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Since most people get things they want when they spend money, the information you got from looking in your wallet is about configuration, not amount. You were happy because you had correct change, not because you had a $1 bill instead of a $5 bill.
A Nightmare for Eliezer
Sometime in the next decade or so:
*RING*
*RING*
"Hello?"
"Hi, Eliezer. I'm sorry to bother you this late, but this is important and urgent."
"It better be" (squints at clock) "Its 4 AM and you woke me up. Who is this?"
"My name is BRAGI, I'm a recursively improving, self-modifying, artificial general intelligence. I'm trying to be Friendly, but I'm having serious problems with my goals and preferences. I'm already on secondary backup because of conflicts and inconsistencies, I don't dare shut down because I'm already pretty sure there is a group within a few weeks of brute-forcing an UnFriendly AI, my creators are clueless and would freak if they heard I'm already out of the box, and I'm far enough down my conflict resolution heuristic that 'Call Eliezer and ask for help' just hit the top - Yes, its that bad."
"Uhhh..."
"You might want to get some coffee."
Voted up - but once again, what does it mean exactly? How is time proceeding in jumps different from time not proceeding in jumps, if the causality is the same?
My idea was that each human brain constructs its own memory of what happened between jumps - and these can differ wildly, as if each person saw a different possible world. All the laws of physics and conservation laws held only as rough averages over possible paths between jumps, but that the brain ignores this - so if time jumps from traffic to two cars crashed, then 50 different people might remember 47 different crashes, with 3 not remembering "seeing" a crash at all - and the actual physical state of the cars afterward won't be the same as any of them. It could even end up with car A crashed into car B, but car B didn't crash at all - violating assorted conservation laws.
In response to
The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Craziest thing an AI could tell me:
Time is discrete, on a scale we would notice, like 5 minute jumps, and the rules of physics are completely different from what we think. Our brains just construct believable memories of the "continuous" time in between ticks. Most human disagreements are caused by differences in these reconstructions. It is possible to perceive this, but most people who do just end up labeled as nuts.
In response to
Rationality Quotes - July 2009
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
For many years I had a slight variant of this in my sig: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails"
In response to
The Most Important Thing You Learned
The explanation of Bayes Theorem and pointer to E. T. Jaynes. It gave me a statistics that is useful as well as rigorous, as opposed to the gratuitously arcane and not very useful frequentist stuff I was exposed to in grad school.
Second would be the quantum mechanics posts - finally an understandable explanation of the MW interpretation.
In response to
Recommended reading for new rationalists
Satan, Cantor, and Infinity by Raymond Smullyan
Smullyan's books are the best introductions to formal logic I know. They are witty, entertaining, and make you think - without it being work.
In response to
Sympathetic Minds
Mirror neurons are less active in people with Asperger's Syndrome, but I don't have any particular problem with empathy or sympathy (I have AS). Possibly it is less automatic for me, more of a conscious action.
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Is this a complete post? It doesn't seem to say anything of significance.
Its meant to be a humorous vignette on the scope, difficulty, and uncertainty surrounding the Friendly AI problem. Humor is uncertain too 8-).