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All of clwainwright's Comments + Replies

Reveal Culture
clwainwright30

It appears that the first link to the "Ask/Guess Culture model" is broken, or the associated content has been removed. Is there an alternate link to use?

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2Raemon
There's this LW post now which may give you the context.
The ground of optimization
clwainwrightΩ3110

This seems like a good definition of optimization for algorithmic systems, but I don't see how it works for physical systems. Going by the primary definition,

An optimizing system is a system that has a tendency to evolve towards one of a set of configurations that we will call the target configuration set, when started from any configuration within a larger set of configurations, which we call the basin of attraction.

But in the physical world, there are literally zero closed systems with this property. Entropy always increases*, and the target configu... (read more)

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3Thomas Kwa
I agree that closed physical systems aren't optimizing systems. It seems like the first patch given by the author works when worded more carefully: "We could stipulate that some [low-entropy] power source [and some entropy sink] is provided externally to each system we analyze, and then perform our analysis conditional on the existence of that power source." Then an optimizing system with X bits of "optimization power" (which is log(target states / basin of attraction size) or something) has to sink at least X bits, and this seems like it works. Maybe it gets hard to rigorously define the exact form of the power source and entropy sink though? Disclaimer: I don't know statistical mechanics.