outlawpoet

hi

That is an excellent question.

I must agree with this, although video and most writing OTHER than short essays and polemics would be mostly novel, and interesting.

If every snide, unhelpful jokey reply you post is secretly a knowing reference to something only one other person in the world can recognize, I retract every bad thing I ever said about you.

Is then the ability to explicitly (at a high, abstract level) reach down to the initial hypothesis generation and include, raise, or add hypotheses for consideration always a pathology?

I can imagine a system where extremely low probability hypotheses, by virtue of complexity or special evidence required, might need to be formulated or added by high level processes, but you could simply view that as another failure of the generation system, and require that even extremely rare or novel structures of hypotheses must go through channels to avoid this kind of disturbance of natural frequencies, as it were.

It may not be a completely generic bias or fallacy, but it certainly can affect more than just human decision processes. There are a number of primitive systems that exhibit pathologies similar to what Eliezer is describing, speech recognition systems, for example, have a huge issue almost exactly isomorphic to this. Once some interpretation of a audio wave is a hypothesis, it is chosen in great excess to it's real probability or confidence. This is the primary weakness of rule-based voice grammars, that their pre-determined possible interpretations lead to unexpected inputs being slotted into the nearest pre-existing hypothesis, rather than leading to a novel interpretation. The use of statistical grammars to try to pound interpretations to their 'natural' probabilistic initial weight is an attempt to avoid this issue.

This problem is also hidden in a great many AI decision systems within the 'hypothesis generation' system, or equivalent. However elegant the ranking and updating system, if your initial possible list is weak, you distort your whole decisions process.

The bloodstained sweater in the original song refers to an urban legend that Mr. Rogers was a Marine Sniper in real life.

I seem to have missed some context for this, I understand that once you've gone down the road of drawing the cards, you have no decision-theoretic reason to stop, but why would I ever draw the first card?

A mere doubling of my current utilons measured against a 10% chance of eliminating all possible future utilons is a sucker's bet. I haven't even hit a third of my expected lifespan given current technology, and my rate of utilon acquisition has been accelerating. Quite aside from the fact that I'm certain my utility function includes terms regarding living a long time, and experiencing certain anticipated future events.