Mike_Linksvayer comments on Archimedes's Chronophone - Less Wrong
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– (From the follow up article)
I think that the rules for the chronophone are either inconsistent, or incorrectly applied. There is not a fine enough distinction between our “cognitive policies”, and our “meta-cognitive policies”.
That is, if you were to explain Python into the chronophone, you are executing two different cognitive policies at two different levels of reduction:
Now, presumably, if Archimedes says something into the chronophone to himself, it comes out unchanged. Therefore, the rules predict that what will come out the chronophone will be (depending on which level of meta-cognitive-policy you choose):
You see the problem here. If level 2 is the “correct” way of looking at it, (which seems more fundamental to me), then whatever you say, it has a root goal of getting Archimedes to understand something obvious in your culture. Even if you say something unobvious.
(I suppose you could say something “doubly-unobvious” to get it to say something merely unobvious in both his culture and ours, but it's unobvious to me what that would look like. What useful ideas are unobvious both to our culture and Archimedes, and more, are the same level of unobviousness, that you could iterate the unobviousness and get useful output? If that's too unclear, I can try to clarify it.)