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ChristianKl comments on Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments - Less Wrong
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Comments (195)
Okay, English isn't my first language.
You could easily have made the same typo even if it were; we're talking about the mere transposition of two adjacent letters.
(Another example: "casual" vs. "causal", which often trips me up in reading.)
In Italian that's even worse, since causale does mean ‘causal’ but casuale means ‘random’.
Cool, that means you would get the joke about how "women are interested in causal sex"!
Is there acausal sex? (Would that be, like, having (phone/cyber)sex with someone in a different Tegmark universe via some form of communication built on UDT acausal trade?)
Acausal sexual reproduction is quite plausible, in a sense. Suppose you were a single woman living in a society with access to sophisticated genetic engineering, and you wanted to give birth to a child that was biologically yours and not do any unnatural optimizing. You could envision your ideal mate in detail, reverse-engineer the genetics of this man, and then create a sperm population that the man could have produced had he existed. I can easily imagine a genetic engineer offering this service: you walk into the office, describe the man's physical attributes, personality, and even life history, and the engineer does the rest as much as is possible (in this society, we know that a plurality of men who played shortstop in Little League have a certain allele, etc.) The child could grow up and meaningfully learn things about the counterfactual father--if you learned that the father was prone to depression, that would mean that you should watch out for that as well.
If the mother really wants to, she can take things further and specify that the man should be the kind of person who would have, had he existed, gone through the analogous procedure (with a surrogate or artificial womb), and that the counterfactual woman he would have specified would have been her. In this case, we can say that the man and the woman have acausally reproduced.
Hmm. So the man has managed to "acausally reproduce", fulfill his utility function, in spite of not existing. You could go further and posit an imaginary couple who would have chosen each other for the procedure - so they succeed in "acausally reproducing", even though neither of them exists. Then when someone tries to write a story about the imaginary couple, the child becomes observable to the writer and starts doing some reproducing of her own :-)
My interpretation of acausal sexual reproduction would be something more like All You Zombies.
What makes this acausal? That is, when are future inputs modifying present results? Or are you using a different definition of acausal?
I meant it in the sense of ata's parent comment, although there is a backwards arrow in there: the phenotype is determining the genotype rather than vice versa.
You simply must read http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Sinhababu-Possible-Girls.pdf - possibly the most romantic paper I've ever read.
That paper is absolutely brilliant! I kept laughing every time a new clearly logically reasoned yet humorous detail was explored.
If you're basing the sex on acausal trade then you should perhaps refer to it as acausal prostitution. Or possibly acausal marriage.
Acausal conception.
(Acausal contraception.)
Simulate agent.
Check if it tries to do the same for you.
If it does, build it a body and have sex.
In a galaxy far far away, an agent simulates you, sees you try to do the same for them.
It clones you and has sex.
Does this fit the bill?