From the last thread:
From Costanza's original thread (entire text):
"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."
Meta:
- How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
- Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.
Meta:
- I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
- I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.
When you have a bunch of other data, you should be not interested in the Kolmogorov complexity of the number, you are interested in Kolmogorov complexity of other data concatenated with that number.
E.g. you should not assign higher probability that Bill Gates has made precisely 100 000 000 000 $ than some random-looking value, as given the other sensory input you got (from which you derived your world model) there are random-looking values that have even lower Kolmogorov complexity of total sensory input, but you wouldn't be able to find those because Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable. You end up mis-estimating Kolmogorov complexity when you don't have it given to you on a platter pre-made.
Actually, what you should use is algorithmic (Solomonoff) probability, like AIXI does, on the history of sensory input, to weighted sum among the world models that present you with the marketing spiel of the mugger. The shortest ones simply have the mugger make it up, then there will be the models where mugger will torture beings if you pay and not torture if you don't, it's unclear what's going to happen out of this and how it will pan out, because, again, uncomputable.
In the human approximation, you take what mugger says as privileged model, which is strictly speaking an invalid update (the probability jumps from effectively zero for never thinking about it, to nonzero), and the invalid updates come with a cost of being prone to losing money. The construction of model directly from what mugger says the model should be is a hack; at that point anything goes and you can have another hack, of the strategic kind, to not apply this string->model hack to ultra extraordinary claims without evidence.
edit: i meant, weighted sum, not 'select'.