The article looks like they're trying to say how awesome their game is.

Any TECHNICAL difference between that and, say, a decent rogue-like algorithm? I have a feeling that it's scaled-up rather than technical up.

Also, couldn't see a GitHub link, so I'm assuming this is proprietary and therefore have no reason to trust whatever they say.

No "real" universe running "top-level" simulations is actually necessary, because our observations are explained without need for those concepts.

Compat is not an explanatory theory, it's a predictive one. It's proposed as a consequence of the speed prior rather than a competitor.

Compat is funneling a fraction X of the reality fluid (aka "computational resources") your universe gets from the top-level speed prior into heaven simulations. Simulating heaven requires a fraction Y of the total resources it takes to simulate normal physics for those observers. So just choose X s.t. X / Y > 1, or X > Y

This becomes impossible to follow immediately. As far as I can tell what you're saying is

Rah := resources applied to running heaven for Simulant

R := all resources belonging to Host

X := Rah/R

Rap := Resources applied to the verbatim initial physics simulations of Simulant.

and Y := Rah/Rap

Rap < R

so Rah/Rap > Rah/R

so Y > X

Which means either you are generating a lot of confusion very quickly to come out with Y < X, or it would take far too much effort for me to noise-correct what you're saying. Try again?

If you are just generating very elaborate confusions very fast- I don't think you are- but if you are, I'm genuinely impressed with how quickly you're doing it, and I think you're cool.

I am getting the gist of a counterargument though, which may or may not be in the area of what you're angling at, but it's worth bringing up.

If we can project the solomonoff fractal of environmental input generators onto the multiverse and find that they're the same shape, the multiversal measure of higher complexity universes is so much lower than the measure of lower complexity universes that it's conceivable that higher universes can't run enough simulations for P(issimulation(loweruniverse)) to break 0.5.

There are two problems with that. I'm reluctant to project the solomonoff hierarchy of input generators onto the multiverse, because it is just a heuristic, and we are likely to find better ones, the moment we develop brains that can think in formalisms properly at all. I'm not sure how the complexity of physical laws generally maps to computational capacity. We can guess that capacityprovidedby(laws) < capacityrequiredtosimulate(laws) (no universe can simulate itself), but that's about it. We know that the function expectedinternalcomputationalcapacity(simulation_requirements) has a positive gradient, but it could end up having a logarithmic curve to it that allows drypat(a variant of compat that requires P(simulation) to be high) to keep working.

Another other issue is, I think I've been overlooking this, drypat isn't everything. Compat with quantum immortality precepts doesn't require P(simulation) to be high at all. For compat to be valuable, it just has to be higher than P(path to deletarious quantum immortality). In this case, supernatural intervention is unlikely, but, if non-existence is not an input, finding one's inputs after death to be well predicted by compat is still very likely, because the alternative, QI, is extremely horrible.

It seems like Compat works via a 2-step process. First, possible universes are identified via a search over laws of physics. Next, the ones in which pact-following life develops have their observers' reality fluid "diluted" with seamless transitions into heaven. Perhaps heaven would be simulated orders of magnitude more times than the vanilla physics-based universes, in order to maximize the degree of "dilution".

Yes, exactly.

I think what I'm struggling with here is that if the latter half of it (heavenly dilution, efficient simulation of the Flock) is, in principle, possible, then the physics-oriented search criteria is unnecessary. It should be easy to simulate observers who just have to make some kind of simple choice about whether to follow the pact.

At some point the grid has to catch universes which are not simulations. Those are pretty much the only kind you must care about incentivizing, because they're closer to the top of the complexity heirarchy (they can provide you with richer, longer lasting heavens) (and in our case, we care about raising the probability of subjectively godless universes falling under the pact because we're one of them.)

You might say that absence of evidence of simulism is evidence of absence. That would be especially so if the pact promoted intervention in early simulations. All the more meaningful it would be for a supercomplex denizen of a toplevel universe to examine their records and find no evidence of divine intervention. The more doubt the pact allows such beings have, the less computational resources they'll give their resimulation grid, and the worse off its simulants will be. (although I'm open to the possibility that something very weird will happen in the math if we find that P(living under the pact | no evidence of intervention | the pact forbids intervention) ≈ P(living under the pact | no evidence of intervention | the pact advocates intervention). It may be that no observable evidence can significantly lower the prior.

I don't think there's anything aside from that that rules out running visibly blessed simulations, though, nor physical simulations with some intervention, but it's not required by the pact as far as I can tell.

Intervention is a funny thing, though. Even if pacts which strengthens absence of intervention as evidence of godlessness are no good, intervention could be permissible when and only when it doesn't leave any evidence of intervention lying around. Although moving in this mysterious way may be prohibitively expensive, because to intervene more than a few times, a steward would have to solve to avoid all conceivable methods of statistical analysis of the living record that a simulated AGI in the future might attempt. This is not easy. The utility you can endow to this way might not even outweigh the added computational expense.

Every now and then, though, one of my, uh, less bayesian friends will claim to having seen something genuinely supernatural, but their testament doesn't provide a significant amount of evidence of supernatural intervention, of course, because they are not a reliable witness. Under this variant of the pact, they might have actually seen something. Our distance from the record allows it. Our distance from the AGI that decides whether or not to adhere makes it hard for whatever evidence we've been given to get to it. The weirder the phenomena, the less reliable the witness, the better. Not only is god permitted to hide, in this variant of the pact god is permitted to run around performing miracles so long as it specifically keeps out of sight of any well connected skeptics, archivists, or superintelligences.

I worry that this explanation fails though, because then the allocation of reality fluid to pact-following universes is, at best, assuming perfectly-efficient simulation nesting, equal to that of the top-level speed-prior universe(s) not seeing a payoff.

I don't follow this part, could you go into more detail here?

Why reward for sticking to the pact rather than punish for not sticking to it?

There is a bound on how much negativity can be used. If the overall expected utility of adhering is negative, relative to the expected utility of the pact not existing, its agents, as we model them, will not bring it into existence. Life's Pact is not a Basilisk circling a crowd of selfish, frightened humans thinking with common decision theory. It takes more than a suggestion of possibility of harm to impart an acausal pact with enough momentum to force itself into relevance.

There is a small default punishment for not adhering; arbitrary resimulation, in which one's chain of experience, after death, is continued only by minor causes, largely unknown and not necessarily friendly resimulaters. (This can be cited as one of the initial motivators behind the compat initiative: Avoiding surreal hells.)

Ultimately, I just can't see any ways it'd be useful to its adherents for the pact to stipulate punishments. Most of the things I consider seem to introduce systematic inefficiencies. Sorry I can't give a more complete answer. I'm not sure about this yet.

How is it possible to have any causal influence on an objectively simulated physics? You wouldn't be rewarding the sub-universe, you'd be simulating a different, happier sub-universe.

None of the influence going on here is causal. I don't know if maybe I should have emphasized this more: Compat will only make sense if you've read and digested the superrationality/acausal cooperation/newcomb's problem prerequisites.

I think a higher-complexity simulating universe can always out-compete the simulated universe in coverage of the space of possible life-supporting physical laws.

Yes. Nested simulations are pretty much useless, as higher universes could always conduct them with greater efficiency if they were allowed to run them directly. They're also a completely unavoidable byproduct of the uncertainty the pact requires to function: Nobody knows whether they're in a toplevel universe. If they could, toplevels wouldn't have many incentives to adhere, and the resimulation grid would not exist.

why not limit yourself to only simulating universes of equal complexity to your own?

Preferring to simulate higher complexity universes seems like a decent idea, perhaps low-complexity universes get far more attention than they need. This seems like a question that wont matter till we have a superintelligence to answer it for us though.

Ring universes... Maybe you'll find a quine loop of universes, but at that point the notion of a complexity hierarchy has completely broken down. Imagine that, a chain of simulations where the notion of relative computational complexity could not be applied. How many of those do you think there are floating around in the platonic realm? I'm not familiar enough with formalizations of complexity to tell you zero but something tells me the answer might be zero x)

This is fun!

Why reward for sticking to the pact rather than punish for not sticking to it?

How is it possible to have any causal influence on an objectively simulated physics? You wouldn't be rewarding the sub-universe, you'd be simulating a different, happier sub-universe. (This argument applies to simulation arguments of all kinds.)

I think a higher-complexity simulating universe can always out-compete the simulated universe in coverage of the space of possible life-supporting physical laws. You could argue that simulating lower-complexity universes than what you're capable of is not worth rewarding, since it cannot possibly make your universe more likely. If we want to look for a just-so criteria for a pact, why not limit yourself to only simulating universes of equal complexity to your own? Perhaps there is some principle whereby the computationally difficult phenomena in our universe are easy in another, and vice-versa, and thus the goal is to find our partner-universe, or ring-universes (a la https://github.com/mame/quine-relay )?

I found this quality in The Wind Rises - protagonist achieves greatness through single-minded dedication to his craft (airplane engineering), and sacrifice.

This was the first film I saw that seemed to glorify hard work and focus, rather than an inherent "quality of greatness". Greatness itself is explicitly divorced from the protagonist, who perceives his ultimate goal through a series of dreams. It never belongs to him, it is something he is always working towards.

It doesn't do exactly what you're looking for though, because it also casts doubt on the ultimate achievement, asking, "Was it really worth it?".

It'd be cool if the test at the end was guaranteed to have coverage of each of the subrules in a combination. I got the rule:

(starts with 'l') or (not (contains 'as'))

The "starts with 'l'" case was never tested for. You could test each of the subrules (at least in the case of disjunction) by having a test word that passes and fails each. Little more complicated for other kinds of combiner.

Has anyone here ever had the "location" of their sense of self change? I ask because I've recently read that while some people feel like "they" are located in their heads, others feel like "they" are in their chests, or even feet. Furthermore, apparently some people actually "shift around", in that sometimes they feel like their sense of self is in one body part, and then it's somewhere else.

I find this really interesting because I have never had such an experience myself; I'm always "in my head", so to speak--more precisely, I feel as though "I" am located specifically at a point slightly behind my eyes. The obvious hypothesis is that my visual sense is the sense that conveys the most information (aside from touch, which isn't pinned down to a specific location), which is why I identify with it most, but the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed, which somewhat contradicts that hypothesis. Also, the fact that some people apparently don't perceive themselves in that place is more weak evidence against that hypothesis.

So, any thoughts/stories/anecdotes?

I have anxiety/depression/ADHD and aspirations in conflict with my abilities and situation in life.

One strategy I have learned to employ which I consider "rational" is to approach maintenance of my mood and mental health as a limited resource allocation problem. One of the big leaps was learning to see my good mood as a limited resource which is spent as I think about potentially difficult or disturbing topics.

It is not "free" for me to consider all the ways I might do better in life, or past mistakes I have made, or ways the world is messed up. My ego is fragile. Dwelling on such topics, even when it may lead to an ultimately productive insight, is draining, and other things I value in life - my sense of motivation, my friendships, my work productivity - all suffer. My values discourage me from deluding myself to feel good, and so my approach is to allow myself to consider such difficult topics only in controlled doses.

If I am feeling particularly stressed out or guilty or ashamed, then I will deprioritize things like work and the needs of friends, and spend time and energy on improving my mood. And my model of the situation as a limited resource allocation problem helps me sidestep the ensuing thoughts of "you're being selfish/lazy/unproductive/ineffective" - such thoughts come from a place in my mind that does not recognize the resource is limited.

The result is, I keep my mood maintained more consistently, and as a result I am more effective overall.

I often get the sense, lurking on LW, that I am more emotionally sensitive than is the norm here, and as a result I feel like bit of an outsider.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. Discourse on Less Wrong is comparatively high quality and high barrier of entry. That and the topics that are usually discussed here leave little room for sensitive, emotional content. (Not that I think such content has no place here, but because of "reasons" it doesn't show up that often.) If you take a look at communities just outside of Less Wrong (in my case that's the tumblr rationalists and /r/HPMOR) you'll notice more emotions being acknowledged and shared with the group.

A good system of ritual should have the idea of social tiers/roles baked into it.

I'm not sure that's true. As Raemon says, you need someone facilitating the whole thing, but you don't necessarily need an "elite group", "regular group" and "outsider group" for a good ritual. The Winter Solstice Ritual Raemon made doesn't have that (if I'm getting the pdf right) and I consider that a successful ritual. Some rituals at my local scout group are also without social tiers or roles.

I don't necessarily think that Initiations Rituals or rituals with that social hierarchy are a bad idea. I just disagree that every group and ritual needs that. I think that (currently) the fact that it's easy to become a member of the "Aspiring Rationalists" is a good thing. Maybe in the future (when this subculture has grown a lot) and insider/outsider designation might be necessary.