= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
See https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.4318 , you need to formally reply to that.
Link doesn't work anymore? Glen is actually extremely socially calibrated. I just say this vid. I thought he would be autistic. Perhaps I've (and we've) unfairly bullied him and are jealous of his writing output. Plus, his wife is super hot. I wish we could get to the bottom of why so many of us feel his writing is 'off'. I think it's just the self-promotion aspect of it - tooting his own horn. But maybe that's okay.
I fixed the link, the period at the end was messing it up.
In response to
A rational unfalsifyable believe
Can believing an unfalsifyable believe be rational?
Sure, see http://lesswrong.com/lw/ss/no_logical_positivist_i/
In response to
Two forms of procrastination
For interesting long articles you can use pocket or a similar app to save it for when you have more time.
In response to
Zombies Redacted
Are you planning on doing this for more of the sequences? I think that would be great.
In response to
Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
Seeing prices go up doesn't mean there's demand for them. If demand is low, then this isn't a market failure, it can make perfect sense that products with low demand don't get large companies producing them and so the prices don't reflect economies of scale.
So let's look at the actual sales. I've sold a bit on Amazon and know some tools that can give you good estimates on how many sales an items has had.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00REF5PM2/, the generic currently selling for ~$30, is currently ranked 246,691 in Health & Personal Care (archived: https://archive.is/5RRNF) (this number fluctuates, so might be different when you look). According to http://junglescout.com/estimator , such a rank sells less than 5 a month. Other tools I've checked have similar results, under 5 a month.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000GCECRO/, the Tum brand, is ranked 33,992 in Health & Personal Care (https://archive.is/cP0k4). Junglescout estimates 122 sales a month. Another source I checked says 91 a month, so 100 a month is probably close. Now, maybe it would sell more if the price was lower? Sales rank when the price was lower seems to have been in the 10-20,000 range, or 200-300 sales a month.
Let's say there are 2000 sales a year, if you offer it at $5 and make $2 profit on each you're making $4,000 a year. That doesn't seem enough for a large company to deal with. (You should also account for sales at other locations, though. But you pointed to Amazon of proof of demand, when it can simply be proof of lack of supply and lackluster demand.)
I don't actually know what thresholds companies tend to have for keeping products alive. If you have better information on that it would be helpful.
Oh. In this case, I agree with you. I never intended to claim otherwise, or even, the whole original point doesn't make sense without this.
My current view is that it's not possible to check how the world looks after torture without generating information that approximates simulation of torture itself; however this information can be arbitrarily diluted, and diluting it discounts the moral weight by an appropriate factor. We count this quantitatively.
Under this view, the "final state" automatically counts with the "in between" part.
I never intended to claim otherwise, or even, the whole original point doesn't make sense without this.
I'm not sure how the original post makes sense if you agree. I understood the original point as:
- Through some tricks with physics we can "skip" the middle states when simulating
- So we can evaluate actions without instantiating those middle states
This seems to imply that our evaluations don't need to take into account middle states. Value is definitely not linear, so you can't do subtraction of the trick states.
This is a problem even if your skip turns out to be possible.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean: "final state" - state of what? "how bad it is" - what is?
"final state" - state of what?
The world. You're assuming that the value of the world only depends on its state at the end of your simulation. But it doesn't: events that happen between now and then also matter. So if you want to check how bad the world will be if you do action X, you can't just use your trick to find out how the world will be after doing action X, because you also need to know what happened in between.
If you don't agree that states in between matter, consider whether torturing someone and then erasing their memory is morally problematic.
Even if your other assumptions work, I dispute the claim that value only depends on final state. If you reach the same outcome in two different paths, but one involved torture and the other didn't, they aren't valued equally.
Therefore, if you didn't simulate the torture, you can't get a value for how bad it is.
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Update: The conclusion of that article is that the expected utilities don't converge for any utility function that is bounded below by a computable, unbounded utility function. That might not actually be in conflict with the idea I'm grasping at here.
The idea I'm trying to get at here is that maybe even if EU doesn't converge in the sense of assigning a definite finite value to each action, maybe it nevertheless ranks each action as better or worse than the others, by a certain proportion.
Toy model:
The only hypotheses you consider are H1, H2, H3, ... etc. You assign 0.5 probability to H1, and each HN+1 has half the probability of the previous hypothesis, HN.
There are only two possible actions: A or B. H1 says that A gives you 2 utils and B gives you 1. Each HN+1 says that A gives you 10 times as many utils as it did under the previous hypothesis, HN, and moreover that B gives you 5 times as many utils as it did under the previous hypothesis, HN.
In this toy model, expected utilities do not converge, but rather diverge to infinity, for both A and B.
Yet clearly A is better than B...
I suppose one could argue that the expected utility of both A and B is infinite and thus that we don't have a good reason to prefer A to B. But that seems like a problem with our ability to handle infinity, rather than a problem with our utility function or hypothesis space.
In your example, how much should you spend to choose A over B? Would you give up an unbounded amount of utility to do so?