Unfortunately, the set up for it to work involves a massive use of product-specific tariffs and subsidies, to account for negative and positive externalities respectively.
Nope. For it to work requires nothing but the usual prerequisites for markets (property rights, sufficient freedom, etc.). You are talking about producing optimal results which, as far as I know, no human economic system is capable of.
I never said that the "invisible hand" would fail to function, I said that it would function inefficiently. Since efficiency is the major factor in deciding whether an economic strategy "works", I noted that it would be out-performed by a system that can account for externalities. The free market could be patched to optimize things that contain externalities by applying tariffs and subsidies.
Given that I know of no system to properly account for externalities, I noted that as a failing of the free market but did not suggest any alternative -- especially since my country already has this patch applied to some of the biggest and most obvious externalities, yet also shows signs of promoting the wrong things (eg corn based ethanol).
The things that really provided bad return on investment are watching TV and playing computer games. Getting someone from playing computer games to computer programming is a massive shift.
Not sure about TV, but there's evidence that at least some games can have significant positive cognitive effects - most of the research is on FPSes IIRC. Still, programming is probably better for one's career prospects.
My understanding is that various games can provide benefits such as ability to find relevant things in clutter, and reaction time, and decreasing the loss of mental function in the elderly. Other games could provide other benefits. However, if you consider that computer games could easily eat up all your free time plus some of your sleep, socialization, and homework time, and that alternate activities also have non-obvious benefits, this seems merely like a feel-good excuse. It's probably not as bad as watching certain television shows though.
The idea underpinning market economics is the "invisible hand" which is supposed to aggregate everybody's selfish behaviour into collective good (given a certain institutional set-up).
Unfortunately, the set up for it to work involves a massive use of product-specific tariffs and subsidies, to account for negative and positive externalities respectively. Otherwise the "invisible hand" would function inefficiently, over-promoting things with negative externalities like pollution, and under-promoting things with positive externalities like education.
Solomonoff induction has no resource limit. It's a theoretical framework for understanding machine learning when resources are not an issue, not an engineering proposal.
But it seems to me rather different to assume you can do any finite amount of calculation, vs relying on things that can only be done with infinite calculation. Can we ever have a hope of having infinite resources?
Well when it tries to guess the next bit it gets 50% of its guesses right, which is as good as anything else.
Would it be legitimate to ask the SI to estimate the probability that its guess is correct? I suppose that if it sums up its programs' estimates as to the next bit and finds itself predicting a 50% chance either way, it at least understands that it is dealing with random data but is merely being very persistent in looking for a pattern just in case it merely seemed random? That's not as bad as I thought at first.
In some comment some time earlier I proposed a voting/rating system (which I now can't find because "vote" occurs in every hit) which was intendend to be intuitive and provide the necessary information. The basic idea is to asynchroneously transport human emotion. Translating the emotion to/from a few well known words is trivial and if the set of words is sufficiently rich and the aggregation of these ratings (for sorting/filtering) follows some sensible rules then I think this system should be near optimum.
I'd add independent votes for the dichotomies love/hate, happy/sad, awed/pity, surprised/bored, funny/sick, (for comparison you can have a look at the Lojban attitudinals). Using such a system a great insightful post might get voted love+awe. And a rant hate and/or sick. Some unhelpful commonplace get 'bored'.
Adding a satisfied/dissatisfied attitudinal is problematic because it is prone to depend on the relationship to the poster. One could add an agreement/disagreement vote which votes the relation between both members and which isn't taken into account when ranking globally but in a personal view.
In a way the usual 'like' is an abstracted sum of the positive emotions. Whereas karma here is a sum of all emotions (because it allows downvotes).
Slashdot tries a different approach that tries to use some objective categories which I can't translate to simple emotions ('informative'=curiosity? 'insightful'=surprise+awe?, 'funny'=surprise+happyness?). But I do get little out of these tags and they are more difficult to translate.
ADDED: See Measuring Emotions
Since you mention Slashdot, here's a little side effect of one of their moderation systems. At one point, they decided that "funny" shouldn't give posters karma. However, given the per-post karma cap of 5, this can prevent karma-giving moderation while encouraging karma-deleting moderation by people who think the comment overrated, potentially costing the poster tons of karma. As such, moderators unwilling to penalize posters for making jokes largely abandoned the "funny" tag in favor of alternatives.
I suspect that if an agree/disagree moderation option were added, it would likely suffer from a similar problem. Eg if we treated that tag reasonably and used it to try to separate karma gains/losses from personal agreement/disagreement, people would be tempted to rate a post they especially like as disagree/love/awe.
A more interesting idea, I think, would be to run correlations between your votes and various other bits, such as keywords, author, and other voters, to increase the visibility of posts you like and decrease the visibility of posts you don't like. This would encourage honest and frequent voting, and diversity. Conversely, it would cause people to overestimate the community's agreement with them (more than they would by default).
Remember that SI works by accounting for all the infinite multitude of hypothesis that can generate the given string. Given an algorithmically random TB of data, SI will take into consideration surely a TB hypothesis with high probability but also all the bigger hypothesis with exponentially lower probabilities.
OK, so it will predict one of multiple different ~ 1 terabyte programs as having different likelihoods. I'd still rather it predict random{0,1} for less than 10 bytes, as the most probable. Inability to recognize noise as noise seems like a fundamental problem.
Maybe we're using different definitions of SI? The version that I'm thinking of (which I believe is the original version) quantifies over all possible deterministic programs that output a sequence of bits, using an arbitrary encoding of programs. Then it sums up the weights of all programs that are consistent with the inputs seen so far, and outputs a probability distribution. That turns out to be equivalent to a weighted mixture of all possible computable distributions, though the proof isn't obvious. If we need to adapt this version of SI to output a single guess at each step, we just take the guess with the highest probability.
Does that sound right? If yes, then this page from Li and Vitanyi's book basically says that SI's probability of the next bit being 1 converges to 5/6 with probability 1, unless I'm missing something.
He has repeatedly said that he's talking about an SI that outputs a specific prediction instead of a probability distribution of them, and you even quoted him saying so.
A huge problem with seeing hypocrisy as a vice is that it's prevents one from pointing out in polite company that the other person is hypocritical.
In general it would be good to have a culture where people can say: "Yes, I'm a bit of hypocrical about one issue. Yes, it would be better if I would walk my talk but the flesh is weak."
This does not seem nearly as bad as the flip side, people preaching weak morals so as to not be seen failing them.
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What are your reasons for thinking this? I find myself disagreeing: one big disanalogy is that while we have language and chimps do not, we and the AGI both have language. I find it implausible that the AGI could not in principle communicate to us its goals: give the AGI and ourselves an arbitrarily large amount of time and resources to talk, do you really think we'd never come to a common understanding? Because even if we don't, the AGI effectively does have such resources by which it might, I donno, choose its words with care.
I'm also not sure why we should think it would even be particularly challenging to understand the goals of an AGI. It's not easy even with other humans, but why would it be much harder with AGI? Do we have some reason to expect its goals to be more complex than ours? It's been my experience that the more sophisticated and intelligent someone is, the more intelligible their behavior tends to be. My prejudice therefore says that the goals of an AGI would be much easier to understand than, say, my own.
I find myself agreeing with you -- human goals are a complex mess, which we seldom understand ourselves. We don't come with clear inherent goals, and what goals we do have we abuse by using things like sugar and condoms instead of eating healthy and reproducing like we were "supposed" to. People have been asking about the meaning of life for thousands of years, and we still have no answer.
An AI on the other hand, could have very simple goals -- make paperclips, for example. An AI's goals might be completely specified in two words. It's the AI's sub-goals and plans to reach its goals that I doubt I could comprehend. It's the very single-mindedness of an AI's goals and our inability to comprehend our own goals, plus the prospect of an AI being both smarter and better at goal-hacking than us, that has many of us fearing that we will accidentally kill ourselves via non-friendly AI. Not everyone will think to clarify "make paperclips" with, "don't exterminate humanity", "don't enslave humanity", "don't destroy the environment", "don't reprogram humans to desire only to make paperclips", and various other disclaimers that wouldn't be necessary if you were addressing a human (and we don't know the full disclaimer list either).