There's a discussion post that mentions the fundraiser here, along with other news: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/o0d/miri_ama_plus_updates/

I see. It seemed to me that it was about the experimental method which did not fit to a mathematical statement. I understand the possibility of being mistaken. I was mistaken many times, I am not sure with some proofs and I know some persuasive fake proofs... Despite this, I am not very convinced that I should do such things with my probability estimates. After all, it is just an estimate. Moreover it is a bit self-referencing when the estimate uses a more complicated formula then the statement itself. If I say that I am 1-sure, that 1 is not 1/2, it is safe, isn't it? :-D Well, it does not matter :-) I think that I got the point, "I know that I know nothing" is a well known quote.

Yeah, this article seems overly harsh on the "restrainists." After all, their assumption could have started from the empirical observation that many species have reproductive strategies that do not emphasize "as many as possible." Humans, elephants, and Lions have few offspring per reproductive cycle relative to spiders and frogs. Clearly SOMETHING is restraining their reproductive rate and promoting a high investment strategy.

Even so, it was probably very improbable, considered in an isolated event—but it only had to happen once, and there were a lot of tide pools.

isn't it more likely that the "first replicator" was not a single event, but that it started multiple times and failed to survive in the vast majority of cases?

You forgot about MetaOmega, who gives you $10,000 if and only if No-mega wouldn't have given you anything, and O-mega, who kills your family unless you're an Alphabetic Decision Theorist. This comment doesn't seem specifically anti-UDT -- after all, Omega and No-mega are approximately equally likely to exist; a ratio of 1:1 if not an actual p of .5 -- but it still has the ring of Just Cheating. Admittedly, I don't have any formal way of telling the difference between decision problems that feel more or less legitimate, but I think part of the answer might be that the Counterfactual Mugging isn't really about how to act around superintelligences: It illustrates a more general need to condition our decisions based on counterfactuals, and as EY pointed out, UDT still wins the No-mega problem if you know about No-mega, so whether or not we should subscribe to some decision theory isn't all that dependent on which superintelligences we encounter.

I'm necroing pretty hard and might be assuming too much about what Caspian originally meant, so the above is more me working this out for myself than anything else. But if anyone can explain why the No-mega problem feels like cheating to me, that would be appreciated.

It's bleen, without a moment's doubt.

"Policy debates should not appear one-sided" doesn't in this case give credence to the idea that a world with suffering implies the possibility of the God. Quite the opposite. That is a post-hoc justification for what should be seen as evidence to lower the probability of "belief in just and benevolent God." This is analogous to EY's example of the absence of sabotage being used as justification for the concentration camps in "Conservation of Expected Evidence"

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I think this answer contains something important--

Not so much an answer to the problem, but a clue to the reason WHY we intuitively, as humans, know to respond in a way which seems un-mathematical.

It seems like a Game Theory problem to me. Here, we're calling the opponents' bluff. If we make the decision that SEEMINGLY MAXIMIZES OUR UTILITY, according to game theory we're set up for a world of hurt in terms of indefinite situations where we can be taken advantage of. Game Theory already contains lots of situations where reasons exist to take action that seemingly does not maximize your own utility.

and they don't understand that there has never been a common ancestor of all and only the monkeys

This fact though -- that monkeys are paraphyletic -- argues in favour of (not against) the view that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was itself monkey-like...

If you think about when the "ape traits" must have evolved, it would be after the new-world monkeys had already diverged away. The common ancestor of monkeys and apes wouldn't have had them, but must have had those traits common to both old and new-world monkeys. It itself has to be basically a monkey.

(I drew out a phylogenetic tree for this but couldn't get it to format, alas...)

To be honest, your comments confuse me. I knew about the link but I didn't see a connection between the link and experimental method and where the citations in the link came from. I am not sure what you mean by "anything like that" in your last comment and I am not very interested in it.

But I prefer to keep the original problem: If looking up a result in a math book could count as an experiment what is the (broader) definition of an experiment, then?

I don't think you've responded to my linked comment. But OK, looking up a result in a math book could count as an experiment, as could any method by which you might learn about dyslexia or whatever you suspect might be confusing you. If you don't believe anything like that could happen to you, either you made that judgement based on experience and science or you are very badly misguided.

(I think this may have came across a bit more confrontational than was optimal)

((Also, on that note, mirefek, if I came across as more confrontational than seemed appropriate, apologies.))

Please, be more specific. I am not sure exactly what are you responding to. Do you mean that a math proof (or knowledge of it) can be considered as experimental method in some sense?

Replace quarks by whatever fundamental thing reality is made of.

That's the kicker, isn't it. We'd like to be able to look at an arbitrary model of the world, and see if it has any observers in it who might experience "hands".

Ahem. I can think of many ways that some broadly defined "experimental method" could come into play there.

I think that I got the point, "I know that I know nothing" is a well known quote.

It's actually a somewhat different point he's trying to make (it's spaced out over several blogposts) - the idea is not to say "all knowledge is fallible." You should be very confident in math proofs that have been well vetted. It's useful to have a sense of how certain your knowledge is. (like, could you make 100 similar statements without being wrong once? 1,000? 10,000?)

(i.e. "the sun will rise tomorrow" is a probability, not a certainty, and "Ghosts could be real" is a probability, not a certainty, but they are very different probabilities.)

If you're interested, I do recommend the sequences in more detail - a lot of their points build on each other. (For example, there are multiple other posts that argue about what it's useful to think in probabilities, and how to apply that to other things).

He is saying that things that are not actual, yet "possible", are exactly the same, as far as the universe is concerned, as things that are not actual and not "possible". Specifically, they are all nonexistent. Hence possibility is not fundamental in any ontological sense.

But the laws of the universe demarcate possible things from impossible things: so can you dismiss the reality of possibilities without dismissing the reality of laws?

The point was less about the physical world applications of 2+2=4, and more about the fact that any belief you have is ultimately based on the evidence you've encountered. In the case of purely theoretical proofs, it's still based on your subjective experience of having read and understood the proofs.

Humans are sometimes literally insane (for example, not being able to tell that they're missing an arm). Also, even the best of us sometimes misunderstand or misremember things. So you need to leave probability mass for having misunderstood the proof in the first place.

(The followup to this post is this one: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mo/infinite_certainty/ which addresses this in some more detail)

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