eternal_neophyte

it's not a very obvious example

I honestly regret that I didn't make it as clear as I possibly could the first time around, but expressing original, partially developed ideas is not the same thing as reciting facts about well-understood concepts that have been explained and re-explained many times. Flippancy is needlessly hostile.

there are some problems to which search is inapplicable, owing to the lack of a well-defined search space

If not wholly inapplicable, then not performant, yes. Though the problem isn't that the search-space is not def... (read more)

for more abstract domains, it's harder to define a criterion (or set of criteria) that we want our optimizer to satisfy

Yes.

But there's a significant difference between choosing an objective function and "defining your search space" (whatever that means), and the latter concept doesn't have much use as far as I can see.

If you don't know what it means, how do you know that it's significantly different from choosing an "objective function" and why do you feel comfortable in making a judgment about whether or ... (read more)

It only makes sense to talk about "search" in the context of a *search space*; and all extent search algorithms / learning methods involve searching through a comparatively simple space of structures, such as the space of weights on a deep neural network or the space of board-states in Go and Chess. Defining these spaces is pretty trivial. As we move on to attack more complex domains, such as abstract mathematics, or philosophy or procedurally generated music or literature which stands comparison to the best products of human genius, the problem of even /defining/ the search space in which you intend to leverage search-based techniques becomes massively involved.

The strength of the claim being made by Slashdot and the lack of any examination of ways in which it could be false by whoever wrote Slashdot's summary both invite skepticism.

I'm of the opinion that we are in base reality regardless, though. The reason for this being is that the incentive for running a simulation is so that you can observe the behavior of the system being simulated. If you have some vertical stack of simulations all simulating intelligent agents in a virtual world, and most of these simulations are simulating basically the same thing, that... (read more)

I liked Nietzche's framing of the question in terms of infinite recurrence better. Strangely I would forgo infinite recurrence but would choose the second option in your scenario ( since if it turns out to be a mistake the cost will be limited ).

The connection between neuroses and memories was something that made me think a lot. I've been trying to provoke myself into some kind of "transformation" for about 10 years, with some limited successes and a lot of failures for a want of insight. Information like this is really valuable so thank you for sharing your experience.

Given that world GDP growth continues for at least another century, 100%. :)

It is impossible for one to act on another's utility function (without first incorporating it into their own utility function).

This seems tautological and trivially so. Whatever utility function you act on becomes by virtue of that fact "your" utility function.

these laws are exactly the outside world

That is my view precisely. One way out is to assert that there is at least one mind responsible for providing the percepts available to other minds, and from its perspective nothing is unknown and it fills the function of the "outside world".

The panpsychism argument is probably the most compelling one among all of these. The problem with it is that if percepts are the basic substance of the universe howcome we have experiences that we cannot predict? It implies our future experiences are determined by something outside of our own minds.

I don't know a whole lot about physics or the other subjects he talks about. It just seems very well-argued to me.

These two facts are related.

Those are a lot of links to sift through though - can you give an example of just one? :)

Let's assume all the arguments linked are in fact sound. First obvious question is does he offer anything that resembles a falsifiability condition? If not then he doesn't present anything remarkable or particularly difficult to dispatch with since his is a scientific, material hypothesis.

A section of three dimensional space can be modelled as a cubic grid with nodes where the edges intersect, up to some limited resolution for a cube of finite volume ( and I suppose the same holds true with more than three dimensions ). It sounds as if you're proposing this graph basically be flattened - you take a fully connected regular polygon of n^3 angles, map the nodes in your cube to your polygon and then delete all edges in the connected polygon that don't correspond to an edge present in the cube.

I have further questions but they hinge on whether or not I've understood you correctly., Is the above so far a fair summary?

Hate to have to say this but directly addressing a concern is social confirmation of a form that the concern deserves to be addressed, and thus that it's based in something real. Imagine a Scientologist offering to explain to you why Scientology isn't a cult.

Of the people I know of who are outright hostile to LW, it's mostly because of basilisks and polyamory and other things that make LW both an easy and a fun target for derision. And we can't exactly say that those things don't exist.

Thank you for being gracious about accepting the criticism.

While I feel I technically speaking ought to be applauding any effort to boost the tollerance of heterodox opinions in universities, my heart would not be in it. I think the issue is that many of the most vicious "political types" are the ones with the weakest knowledge about the history and provenance of their own ideas. How many ultra-feminists have ever so much as opened "The Feminine Mystique"? The Feminine Mystique is not even talked about or refferenced in discussions on Feminism I've come across. How many "Marxists" ev... (read more)

"actually, X" is never a good way to sell anything. Scientists are quite prone to this kind of speech which from their perspective is fully justified ( because they've exhaustively studied a certain topic ) - but what the average person hears is the "you don't know what you're talking about" half of the implication which makes them deaf to the "I do know what I'm talking about" half. If you just place the fruits of rationality on display; anyone with a brain will be able to recognize them for what they are and they'll adjust t... (read more)

He's really, really smart.

This is the kind of phrasing that usually costs more to say than you can purchase with it. Anyone who is themselves really, really smart is going to raise hackles at this kind of talk; and is going to want strong evidence moreover ( and since a smart person would independently form the same judgement about Yudkowsky, if it is correct, you can safely just supply the evidence without the attached value judgment ).

Fiction authors have a fairly robust rule of thumb: show, don't tell. Especially don't tell me what judgement to for... (read more)