Rationality Quotes February 2014

A1987dM

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

there's nothing that makes the existing universe special among all mathematically possible universe other than the fact that we're in it.

N.B. This assertion seems pretty falsifiable. If the laws of physics turn out to be particularly simple then we'll be forced to conclude that the universe is special.

I think you've got it backwards; if you picked at random a universe among all mathematically possible ones with probabilities proportional to (number of sentient beings in it)*2^-(Kolmogorov complexity) (i.e. SIA+Solomonoff induction), you'd most likely get a universe barely as complex as needed for sentience. If on the other hand the laws of physics turned out to be much more complex than that...

(Or at least that's what I thought right after reading Good and Real. But it looks like the sum (number of sentient beings in it)*2^-(Kolmogorov complexity) might not even converge.)

2roystgnr12y

And, wait for it... (no, seriously, wait 5 seconds for it) the laws of physics did turn out to be particularly simple. In the 5 seconds you were waiting, did the air wafting around the room obey Navier-Stokes, or Navier-Stokes+a-dragon-randomly-appears? Both of those are fine, formalizable mathematical rules; one just happens to be much much simpler than the other. And because the observed laws of physics are so particularly simple, they are dwarfed in number by mathematically possible more complex laws that we never observe. Choose between "Navier-Stokes" and "Navier-Stokes+dragon-after-half-a-second" and "Navier-Stokes+dragon-after-a-quarter-second" and so on; why do you expect to see the former rule rather than any of the infinite collection of latter rules? Without some kind of special privileged probability measure, we have no reason to expect to be in such a special universe, but here we are.

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Rationality Quotes February 2014

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Rationality Quotes February 2014

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