80% is hardly "confident"... but fair enough.

Self-experimentation seems like a really bad way to test things about mental exhaustion. It would be way too easy to placebo myself into working for a longer amount of time without a break, when testing the condition that would support my theory. Might wait until I can find a test subject.

Well, I agree with you that I should buy cryonics at very high prices and I plan on doing so. For the last few years I've spent the majority of my time in places where being signed up for cryonics wouldn't make a difference (9 months out of the year on a submarine, and now overseas in a place where there aren't any cryonics companies set up).

You should probably still upvote because the < 1/4 of the time I've spent in situations where it would matter still more than justify it. I should also never eat an icecream snickers again. I'll be the first to admit I don't behave perfectly rationally. :)

The person may not believe that MWI is true; the beliefs were stated as being conditional.

Nevertheless, your argument does apply to me, since I have similar beliefs (or at least worries), and I also for the most part buy your arguments on MWI. I do plan to sign up for cryonics within the next year or so, but not at any price. This is because I don"t expect to die soon enough for my short-term motivational system to be affected.

Notice that I said "should move their credence", not "would". It is not a prediction about the reaction of (rational or irrational) real-life theists, but an assessment of the objective merits of the argument.

Well, I'm sort of hypothesizing that simplicity is not just elegance, but involves a trade-off between elegance and parsimony (vaguely similar to how algorithmic 'efficiency' involves a trade-off between time and space). What heuristic are you referring to which is bad news for this hypothesis? Also, what's QMI? I'm actually very much ignorant when it comes to quantum mechanics.

This seems like a clear example of "You shouldn't adjust the probability that high just because you're trying to avoid overconfidence; that's privileging a complicated possibility."

Has there been a post on this subject yet? Handling overconfidence in that sort of situation is complicated.

It may or may not be an example, but it's certainly not a clear one to me. Please explain? The entire sentence seems nonsensical, I know that the individual words mean but not how to apply them to the situation. Is this just some psychological effect because it targets a statement I personally made? It certainly doesn't feel like it but...

Edit: Figured out what I misunderstood. I modelled as .02 positive confidence not .98 negative confidence.

There are a bunch of tricks that lets you immunize yourself to classes of basilisks, without having access to the specific basilisk- sort of like vaccination, you deliberately infect yourself with a non-lethal variant first.

Eliezer has demonstrated all the skills needed to construct basilisks, is very smart, and have shown to recognize the danger of basilisks. I don't think that's a very common combination, but conditional on eliezer having basilisk weapons most others fitting that description equally well probably do as well.

I was about to condescendingly explain that there's simply no reason to posit such a thing, when it started making far too much sense for my liking. That said, untraceable? How?

The IARPA expert aggregation exercises look plausible, and have supposedly done all right predicting geopolitical events. I would not be shocked if the first to use those methods on financial markets got a bit of alpha.

Unfortunately you need access to a comparably-sized bunch of estimates in order to beat the market. You can't quite back it out of a prediction market's transaction history. And the amount of money to be made is small in any event because there's just not enough participation in the markets.

The conventional reply is that noise traders improve markets by making rational prediction more profitable. This is almost certainly true for short-term noise, and my guess is that it's false for long-term noise, i.e., if prices revert in a day, noise traders improve a market, if prices take ten years to revert, the rational money seeks shorter-term gains. Prediction markets may be expected to do better because they have a definite, known date on which the dumb money loses - you can stay solvent longer than the market stays irrational.

1. The narrower blob, the wider its Fourier transform. To recognise a perfectly localised blob in the momentum space one would need to measure at every place over the whole Universe.
2. Not every structure is recognisable as such by human eye.

Still, what you see in one basis is not independent on what you see in another one, and I expect elegant mapping between the bases. There is difference between

• "there exist a basis in the Hilbert space in which some vaguely interesting phenomena could be observed, if we were able to perceive the associated operator the same way as we perceive position"

and

• "there exist simple functions of observables such as momentum, particle number or field intensities defining observables which, if we could perceive them directly, would show us a world with life and civilisations and evolution"

My 15% belief is closer to the second version.

I'm pretty sure that the current theories aren't weird enough, but less sure that current theories need to be modified to include various things that people experience. However, it does seem to me that materialists are very quick to conclude that mental phenomena have straightforward physical explanations.

What I meant was that there may be more to such things as auras, ghosts, precognition, free will, etc. than current skepticism allows for, while still not having anything in the universe other than matter/energy.

As I point out in the other comment, the real year of maximum alignment was 1998. So perhaps SubGenius is the true faith, the few true SubGenii were raptured that year, and 2012 is just when the cosmic wrecking crew come in to clean up.

It's a coincidence of note in itself that the midpoint of the current "galactic solstice" should have occurred so extremely close to a millennial year in the dominant planetary calendar; also that the third Christian millennium begins so close in time to the start of a new Mayan cycle. It would be easier to understand all this if both Mayan and European cultures had a visible history of caring about "galactic alignment", and there was a visible history of adjusting the calendar accordingly. We know the Mayans were eager astrologers, and the beginning of the "Christian era" was probably associated with the transition between the zodiacal Age of Aries and Age of Pisces (12 signs in the zodiac, divide up the 26000-year precession into 12 periods and you get approximately 2000-year epochs). So we can point to ways in which ancient astronomy has shaped the calendar, but not enough to definitely explain Christian 2000 and Mayan 2012 as attempts to synchronize the calendar with galactic 1998.

It's already a stretch to posit a secret history of influential esoteric astrology shaping the western calendar. But if we then try to explain the coincidence of this period in time with general technological and scientific acceleration, basically you either have to say that it's just a coincidence, or that it's not a coincidence and reality is connected in ways far beyond what we currently understand. The simplest version of that hypothesis, for this community, is "we're living in the Matrix".

It's easy to invent scenarios. But the high probability estimate really derives from two things.

First, the special date from the Mayan calendar is astronomically determined, to a degree that hasn't been recognized by mainstream scholarship about Mayan culture. The precession of the equinoxes takes 26000 years. Every 6000 years or so, you have a period in which a solstice sun or an equinox sun lines up close to the galactic center, as seen from Earth. We are in such a period right now; I think the point of closest approach was in 1998. Then, if you mark time by transits of Venus (Venus was important in Mayan culture, being identified with their version of the Aztecs' Quetzalcoatl), that picks out the years 2004 and 2012. It's the December solstice which is the "galactic solstice" at this time, and 21 December 2012 will be the first December solstice after the last transit of Venus during the current period of alignment.

OK, so one might suppose that a medieval human civilization with highly developed naked-eye astronomy might see all that coming and attach a quasi-astrological significance to it. What's always bugged me is that this period in time, whose like comes around only every 6000 years, is historically so close to the dramatic technological developments of the present day.

Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which, when humans speak to the ultra-advanced aliens, they discover that the aliens also struggle with impossible messages from beyond, because there are glyphs and messages encoded in the digits of pi. If you were setting up a universe in such a way that you wanted creatures to go through a singularity, and yet know that the universe they had now mastered was just a second-tier reality, one way to do it would certainly be to have that singularity occur simultaneously with some rare, predetermined astronomical configuration.

Nothing as dramatic as a singularity is happening yet in 2012, but it's not every day that a human probe first reaches interstellar space, the black hole at the center of the galaxy visibly lights up, and we begin to measure the properties of the fundamental field that produces mass, all of this happening within a year of an ancient, astronomically timed prophecy of world-change. It sounds like an unrealistic science-fiction plot. So perhaps one should give consideration to models which treat this as more than a coincidence.

Also, even if the transhuman powers are choosing based on current end-of-the-world predictions, there's no reason why they would choose 2012 rather than any of the many past predictions.

I don't have a stable opinion on that topic. But the question here is whether, given that hypothesis, it's rational to attach significance to 2012-ism.

1. The art form must be linear and intend to proceed without interaction from the user.
2. The length of the three "notes" must be in 8:8:15 ratio (in that order).
3. The main distinguishing factor between "notes", must be in 2:3:4 ratio (in that order).
4. The motif must be the overwhelmingly dominant "voice" when it occurs.

I'm not quite sure how to parse that, but I'll do my best. I am more confident in math than I am in my belief that arbitrary parts of my life are not hallucinations.

I'd like to point out that anyone who does not share the (claimed) Infinite Certainty should be upvoting, as this confidence level is infinitely higher than any other possible confidence level. (It's kind of like, if you agree that dividing by zero is merely an error, then any claim to infinite certainty is also an error, almost exactly the same error in fact.)

Are you saying that you probably agree that 0 and 1 are probabilities, but my claim is not one of the things you would assign a probability of 1 to?

Well, on a somewhat trivial note, I (plan to) make my living proving that certain things have probabilities distinct from 0, so if 0 and 1 weren't probabilities to begin with I'd be out of a job.

That's not really it, though, because I think the "0 and 1 are not probabilities" claim is really about degrees of belief in non-mathematical propositions. In its most-reasonable-to-me form, it says something like "Even if you have an argument that statement S is true with probability 1, you should believe Pr[S] < 1, because your argument could be wrong". And there's... really not a lot I could say in response to that. Except I would note that the value 1 isn't really special here.

But there's a lot of things that go together with this idea that I do disagree with. In very many senses, even non-mathematical propositions do end up having probabilities of 0 or 1. For instance:

• Any time we deal with (even theoretical) infinities (this one is important because here we get events with probability 0 that can actually happen)
• Tautologies (duh)
• Conditional probabilities (nobody really disagrees with this, but I think lots of probabilities we think are unconditional aren't)
• Any belief that I can never be talked out of (given how the human mind works, probably most beliefs we have are like this actually)

Plus in practice accepting "0 and 1 are not probabilities" rhetorically or otherwise just means that you stop writing 1 and start writing 1-epsilon. Whose belief is it really that doesn't affect anything?

Me, too. It wouldn't surprise me too much if there's a limit on intelligence, but I'd be extremely surprised humans are at that limit.

I don't think that's so obviously true. Here are some possible arguments against that theory:

1) There is a theoretical upper limit at which information can travel (speed of light). A very large "brain" will eventually be limited by that speed.

2) Some computational problems are so hard that even an extremely powerful "brain" would take very long to solve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory#Intractability).

3) There are physical limits to computation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit). Bremermann's Limit is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe. According to this limit, a computer the size of the Earth would take 10^72 years to crack a 512 bit key. In other words, even an AI the size of the Earth would not manage to break modern human encryption by brute-force.

More theoretical limits here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation

To follow up on what olalonde said, there are problems that appear to get extraordinarily difficult as the number of inputs increases. Wikipedia suggests that the know best solutions to the traveling salesman problem is on the order of O(2^n), where n is the number of inputs. Saying that adding computational ability resolves these issues for actual AGI implies either:

1) AGI trying to FOOM won't need to solve problems as complicated as traveling salesman type problems, or

2) AGI trying to FOOM will be able to add processing power at a rate reasonably near O(2^n), or

3) In the process of FOOM, an AGI will be able to determine P=NP or similarly revolutionary result.

None of those seem particularly plausible to me. So for reasonable sized n, AGI will not be able to solve problems appreciably better than humans.

If particles snap to grid once you get down far enough, then there are a finite, though very large, number of ways you could configure atoms and stuff them into a limited amount of space.

It's called the Bekenstein bound and it doesn't require discreteness.

Perhaps a workable restatement would be something like:

"Any attempt to formalize and extract our moral intuitions and judgements of how we should act in various situations will just produce a hopelessly complicated and inconsistent mess, whose judgements are very different from those of prescribed by any form of utilitarianism, deontology, or any other ethical theory that strives to be consistent. In most cases, any attempt of using a reflective equilibrium / extrapolated volition -type approach to clarify matters will leave things essentially unchanged, except for a small fraction of individuals whose moral intuitions are highly atypical (and who tend to be vastly overrepresented on this site)."

(I don't actually know how well this describes the actual theories for particularism.)

If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941.

This is suspect. The U.S. had greater industrial capacities and population than Japan, but that doesn't guarantee victory. Rebuilding the navy would take a lot of time which the Japanese could use to end their war in China. Also, it was far from clear in late 1941 whether the USSR would withstand the German assault and whether the British would not seek peace.

Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of "provoke"?

Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word "deliberate." The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions. For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.

Thanks; I assumed the many upvotes came from people who considered my confidence level too high, not too low, but it's nice to have someone actually confirm that.

Do you think that the U.S. government provoked an attack specifically on Pearl Harbor, or that they just wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere?

I think they wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere, but they were aware of the fact that Pearl Harbor was a likely target.

Where exactly do you place the boundary of deliberate provocation? That is, does not trying too hard to prevent the attack count, or had they have to be actively persuading the Japanese and moving the fleets into easily attackable positions?

I think they were actively persuading the Japanese to commit some act of war, and were not trying too hard to prevent the specific act of war that happened.