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johnlawrenceaspden comments on Skill: The Map is Not the Territory - Less Wrong
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I've been enjoying the new set of Sequences. I wasn't around when the earlier Sequences were being written; It's like the difference between reading a series of books all in one go, versus being part of the culture, reading them one at a time, and engaging in discussion in between. So thanks to Eliezer for posting them!
I really liked how there was an ending koan in the last post. It prompted discussion. I tried to think of a good prompt to post for this one, but couldn't. Anyone have some good ideas?
Also, Skill #2 made me think of this optical illusion
I was planning to paint my boat today. There's already a coat of paint on it, drying. If I overpaint today, that's optimal. If I wait till tomorrow, then I'll have to sand it down first.
It looks like it might rain, but the forecast is good. I don't know what effect rain will have on newly applied paint, or indeed on the current partly dried surface.
Do I spend the afternoon painting the boat or carry on sitting in a coffee shop reading Less Wrong?
LessWrong will still be there tomorrow. The optimal opportunity to paint the boat won't be.
Is it possible to protect the boat from rain in some manner, such as leaving it under a roof?
Impractical, as it happens. I eventually solved the problem by going home, changing into painting clothes, cleaning brushes, arranging tools and stirring paint. At that point it started raining heavily. So I undid all that in the rain, changed back into dry clothes, went back to the coffee shop and am now reading Less Wrong again. I think I just failed rationality for ever.
I don't think it's possible to fail rationality "for ever", as long as you are in a state where you can make observations, record memories, formulate goals, plan and take actions. Though you do seem to have been a bit unfortunate in the timing of the precipitation.
Merely humanly impossible. If you are a more pure agent just assign probability "1" to enough things and you'll be set.
Hmmm. It seems that I should add "as long as you are able to reassign all priors of 1 to priors of 0.999999999, and all priors of 0 to priors of 0.000000001" to my list of exceptions. (It won't fix the agent immediately, but it will place the agent in a situation of being able to fix itself, given sufficient observations and updates).
That's not the only problem. An agent that assigns equal probability to all possible experiences will never update.
Oh, that's sneaky.
Perhaps a perfect agent should occasionally - very occasionally - perturb a random selection of its own priors by some very small factor (10^-10 or smaller) in order to avoid such a potential mathematical dead end?
Nice try, but random perturbations won't help here.
You may already know this, but the phrase "fail x forever" is a thing.