If the hypotheses allowed for some margin of error when checking for the shortest programs (and they should when applied to across a map-territory divide), it might very well stop at such a crackpot program that assumes all the mismatch may just be errors in the sense data.
It looks to me like you're reading your own interpretation into what he wrote, because the sentence he wrote before "You end up with" was
they are not uniquely determined and your c can be kilobits long, meaning, one hypothesis can be given prior >2^1000 larger than another, or vice versa, depending to choice of the language.
which is clearly talking about another issue. I can give my views on both if you're interested.
On the issue private_messaging raises, I think it's a serious philosophical problem, but not necessarily a practical one (as he claims), assuming Solomonoff Induction could be made practical in the first place, because the hypothetical AI could quickly update away even a factor of 2^1000 when it turns on its senses, before it has a chance to make any important wrong decisions. private_messaging seems to have strong intuitions that it will be a practical problem, but he tends to be overconfident in many areas so I don't trust that too much.
On the issue you raised, a hypothesis of "simple model + random errors" must still match the past history perfectly to not be discarded, and the exact errors would have to be part of the hypothesis (i.e., program) and therefore count towards its length.
My perspective is this: As long as he provides posts like those over a period of just a few weeks, I do not care about his destructive attitude, or his interspersed troll comments. That which can be killed by truth should be, this aphorism still holds true for me when substituting "truth" for "meaningful argument". Those deserve answers, not ignoring, regardless of their source.
I defended private_messaging/Dmytry before for similar reasons, but the problem is that it's often not fun to argue with him. I do engage with him sometimes if I think I can draw out some additional insights or get him to clarify something, but now I tend not to respond just to correct something that I think is wrong.
On the issue private_messaging raises, I think it's a serious philosophical problem, but not necessarily a practical one (as he claims), assuming Solomonoff Induction could be made practical in the first place, because the hypothetical AI could quickly update away even a factor of 2^1000 when it turns on its senses, before it has a chance to make any important wrong decisions. private_messaging seems to have strong intuitions that it will be a practical problem, but he tends to be overconfident in many areas so I don't trust that too much.
Are you pictur...
My friend, hearing me recount tales of LessWrong, recently asked me if I thought it was simply a coincidence that so many LessWrong rationality nerds cared so much about creating Friendly AI. "If Eliezer had simply been obsessed by saving the world from asteroids, would they all be focused on that?"
Obviously one possibility (the inside view) is simply that rationality compels you to focus on FAI. But if we take the outside view for a second, it does seem like FAI has a special attraction for armchair rationalists: it's the rare heroic act that can be accomplished without ever confronting reality.
After all, if you want to save the planet from an asteroid, you have to do a lot of work! You have to build stuff and test it and just generally solve a lot of gritty engineering problems. But if you want to save the planet from AI, you can conveniently do the whole thing without getting out of bed.
Indeed, as the Tool AI debate as shown, SIAI types have withdrawn from reality even further. There are a lot of AI researchers who spend a lot of time building models, analyzing data, and generally solving a lot of gritty engineering problems all day. But the SIAI view conveniently says this is all very dangerous and that one shouldn't even begin to try implementing anything like an AI until one has perfectly solved all of the theoretical problems first.
Obviously this isn't any sort of proof that working on FAI is irrational, but it does seem awfully suspicious that people who really like to spend their time thinking about ideas have managed to persuade themselves that they can save the entire species from certain doom just by thinking about ideas.