LessWrong is sci-fi. Check what's popular. Superintelligent AI, space travel, suspended animation, hyper-advanced nanotech...
It is true that people have written unrealistic books about these things. People also wrote unrealistic books about magicians flying through the air and scrying on each other with crystal balls. Yet we have planes and webcams.
Who is to say there even are concepts that the human mind simply can't grasp? I can't visualize in n-dimensional space, but I can certainly understand the concept
The human mind is finite, and there are in...
Counterexample: P(3^^^...3)(n "^"s) = 1/2^n P(anything else) = 0 This is normalized because the sum of a geometric series with decreasing terms is finite. You might have been thinking of the fact that if a probability distribution on the integers is monotone decreasing (i.e. if P(n)>P(m) then n <m) then P(n) must decrease faster than 1/n. However, a complexity-based distribution will not be monotone because some big numbers are simple while most of them are complex.
A' doesn't become A'' by catching up to him, he becomes A'' when he uses his time machine to jump back 3 hours.
There would be three babies for 6 hours, but then the youngest two would use their time machines and disappear into the past.
A'' doesn't cease to exist. A' "ceases to exist" because his time machine sends him back into the past to become A''.
You don't need a time machine to go forward in time - you can just wait. A'' cant leave everything to A' because A' will disappear within three hours when he goes back to become A''. If A' knows A wasn't reminded the A' can't remind A. the other three Harrys use their time turners to go backwards and close the loop. You do need both forward and backward time travel to create a closed loop, but the forward time travel can just be waiting; it doesn't require a machine.
The nice part about modal agents is that there are simple tools for finding the fixed points without having to search through proofs; in fact, Mihaly and Marcello wrote up a computer program to deduce the outcome of the source-code-swap Prisoner's Dilemma between any two (reasonably simple) modal agents. These tools also made it much easier to prove general theorems about such agents.
Would it be possible to make this program publicly available? I'm curious about how certain modal agents play against each other, but struggling to caculate it manually.
It's true that if you can prove that your opponent will cooperate counterfactual-if you cooperate and defect counterfacual-if you defect, then you should cooperate. But we don't yet have a good formalization of logical counterfactuals, and the reasoning that cooperates with cooperatebot just uses material-if instead of conterfactual-if.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. The chapters aren't in chronological order; the bootstrapping and power leveling happen in chapters two and four.
No. To get the 1/3 probability you have to assume that she would be just as likely to say what she says if she had 1 boy as if she had 2 (and that she wouldn't say it if she had none). In your scenario she's only half as likely to say what she says if she has one boy as if she has two boys, because if she only has one there's a 50% chance it's the one she's just given birth to.
It is hard to tell whether anyone took this seriously - but it seems that an isomorphic argument 'proves' that computer programs will crash - since "almost any" computer program crashes. The “AGI Apocalypse Argument” as stated thus appears to be rather silly.
I don't see why this makes the argument seem silly. It seems to me that the isomorphic argument is correct, and that computer programs do crash.
He's not talking about impossibility
I know Owen was not talking about impossibility, I brought up impossibility to show that what you thought Owen meant could not be true.
both of which involve moving faster than light.
Moving from B to A slower than the speed of light does not involve moving faster than light.
It's not clear to me that ZFC without regularity, replacement, infinity, choice, power set or foundation with a totally ordered field with the LUB property does allow you to talk about most things you want to do with the reals : without replacement or powerset you can't prove that cartesian products exist, so there doesn't seem to be any way of talking about the plane or higher-dimensional spaces as sets. If you add powerset back in you can carry out the Hartogs number construction to get a least uncountable ordinal
It is basically the main point of the definition of ordinals that for any property of ordinals , there is a first ordinal with that property. There are, however, foundational theories without uncountable ordinals , for instance Nik Weaver's Mathematical Conceptualism.
What's the difference between
and
?