"Among all these comments, I see no appreciation of the fact that the version of many worlds we have just been given CANNOT MAKE PREDICTIONS, whereas "collapse theories" DO."
So far as I know, MWI and collapse both make the exact same predictions, although Eliezer has demonstrated that MWI is much cleaner in theoretical terms. If there's any feasible experiment which can distinguish between the two, I'm sure quantum physicists would already have tried it.
To quote E.T. Jaynes:
"This example shows also that the major premise, “If A then B” expresses B only as a logical consequence of A; and not necessarily a causal physical consequence, which could be effective only at a later time. The rain at 10 AM is not the physical cause of the clouds at 9:45 AM. Nevertheless, the proper logical connection is not in the uncertain causal direction (clouds =⇒ rain), but rather (rain =⇒ clouds) which is certain, although noncausal. We emphasize at the outset that we are concerned here with logical connections, because ...
"The same people who would never blindly accept a Bush Admin figure will blindly accept an anti-Bush figure."
Notice how you assume, without bothering to Google it, that the million-casualties figure was "anti-Bush". If it came from Clinton for President, or MoveOn, or the Democratic Party, you would have a case. In reality, the survey was conducted by Opinion Research Business, an independent polling agency which is not even US-based (their HQ is in London). The same group has published pro-Bush results in the past (eg, see http://www.t...
"The big puzzle here is the inverse square of the mutation rate. The example of improvement in a starting population with a randomized genome of maximum variance, which can't be used to send a strongly informative message, doesn't explain the maintenance of nearly all information in a genome."
(hacks program for asexual reproduction)
I've found that, assuming asexual reproduction, the genome's useful information really does scale nice and linearly with the mutation rate. The amount of maintainable information decreases significantly (by a factor the three or so, in the original test data).
"Wei Dai, being able to send 10 bits each with a 60% probability of being correct, is not the same as being able to transmit 6 bits of mathematical information. It would be if you knew which 6 bits would be correct, but you don't."
"Given sexuality and chromosome assortment but no recombination, a species with 100 chromosomes can evolve much faster than an asexual bacterial population!"
No, it can't. Suppose that you want to maintain the genome against a mutation pressure of one hundred bits per generation (one base flip/chromosome, to ma...
"This increases the potential number of semi-meaningful bases (bases such that some mutations have no effect but other mutations have detrimental effect) but cancels out the ability to store any increased information in such bases."
If 27% of all mutations have absolutely no effect, the "one mutation = one death" rule is broken, and so more information can be stored because the effective mutation rate is lower (this also means, of course, that the rate of beneficial mutations is lower). So it may be a 40 MB bound instead of a 25 MB bound...
"The notion of sacred values seems to lead to irrationality in a lot of cases, some of it gross irrationality like scope neglect over human lives and "Can't Say No" spending."
Could you post a scenario where most people would choose the option which unambiguously causes greater harm, without getting into these kinds of debates about what "harm" means? Eg., where option A ends with shooting one person, and option B ends with shooting ten people, but option B sounds better initially? We have a hard enough time getting rid of irrationality, even in cases where we know what is rational.
"An option that dominates in finite cases will always provably be part of the maximal option in finite problems; but in infinite problems, where there is no maximal option, the dominance of the option for the infinite case does not follow from its dominance in all finite cases."
From Peter's proof, it seems like you should be able to prove that an arbitrarily large (but finite) utility function will be dominated by events with arbitrarily large (but finite) improbabilities.
"Robin Hanson was correct, I do think that TORTURE is the obvious opti...
"For those who would pick SPECKS, would you pay a single penny to avoid the dust specks?"
Yes. Note that, for the obvious next question, I cannot think of an amount of money large enough such that I would rather keep it than use it to save a person from torture. Assuming that this is post-Singularity money which I cannot spend on other life-saving or torture-stopping efforts.
"You probably wouldn't blind everyone on earth to save that one person from being tortured, and yet, there are (3^^^3)/(10^17) >> 7*10^9 people being blinded for ea...
"Wow. People sure are coming up with interesting ways of avoiding the question."
My response was a real request for information- if this is a pure utility test, I would select the dust specks. If this were done to a complex, functioning society, adding dust specks into everyone's eyes would disrupt a great deal of important stuff- someone would almost certainly get killed in an accident due to the distraction, even on a planet with only 10^15 people and not 3^^^^3.
"Congratulations, you made my brain asplode."
Read http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=22 if you haven't already. Your utility function should not be assigning things arbitrarily large additive utilities, or else you get precisely this problem (if pigs qualify as minds, use rocks), and your function will sum to infinity. If you "kill" by destroying the exact same information content over and over, it doesn't seem to be as bad, or even bad at all. If I made a million identical copies of you, froze them into complete stasis, and then shot 999,...
"So how would you recognize a natural ethical process if you saw one?"
Suppose that you observe process A- maybe you look at it, or poke around a bit inside it, but you don't make a precise model. If you extrapolate A forward in time, you will get a probability distribution over possible states (including the states of all the other stuff that A touches). If A consistently winds up in very small regions of this distribution, compared to what your model is, and there's no way to fix your model without making it extremely complex, you can say A is a...
"(BTW, one of the reasons I don't vote is that I am confident that I cannot, under any circumstances, EVER, have sufficient and reliable information about the candidates to allow me to make a good decision. So, I believe all voting decisions people actually make are irrational.)"
See http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/.
"Can anyone arrange to get money to this man or his family? I'm tempted to donate, to honor his deed."
"I see man as made in the image of God."
This does make some sense. If man is made in the image of God, and we know God is a mass murderer, then we can predict that some men will also be mass murderers. And lo, we have plenty of examples- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
"Sure God is not going to change natural law just because we are putting him to the test."
If God does exist, as soon as we finish saving the world and whatnot, he should be immediately arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity, due to his failure to interven...
"I would argue that they are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life."
A fully human life, in the natural sense of the term, has an average span of sixteen years. That's the environment we were designed to live in- nasty, brutal, and full of misery. By the standards of a typical human tribe, the Holocaust would have been notable for killing such a remarkably small percentage of the population. Why on Earth would we want to follow that example?
"It looks like this website has rejected the theistic understanding of faith and hope.&q...
""Fixed by evidence" != "simple"."
This is certainly true in the general case, but all physics theories which I've studied in detail really are simple, in the bits of entropy sense.
"Please recall that my original contention was that Einstein must have had enough observational evidence to fix the information inherent in General Relativity as a solution. If you describe ways that the information in General Relativity can be fixed by evidence, you are not contradicting this."
True; why do you have to contradict the main point of a post to comment on it? My point was that the space of possibilities was not vast; it was quite small, given the common-sense rules of gravity and math which were known at the time. Developing GR took ...
"If only you had been around to solve the problem instead of Maxwell and Einstein, how much work could have been saved!"
Obvious != simple != easy to learn. You of all people should understand this. You seemed to understand it seven years ago, back during the days of your wild and reckless youth. To quote SitS:
"Let's take a concrete example, the story Flowers for Algernon (later the movie Charly), by Daniel Keyes. (I'm afraid I'll have to tell you how the story comes out, but it's a Character story, not an Idea story, so that shouldn't spoil...
"Sure, if we don't mind that G and T take a full page to write out in terms of the derivatives of the metric tensor."
The Riemann tensor is a more natural measure of curvature than the metric tensor, and even in that language it's still pretty simple:
8piT = R (tensor) - .5gR (scalar)
where R (tensor) (subscript) ab = Riemann tensor (superscript) c (subscript) acb and R (scalar) = g (superscript) ab * R (tensor) (subscript) ab
You can make any theory seem complicated by writing it out in some nonstandard format. Take Maxwell's equations of electromag...
"McCabe, you're right, it's completely obvious, it makes you wonder why Einstein took ten years to figure it out."
I never said it was obvious; I said that the equations were a unique solution imposed by various constraints. Proving that the equations are a unique solution is quite difficult; I can't do it, even with a ready-made textbook in front of me. There are many examples of simple, unique-solution equations being very hard to derive- Newton's law of gravity and Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism come to mind.
"But selecting the tensor f...
"And remember that General Relativity was correct, from all the vast space of possibilities."
The Einstein field equation itself is actually extremely simple:
G = 8piT
where G is the Einstein tensor and T is the stress-energy tensor. Few serious competitors to GR have emerged for a very good reason; what sane modifications could you make to this equation? G and T have to be directly proportional, because everyone knows that the curvature of spacetime (and hence the effect of gravity) is directly proportional to the quantity of matter/energy. The con...
"Tom, you appear to have given an argument for never funding anything that has research as a major component."
The utility of funding a specific project goes to zero as the amount of money that project requires per unit of output goes to infinity. Funding one project has an opportunity cost, in the utility equation, of not funding other projects. So at some point, it will make sense (doing the opposite would have a negative expected utility) to contribute to some other project than SIAI. I don't have a clear idea of where that point is, but we've gotten a lot closer in the past two years.
"Why would the amount of research being done stay the same, if the amount of money coming in goes up by a factor of 10?"
Number of publications. And lack of other strong Bayesian evidence. Money does not correlate well with thinking capacity; if you dump $20 million into a startup, its intelligent output will (on average) drop off rapidly.
"I guess they might spend it on advocacy, or buying hardware, or something, but surely what it would take for your comment about utility to be correct would be for them to do nothing with it. Why would they ...
How would an artist participate, other than just mailing in a check? Doesn't SIAI have something like $500K worth of checks, from this summer's fundraising alone? If the amount of research being done by SIAI stays the same, and the amount of money coming in goes up by a factor of 10, then the utility of every dollar goes down by a factor of 10; eventually it makes more sense to donate to other groups.
"I challenge the "rules" set out by whomever thinks he's the know-all on what can be done with a compass and straight edge."
I would be interested to see what you can get out of a compass and straightedge if you change the allowable operations. You could wind up with something much more complex than the things the ancient Greeks studied (think of how much more complex a Riemannian manifold is than a Euclidean n-space, once you remove a few of Euclid's axioms).
I know this is an old comment, but the answer is actually quite nice.
What the compass and straight-edge basically give you is the capacity for solving quadratic equations. There's a field of numbers between the rational and real numbers called the Constructible numbers that completely characterizes what can be done there.
Alternative techniques (e.g., folding) can allow one to solve cubic equations, and so the field of numbers that can be constructed in this way is an extension of the Constructible numbers.
So the full answer to "what you can get if you...
"So I found this counterexample, and saw that my attempted disproof was false, along with my dreams of fame and glory."
I know how that feels. When I was 14 or so, I took a course on cryptography, and the textbook proclaimed that modular inverses were the basis of public-key algorithms like RSA. I felt that modular inverses were crackable, and I plodded along on the problem for a few weeks, until I finally discovered a polynomial-time algorithms for doing modular inverses. It turned out that I had reinvented Euclid's algorithm, and the textbook authors were idiots.
Well, that's a pretty impressive "error" though. :-)
"On the topic of reversing changes to appreciate their absurdity: movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien to me than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes."
Most people do not know enough history (or rather, the specific parts of history) to even realize how absurd the past was. If you read a high-school level history textbook, which is the most information 99% of the public will actually remember (if that), history seems a great deal like the modern day: people had politic...
"You can actually give a semi-plausible justification of special relativity based on what was known in 1901."
You can give a semi-plausible justification for anything. It was obvious at the time that our knowledge was incomplete, but the specific way in which our knowledge was incomplete was still a mystery. It is very easy to invent a plausible-sounding quack theory of physics; that is why we have the Crackpot Index.
"That was when I thought to myself, "Maybe this one is teachable.""
How many people have asked you about becoming an AGI designer? It sounds like you have a good deal of experience with rejection, even after weeding out the obvious crackpots.
"As a result, the theory wasn't scrapped;"
By "the theory" you mean general relativity, which is one of the most well-confirmed theories in all of physics. You can't just come up with a slightly modified version of GR to accommodate weird observations; the Einstein field equation is a unique solution because of all the demands placed on any reasonable theory of gravity. If you assume:
"Tom McCabe, that is not proof."
There is no such thing as proof. See http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=11.
"Black holes, dark matter and dark energy seem to pretty much fit this description. They are, after all, inventions tacked on to calculations, in order to make theory and calculation fit observations."
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_cluster for dark matter.
"I wasn't aware that speech, empathy, and social skills were functions of the kidneys rather than the brain. "
We know empathy and social skills don't require general intelligence; plenty of mammals show empathy and social skills. If the definition of "intelligence" is "whatever occurs in the brain", then a 4004 CPU shows "intelligence" every time it adds two hex digits.
"Is Tom McCabe asserting that I have NOT done what is claimed in some part of my CV, or published something which is, in fact, a matter of record?"
If you want something specific, a quick check of your website shows a picture of you (on your personal homepage!) holding two Hugo awards to your head. A quick Google reveals that you have never won the Hugo; this is dishonest at best.
You mean the JV Post that has supposedly done all this (http://www.jimwestergren.com/greatest-nerd-of-all-times-jonathan-vos-post/), yet only has sixteen Google Scholar-indexed papers (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=G&oi=qs&q=Jonathan+vos+post+author:j-post)?
Ouch. I had vague feelings that something was amiss, but I believed you when you said they were all correct. I knew that sociology had a lot of nonsense in it, but to proclaim the exact opposite of what actually happened and sound plausible is crazy (and dangerous!).
"Got protocol? Yes or no?"
If there was any actual evidence, somebody would have claimed Randi's million-dollar prize years ago. I wasn't able to find a copy of "The Irreducible Mind" online; it doesn't have a Wikipedia article and apparently isn't that popular. A quick Google of the authors reveals that only one (Bruce Greyson) has a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greyson). The lead author, Edward F. Kelly, is employed as a professor of "Perceptual Studies" at the University of Virginia Health System (ht...
"Of course you are assuming a strong form of Bayesianism here. Why do we have to accept that strong form?"
Because it's mathematically proven. You might as well ask "Why do we have to accept the strong form of arithmetic?"
"So, if some evidence slightly moves the expectation in a particular direction, but does not push it across the 50% line from wherever it started, what is the big whoop?"
Because (in this case especially!) small probabilities can have large consequences. If we invent a marvelous new cure for acne, with a 1% cha...
Frank: It is impossible for A and ~A to both be evidence for B. If a lack of sabotage is evidence for a fifth column, then an actual sabotage event must be evidence against a fifth column. Obviously, had there been an actual instance of sabotage, nobody would have thought that way- they would have used the sabotage as more "evidence" for keeping the Japanese locked up. It's the Salem witch trials, only in a more modern form- if the woman/Japanese has committed crimes, this is obviously evidence for "guilty"; if they are innocent of any wrongdoing, this too is a proof, for criminals like to appear especially virtuous to gain sympathy.
"Markets for more than a few years into the future normally say that the best forecast is that conditions will stay the same and/or that existing trends will continue."
Judging from the crude oil data, futures markets tend to lag current prices; ie, if the current price was $20 a few days/weeks/months/years ago, the futures price will be $20 today. Markets have short-term memories; they think of "normal" as what conditions have been like for the past few years, and so if there's a deviation from "normal" (in either direction), people predict that the deviation will correct itself over time.
I'm not convinced that prediction markets supply data that's any more accurate than the predictions of individuals. Consider the market in crude oil futures; crude oil is much simpler and therefore much easier to predict than a Friendly intelligence explosion, and yet the data (http://www.durangobill.com/OilChart.html) shows that futures are horrifically inaccurate at predicting future prices. In fact, for most of the past six years, you could have done better at predicting the price of crude oil by using the current price instead of the future-market price. Does anyone have a link to a paper studying how accurate prediction markets are, compared to individual guessing?
Eliezer: Both Douglas Hofstadter and Ray Kurzweil have two children (http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds10-2/hofstadter.html, http://sgouros.com/judy/reviews/hofstadter.html, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/14/100008848/).
"Funny, I've always thought that debates are one of the most entertaining forms of social interaction available."
We may not have rationality dojos, but in-person debating is as good an irrationality dojo as you're going to get. In debating, you're rewarded for 'winning', regardless of whether what you said was true; this encourages people to develop rhetorical techniques and arguments which are fully general across all possible situations, as this makes them easier to use. And while it may be hard to give public demonstrations of rationality, dem...
"The Foresight Institute has the same problem: People want to donate time instead of money, but it's really, really hard to use volunteers. If you know a solution to this, by all means share."
There's always Amazon's Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome). It's an inefficient use of people's time, but it's better than just telling people to go away. If people are reluctant to donate money, you can ask for donations of books- books are actually a fairly liquid asset (http://www.cash4books.net/).