All of kybernetikos's Comments + Replies

And the Archangel has decided to take some general principles (which are rules) and implant them in the habit and instinct of the children. I suppose you could argue that the system implanted is a deontological one from the Archangels point of view, and merely instinctual behaviour from the childrens point of view. I'd still feel that calling instinctual behaviour 'virtue ethics' is a bit strange.

It seems as if your argument rests on the assertion that my access to facts about my physical condition is at least as good as my access to facts about the limitations of computation/simulation. You say the 'physical limitations', but I'm not sure why 'physical' in my universe is particularly relevant - what we care about is whether it's reasonable for there to be many simulations of someone like me over time or not.

I don't think this assertion is correct. I can make a statement about the limits of computation / simulation - i.e. that there is at least en... (read more)

That's very interesting, but isn't the level-1 thinking closer to deontological ethics than virtue ethics, since it is based on rules rather than on the character of the moral agent?

The point is that they are the kind of species to deal with situations like this in a more or less fairminded way. That will stand them in good stead in future difficult negotiatons with other aliens.

It's likely that anything around today has a huge impact on the state of the future universe. As I understood the article, the leverage penalty requires considering how unique your opportunity to have the impact would be too, so Archimedes had a massive impact, but there have also been a massive number of people through history who would have had the chance to come up with the same theories had they not already been discovered, so you have to offset Archimedes leverage penalty by the fact that he wasn't uniquely capable of having that leverage.

I tend to think death, but then I'm not sure that we genuinely survive from one second to another.

I don't have a good way to meaningfully define the kind of continuity that most people intuitively think we have and so I conclude that it could easily just be an illusion.

Thinking of probabilities as levels of uncertainty became very obvious to me when thinking about the Monty Hall problem. After the host has revealed that one of the three doors has a booby prize behind it, you're left with two doors, with a good prize behind one of them.

If someone walks into the room at that stage, and you tell them that there's a good prize behind one door and a booby prize behind another, they will say that it's a 50/50 chance of selecting the door with the prize behind it. They're right for themselves, however the person who had been... (read more)

The complaints about Omega being untrustworthy are weak. Just reformulate the problem so Omega says to all agents, simulated or otherwise, "You are participating in a game that involves simulated agents and you may or may not be one of the simulated agents yourself. The agents involved in the game are the following: <describes agents' roles in third person>".

Good point.

That clears up the summing utility across possible worlds possibility, but it still doesn't address the fact that the TDT agent is being asked to (potentially) make two de... (read more)

Yes. I think that as long as there is any chance of you being the simulated agent, then you need to one box. So you one box if Omega tells you 'I simulated some agent', and one box if Omega tells you 'I simulated an agent that uses the same decision procedure as you', but two box if Omega tells you 'I simulated an agent that had a different copywrite comment in its source code to the comment in your source code'.

This is just a variant of the 'detect if I'm in a simulation' function that others mention. i.e. if Omega gives you access to that information in any way, you can two box. Of course, I'm a bit stuck on what Omega has told the simulation in that case. Has Omega done an infinite regress?

3x sounds really scary, but I have no knowledge of whether a 4 micron extra loss of sound dentin is something to be concerned about or not.

The key thing is the question as to whether it could have been you that has been simulated. If all you know is that you're a TDT agent and what Omega simulated is a TDT agent, then it could have been you. Therefore you have to act as if your decision now may either real or simulated. If you know you are not what Omega simulated (for any reason), then you know that you only have to worry about the 'real' decision.

I don't think that the ability to simulate without rewarding the simulation is what pushes it over the threshold of "unfair".

It only seems that way because you're thinking from the non-simulated agents point of view. How do you think you'd feel if you were a simulated agent, and after you made your decision Omega said 'Ok, cheers for solving that complicated puzzle, I'm shutting this reality down now because you were just a simulation I needed to set a problem in another reality'. That sounds pretty unfair to me. Wouldn't you be saying '... (read more)

Omega (who experience has shown is always truthful)

Omega doesn't need to simulate the agent actually getting the reward. After the agent has made its choice, the simulation can just end.

If we are assuming that Omega is trustworthy, then Omega needs to be assumed to be trustworthy in the simulation too. If they didn't allow the simulated version of the agent to enjoy the fruits of their choice, then they would not be trustworthy.

The success is said to be by a researcher who has previously studied the effect of "geomagnetic pulsations" on ESP, but I could not locate it online.

Can we have a prejudicial summary of the previous studies of the 6 researchers who failed to replicate the effect too?

I noticed that if I'm apathetic about doing a task, then I also tend to be apathetic about thinking about doing the task, whereas tasks that I get done I tend to be so enthusiastic about that I have planned them and done them in my head long before I do them in physicality. My conclusion: apathy starts in the mind and the cure for it starts in the mind too.

But what if the doctor is confident of keeping it a secret? Well, then causal decision theory would indeed tell her to harvest his organs, but TDT (and also UDT) would strongly advise her against it. Because if TDT endorsed the action, then other people would be able to deduce that TDT endorsed the action, and that (whether or not it had happened in any particular case) their lives would be in danger in any hospital run by a timeless decision theorist, and then we'd be in much the same boat. Therefore TDT calculates that the correct thing for TDT to outpu

Set up questions that require you assume something odd in the preamble, and then conclude with something unpalatable (and quite possibly false). This tests to see if people can apply rationality even when it goes against their emotional involvement and current beliefs. As well as checking that they reach the conclusion demanded (logic), also give them an opportunity as part of a later question to flag up the premise that they feel caused the odd conclusion.

Something bayesian - like the medical test questions where the incidence in the general population ... (read more)

I agree. In particular I often find these discussions very frustrating because people arguing for elimination seem to think they are arguing about the 'reality' of things when in fact they're arguing about the scale of things. (And sometimes about the specificity of the underlying structures that the higher level systems are implemented on). I don't think anyone ever expected to be able to locate anything important in a single neuron or atom. Nearly everything interesting in the universe is found in the interactions of the parts not the parts themselves.... (read more)

eliminativists want to prove that humans, like the blue-minimizing robot, don't have anything of the sort until you start looking at high level abstractions.

Just because something only exists at high levels of abstraction doesn't mean it's not real or explanatory. Surely the important question is whether humans genuinely have preferences that explain their behaviour (or at least whether a preference system can occasionally explain their behaviour - even if their behaviour is truly explained by the interaction of numerous systems) rather than how these ... (read more)

I sneeze quite often. When someone says 'bless you', my usual response is 'and may you also be blessed'. I've heard a number of people who had apparently never wondered before say 'why do we say that?' after receiving that response.

I have all of the english wikipedia available for offline searching on my phone. It's big, sure, but it doesn't fill the memory card by any means (and this is just the default one that came with the phone).

For offline access on a windows computer, WikiTaxi is a reasonable solution.

I'd recommend that everyone who can carry around offline versions of wikipedia. I consider it part of my disaster preparedness, not to mention the fun of learning new things by hitting the 'random article' button.

A parole board considers the release of a prisoner: Will he be violent again?

I think this is the kind of question that Miller is talking about. Just because a system is correct more often, doesn't necessarily mean it's better.

For example if the human experts allowed more people out who went on to commit relatively minor violent offences and the SPRs do this less often, but are more likely to release prisoners who go on to commit murder then there would be legitimate discussion over whether the SPR is actually better.

I think this is exactly what he is ... (read more)

that I started to wonder why adults would want children to believe in Santa Claus, and whether their reasons for it were actually good.

I think that lots of people have a kind of compulsion to lie to anyone they care about who is credulous, particularly children, about things that don't matter very much. I assume it's adaptive behaviour, to try to toughen up their reasoning skills on matters that aren't so important - to teach them that they can't rely on even good people to tell them stuff that is true.

The good you do can compound too. If you save a childs life at $500, that child might go on to save other childrens lives. I think you might well get a higher rate of interest on the good you do than 5%. There will be a savings rate at which you should save instead of give, but I don't think we're near it at the moment.

Most of us allocate a particular percentage to charity, despite the fact that most people would say that nearly nothing we spend money on is as important as saving childrens lives.

I don't know whether you think it's that we overestimate how much we value saving childrens lives, or underestimate how important xbox games, social events, large tvs and eating tasty food are to us. Or perhaps you think it's none of that, and that we're being simply irrational.

I doubt that anyone could consistently live as if the difference between choice of renting a nice flat... (read more)

I have to admire the cunning of your last sentence.

Or have I accidentally defected? I can't tell.

EDIT: I think the 'wizened' correction was intended to be a joke. When I read your piece originally the idea of you 'wizening up' made me smile, and I suspect that the corrector just wanted to share that idea with others who may have missed it.

I suppose the goal you were going to spend the money on would have to be of sufficient utility if achieved to offset that in order to make the scenario work. Maybe saving the world, or creating lots of happy simulations of yourself, or finding a way to communicate between them.

Imagine a raffle where the winner is chosen by some quantum process. Presumably under the many worlds interpretation you can see it as a way of shifting money from lots of your potential selves to just one of them. If you have a goal you are absolutely determined to achieve and a large sum of money would help towards it, then it might make a lot of sense to take part, since the self that wins will also have that desire, and could be trusted to make good use of that money.

Now, I wonder if anyone would take part in such a raffle if all the entrants who did... (read more)

Yeah, that is a problem with the illustration. However, I don't think it's completely devoid of use.

Taking a risk based on some knowledge is a very strong sign of having internalised that knowledge.

I've heard this contrasted as 'knowledge', where you intellectually assent to something and can make predictions from it and 'belief', where you order your life according to that knowledge, but this distinction is certainly not made in normal speech.

A common illustration of this distinction (often told by preachers) is that Blondin the tightrope walker asked the crowd if they believed he could safely carry someone across the Niagra falls on a tightrope, and almost the whole crowd shouted 'yes'. Then he asked for a volunteer to become the first man ever so carried, at which point the crowd shut up. In the end the only person he could find to accept was his manager.

If you want to read the full thing, rather than just the description, you can download the ebook here. I certainly enjoyed it.

There's a fairly obvious answer to that stuff in my opinion. Ventus by Schroeder (scifi) covers it nicely. It would be a structure set up by the atlantians for control of nature, before they ascended probably and left Earth for the stars.

Edit: It occurs to me that the other possibility would be a simulation, originally invented by the atlantians for them to upload themselves into, or perhaps muggles were supposed to be NPCs.