Link: Counterintuitive Counterfactual Strategies Overview: Over the weekend, I was thinking about the variant of Newcomb's Paradox where both boxes are transparent. The one where, unless you precommit to taking a visibly empty box instead of both boxes, omega can self-consistently give you less money. I was wondering if I...
A post about how, for some causal models, causal relationships can be inferred without doing experiments that control one of the random variables. If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does? > To help address problems like the two example problems just discussed, Pearl introduced a causal calculus. In the...
In the post Complexity and Intelligence, Eliezer says that the Kolmogorov Complexity (length of shortest equivalent computer program) of the laws of physics is about 500 bits: > Suppose you ran a Turing machine with unlimited tape, so that, starting from our laws of physics, it simulated our whole universe...
Rot13: Svfure–Farqrpbe qvfgevohgvba
Why would you assume that? That's like saying by the time we can manufacture a better engine we'll be able to replace a running one with the new design.
For example, evolution has optimized and delivered a mechanism for turning gene edits in a fertilized egg into a developed brain. It has not done the same for incorporating after-the-fact edits into an existing brain. So in the adult case we have to do an extra giga-evolve-years of optimization before it works.
Could you convert the tables into graphs, please? It's much harder to see trends in lists of numbers.
Another possible hypothesis could be satiation. When I first read wikipedia, it dragged me into hours long recursive article reading. Over time I've read more and more of the articles I find interesting, so any given article links to fewer unread interesting articles. Wikipedia has essentially developed a herd immunity against me. Maybe that pattern holds over the population, with the dwindling infectiousness overcoming new readers?
On second thought, I'm not sure that works at all. I guess you could check the historical probability of following to another article.
"reality is a projection of our minds and magic is ways to concentrate and focus the mind" is too non-reductionist of an explanation. It moves the mystery inside another mystery, instead of actually explaining it.
For example: in this universe minds seem to be made out of brains. But if reality is just a projection of minds, then... brains are made out of minds? So minds are made out of minds? So where does the process hit bottom? Or are we saying existence is just a fractal of minds made out of minds made out of minds all the way down?
Hm, my take-away from the end of the chapter was a sad feeling that Quirrel simply failed at or lied about getting both houses to win.
The 2014 LW survey results mentioned something about being consistent with a finger-length/feminism connection. Maybe that counts?
Some diseases impact both reasoning and appearance. Gender impacts both appearance and behavior. You clearly get some information from appearance, but it's going to be noisy and less useful than what you'd get by just asking a few questions.
There's a radiolab episode about blame that glances this subject. They talk about, for example, people with brain damage not being blamed for their crimes (because they "didn't have a choice"). They also have a guest trying to explain why legal punishment should be based on modelling probabilities of recidivism. One of the hosts usually plays (is?) the "there is cosmic blame/justice/choice" position you're describing.
Well, yeah. The particular case I had in mind was exploiting partial+ordered transfiguration to lobotomize/brain-acid the death eaters, and I grant that that has practical problems.
But I found myself thinking about using patronus and other complicated things to take down LV after, instead of exploiting weak spells being made effective by the resonance. So I put the idea out there.
If I may quote from my post:
Assuming you can take down the death eaters, I think the correct follow-up
and:
LV is way up high, too far away to have good accuracy with a hand gun.
Counterintuitive Counterfactual Strategies
Over the weekend, I was thinking about the variant of Newcomb's Paradox where both boxes are transparent. The one where, unless you precommit to taking a visibly empty box instead of both boxes, omega can self-consistently give you less money.
I was wondering if I could make this kind of "sacrifice yourself for yourself" situation happen without involving a predictor guessing your choice before you made it. Turns out you can.
A post about how, for some causal models, causal relationships can be inferred without doing experiments that control one of the random variables.
If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?
To help address problems like the two example problems just discussed, Pearl introduced a causal calculus. In the remainder of this post, I will explain the rules of the causal calculus, and use them to analyse the smoking-cancer connection. We’ll see that even without doing a randomized controlled experiment it’s possible (with the aid of some reasonable assumptions) to infer what the outcome of a randomized controlled experiment would have been, using only relatively easily accessible experimental data, data that doesn’t require experimental intervention to force people to smoke or not, but which can be obtained from purely observational studies.
In the post Complexity and Intelligence, Eliezer says that the Kolmogorov Complexity (length of shortest equivalent computer program) of the laws of physics is about 500 bits:
Suppose you ran a Turing machine with unlimited tape, so that, starting from our laws of physics, it simulated our whole universe - not just the region of space we see around us, but all regions of space and all quantum branches. [...]
Then the "Kolmogorov complexity" of that entire universe [...] would be 500 bits, or whatever the size of the true laws of physics when written out as equations on a sheet of paper.
Where did this 500 come from?
I googled around for estimates on the... (read more)
I like this quote by Stephen Hawking from one of his answers: