Many of them render considering them not true pointless, in the sense all my reasoning and senses are invalid if they don't hold so I might as well give up and save computing time by conditioning on them being true.

I call these sorts of models sticky, in the sense that they are pervasive in our perception and categorisation. Sitcky categories are the sort of thing that we have a hard time not taking literally. I haven't gone into any of this yet, of course, but I like it when comments anticipate ideas and continue trains of thought.

Maybe a short run-long run model would be good to illustrate this stickiness. In the short run, perception is fixed; this also fixes certain categories, and the "degree of stickiness" that different categories have. For example, chair is remarkably hard to get rid of, whereas "corpuscle" isn't quite as sticky. In the long run, when perception is free, no category needs to be sticky. At least, not unless we come up with a more restrictive model of possible perceptions. I don't think that such a restrictive model would be appropriate in a background epistemology. That's something that agents will develop for themselves based on their needs and perceptual experience.

Many of them are directly implemented in physical systems

Different mathematical models of human perceptual experience might be perfectly suitable for the same purpose.. Physics should be the clearest example, since we have undergone many different changes of mathematical models, and are currently experiencing a plurality of theories with different mathematics in cosmology. The differences between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics should in particular show this nicely: different formalisms, but very good models of a large class of experiences.

you cant have one of them without ALL the others.

I think you slightly underestimate the versatility of mathematicians in making their systems work despite malfunctions. For instance, even if ZFC were proved inconsistent (as Edward Nelson hopes to do), we would not have to abandon it as a foundation. Set theorists would just do some hocus pocus involving ordinals, and voila! all would be well. And there are several alternative formulations of arithmetic, analysis, topology, etc. which are all adequate for most purposes.

You might try to imagine an universe without math.

In the case of some math, this is easy to do. In other cases it is not. This is because we don't experience the freefloating perceptual long term, not because certain models are necessary for all possible agents and perceptual content.

Link?

The cause of me believing math is not "it's true in every possible case", because I can't directly observe that. Nor is it "have been applied successfully in many cases so far".

Basically it's "maths says it's true" where maths is an interlocking system of many subsystems. MANY of these have been applied successfully in many cases so far. Many of them render considering them not true pointless, in the sense all my reasoning and senses are invalid if they don't hold so I might as well give up and save computing time by conditioning on them being true. Some of them are in implicit in every single frame of my input stream. Many of them are used by my cognition, and if I consistently didn't condition on them being true I'd have been unable to read your post or write this reply. Many of them are directly implemented in physical systems around me, which would cease to function if they failed to hold in even one of the billions and billions of uses. Most importantly, many of them claim that several of the others must always be true of they themselves are not, and while gödelian stuff means this can't QUITE form a perfect loop in the strongest sense, the fact remains that if any of them fell ALL the others would follow like a house of cards; you cant have one of them without ALL the others.

You might try to imagine an universe without math. And there are some pieces of math that might be isolated and in some sense work without the others. But there is a HUGE core of things that cant work without each other, nor without all those outlying pieces, at all even slightly. So your universe couldn't have geometry, computation, discrete objects that can be moved between "piles", anything resembling fluid dynamics, etc. Not much of an universe, nor much sensical imaginability, AND it would be necessity be possible to simulate in an universe that does have all the maths so in some sense it still wouldn't be "breaking" the laws.

I'm not sure speed alone, by itself, is a solution. If you speed down a game by, say, 70% there would probably be no difference than if you sped it down by 90%, since there's a limit to what the character can do in a given second. Mario, for instance, once you jump, there's not much to do until he actually lands.

Suppose the same would happen if we had the capability to speed down time in our actual lives. Sure you could dodge bullets and win F1 races from time to time, but the actual day-to-day tasks, that take the majority of our time wouldn't be improved much. If you need to eat lunch, eating it in an optimal way won't give you much advantage in comparison to regular people that don't take the fork to their mouths following a perfect parabola.

There's a nice conventional categorisation of behaviour modification programmes that goes like this:

Fixed-ratio: a reward is given after a fixed number of nonreinforced responses (e.g. an M&M after every pomodoro, or even fifth pomodoro). Fixed-interval: a reward is given after a fixed interval of time (e.g. you might always set the pomodoro for 25 minutes as per convention). Variable-ratio: a reward is given after a variable number of nonreinforced responses (e.g. you flip a coin after every pomodoro to decide whether you get an M&M). Variable-interval: a reward is given after a variable time interval (i.e. you find some way to determine how long to set the pomodoro, perhaps with a lower bound).

The schedule of reinforcement you're using is left a bit vague. It looks like you're following an FR schedule but could also be doing an FI or VI schedule. But for the purposes of offering advice to people who might want to try something like this, I'll assume you're using either FR or FI.

Psychologists categorise schedules in that way because they want to study the effects of differences in reinforcement. In particular they've been interested in the effects of changes in schedules on the extinction of a behaviour. One major result from the literature (which is reported in most psych textbooks that include a chapter on learning theories) is that variable schedules (using either ratios of respondes or time intervals) are much more resistant to extinction than fixed schedules. As an example, consider a slot machine at a casino; it doesn't have a fixed ratio of 1 reward for every nth try. Instead it varies the ratio of attempts and rewarded attempts, taking advantage of the much stronger reinforcement effect.

So my first piece of advice is: do not use fixed schedules. Varying the rate of reinforcement (either as a function of time or number of completed pomodoros) will help make the good habit you're trying to build stick if your pomodoros use is ever disrupted (because you're busy, you somehow forget, or whatever).

Another result from the literature is that ratio schedules produce higher response rates. This occurs because faster responding increases the likelihood of being reward sooner, since ratio schedules don't depend on time but on attempts. In many situations you might want to take advantage of this and opt for a VR schedule (say if you wanted to encourage a child to behave). In this case, though, it would probably only lead to extinction or abuses. Extinction because if your time intervals are somewhat long (say around 30-60 minutes), then the rewards might be given too infrequently to build your motivation and give you energy. Abuses because the big spaces between rewards might encourage you to cheat the system and eat some M&Ms anyhow because you want the energy.

That leads me to my second bit of advice: don't use a VR schedule; instead vary the time interval. I suggest finding some way to randomise the selection (like rolling dice, throwing darts, or having an algorithm spit out a number) and putting a lower bound on the time intervals (to give yourself enough time to build some flow and focus).

Wish I could upvote this 1000 times. This will probably do far more for this site than 1000 articles of mere content. Certainly, it will for my enjoyment and understanding.

Huh. Okay, I'm pretty sure I have an actual memory of inventing this, though I was hesitant about saying so. But I also remember inventing it at a fairly recent MIRI workshop, while the term clearly dates back to at least 2012. Maybe I saw and subconsciously remembered, or maybe "Cake or Death" is just the obvious thing to call utility alternatives.

Funny, I always thought it was the other way around... consequentialism is useful on the tactical level once you've decided what a "good outcome" is, but on the meta-level, trying to figure out what a good outcome is, you get into questions that you need the help of virtue ethics or something similar to puzzle through. Questions like "is it better to be alive and suffering or to be dead", or "is causing a human pain worse than causing a pig pain", or "when does it become wrong to abort a fetus", or even "is there good or bad at all?"

The obvious things to do here is either:

a) Make a list/plan on paper, abstractly, of what you WOULD do is you had terminal goals, using your existing virtues to motive this act, and then have "Do what the list tells me to" as a loyalty-like high priority virtue. If you have another rationalist you really trust, and who have a very strong honesty commitment, you can even outsource the making of this list.

b) Assemble virtues that sum up to the same behaviors in practice; truth seeking, goodness, and "If something is worth doing it's worth doing optimally" is a good trio, and will have the end result of effective altruism while still running on the native system.

I suspect that calling your utility function itself into question like that isn't valid in terms of expected utility calculations.

I think what you're suggesting is that on top of our utility function we have some sort of meta-utility function that just says "maximize your utility function, whatever it is." That would fall into your uncertainty trap, but I don't think that is the case, I don't think we have a meta-function like that, I think we just have our utility function.

If you were allowed to cast your entire utility function into doubt you would be completely paralyzed. How do you know you don't have an unbounded utility function for paperclips? How do you know you don't have an unbounded utility function for, and assign infinite utility to, the universe being exactly the way it would be if you never made a fully rational decision again and just went around your life on autopilot? The end result is that there are a number of possible courses of action that would all generate infinity utility and no way to choose between them because infinity=infinity. The only reason your argument sounds logical is because you are allowing the questioning of the boundedness of the utility function, but not its contents.

I think that knowledge of your utility function is probably a basic, prerational thing, like deciding to use expected utility maximization and Bayesian updating in the first place. Attempting to insert your utility function itself into your calculations seems like a basic logical error.