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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (426)
(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.
Instrumental values are just subgoals that appear when you form plans to achieve your terminal values. They aren't supposed to be reflected in your utility function. That is a type error plain and simple.
For agents with bounded computational resources, I'm not sure that's the case. I don't terminally value money at all, but I pretend I do as a computational approximation because it'd be too expensive for me to run an expected utility calculation over all things I could possibly buy whenever I'm consider gaining or losing money in exchange for something else.
I thought that was what I just said...
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...
I'm not claiming they're ultimate definitions --after all any definition must be grounded in something else-- but at least they disambiguate which meaning is meant, the way “acoustic wave” and “auditory sensation” disambiguate “sound” in the tree-in-a-forest problem. For a real-world example of such a confusion, see this, where people were talking at cross-purposes because by “no explanation exists for X” one meant ‘no explanation for X exists written down anywhere’ and another meant ‘no explanation for X exists in the space of all possible strings’.
Sentences such as “there exist infinitely many prime numbers” don't sound that unusual to me.
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.