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Irrationality Game II
I was very interested in the discussions and opinions that grew out of the last time this was played, but find digging through 800+ comments for a new game to start on the same thread annoying. I also don't want this game ruined by a potential sock puppet (whom ever it may be). So here's a non-sockpuppetiered Irrationality Game, if there's still interest. If there isn't, downvote to oblivion!
The original rules:
Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.
Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.
Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.
Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.
Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."
If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.
That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.
If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.
The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.
Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.
Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?
Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.
That means our local theists are probably gonna get a lot of upvotes. Can you beat them with your confident but perceived-by-LW-as-irrational beliefs? It's a challenge!Additional rules:
- Generally, no repeating an altered version of a proposition already in the comments unless it's different in an interesting and important way. Use your judgement.
- If you have comments about the game, please reply to my comment below about meta discussion, not to the post itself. Only propositions to be judged for the game should be direct comments to this post.
- Don't post propositions as comment replies to other comments. That'll make it disorganized.
- You have to actually think your degree of belief is rational. You should already have taken the fact that most people would disagree with you into account and updated on that information. That means that any proposition you make is a proposition that you think you are personally more rational about than the Less Wrong average. This could be good or bad. Lots of upvotes means lots of people disagree with you. That's generally bad. Lots of downvotes means you're probably right. That's good, but this is a game where perceived irrationality wins you karma. The game is only fun if you're trying to be completely honest in your stated beliefs. Don't post something crazy and expect to get karma. Don't exaggerate your beliefs. Play fair.
- Debate and discussion is great, but keep it civil. Linking to the Sequences is barely civil -- summarize arguments from specific LW posts and maybe link, but don't tell someone to go read something. If someone says they believe in God with 100% probability and you don't want to take the time to give a brief but substantive counterargument, don't comment at all. We're inviting people to share beliefs we think are irrational; don't be mean about their responses.
- No propositions that people are unlikely to have an opinion about, like "Yesterday I wore black socks. ~80%" or "Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader in his latter days had he not been dethroned by Pope Sergius III. ~30%." The goal is to be controversial and interesting.
- Multiple propositions are fine, so long as they're moderately interesting.
- You are encouraged to reply to comments with your own probability estimates, but comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments. That is, upvote for good discussion, not agreement or disagreement.
- In general, just keep within the spirit of the game: we're celebrating LW-contrarian beliefs for a change!
Enjoy!
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Comments (380)
Meta-discussion Comment
Thanks Hariant!
Just want to make sure I'm understanding the terminology. Saying I'm 10% confident of proposition X is equivalent to saying I'm 90% confident in not-X, right?
Yes. However, since the point of the game is to display beliefs that you hold and others don't, you should choose the phrasing that makes your confidence higher than LW's. That is: if you think other LWers are 5% confident of X, then you should say you're 10% confident of X; and if you think other LWers are 15% confident of X, then you should say you're 90% confident of not-X.
I'll bite:
The U.S. government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour through diplomacy and/or fleet redeployment, and it was not by chance that the carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet weren't at port when the attack happened.
Very confident. (90-95%)
By the way, the reason I assume I am personally more rational about this than the LW average is that there are lots of US Americans around here, and I have sufficient evidence to believe that people tend to become less rational if a topic centrally involves a country they are emotionally involved with or whose educational system they went through.
I don't have a lot of strong reasons to disbelieve you, but what evidence makes you think this is so?
Are you referring to my belief regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor, or to my belief regarding my rationality on this topic in relation to the LW average?
Does that mean that you have some strong reasons to disbelieve me?
I think they wanted the Japanese to attack somewhere, but they were aware of the fact that Pearl Harbor was a likely target.
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.
I have seen a few low status conspiracy theorists advocating a position like this, and eventually started to agree that provoking an attack from an enemy is a strategy the US has used several times this century, my probability for this particular incident is still around 75% at most though
Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define "provoke." For some reasonable definitions, the statement is almost certainly true; for others, probably not.
As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don't think that's plausible. 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. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.
Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.
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.
The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded? What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?
"Guaranteed victory" sounds like hindsight bias to me. Even if the US mainland could not have been invaded, that doesn't mean the USA could not have lost the war.
The point is that the "official historical narrative" is different in different countries. For example, Japan has a strong culture of ignoring Japanese war crimes, in Polish textbooks there rarely is mention of Poland taking part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, Britons are generally unaware of the fact that GB declared war on Germany and not vice versa, many French think that the surrender to Germany was an action the government did not have the license to make, and so on.
"The government" is an abstract concept. I am talking about a circle of people within the government who together had the power to provoke Japan, and to assure that the losses at Pearl Harbor were within reasonable bounds. I am not overly familiar with the way the U.S. government was organised at that time, but it seems to me that such a circle had to include either the president or high ranking intelligence officials, most likely both.
It wouldn't have mattered for the Pacific war, except by prolonging it somewhat. Even if Japan had conquered every single island in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as long as the U.S. government remained in control of the U.S. mainland, as it surely would have, it still would have had enough resources and industrial capacity to outproduce Japan in warships and other naval assets by orders of magnitude and eventually roll back the Japanese conquests by sheer overwhelming strength.
Germany arguably had some chance to win the European war, but Japan was doomed from day one.
Also, as someone has already noted, the greater importance of carriers over battleships in WW2 is itself known only from hindsight, and contrary to the prevailing beliefs of the time.
Well, yes, you can always conceive of some deus ex machina. But it's implausible that fears about hypothetical Japanese superweapons would have influenced the strategic plans of FDR & Co. in 1941.
By 1941, FDR & Co. already had sufficiently strong grip on power that they comfortably knew that a war would allow them to seize complete control of the media (and all other means of propaganda) and ensure that this could never happen.
True enough, but thus typically has the form of the same official narrative with some additional spin, omission, and lying with regards to the relevant local details in order to accommodate nationalist sensibilities. In contrast, sensible, intelligent, well-informed, and yet radical criticism of the official narrative can be found, to my knowledge, only within the Old Right intellectual tradition in the U.S. (Which has been driven to the fringe for many decades, but its vestiges somehow still occasionally surface in the respectable public discourse.)
American public opinion may have expected such invasions, but did any serious military experts? Earl Warren and FDR's political pandering is not really strong evidence of a serious military expectation. Obviously, we know now that the Pearl Harbor attack was at the outermost of Japanese logistical capacity - they never planned an invasion of Hawaii, much less the West Coast.
Given the history, we know that transpacific projections of land forces were very possible for the United States (Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima). Why would an invasion of Hawaii be more difficult?
As an aside, I agree that FDR courted war because he wanted to join the European conflict. Lend-Lease and escorting convoys were not the acts of a neutral party. Likewise, the raw material embargos on Japan placed that nation in an untenable position. I upvoted you for asserting that FDR knew that Pearl Harbor would be attacked in time to make changes to defensive preparations at that base. From FDR's perspective, a "surprise" attack that was a stalemate instead of a defeat would have served his political goal (war with Germany) just as well.
Well, "provocation" is one of those problematic words, in that nearly always, the party accused of "provocation" denies it -- and the act itself is therefore nearly always done in a way that attempts for some plausible deniability. So even if there is agreement on the facts of what happened, there is usually room for debate over whether an act constituted "provocation."
Of course. But under FDR, he and his inner circle did act in a fairly coherent way (and by extension, so did the entire pyramid of New Deal patronage that they headed). There were certainly individuals and institutions within the U.S. government outside of their control, but by 1941, they had been mostly side-stepped and pushed away into irrelevance.
I wouldn't consider Acheson a credible source. Certainly, it's very naive to take anything written by the political actors of the New Deal/WW2 era at face value, and disentangling the real events from the available information is a task of enormous complexity and difficulty. That rabbit hole is very, very deep.
It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn't.
Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?
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.
Even in the worst possible case, I still don't see what could prevent the U.S. from simply cranking out a new huge Pacific navy and overwhelming Japan. Yes, the production would take a few years to ramp up to full capacity, as it did in reality -- but once it did, I can't imagine what could save Japan from being overwhelmed.
Ending the war in China wouldn't have helped the Japanese at all, even if they linked with a victorious German army in the Far East. An additional land army at their disposal could not prevent the U.S. navy steamroller from eventually reaching their home islands, whereupon they would be bombed and starved into surrender. (If not for the atom bomb ending their agony even earlier.) The Japanese islands are so exposed and vulnerable to any superior naval power that they could be lost even as the world's mightiest army is watching helplessly from the Asian mainland.
The only theoretical chance I see is if Germany somehow conquered both the U.S.S.R. and Britain, and then threw all its resources on a crash program to build up a huge navy of its own and help the Japanese. But I'm not sure if they'd be able to outproduce the U.S. even in that case. (And note that this would require a vanishingly improbable long continuation of the Germans' lucky streak.)
In the context of this discussion the important thing is what could be reliably predicted in 1941, so we should ignore the possible effects of the atomic bomb.
Assume that the entire U.S. navy is destroyed in January 1942. A reasonable realistic scenario, if everything went really well for Japan, may be this:
Now in this situation, being a U.S. general, what would be your advice given to Truman? Would it be "let's continue in a low intensity war against both Germany and Japan until we have a strong enough navy, which may be in 1947 or 1948, and then start taking one island after another, which may take two more years, and then, from the island bases supplied through the U-boat infested Pacific start bombarding Japan, until the damned fanatics realise they have no other chance than to surrender"? Or would it rather be "let's accept peace if it's offered on honourable terms"?
Even assuming a plausible scenario in which the US couldn't defeat Germany, that doesn't have anything to do with whether we could have defeated Japan standing alone.
Historically, we know it wasn't that hard for the US - despite Japan attacking first, the US adopted a "Europe First" strategy that committed approx. 2/3 of capacity to fighting Germany. Despite this, the US defeated Japan easily - there are no major victories for Japan against the US after Pearl Harbor, and Midway was less than a year after Pearl Harbor. If the US strategy is "Japan First" (doing things like transferring the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific), why should we expect the Pacific war would last long enough that Germany would be able to consolidate a victory in the east into driving the UK into peace and be able to intervene in the Pacific?
Also, why do you think an invasion of Hawaii was possible? The surprise strike was at the end of Japanese logistical capacity - I think the US wins if Japan tries a land invasion.
Remember the context: we are in the hypothetical where all US ships (Atlantic fleet included) were magically anihilated in the end of 1941.
I'm a big believer in not fighting the hypothetical, but there is no historically plausible account leading to the destruction of the Atlantic fleet. At that point, we aren't discussing facts relevant to whether FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time.
The hypothetical of Pearl Harbor as the most resounding success it could possibly be (US Pacific fleet reduced to irrelevance) and Germany winning the Battle of Moscow strongly enough that it has leverage to force the UK out of the war is reasonable for discussing FDR's decision process. That's all he could reasonably have thought he was risking by allowing Pearl Harbor. As I stated elsewhere, I think FDR gets his political goals with Japan firing the first shot - there's no need for him to court a military disaster.
Even in that scenario, Japanese victory is conditional on the political decision of the U.S. government to accept the peace. My comments considered only the strategic situation under the assumption that all sides were willing to fight on with determination. And I don't think this assumption is so unrealistic: the American people were extremely unwilling to enter the war, but once they did, they would have been even less willing to accept a humiliating peace. Especially since the Pacific great naval offensive could be (and historically was) fought with very low casualties, and not to mention the U.S. government's wartime control of the media that was in many ways even more effective than the crude and heavy-handed control in totalitarian states.
Now, in your scenario, the U.S. would presumably see immediately that its first priority was navy rebuilding. (An army is useless if you can't get it off the mainland.) This means that by 1944, Americans would be cranking out even more ships than they did historically. I don't think the Axis could match that output even if they were in control of the entire Eurasia.
(The U-boats would have been a complicating factor. Their effectiveness changed dramatically with unpredictable innovations in technology and tactics. In actual history, they became useless by mid-1943, although Germans were arguably on the verge of introducing dramatically superior ones at the time of their capitulation. But in any case, the U-boat factor cuts both ways: Americans could swamp the Pacific with even greater numbers of U-boats and wreck the entire Japanese logistics, as they actually did.)
The "and it was not chance" bit? That requires the conspirators be non-human.
Carrier supremacy was hardly an established doctrine, much less proved in battle; orthodox belief since Mahan was that battleships were the most important ships in a fleet. The orthodox method of preserving the US Navy's power would have been to disperse battleships, not carriers. Even if the conspirators were all believers in the importance of carriers, even a minimum of caution would have led them to find an excuse to also save some of the battleships. To believe at 90% confidence that a group of senior naval officials, while engaging in a high-stakes conspiracy, also took a huge un-hedged gamble on an idea that directly contradicted the established naval dogma they were steeped in since they were midshipmen, is ludicrous.
Not really. It wasn't just "a carrier fleet" and "a battleship fleet", it was a predominantly modern carrier fleet and an outdated battleship fleet that consisted mostly of WWI designs or modifications of WWI designs. It was also consensus that if you were going to deploy carriers, the Pacific Ocean was a more promising theatre than the Atlantic ocean, due to (a) the weather and (b) the lack of strategically positioned air bases on land that were in little danger of being invaded, such as Newfoundland, Great Britain, West Africa, and so on. Also, the U.S. Navy could have commissioned more battleships instead of carriers, but they didn't, and that means they did have plans for them; most likely in the Pacific theatre. It was clear from the start that being at war with Japan would also mean being at war with Germany, so fighting only on the Pacific front was never an option.
I didn't say they wouldn't try to save the carriers. I said they would have hedged their bets by also dispersing some of the battleships. Your 90% confidence in your whole conjunct opinion requires a greater-than-90% confidence in the proposition that while saving the carriers, the people involved, all steeped in battleship supremacy/prestige for decades, would deliberately leave all the battleships vulnerable, rather than disperse even one or two as a hedge.
Only in violation of the Washington and First London Naval Treaties. The US Navy could not have built more battleships at the time it started, for example, the Enterprise (1934) under those treaties.
I note that in the period 1937-to-Pearl-Harbor, which is to say subsequent to the 1936 Second London Naval Treaty that allowed it, the US Navy started no fewer than nine new battleships (and got funding authorization for a tenth), which suggests that they still seriously believed in battleships. Otherwise, why not build carriers in their place?
But they did disperse some of the battleships. That's why all the battleships at Pearl Harbor were outdated classes. They didn't have that many outdated carriers, and carriers retain their value more over the course of time than battleships and battlecruisers do.
The ratio value:tonnage of capital ships sunk at Pearl harbor was significantly lower than the ratio value:tonnage of capital ships in the surviving fleets in the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere. This was never about carriers versus battleships, it was about vessels with high value versus vessels with low value.
Er? What battleships are you claiming were dispersed?
There were quite literally no newer battleships on active duty in the US Navy on December 7th, 1941 than the West Virginia, "outdated class" or no, sunk at Pearl Harbor along with her brand-new CXAM-1 radar. The only newer battleships in commission were the North Carolina and Washington, both of which were not yet on active duty because of delays caused by propeller issues.
Upvoted, not for the assertion, but for the confidence level (I would give it 25-75%)
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.
Irrationality Game
For reasons related to Godel's incompleteness theorems and mathematically proven minimum difficulties for certain algorithms, I believe there is an upper limit on how intelligent an agent can be. (90%)
I believe that human hardware can - in principle - be as intelligent as it is possible to be. (60%) To be clear, this doesn't actually occur in the real world we currently live in. I consider the putatively irrational assertion roughly isomorphic to asserting that AGI won't go FOOM.
If you voted already, you might not want to vote again.
If it turns out that "human hardware" is as intelligent as it is possible to be, that entails many things in addition to the assertion that AGI won't go FOOM.
I would vote differently on these assertions.
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.
One of the most direct methods for an agent to increase its computing power (does this translate to an increase in intelligence, even logarithmically?) is to increase the size of its brain. This doesn't have an inherent upper limit, only ones caused by running out of matter and things like that, which I consider uninteresting.
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.
Oh. Well, if you're just ignoring increases in processing power, then I don't see why your confidence is as low as 90%.
(Although it's interesting to observe that if your AGI is currently running on a laptop computer and wants to increase its processing power, then of course it could try to turn the Earth into a planet-sized computer... but if it's solving exponentially-hard problems, then it could, at a guess, get halfway there just by taking over Google.)
I'm not ignoring increases in processing power - I'm not sure that increases in available processing power will grow substantially faster than polynomial rate of increase. And we already know that common types of problems grow exponentially - or worse.
Suppose an AGI takes over the entire internet - where's the next exponential increase in computing power going to come from?
Turning Earth into computron is not a realistic possibility before the AGI goes FOOM.
I think we basically agree, then, although I haven't carefully thought about all possible ways to increase processing power.
Moore's law for a while, then from taking over the economy and redirecting as many resources as possible to building more hyper-efficient processors. Deconstructing Mercury and using it to build a sphere of orbiting computers around the sun. Figuring out fusion so as to make more use of the sun's energy. Turning the sun into a black hole and using it as a heatsink. Etc. Not necessarily in that order.
Let's be specific: Before the AGI goes FOOM and takes over human society, where will its increases in computing power come from? Why won't achieving those gains require solving computationally hard problems?
Your examples about wonder technologies like converting Mercury into computron and solving fusion are plausible acts for a post-FOOM AGI, not a pre-FOOM AGI. I'm asserting that the path from one to the other leads through computationally hard problems. For example, a pre-FOOM AGI is likely to want to decrypt something protected by a 512-bit key, right?
The first 3 among those are a few decades to centuries out of our own reach. We wouldn't use Mercury to build a Dyson Sphere/ring, because we need the sunlight. But we're actively working on building more and better processors and attempting to turn fusion into a viable technology.
Also, have you heard of lead pipe cryptanalysis? Decrypting a 512 bit key is doing things the hard way. Putting up a million dollar bounty for anyone who determines the content of the message is the easy way.
There are problems that can't be solved simply by publicly throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at them. For example, an agent probably could swing the elections for Mayor of London between the two candidates running with that kind of money, but probably could not get a person of their choice chosen if they weren't already a fairly plausible candidate. And I don't think total control of the US nuclear arsenal is susceptible to lead-pipe cryptanalysis.
In short, world takeover is filled with hard problems that a pre-FOOM AGI probably would not be smart enough to solve. Going FOOM implies that the AGI will path through the period of vulnerability to human institutions (like the US military) faster than those institutions will realize that there is a threat and organize to act against the threat. Achieving that invulnerability seems to require solving problems that an AGI without massive resources would not be smart enough to solve.
It all depends on whether an AGI can start out significantly past human intelligence. If the answer is no, then it's really not a significant danger. If the answer is yes, then it will be able to determine alternatives we can't.
Also, even a small group of humans could swing the election for Mayor of London. An AGI with a few million dollars at its disposal might be able to hire such a group.
I think 1 is the most likely scenario (although I don't think FOOM is a very likely scenario). Some more mind blowing hard problems are available here for those who are still skeptical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcomputational_problem
Can you rephrase "this doesn't actually occur in the real world we currently live in"?
What's your estimate that this value is at a level that we actually care about (i.e. not effectively infinite from our point of view)?
I intended to answer this question with my second prediction - I am 60% confident that super-human intelligence is not possible.
I really do think that the reproductive advantage of increased intelligence is great enough that the line of how intelligent it is possible for agents to be is within a reasonably small number of standard deviations of the mean of current human intelligence. My inability to make seat-of-the-pants estimates of statistical effects may make me look foolish, but maybe-maybe 8-12 standard deviations??
Is there a simple summary of why you think this is true of intelligence when it turned out not to be true of, say, durability, or flightspeed, or firepower, or the ability to efficiently convert ambient energy into usable form, or any of a thousand other evolved capabilities for which we've managed to far exceed our physiological limits with technological aids?
I don't think I understand your question. There appear to be upper limits to how easy it is to solve certain kinds of problems that an intelligent agent would want to be able to solve. It is uncertain whether we have discovered the most clever methods of solving these problems - for example, we aren't certain whether P = NP. Apparently, many mathematicians think humanity has been basically as clever as is possible (i.e. P != NP).
If we think there are limits, faul_sname asks the obvious next question - is human-level intelligence anywhere near those limits? I don't see why not - intelligence has consistently shown reproductive fitness - so I expect evolution would select for it. It could be that humanity is in a local optimum and the next level of intelligence cannot be reached because the intermediate steps are not viable. But I'm not aware of evidence that the shape of intelligence improvement was like that for our ancestors.
Yes, but the speed at which it would do so is quite limited. Particularly with a generational time of 15-25 years, and with the fact that evolution basically stopped working as an enhancer once humans passed the threshold of preventing most premature deaths (where premature just means before the end of the reproductive window).
What makes you think that the threshold for civilization is anywhere near the upper bound for possible intelligence?
You make an excellent point. The evolutionary argument is not as strong as I presented it.
Given that recorded history has no record of successful Xanatos gambits (TVTropes lingo), the case is strong that the intelligence limit is not medium distance from human average (i.e. not 20-50 std. dev. from average).
That leaves the possibility that (A) the limit is far (>50 std dev.) or (B) very near (the 8-12 range I mentioned above).
It seems to me that our ability to understand and prove certain results about computational difficulty (and the power of self-reference) that would apply even if super-human intelligence was possible is evidence that (B) is more likely than (A).
Do you mean "an upper limit" relative to available computing power or in an absolute sense?
Downvoted for the first, upvoted for the second.
Physics limit how big computers can get; I have no evidence whatsoever for humans being optimal.
I proposed a variation on this game, optimized for usefulness instead of novelty: the "maximal update game". Start with a one sentence summary of your conclusion, then justify it. Vote up or down the submissions of others based on the degree to which you update on the one sentence summary of the person's conclusion. (Hence no UFOs at the top, unless good arguments for them can be made.)
If anyone wants to try this game, feel free to do it in replies to this comment.
Downvoted for agreement: you did in fact propose the specified variation.
He didn't state his confidence level. Since his probability estimate for this is likely much higher than mine, I upvoted.
That seems worth its own thread.
Irrationality Game
It's possible to construct a relatively simple algorithm to distinguish superstimulatory / acrasiatic media from novel, educational or insightful content. Such an algorithm need not make use of probabilistic classifiers or machine-learning techniques that rely on my own personal tastes. The distinction can be made based on testable, objective properties of the material. (~20%)
(This is a bit esoteric. I am starting to think up aggressive tactics to curb my time-wasteful internet habits, and was idly fantasising about a browser plugin that would tell me whether the link I was about to follow was entertaining glurge or potentially valuable. In wondering how that would work, I started thinking about how I classify it. My first thought would be that it's a subjective judgement call, and a naive acid-test that distinguished the two was tantamount to magic. After thinking about it for a little longer, I've started to develop some modestly-weighted fuzzy intuitions that there is some objective property I use to classify them, and that this may map faithfully onto how other people classify them.)
Upvoted because I can't think of any sense in which it's possible to reliably separate akrastic from non-akrastic media without a pretty good model of the reader. Wikipedia's a huge time sink, for example, yet it's a huge time sink because it consists of lots of educational but low-salience bits; that article on orogeny might be extremely useful if I'm trying to write a terrain generation algorithm, but I'll probably only have to do that at most once in my life.
On the other hand, it's probably possible to come up with an algorithm that reliably distinguishes some time-wasting content. Coming up with a set of criteria for image galleries, for example, would go a long way and seems doable.
I would expect to have to do that either zero or at least two times.
I tend to be a one-evolving-draft sort of programmer. Fair point, though.
Wikipedia was one example of a challengingly messy corpus, though I do think there's a sharp division between articles that make you know more stuff and articles that don't. I personally wouldn't consider the orogeny article akrasiatic.
It is possible I'm working from a quite specific definition of akrasia in this case.
Simple compared to what, and with what rates of false positives/negatives?
As in implementable in a couple of hundred lines of JavaScript. If I had good answers for the second question, I'd be a lot more sure than 20%.
Something that disqualifies things that don't contain keywords from the thing you're currently working on might function as a very crude version of this.
Come up with 20 independent algorithms like that, use bayes theorem to combine the results, and you should come pretty close.
Upvoted for this sentence.
Irrationality game
0 and 1 are probabilities. (100%)
Upvoted in furious, happy disagreement, because I was going to post this very thing, with a confidence level of 20%, but then I reasoned out that this was unbelievably stupid and the probability of infinite Bayesian evidence being possible should be the same as probabilities for other things we have very strong reason to believe are simply impossible: 1 - epsilon.
I suppose if I wanted to maximize karma I should have stated a confidence level of 0%.
You're supposed to post things you actually believe, you know! What are you, a spirit-of-the-game violator?
I do believe the 100% thing, though. It's just that in this case, karma is not maximized where spirit-of-the-game is maximized, and I thought I'd point that out.
Gaining utility from karma, illegitemate or fraudulent sources regardless, is an ongoing problem which never ceases to amuse me. Let the humans have their fun!
I'm pretty sure the probability of almost certainly impossible things being possible is lower than 1-epsilon. Except for very large values of epsilon.
Indeed, for values of epsilon approaching one.
Nothing we can say will change your mind, unless already don't believe this.
Does this belief really affect anything, or is it only a proposition considered true without any consequences on your cognitive processes? (I've always regarded "0 and 1 are not probabilities" as more of a rhetorical figure than a statement of belief.)
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:
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?
I suspect that with enough resources you could be talked out of any of your beliefs. Oh, sure, it would take a lot of time, planning, and manpower (and probably some people you approve of having the beliefs we'd want to indoctrinate you with). You're not actually 100% certain that you're 100% certain that 0 and 1 are probabilities.
The trouble with thinking 0 or 1 is a probability is that it is exactly equivalent to having an infinite amount of evidence, which is impossible by the laws of thermodynamics; minds exist within physics.
Furthermore, a feeling of absolute certainty isn't even a number, much less a probability.
At some point you have to ask: who is this "me" that can have any arbitrary collection of beliefs?
(And yes, incidentally, I don't assign 100% probability to the fact that I assign 100% probability to the statement "0 and 1 are probabilities." I think I could be persuaded, not to have a lower confidence in the 0-1 statement, but to believe that my confidence in it is lower than it is. This is sort of hard to think about, though.)
Tautologies are true for mathematical reasons and there is little difference - as far as probability assessment goes - between "P ∨ ∽P" and "Yding Skovhøj is the highest peak of Egypt or Yding Skovhøj is not the highest peak of Egypt". Thus, tautologies (and pseudologies, or how do we call their false counterparts) don't really make a category distinct from mathematical statements.
I am not sure what you mean here. Of course there are conditional probabilities of form "if X, then X", but they already belong to the tautology group.
Regarding mathematical statements it's nevertheless important to notice that there are two meanings of "probability". First, there is what I would call "idealised" or "mathematical probability", formally defined inside a mathematical theory. One typically defines probability as a measure over some abstract space and usually is able to prove that there exist sets of probability 1 or 0. This is, more or less, the sort of probability relevant to the probabilistic method you have linked to. Second, there is the "psychological" probability which has the intuitive meaning of "degree of belief", where 1 and 0 refer to absolute certainty. This is, more or less, the sort of probability spoken about in "1 and 0 aren't probabilities".
These two kinds of probabilities may correspond to each other more or less closely, but aren't the same: having a formal proof of a proposition isn't the same as being absolutely certain about it; people make mistakes when checking proofs.
If believing P doesn't affect anything, then naturally believing non-P doesn't affect anything either. So, if you agree that "1 and 0 aren't probabilities" is an inconsequential belief, does it mean that your answer to my original question is "yes"?
Saying that my belief in P is inconsequential implies that actually I am acting as if I believed not-P, even though I profess a belief in P. I argue that, conversely, many people who profess a belief in not-P act as if they actually believe P.
The point is that "acting as if one believes P" and "acting as if one believes not-P" can sometimes be the same actings. This is what I meant by "inconsequential". I want to know whether, in your opinion, this is such a situation; that is, whether there is some imaginable behaviour (other than professing the belief) which would make sense if one believed that "1 is not a probability" but would not make sense if one believed otherwise.
Upvoted not for the claim, but the ridiculously high confidence in that claim.
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?
I believe 0 and 1 are probabilities, but there is no way to obtain that degree of certainty. (unless you have an incredibly clever method you aren't sharing, which is mean)
An analogy would be that I believe that 3^^^3 is a number, even though I don't think I will ever have that many dollars. Similarly, I believe that 0 and 1 are probabilities, but I wouldn't grant any particular belief a probability of 0 or 1.
My intention was to make a stronger claim than the one you agree with, but fortunately my degree of confidence takes care of that for me.
Only Sith deal in absolutes!
I am very happy that the parent is currently at 0 karma.
I'd not seen Elizier's post on "0 and 1 are not probabilities" before. It was a very interesting point. The link at the end was very amusing.
However, it seems he meant "it would be more useful to define probabilities excluding 0 and 1" (which may well be true), but phrased it as if it were a statement of fact. I think this is dangerous and almost always counterproductive -- if you mean "I think you are using these words wrong" you should say that, not give the impression you mean "that statement you made with those words is false according to your interpretation of those words is false".
Downvoted for agreement. Of course usually it isn't rational to assign probabilites of 0 and 1, but in this case I think it is.
Downvoted for agreement. Trivially, P(A|A)=1 and P(A|~A)=0.
So you are more confident in math than in hallucinating this entire interaction with an internet forum?
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.
Damn... You're good. Anyway, 1 and 0 aren't probabilities because Bayes Theorem break down there (in the log-odds/information base where Bayes Theorem is simple addition, they are positive and negative infinity). You can however meaningfully construct limits of probabilities. I prefer the notation (1 -) epsilon.
Log-odds aren't what probability is, they're a way to think about probability. They happen not to work so well when the probabilities are 0 and 1; they also fail rather dramatically for probability density functions. That doesn't mean they don't have their uses.
Similarly, Bayes's Theorem breaks down because the proof of it assumes a nonzero probability. This isn't fixed by defining away 0 and 1, because it can still return those as output, and then you end up looking silly. In many cases, not being able to condition on an event with probability 0 is the only thing to do: given that a d6 comes up both odd and even, what is the probability that the result is higher than 3?
[I tried saying some things about conditioning on sets of measure 0 here, but apparently I don't know what I'm talking about so I will retract that portion of the comment for the sake of clarity.]
Log-odds are perfectly isomorphic with probabilities and satisfies Cox's Theorem. Saying that log-odds are not what probabilities are is as non-sequiteur as saying 2+2 isn't a valid representation of 4.
Bayes theorem assumes no such thing as non-zero probability, it assumes Real Numbered probabilities, as it is in fact a perfectly valid statement of real-number arithmetic in any other context. It just so happens to be that this arithmetic expression is undefined for when certain variables are 0, and is an identity (equal to 1) when certain variables are 1. Neither are particularly interesting.
Bayes Theorem is interesting because it becomes propositional logic when you apply it to a limit going towards 1 or 0.
Real life applications are not my expertise, but I know my groups, categories and types. 0 and 1 are not probabilities, just as positive and negative infinity are not Real Numbers. This is a truth derived directly from Russel's Axioms, which is the definition basis for all modern mathematics.
When you say P(A) = 1 you are not using probabilities anymore, At best your are doing propositional logic, at worst you'll get a type error. If you want to be as sure as you can, let credence be 1 - epsilon for arbitrarily small positive real epsilon.
1 and 0 are not probabilities by definition
Clearly log-odds aren't perfectly isomorphic with multiplicative probabilities, since clearly one allows probabilities of 0 and 1 and the other doesn't.
Bayes's theorem does assume nonzero probability, as you can observe by examining its proof.
You can't derive properties of probability from Russell's axioms, because these describe set theory and not probability. One standard way of deriving properties of probability is via Dutch Book arguments. These can only show that probabilities must be in the range [0,1] (including the endpoints). In fact, no finite sequence of bets you offer me can distinguish a credence of 1 from a credence of 1-epsilon for sufficiently small epsilon. (That is, for any epsilon, there's a bet that distinguishes 1-epsilon from 1, but for any sequence of bets, there's an 1-epsilon that is indistinguishable from 1).
Here is an analogy. The well-known formula D = RT describes the relationship between distance traveled, average speed, and time. You can also express this as log(D) = log(R) + log(T) if you like, or D/R = T. In either of these formulas, setting R=0 will be an error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a speed of 0, and if you think your speed is 0 you are actually traveling at a speed of epsilon for some very small value of epsilon. It just means that when you passed to these (mostly equivalent) formulations, you lost the capability to discuss speeds of 0. In fact, when we set R to 0 in the original formula, we get a more useful description of what happens: D=0 no matter the value of T. In other words, 0 is a valid speed, but you can't travel a nonzero distance with an average speed of zero, no matter how much time you allow yourself.
What is the difference between log-odds and log-speeds, that makes the former an isomorphism and the latter an imperfect description?
Finally, do you really think that someone who thinks "0 and 1 are probabilities" is a statement LW is irrational about is unaware of the "0 and 1 are not probabilities" post?
Irrationality Game
If we are in a simulation, a game, a "planetarium", or some other form of environment controlled by transhuman powers, then 2012 may be the planned end of the game, or end of this stage of the game, foreshadowed within the game by the Mayan calendar, and having something to do with the Voyager space probe reaching the limits of the planetarium-enclosure, the galactic center lighting up as a gas cloud falls in 30,000 years ago, or the discovery of the higgs boson.
Since we have to give probabilities, I'll say 10%, but note well, I'm not saying there is a 10% probability that the world ends this year, I'm saying 10% conditional on us being in a transhumanly controlled environment; e.g., that if we are in a simulation, then 2012 has a good chance of being a preprogrammed date with destiny.
This begs the question: how likely do you think it is that we are in a transhumanly controlled environment?
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.
Upvoted solely because 1999/2000 was foreshadowed so much more heavily.
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".
Upvoted because 10% as an estimate seems too high.
I especially can't imagine why transhuman powers would have used the end of the calendar of a long-dead civilization (one of many comparable civilizations) to foreshadow the end of their game plan.
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.
Why pick out those events?
It's easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they'd happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?
Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.
I agree that in themselves, the events I listed don't much suggest that the world ends, the game reboots, or first contact occurs this year. The astronomical and historical propositions - that there's something unlikely going on with calendars and the location of modernity within the precessional cycle - are essential to the argument.
One of the central ingredients is this stuff about a near-conjunction between the December solstice sun and "the galactic center", during recent decades. One needs to specify whether "galactic center" means the central black hole, the galactic ecliptic, the "dark rift" in the Milky Way as seen from Earth, or something else, because these are all different objects and they may imply different answers to the question, "in which year does the solstice sun come closest to this object". I've just learned some more about these details, and should shortly be able to say how they impact the argument.
You're still cherry-picking. There have been loads of conjunctions and other astronomical events that have been taken as omens. You could argue that the conjunction with the galactic center is a "big" one, but there are bigger possible ones that you're ignoring because they don't match (eg if the sun was aligned with with CMB rest frame, that would be the one you'd use)
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.
Computationalism is an incorrect model of cognition. Brains compute, but mind is not what the brain does. There is no self hiding inside your apesuit. You are the apesuit. Minds are embodied and extended, and a major reason why the research program to build synthetic intelligences has largely gone nowhere since its inception is the failure of many researchers to understand/agree with this idea.
70%
I don't understand why you don't believe that computations can be "embodied and extended."
I do believe that the fact that any kind of human emulation would have to be embedded into a digital body with sensory inputs is underdiscussed here, though I'm not even sure what constitutes scientific literature on the subject so I don't want to make statements about that.
Do you believe a upload with a simulated body would work? how high fidelity?
Have you been reading this recently?
More particularly, anything that links to this post.
Just because I am an apesuit, doesn't mean I need to dress my synthetic intelligence in one.
Irrationality game
Moral intuitions are very simple. A general idea of what it means for somebody to be human is enough to severely restrict variety of moral intuitions which you would expect it to be possible for them to have. Thus, conditioned on Adam's humanity, you would need very little additional information to get a good idea of Adam's morals, while Bob the alien would need to explain his basic preferences at length for you to model his moral judgements accurately. It follows that the tricky part of explaining moral intuitions to a machine is explaining human, and it's not possible to cheat by formalizing moral separately.
Please attach a probability.
Fairly certain (85%—98%).
That is a very wide range. Downvoted you anyway.
Irrationality game
I have a suspicion that some form of moral particularism is the most sensible moral theory. 10% confidence.
What do you mean by the "most sensible moral theory"?
And what the hell does Dancy mean if he says that there are rules of thumb that aren't principles?
I would weight this lower than .01% just because of my credence that it's incoherent.
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.)
Upvoted for too low a probability.
In the turing machine sense, sure. In the "this is all you should know" sense, no way, have an upvote.
Irrationality Game
I believe that exposure to rationality (in the LW sense) at today's state does in general more harm than good^ to someone who's already a skeptic. 80%
^ In the sense of generating less happiness and in general less "winning".
I realized I didn't have a model of an average skeptic, so I am not sure what my opinion on this topic actually is.
My provisional model of an average skeptic is like this: "You guys as LW have a good point about religion being irrational; the math is kind of interesting, but boring; and the ideas about superhuman intelligence and quantum physics being more than just equations are completely crazy."
No harm, no benefit, tomorrow everything is forgotten.
Irrationality Game
Being a materialist doesn't exclude nearly as much of the magical, religious, and anomalous as most materialists believe because matter/energy is much weirder than is currently scientifically accepted.
75% certainty.
I'm having trouble understanding what you are claiming. It seems that once anything is found to exist in the actual world, people won't call it "magical" or "anomalous". When Hermione Granger uses an invisibility cloak, it's magic. When researchers at the University of Dallas use an invisibility cloak, it's science.
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.
Taboo "matter/energy".
Well damn. What is left? "You know... like... the stuff that there is."
Thank you. I was about to ask the same thing.
Upvoted, as many phenomena that get labelled "magical" or "religious" have readily-identifiable materialist causes. For those phenomena to be a consequence of esoteric physics and to have a more pedestrian materialist explanation that turns out to be incorrect, and to conform to enough of a culturally-prescribed category of magical phenomena to be labelled as such in the first place seems like a staggering collection of coincidences.
An alien civilization within the boundaries of the current observable universe has, or will have within the next 10 billion years, created a work of art which includes something directly analogous to the structure of the "dawn motif" from the beginning of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. (~90%)
I'm inclined to downvote this for agreement, but haven't yet. Can you say more about what "directly analogous" means? How different from ASZ can this work of art be and still count?
Cool. Upvoted immediate parent for specificity and downvoted grandparent for agreement.
Upvoted for overconfidence, not about the directly analogous art form (I suspect that even several hundred pieces of human art have that) but about there being other civilizations within the observable universe.
Though I would still give that at least 20%.
IRRATIONALITY GAME
Eliezer Yudovsky has access to a basilisk kill agent that allows him to with a few clicks untraceably assassinate any person he can get to read a short email or equivalent, with comparable efficiency to what is shown in Deathnote.
Probability: improbable ( 2% )
Upvoted for vast overconfidence.
Downvoted back to zero because I suspect you're not following the rules of the thread.
Also, I have no idea who "Eliezer Yudovsky" is, though it doesn't matter for either of the above.
Upvoted for enormous overconfidence that a universal basilisk exists.
Never said it was a single universal one. And a lot of those 2% is meta uncertainty from doing the math sloppily.
The part where I think I might do better is having been on the receiving end of weaker basilisks and having some vague idea of how to construct something like it. That last part is the tricky one stopping me from sharing the evidence as it'd make it more likely a weapon like that falls into the wrong hands.
The thing about basilisks is that they have limited capacity for causing actual death. Particularly among average people who get their cues of whether something is worrying from the social context (e.g. authority figures or their social group).
Must... resist... revealing... info.... that... may... get... people.... killed.
Please do resist. If you must tell someone, do it through private message.
Yea. It's not THAT big a danger, I'm just trying to make it clear why I hold a belief not based of evidence that I can share.
I am way to good at this game. :(
I really didn't expect this to go this high. All the other posts get lots of helpful comments about WHY they were wrong. If I'm really wrong, which these upvotes indicate; I really need to know WHY so I know with connected beliefs to update as well.
Irrationality game comment:
Imagine that we transformed the Universe using some elegant mathematical mapping (think about Fourier transform of the phase space) or that we were able to see the world through different quantum observables than we have today (seeing the world primarily in the momentum space, or even being able to experience "collapses" to eigenvectiors not of x or p, but of a different, for us unobservable, operator, e.g. xp). Then, we would observe complex structures, perhaps with their own evolution and life and intelligence. That is, aliens can be all around us but remain as invisible as Mona Lisa on a Fourier transformed picture from Louvre.
Probability : 15%.
Upvoted for underconfidence; there are a lot of bases you can use.
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
and
My 15% belief is closer to the second version.
Any blob (continuous, smooth, rapidly decreasing function) in momentum space corresponds to a blob in position space. That is, you can't get structure in one without structure in the other.
Irrationality Game
Prediction markets are a terrible way of aggregating probability estimates. They only enjoy the popularity they do because of a lack of competition, and because they're cheaper to set up due to the built-in incentive to participate. They do slightly worse than simply averaging a bunch of estimates, and would be blown out of the water by even a naive histocratic algorithm (weighted average based on past predictor performance using Bayes). The performance problems of prediction markets are not just due to liquidity issues, but would inevitably crop up in any prediction market system due to bubbles, panics, hedging, manipulation, and either overly simple or dangerously complex derivatives. 90%
Hanson and his followers are irrationally attached to prediction markets because they flatter libertarian sensibilities. 60%
Fantastic. Please tell me which markets this applies to and link to the source of the algorithm that gives me all the free money.
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.
Aren't prediction markets just a special case of financial markets? (Or vice versa.) Then if your algorithm could outperform prediction markets, it could also outperform the financial ones, where there is lots of money to be made.
In prediction markets, you are betting money on your probability estimates of various things X happening. On financial markets, you are betting money on your probability estimates of the same things X, plus your estimate of the effect of X on the prices of various stocks or commodities.
Down-voted for semi-agreement.
There are simply too many irrational people with money, and as soon as it became popular to participate in prediction markets, the way it currently is to participate in the stock market, they will add huge amounts of noise.
Markets can incorporate any source or type of information that humans can understand. Which algorithm can do the same?
A new word to me. Is this what you're referring to?
If you think Prediction Markets are terrible, why don't you just do better and get rich from them?
The case for atheistic reductionism is not a slam-dunk.
While atheistic reductionism is clearly simpler than any of the competing hypotheses, each added bit of complexity doubles the size of hypothesis space. Some of these additional hypotheses will be ruled out due to impossibility or inconsistency with observation, but that still leaves a huge number of possible hypotheses that each add take up a tiny amount of probability mass, but they add up.
I would give atheistic reductionism a ~30% probability of being true. (I would still assign specific human religions or a specific simulation scenario approximately zero probability.)
Assuming our MMS-prior uses a binary machine, the probability of any single hypothesis of complexity C=X is equal to the total probabilities of all hypotheses of complexity C>X.
There is no dark matter. Gravity behaves weirdly for some other reason we haven't discovered yet. (85%)
Many such "modified gravity" theories have been proposed. The best known is "MOND", "Modified Newtonian Dynamics".
MWI is unlikely because it is too unparsimonious (not very confident).