potato comments on Crisis of Faith - Less Wrong
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I haven't read anything like this in my admittedly limited readings on Solomonoff induction. Disclaimer: I am only a mere mathematician in a different field, and have only read a few papers surrounding Solomonoff.
The claims I've seen revolve around "assembly language" (for some value of assembly language) being sufficiently simple that any biases inherent in the language are small (some people claim constant multiple on the basis that this is what happens when you introduce a symbol 'short-circuiting' a computation). I think a more correct version of Anti-reductionist's argument should run, "we currently do not know how the choice of language affects SI; it is conceivable that small changes in the base language imply fantastically different priors."
I don't know the answer to that, and I'd be very glad to know if someone has proved it. However, I think it's rather unlikely that someone has proved it, because 1) I expect it will be disproven (on the basis that model-theoretic properties tend to be fragile), and 2) given the current difficulties in explicitly calculating SI, finding an explicit, non-trivial counter-example would probably be difficult.
Note that
is not such a counter-example, because we do not know if "sufficiently assembly-like" languages can be chosen which exhibit such a bias. I don't think the above thought-experiment is worth pursuing, because I don't think we even know a formal (on the level of assembly-like languages) description of either CI or MWI.
Not Solomonoff, minimum description length, I'm coming from an information theory background, I don't know very much about Solomonoff induction.
OP is talking about Solomonoff priors, no? Is there a way to infer on minimum description length?
What is OP?
EY
I meant Anti-reductionist, the person potato originally replied to... I suppose grandparent would have been more accurate.
He was talking about both.
So how do you predict with minimum description length?
With respect to the validity of reductionism, out of MML and SI, one theoretically predicts and the other does not. Obviously.