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Bill_McGrath comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (426)
Could you explain why you did that?
As regards the pentagons, I kinda assumed the pentagons weren't regular, equiangular pentagons - you could tile a floor in tiles that were shaped like a square with a triangle on top! Or the pentagons could be different sizes and shapes.
Because he doesn't want to create Azkaban.
Also, possibly because there's not a happy ending.
But if all mathematically possible universes exist anyway (or if they have a chance of existing), then the hypothetical "Azkaban from a universe without EY's logical inconsistencies" exists, no matter whether he writes about it or not. I don't see how writing about it could affect how real/not-real it is.
So by my understanding of how Eliezer explained it, he's not creating Azkaban, in the sense that writing about it causes it to exist, he's describing it. (This is not to say that he's not creating the fiction, but the way I see it create is being used in two different ways.) Unless I'm missing some mechanism by which imagining something causes it to exist, but that seems very unlikely.
I seem to recall that he terminally cares about all mathematically possible universes, not just his own, to the point that he won't bother having children because there's some other universe where they exist anyway.
I think that violates the crap out of Egan's Law (such an argument could potentially apply to lots of other things), but given that he seems to be otherwise relatively sane, I conclude that he just hasn't fully thought it through (“decompartimentalized” in LW lingo) (probability 5%), that's not his true rejection to the idea of having kids (30%), or I am missing something (65%).
That is not the reason or even a reason why I'm not having kids at the moment. And since I don't particularly want to discourage other people from having children, I decline to discuss my own reasons publicly (or in the vicinity of anyone else who wants kids).
(I must have misremembered. Sorry)
Congratulations for having "I am missing something" at a high probability!
OK, no prob!
(I do care about everything that exists. I am not particularly certain that all mathematically possible universes exist, or how much they exist if they do. I do expect that our own universe is spatially and in several other ways physically infinite or physically very big. I don't see this as a good argument against the fun of having children. I do see it as a good counterargument to creating children for the sole purpose of making sure that mindspace is fully explored, or because larger populations of the universe are good qua good. This has nothing to do with the reason I'm not having kids right now.)
I think I care about almost nothing that exists, and that seems like too big a disagreement. It's fair to assume that I'm the one being irrational, so can you explain to me why one should care about everything?
All righty; I run my utility function over everything that exists. On most of the existing things in the modern universe, it outputs 'don't care', like for dirt. However, so long as a person exists anywhere, in this universe or somewhere else, my utility function cares about them. I have no idea what it means for something to exist, or why some things exist more than others; but our universe is so suspiciously simple and regular relative to all imaginable universes that I'm pretty sure that universes with simple laws or uniform laws exist more than universes with complicated laws with lots of exceptions in them, which is why I don't expect to sprout wings and fly away. Supposing that all possible universes 'exist' with some weighting by simplicity or requirement of uniformity, does not make me feel less fundamentally confused about all this; and therefore I'm not sure that it is true, although it does seem very plausible.
The moral value of imaginary friends?
I notice that I am meta-confused...
Shouldn't we strongly expect this weighting, by Solomonoff induction?
Probability is not obviously amount of existence.
(Assuming you mean “all imaginable universes with self-aware observers in them”.)
Not completely sure about that, even Conway's Game of Life is Turing-complete after all. (But then, it only generates self-aware observers under very complicated starting conditions. We should sum the complexity of the rules and the complexity of the starting conditions, and if we trust Penrose and Hawking about this, the starting conditions of this universe were terrifically simple.)
What do you mean, you don't care about dirt? I care about dirt! Dirt is where we get most of our food, and humans need food to live. Maybe interstellar hydrogen would be a better example of something you're indifferent to? 10^17 kg of interstellar hydrogen disappearing would be an inconsequential flicker if we noticed it at all, whereas the loss of an equal mass of arable soil would be an extinction-level event.
I care about the future consequences of dirt, but not the dirt itself.
(For the love of Belldandy, you people...)
He means that he doesn't care about dirt for its own sake (e.g. like he cares about other sentient beings for their own sakes).
Yes, and I'm arguing that it has instrumental value anyway. A well-thought-out utility function should reflect that sort of thing.
Try tabooing exist: you might find out that you actually disagree on fewer things than you expect. (I strongly suspect that the only real differences between the four possibilities in this is labels -- the way once in a while people come up with new solutions to Einstein's field equations only to later find out they were just already-known solutions with an unusual coordinate system.)
I've not yet found a good way to do that. Do you have one?
"Be in this universe"(1) vs "be mathematically possible" should cover most cases, though other times it might not quite match either of those and be much harder to explain.
Defining 'existence' by using 'interaction' (or worse yet the possibility of interaction) seems to me to be trying to define something fundamental by using something non-fundamental.
As for "mathematical possibility", that's generally not what most people mean by existence -- unless Tegmark IV is proven or assumed to be true, I don't think we can therefore taboo it in this manner...
That's way too complicated (and as for tabooing 'exist', I'll believe it when I see it). Here's what I mean: I see a dog outside right now. One of the things in that dog is a cup or so of urine. I don't care about that urine at all. Not one tiny little bit. Heck, I don't even care about that dog, much less all the other dogs, and the urine that is in them. That's a lot of things! And I don't care about any of it. I assume Eliezer doesn't care about the dog urine in that dog either. It would be weird if he did. But it's in the 'everything' bucket, so...I probably misunderstood him?
So you're using exist in a sense according to which they have moral relevance iff they exist (or something roughly like that), which may be broader than ‘be in this universe’ but may be narrower than ‘be mathematically possible’. I think I get it now.
I was confused by this for a while, but couldn't express that in words until now.
First, I think existence is necessarily a binary sort of thing, not something that exists in degrees. If I exist 20%, I don't even know what that sentence should mean. Do I exist, but only sometimes? Do only parts of me exist at a time? Am I just very skinny? It doesn't really make sense. Just as a risk of a risk is still a type of risk, so a degree of existence is still a type of existence. There are no sorts of existence except either being real or being fake.
Secondly, even if my first part is wrong, I have no idea why having more existence would translate into having greater value. By way of analogy, if I was the size of a planet but only had a very small brain and motivational center, I don't think that would mean that I should receive more from utilitarians. It seems like a variation of the Bigger is Better or Might makes Right moral fallacy, rather than a well reasoned idea.
I can imagine a sort of world where every experience is more intense, somehow, and I think people in that sort of world might matter more. But I think intensity is really a measure of relative interactions, and if their world was identical to ours except for its amount of existence, we'd be just as motivated to do different things as they would. I don't think such a world would exist, or that we could tell whether or not we were in it from-the-inside, so it seems like a meaningless concept.
So the reasoning behind that sentence didn't really make sense to me. The amount of existence that you have, assuming that's even a thing, shouldn't determine your moral value.
I imagine Eliezer is being deliberately imprecise, in accordance with a quote I very much like: "Never speak more clearly than you think." [The internet seems to attribute this to one Jeremy Bernstein]
If you believe MWI there are many different worlds that all objectively exist. Does this mean morality is futile, since no matter what we choose, there's a world where we chose the opposite? Probably not: the different worlds seem to have different different "degrees of existence" in that we are more likely to find ourselves in some than in others. I'm not clear how this can be, but the fact that probability works suggests it pretty strongly. So we can still act morally by trying to maximize the "degree of existence" of good worlds.
This suggests that the idea of a "degree of existence" might not be completely incoherent.
I suppose you can just attribute it to imprecision, but "I am not particularly certain ...how much they exist" implies that he's talking about a subset of mathematically possible universes that do objectively exist, but yet exist less than other worlds. What you're talking about, conversely, seems to be that we should create as many good worlds as possible, stretched in order to cover Eliezer's terminology. Existence is binary, even though there are more of some things that exist than there are of other things. Using "amount of existence" instead of "number of worlds" is unnecessarily confusing, at the least.
Also, I don't see any problems with infinitarian ethics anyway because I subscribe to (broad) egoism. Things outside of my experience don't exist in any meaningful sense except as cognitive tools that I use to predict my future experiences. This allows me to distinguish between my own happiness and the happiness of Babykillers, which allows me to utilize a moral system much more in line with my own motivations. It also means that I don't care about alternate versions of the universe unless I think it's likely that I'll fall into one through some sort of interdimensional portal (I don't).
Although, I'll still err on the side of helping other universes if it does no damage to me because I think Superrationality can function well in those sort of situations and I'd like to receive benefits in return, but in other scenarios I don't really care at all.
That sounds sufficiently ominous that I'm not quite sure I want kids any more.
Shouldn't you be taking into account that I don't want to discourage other people from having kids?
That might just be because you eat babies.
But you're afraid that if you state your reason, it will discourage others from having kids.
All that means is that he is aware of the halo effect. People who have enjoyed or learned from his work will give his reasons undue weight as a consequence, even if they don't actually apply to them.
Unfortunately, that seems to be a malleable argument. Which way your stating that (you don't want to disclose your reasons for not wanting to have kids) will influence audiences seems like it will depend heavily on their priors for how generally-valid-to-any-other-person this reason might be, and for how self-motivated both the not-wanting-to-have-kids and the not-wanting-to-discourage-others could be.
Then again, I might be missing some key pieces of context. No offense intended, but I try to make it a point not to follow your actions and gobble up your words personally, even to the point of mind-imaging a computer-generated mental voice when reading the sequences. I've already been burned pretty hard by blindly reaching for a role-model I was too fond of.
Obviously his reason is that he wants to personally maximize his time and resources on FAI research. Because not everyone is a seed AI programmer, this reason does not apply to most everyone else. If Eliezer thinks FAI is going to probably take a few decades (which evidence seems to indicate he does), then it probably very well is in the best interest of those rationalists who aren't themselves FAI researchers to be having kids, so he wouldn't want to discourage that. (although I don't see how just explaining this would discourage anybody from having kids who you would otherwise want to.)
I feel that I should. It's a politically inconvenient stance to take, since all human cultures are based on reproducing themselves; antinatal cultures literally die out.
But from a human perspective, this world is deeply flawed. To create a life is to gamble with the outcome of that life. And it seems to be a gratuitous gamble.
I was sure I had heard seen you talk about them in public (On BHTV, I believe) some thing like (possible misquote) "Lbh fubhyqa'g envfr puvyqera hayrff lbh pna ohvyq bar sebz fpengpu," which sounded kinda wierd, because it applies to literally every human on earth, and that didn't seem to be where you were going.
He has said something like that, but always with the caveat that there be an exception for pre-singularity civilizations.
The way I recall it, there was no such caveat in that particular instance. I am not attempting to take him outside of context and I do think I would have remembered. He may have used this every other time he's said it. It may have been cut for time. And I don't mean to suggest my memory is anything like perfect.
But: I strongly suspect that's still on the internet, on BHTV or somewhere else.
Why is that in ROT13? Are you trying to not spoil an underspecified episode of BHTV?
It's not something Eliezer wanted said publicly. I wasn't sure what to do, and for some reason I didn't want to PM or email, so I picked a shitty, irrational half measure. I do that sometimes, instead of just doing the rational thing and PMing/ emailing him/ keeping my mouth shut if it really wasn't worth the effort to think about another 10 seconds. I do that sometimes, and I usually know about when I do it, like this time, but can't always keep myself from doing it.