Other Media Thread

Fair enough. This looks very familiar though. Isn't there a sequence article on this topic?

Sure, you can model music composition as a RL task. The AI composes a song, then predicts how much a human will like it. It then tries to produce songs that are more and more likely to be liked.

Another interesting thing that alphago did, was start by predicting what moves a human would make. Then it switched to reinforcement learning. So for a music AI, you would start with one that can predict the next note in a song. Then you switch to RL, and adjust it's predictions so that it is more likely to produce songs humans like, and less likely to produce ones we don't like.

However automated composition is something that a lot of people have experimented with before. So far there is nothing that works really well.

TV and Movies (Animation) Thread

I am confused a lot about this, so maybe what I write here doesn't make sense at all.

I'm trying to take a "timeless view" instead of taking time as something granted that keeps flowing linearly. Why? Essentially, because if you just take time as something that keeps flowing linearly, then in most Everett branches you die, end of story. Taking about "quantum immortality" already means picking selectively the moments in time-space-branches where you exist. So I feel like perhaps we need to pick randomly from all such moments, not merely from the moments in the future.

To simplify the situation, let's assume a simpler universe -- not the one we live in, but the one we once believed we lived in -- a universe without branches, with a single timeline. Suppose this classical universe is deterministic, and that at some moment you die.

The first-person view of your life in the classical universe would be "you are born, you live for a few years, then you die, end of story". The third-person / timeless / god's view would be "here is a timeline of your person-moments; within those moments you live, outside of them you don't". The god could watch your life as a movie in random order, because every sequence would make sense, it would follow the laws of physics and every person-moment would be surrounded by your experience.

From god's point of view, it could make sense to take a random person-moment of your life, and examine what you experience there. Random choice always needs some metric over the set we choose from, but with a single timeline this is simple: just give each time interval the same weight. For example, if you live 80 years, and spend 20 years in education, it would make sense to say "if we pick a random moment of your life, with probability 25% you are in education at that moment".

(Because that's the topic I am interested in: how does a typical random moment look like.)

Okay, now instead of the classical universe let's think about a straw-quantum universe, where the universe only splits when you flip the magical quantum coin, otherwise it remains classical. (Yes, this is complete bullshit. A simple model to explain what I mean.) Let's assume that you live 80 years, and when you are 40, you flip the coin and make an important decision based on the outcome, that will dramatically change your life. You during the first 40 years you only had one history, and during the second 40 years, you had two histories. In first-person view, it was 80 years either way, 1/2 the first half, 1/2 the second half.

Now let's again try the god's view. The god sees your life as a movie containing together 120 years; 40 years of the first half, and 2× 40 years of the second half. If the god is trying to pick a random moment in your life, does it mean she is twice as likely to pick a moment from your second half than from your first half? -- This is only my intuition speaking, but I believe that this would be a wrong metric. In a correct metric, when the god chooses a "random moment of your life", it should have 50% probability to be before you flipped the magical coin, and 50% probability after your flipped the magical coins. As if somehow having two second halves of your life only made each of them half as thick.

Now a variation of the straw-quantum model, where after 40 years you flip a magical coin, and depending on the outcome you either die immediately, or live for another 40 years. In this situation I believe from the god's view, a random moment of your life has 2/3 probability to be during the first 40 years, and 1/3 during the second 40 years.

If you agree with this, then the real quantum universe is the same thing, except that branching happens all the time, and there are zillions of the most crazy branches. (And I am ignoring the problem of defining what exactly means "you", especially in some sufficiently weird branches.) It could be, from god's point of view, that although in some tiny branches you life forever, still a typical random you-moment would be e.g. during your first 70 years (or whatever is the average lifespan in your reference group).

And... this is quite a confusing part here... I suspect that in some sense the god's view may be the correct way to look at oneself, especially when thinking about antropic problems. That the typical random you-moment, as seen by the god, is the typical experience you have. So despite the "quantum immortality" being real, if the typical random you-moment happens in the ordinary boring places, within the 80 years after your birth, with a sufficiently high probability, then you will simply subjectively not experience the "quantum immortality". Because in a typical moment of life, you are not there yet. But you will... kinda... never be there, because the typical moment of your life is what is real. You will always be in a situation where you are potentially immortal, but in reality too young to perceive any benefits from that.

In other words, if someone asks "so, if I attach myself to a perfectly safe quantum-suicide machine that will immediately kill me unless I win the lottery, and then I turn it on, what will be my typical subjective experience?" then the completely disappointing (but potentially correct) answer is: "your typical subjective experience will always be that you didn't do the experiment yet". Instead of enjoying the winnings of the lottery, you (from the god's perspective, which is potentially the correct one) will only experience getting ready to do the experiment, not the outcomes of it. If you are the kind of person who would seriously perform such experiment, from your subjective point of view, the moment of the experiment is always in the future. (It doesn't mean you can never do it. If you want, you can try it tomorrow. It only means that the tomorrow is always tomorrow, never yesterday.)

Or, using the Nietzsche's metaphor of "eternal recurrence", whenever you perfom the quantum-suicide experiment, your life will restart. Thus your life will only include the moments before the experiment, not after.

For the "spontaneous" version of the experiment, you are simply more likely to be young than old, and you will never be thousand years old. Not necessarily because there is any specific line you could not cross, but simply because in a typical moment of your life, you are not thousand years old yet. (From god's point of view, your thousand-years-old-moments are so rare, that they are practically never picked at random, therefore your typical subjective experience is not being thousand years old.)

Of course on a larger scale (god sees all those alternative histories and alternative universes where life itself never happened), your subjective measure is almost zero. But that's okay, because the important things are ratios of your subjective experience. I'm just thinking that comparing "different you-moments thousand years in the future" is somehow a wrong operation, something that doesn't cut the possibility-space naturally; and that the natural operation would be comparing "different you-moments" regardless of the time, because from the timeless view there is nothing special about "the time thousand years from now".

Or maybe this is all completely wrong...

Meta note before actual content: I've been noticing of late how many comments on LW, including my own, are nitpicks or small criticisms. Contrarianism is probably the root of why our kind can't cooperate, and maybe even the reason so many people lurk and don't post. So, let me preface this by thanking you for the post, and saying that I'm sharing this just as an FYI and not as a critique. This certainly isn't a knock-down argument against anything you've said. Just something I thought was interesting, and might be helpful to keep in mind. :)

Clearly it was a moral error to assume that blacks had less moral weight than whites. The animal rights movement is basically just trying to make sure we don't repeat this mistake with non-human animals. (Hence the use of terms like "speciesism".) You use a couple reductio ad absurdum arguments with bacteria and video game characters, but it’s not entirely clear that we aren’t just socially biased there too. If the absurd turns out to be true, then the reductio ad absurdum fails. These arguments are valid ways of concluding "if A than B", but keep in mind that A isn't 100% certain.

There are actually some surprisingly intelligent arguments that insects, bacteria, some types of video game characters, and even fundamental particles might have non-zero moral weight. The question is what probability one gives to those propositions turning out to be true. IF one has reviewed the relevant arguments, and assigns them infinitesimally small credence, THEN one can safely apply the reductio ad absurdum. IF certain simple algorithms have no moral weight and the algorithms behind human brains have high moral weight, THEN algorithms almost as simple are unlikely to have whatever property gives humans value, while complex algorithms (like those running in dolphin brains) might still have intrinsic value.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

TV and Movies (Animation) Thread

What is the optimal amount of attention to pay to political news? I've been trying to cut down to reduce stress over things I can't control, but ignoring it entirely seems a little dangerous. For an extreme example, consider the Jews in Nazi Germany - I'd imagine those who kept an eye on what was going on were more likely to leave the country before the Holocaust. Of course something that bad is unlikely, but it seems like it could still be important to be aware of impactful new laws that are passed - eg anti-privacy laws, or internet piracy now much more heavily punishable, etc.

So what's the best way to keep up on things that might have an impact on one's life, without getting caught up in the back-and-forth of day-to-day politics?

Do you know how much more there is to go? We're still waiting for the prequel movie, right?