All of toto's Comments + Replies
OK. I assume the usual (Omega and Upsilon are both reliable and sincere, I can reliably distinguish one from the other, etc.)
Then I can't see how the game doesn't reduce to standard Newcomb, modulo a simple probability calculation, mostly based on "when I encounter one of them, what's my probability of meeting the other during my lifetime?" (plus various "actuarial" calculations).
If I have no information about the probability of encountering either, then my decision may be incorrect - but there's nothing paradoxical or surprising about ...
I have problems with the "Giant look-up table" post.
"The problem isn't the levers," replies the functionalist, "the problem is that a GLUT has the wrong pattern of levers. You need levers that implement things like, say, formation of beliefs about beliefs, or self-modeling... Heck, you need the ability to write things to memory just so that time can pass for the computation. Unless you think it's possible to program a conscious being in Haskell."
If the GLUT is indeed behaving like a human, then it will need some so...
When it comes to proving such obvious things, one will invariably fail to convince.
Montesquieu, "The Spirit of the Laws", book XXV, chapter XIII. (Link to the book, Original French)
I don't know, to me he's just stating that the brain is the seat of sensation and reasoning.
Aristotle thought it was the heart. Both had arguments for their respective positions. Aristotle studied animals a lot and over-interpreted the evidence he had accumulated: to the naked eye the brain appears bloodless and unconnected to the organs; it is also insensitive, and can sustain some non-fatal damage; the heart, by contrast, reacts to emotions, is obviously connected to the entire body (through the circulatory system), and any damage to it leads to immedi...
Yes, yes he did, time and again (substituting "copy" for "zombie", as MP points out below). That's the Star Trek paradox.
Imagine that there is a glitch in the system, so that the "original" Kirk fails to dematerialise when the "new" one appears, so we find ourselves with two copies of Kirk. Now Scotty says "Sowwy Captain" and zaps the "old" Kirk into a cloud of atoms. How in the world does that not constitute murder?
That was not the paradox. The "paradox" is this: the only difference bet...
But when Kirk1 disappears a few seconds after Kirk2 appears, all of a sudden we see the act for what it is, namely murder.
I'm not comfortable with 'for what it is, namely'. I would be comfortable with 'see the act as murder'. I don't play 'moral reference class tennis'. Killing a foetus before it is born is killing a foetus before it is born (or abortion). Creating a copy then removing the original is creating a copy and then removing the original (or teleportation). Killing someone who wants to die is killing someone who wants to die (or euthanasia). C...
How in the world does that not constitute murder?
Any plans Kirk had prior to his "original" being dematerialized are still equally likely to be carried out by the "copy" Kirk, any preferences he had will still be defended, and so on. Nothing of consequence seems to have been lost; an observer unaware of this little drama will notice nothing different from what he would have predicted, had Kirk traveled by more conventional means.
To say that a murder has been committed seems like a strained interpretation of the facts. There's a diffe...
People who as their first reaction start pulling excuses why this must be wrong out >of their asses get big negative points on this rationality test.
Well, if people are absolutely, definitely rejecting the possibility that this might ever be true, without looking at the data, then they are indeed probably professing a tribal belief.
However, if they are merely describing reasons why they find this result "unlikely", then I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. They're simply expressing that their prior for "Communist economies di...
Behind a paywall
But freely available from one of the authors' website.
Basically, pigeons also start with a slight bias towards keeping their initial choice. However, they find it much easier to "learn to switch" than humans, even when humans are faced with a learning environment as similar as possible to that of pigeons (neutral descriptions, etc.). Not sure how interesting that is.
Frequentists (or just about anybody involved in experimental work) report p-values, which are their main quantitative measure of evidence.
(which would require us to know P(H), P(E|H), and P(E|~H))
Is that not precisely the problem? Often, the H you are interested in is so vague ("there is some kind of effect in a certain direction") that it is very difficult to estimate P(E / H) - or even to define it.
OTOH, P(E / ~H) is often very easy to compute from first principles, or to obtain through experiments (since conditions where "the effect" is not present are usually the most common).
Example: I have a coin. I want to know if it is "true" or "biased". I ...
I dispute none of this, but so far as I can tell or guess, the main thing powering the superior statistical strength of PatientsLikeMe is the fact that medical researchers have learned to game the system and use complicated ad-hoc frequentist statistics to get whatever answer they want or think they ought to get, and PatientsLikeMe has some standard statistical techniques that they use every time.
1) I'd like to see independent evidence of their "superior statistical strength".
2) On the face of it, the main difference between these guys and a p...
But believers in the Bible really do reject the Koran, and believers in the Koran reject (the extant versions of) the Bible (which they claim are corrupted, as can be "proved" by noticing that they disagree with the Koran). Whereas in the vegetarianism examples, there is no mutual rejection, just people who emphasise a particular point while also accepting others. Many of the people who go veggie to prevent animal suffering would also agree that it causes environmental damage. It's just that their own emotional hierarchy places animal suffering above environmental damage, not a real disagreement about the state of the world (same map of the territory, different preferred locations).
Hmm, the AI could have said that if you are the original, then by the time you make the decision it will have already either tortured or not tortured your copies based on its simulation of you, so hitting the reset button won't prevent that.
Nothing can prevent something that has already happened. On the other hand, pressing the reset button will prevent the AI from ever doing this in the future. Consider that if it has done something that cruel once, it might do it again many times in the future.
1- I can't remember anybody stating that "global warming has a serious chance of destroying the world". The world is a pretty big ball of iron. I doubt even a 10K warming would have much of an impact on it, and I don't think anybody said it would - not even Al Gore.
2- I can remember many people saying that "man-made global warming has a serious chance of causing large disruption and suffering to extant human societies", or something to that effect.
3- If I try to apply "reference class forecasting" to this subject, my suggest...
IIRC Jensen's original argument was based on very high estimates for IQ heritability (>.8). When within-group heritability is so high, a simple statistical argument makes it very likely that large between-group differences contain at least a genetic component. The only alternative would be that some unknown environmental factor would depress all blacks equally (a varying effect would reduce within-group heritability), which is not very plausible.
Now that estimates of IQ heritability have been revised down to .5, the argument loses much of its power.
Or, if the reference class is "science-y Doomsday predictors", then they're almost certainly completely wrong. See Paul Ehrlich (overpopulation), and Matt Simmons (peak oil) for some examples, both treated extremely seriously by mainstream media at time.
I think you are unduly confusing mainstream media with mainstream science. Most people do. Unless they're the actual scientists having their claims deformed, misrepresented, and sensationalised by the media.
When has there been a consensus in the established scientific literature a...
I guess I'm missing something obvious. The problem seems very simple, even for an AI.
The way the problem is usually defined (omega really is omniscient, he's not fooling you around, etc.) there are only two solutions:
You take the two boxes, and Omega had already predicted that, meaning that there is nothing in Box B - you win 1000$
You take box B only, and Omega had already predicted that, meaning that there is 1M$ in box B - you win 1M$.
That's it. Period. Nothing else. Nada. Rien. Nichts. Sod all. These are the only two possible options (again, ass...
1) So do nations with very high taxes, i.e. Nordic countries (or most of Western Europe for that matter).
One of the outliers (Ireland) has probably been knocked down a few places recently, as a result of a worldwide crisis that might well be the result of excessive deregulation.
2) In very small countries, one single insanely rich individual will make a lot of difference to average wealth, even if the ... (read more)