LESSWRONG
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All of Anti-reductionist's Comments + Replies

Crisis of Faith
Anti-reductionist-20

Many in this world retain beliefs whose flaws a ten-year-old could point out

Very true. Case in point: the belief that "minimum description length" or "Solomonoff induction" can actually predict anything. Choose a language that can describe MWI more easily than Copenhagen, and they say you should believe MWI; choose a language that can describe Copenhagen more easily than MWI, and they say you should believe Copenhagen. I certainly could have told you that when I was ten...

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-1Ronny Fernandez
The minimum description length formulation doesn't allow for that at all. You are not allowed to pick whatever language you want, you have to pick the optimal code. If in the most concise code possible, state 'a' has a smaller code than state 'b', then 'a' must be more probable than 'b', since the most concise codes possible assign the smallest codes to the most probable states. So if you wanna know what state a system is in, and you have the ideal (or close to ideal) code for the states in that system, the probability of that state will be strongly inversely correlated with the length of the code for that state.
[anonymous]140

The argument in this post is precisely analogous to the following:

Bayesian reasoning cannot actually predict anything. Choose priors that result in the posterior for MWI being greater than that for Copenhagen, and it says you should believe MWI; choose priors that result in the posterior for Copenhagen being greater than that for MWI, and it says you should believe Copenhagen.

The thing is, though, choosing one's own priors is kind of silly, and choosing one's own priors with the purpose of making the posteriors be a certain thing is definitely silly. Prior... (read more)

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Make an Extraordinary Effort
Anti-reductionist-40

...expand itself exponentially taking over nearby space uploading all of humanity into a simulation

Ah yes, there's nothing wrong with murdering people as long as you name video game characters after them.

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5rabidchicken
If you had every cell in your body replaced individually with synthesized cells with identical properties, you would retain your memories, identity, and supposedly your existence. After all, most of your body has been replaced several times already. How is it different if you take your thoughts and swap them from a human body to a computer? Are you really dead, or just in a glorified full body prosthetic?
-1[anonymous]
Any simulation of a deterministic process is functionally identical to it.
My Bayesian Enlightenment
Anti-reductionist00

What's your justification for having P(she says "at least one is a boy" | 1B,1G) = P(she says "at least one is a girl" | 1B,1G)? Maybe the hypothetical mathematician is from a culture that considers it important to have at least one boy. (China was like that, IIRC)

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1[anonymous]
As a twin, I always found it surprising how easily people assume that children's genders are independent. I saw it more like 'Kid1'<-'Fertilization specifics'->'Kid2', and if, as Wiki says, monozygotic twins occur in about 3 cases per 1000, and same-sex dizygotic twins occur in half cases of all dizygotic twins1, then it's not at all obvious that two children of the same mother have the same distribution of possible genders as two children of the same father or two random children at all. 1 - Wiki doesn't state the frequency of dizygotic twins.
wizzwizz4120

Eliezer is an atheist. But this article doesn't say "there is no God"; it says "act as though God won't save you".

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