer. It's definitely a good idea, but I don't think Eliezer wants to repeat his games. Not a good state of mind, as he said, and I'm willing to believe it due to corroborating experience with other players.