whpearson comments on Assuming Nails - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Psychohistorian 05 July 2010 10:26PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (29)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 07 July 2010 10:18:55PM 1 point [-]

For reference, I think a lot of the people at LW love ethereal etherealness so much that the community would marry it if we could. That would be my first guess as to why your article's substantive point is not a wild success.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "ethereal etherealness"? What Eliezer is talking about in that post looks to me like what most philosophers would call abstract Platonic entities. And I get the sense (though I may be projecting) that most people here are pretty uncomfortable with those. LWers seem to think it worthwhile to eliminate any reference to anything other than concrete physical referents.

Comment author: whpearson 11 July 2010 11:43:47PM *  2 points [-]

I find the discussions of Decision Theories a little ethereal sometimes. There is a base assumption that Eliezer has made that the manner of making the decision doesn't matter. So questions of energy efficiency or computational resources used when making a decision don't come into the discussion. I personally cannot justify that assumption looking at the evolutionary history of brains, i.e. stuff that has worked in the real world. It matters how big the brain is, the smaller the better if you can get away with it. The simpler the better, if you can get away with it, as well.

Quote from a Newcomb's Problem article

We can choose whatever reasoning algorithm we like, and will be rewarded or punished only according to that algorithm's choices, with no other dependency - Omega just cares where we go, not how we got there.

It is precisely the notion that Nature does not care about our algorithm, which frees us up to pursue the winning Way - without attachment to any particular ritual of cognition, apart from our belief that it wins. Every rule is up for grabs, except the rule of winning.