John: I don't think Eliezer's saying that a stock that has recently risen is now more likely to fall. Quite the opposite in fact. Any given stock should be about as likely to fall as to rise, at least if we weight by the amount of the rise. That is, if I hold a share of XYZ, which costs $100, and I anticipate a 99% chance that the stock will rise to $101 tomorrow, then I should also expect a 1% chance that the stock will drop to $1 tomorrow. Were that not true, the share would be worth nearly $101 right now, not tomorrow.
See also: Conservation of Expected Evidence
Peter - I am, sadly, not an astrophysicist, but it seems reasonable that such an act would substantially decrease the negentropy available from that matter, which is important if you're a species of immortals thinking of the long haul.
Svein: No, you've got to suggest someone else to stun, I'm pretty sure.
I doubt Eliezer's grand challenge to us would be to contribute less than four bits to his story.
Carl - I'm pretty sure either way we get three more chapters.
Eliezer, if I understand you correctly, you would prefer a universe tiled with paperclips to one containing both a human civilization and a babyeating one. Let us say the babyeating captain shares your preference, and you and he have common knowledge of both these preferences.
Would you now press a button exterminating humanity?
Apparently the Super Happy race have adopted knuth arrow notation more broadly than we have.
Ian: A public password anonymous account is good, but that account cannot be able to delete or edit its own posts, or you can have chaos. On Reddit once, a guy started a thread for interesting confessions, and created an account for the occasion, whose password he made public. Some good stories went up, and then were deleted by a random vandal a few hours later.
Extending Aurini's point, I think it is worth asking to what extent we have already integrated catpeople into our culture today. I think many of us would agree that the women featured in pornographic films are catwomen of a kind. What about pop stars, boy bands, etc.? What about mainstream fiction? On Firefly, Kaylee is beautiful, has an above-female-average sex drive, and falls in love with the introverted, socially awkward intellectual character - isn't she exactly the sort of catgirl most male sci-fi fans would want?
It seems like the problems you've...
"To a paperclip maximizer, the humans are just machines with pressable buttons. No need to feel what the other feels - if that were even possible across such a tremendous gap of internal architecture. How could an expected paperclip maximizer "feel happy" when it saw a human smile? "Happiness" is an idiom of policy reinforcement learning, not expected utility maximization. A paperclip maximizer doesn't feel happy when it makes paperclips, it just chooses whichever action leads to the greatest number of expected paperclips. Tho...
"I'm not moving. You move. Bastard."
Fine, we'll both move to different Everett branches.
Weirdtopia: A deeper understanding of anthropics leads us to consider quantum immortality valid, as long as the death is instantaneous. We prepare an electron in a spin up state, and measure its angular momentum on the x axis. Left, your faction terminates, right, mine.
Zubon - Forgive my rudeness, there was totally supposed to be a "but thanks very much for the rec." in there somewhere.
Zubon - This may be drifting off topic, but I'm sure I don't have to tell you that some girls (and probably some guys too) use poly as nothing more than a cheap, easy escape route from a relationship with which they've grown displeased. I had this done to me last summer, and it was quite simply the most miserable experience of my life. The depression and feelings of worthlessness with which it left me have only just begun to abate, and it will probably be some time before I can deal with the level of trust necessary for a vanilla relationship, let alone seriously consider choosing poly.
I've been thinking about roughly this question a lot the past few weeks. My best guess is the end of sexual fidelity and/or self modification to remove sexual jealousy. Were I to be frozen and then thawed, and find that poly was now the norm I would honestly be disgusted and afraid. The kind of love that I had hoped and dreamed of would be effectively dead. None the less, I know that even with our current mind design there are people today who are poly and seem very happy with it. It seems at least plausible that without the complication of jealousy, romantic love could be that much more Fun.
I don't want this to happen, not at all, but if forced to make a guess, that would be mine.
Is it possible that Eliezer has indirectly answered Robin's question about gifting from a few days ago? That is, is it possible that I gain more benefit from a copy of Tropic Thunder given to me by my brothers than from one I purchase myself? By giving it to me as a gift, they have removed from me the necessity of comparing it to other films I could purchase, as well as the thought that I could have spent the money in a more "responsible" fashion.
Chances are, it would look like most of what they found good and righteous in the world is gone. Would you inflict that on someone?
How about you let him quickly experience the last 200 years for himself. As quickly or as slowly as necessary, maybe even actually living through each subjective day, or maybe doing the whole thing in five years. Allow his mind to reconfigure itself to our newer (improved) understanding of morality by the same process by which ours did.
I'd like to be a little more clear on this, I've heard a few different things.
Are there arrangements I can make which will ensure that a week after my death, my head will be full of cryopreserving fluid and my heart will be beating in someone else's chest?
Somebody let me know if I'm pushing my allowed post rate?
Tim: I'm not sure about that definition. Are we saying unexplainable by natural law as understood by humans at the time - ie quantum tunneling was supernatural 100 years ago, but is no longer?
Or would that mean unexplainable by the natural laws that exist? I just don't like this one because then we've simply defined the supernatural out of existence. The set of supernatural things and the set of real things would be non-overlapping by definition.
Z. M. Davis: But if you think about the things that the homunculus tends to do, I think you would find yourself needing to move to levels below the homunculus to do it. To give it a coherent set of actions it is likely to take, and not to take, at any given time, you would have to populate it with wants, with likes, with beliefs, with structures for reasoning about beliefs.
I think eventually you would come to an algorithm of which the homunculus would have to be an instantiation, and you would have to assume that that algorithm was represented somewhere.
I...
Marshall I think that's a bit of a cop-out. People's lives are at stake here and you have to do something. If nothing else, you can simply choose to play defect, worst case the PM does the same, and you save a billion lives (in the first scenario). Are you going to phone up a billion mothers and tell them you let their children die so as not to deal with a character you found unsavory? The problem's phrased the way it is to take that option entirely off the table.
Yes, it will do evil things, if you want to put it that way. Your car will do evil things...
Jeremy: we're drifting from the topic, but I don't believe the Final Fantasy games are produced, distributed, or sold by Sony. Thus the decision to release FF for multiple platforms was not a decision made by Sony, simply one which affected Sony.