Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 May 2013 05:07:42PM 3 points [-]

Relativity restricted the maximum speed of travel, thus revealing that countless future generations will not be able to reach the stars

That's perfectly credible since it implies a lack of leverage.

Archimedes's discovery of the buoyancy laws enabled future naval battles and ocean faring, impacting billions so far

10^10 is not a significant factor compared to the sensory experience of seeing something float in a bathtub.

The only thing that matters in physics is the old mundane "fits current data, makes valid predictions".

To build an AI one must be a tad more formal than this, and once you start trying to be formal, you will soon find that you need a prior.

Comment author: shminux 06 May 2013 07:35:02PM 1 point [-]

That's perfectly credible since it implies a lack of leverage.

Oh, I assumed that negative leverage is still leverage. Given that it might amount to an equivalent of killing a googolplex of people, assuming you equate never being born with killing.

To build an AI one must be a tad more formal than this, and once you start trying to be formal, you will soon find that you need a prior.

I see. I cannot comment on anything AI-related with any confidence. I thought we were talking about evaluating the likelihood of a certain model in physics to be accurate. In that latter case anthropic considerations seem irrelevant.