All of Ape in the coat's Comments + Replies

Good overall, but you are making a serious mistake: confusing single halfism, with double halfism.

SSA is a generalized single halfism reasoning. It's very obviously wrong in Sleeping Beauty as it implies that if the Beauty knows that she is awakened on Monday, she expects that there is 3/2 chance that the coin is Heads. Generally if you actually do the math, SSA can't produce correct betting odds for Sleeping Beauty problem. It's, in a sense, even worse than SIA for SB, but ultimately both of them are based on the flawed and unjustified framework of "centr... (read more)

So if a the territory is branching , the map.should, too.

Of course not. The territory can be made of rocks and dirt, but it doesn't mean that the map also has to be.

That's a disadvantage, because the same map can't represent any territory.

I'm not saying that it represents every territory.  I'm saying that it represents a more general class of territories without loosing any advantages of the framework of possible worlds.

 In the post I've even specifically outlined what are the territories that my framework can represent:

"So the territory that pro

You keep missing the point. It's as if you haven't even read the post and simply noticed a couple of key words.

The map that corresponds to a deterministically branching multiversal has possible worlds.

Some do.

I'm proposing a better map, capable to talk about knowledge states and uncertainty, in any circumstances, having all the advantages of maps using the concept of possible worlds, without their weak point.

If you think that the framework of probability experiment that I'm outlining in the post fails to account for something that the frameworks of possibl... (read more)

If..it was pointed out a long time ago that (a form of) probability being in the mind doesn't imply (a firm of) it isn't in the territory as well.

That not true because fundamental determinism is true , or because effective determinism at the macroscopic level is true.

This is beside the point that I'm making. Which is: even if we grant that the universe is utterly deterministic and therefore probability is fully in the map, this map still has to correspond to the territory for which you have to go an look. And we still have to be able to construct a m... (read more)

I don't see problems here.

The problem is that according to the framework of "possible worlds" we technically need to be able to do a thing that we can't do.  The solution to this problem is to use a better framework - the one of probability experiments.

You should imagine a part of the world, not the whole world, including orbits of start in an other galaxy.

My point exactly. In actuality we simply approximate a particular process of our universe to the best of our knowledge, instead of imagining all the universal permutations and then filtering from them the ones logically consistent with our knowledge.

Disagree. For example, if you have a dice that is symmetric by form and by weight with 4 sides, you are sure that if you roll it 100 times you will have around 25 results for each side.

And this belief of mine is grounded in actual behavior of dice in our physical reality, which I would never be able to get without going and checking the way reality works. I don't think we actually have any disagreement here.

I don't see which direct experiment you can use to figure out whether we are in a simulation or not that isn't extremely dangerous (searching for bugs

"Stones" is not a good class with clearly defined boundaries (like humans or potatoes)

Nothing is. We are dealing with abstractions and approximations of reality, in probability theory especially. And yet some approximations are correct while others are not.

Reference class "all stones in the bag" use all information we have, so it's the best.

We've been through that already. We have all kind of information, but still truly take in account only some of it, while constructing our mathematical models.

In fact, reference class should be the space of possibilities

You are perhaps interpreting his interactive dualism as substance dualism

You seem to be nitpicking definitions. Let's try to grasp the substance. Eliezer was initially distinguishing between two types of dualism:

1. Where consciousness is causally ineffective
2. Where consciousness has causal effects

His Zombie post were about the first one. This post is about the second one.

If you want to talk about some sub-type of the second that manages to evade the argument in this post - be my guest. 

The point of arguing for zombies is to argue for non physicalism. Zombi

There is no such thing as The One Truly Perfect Class. All of these are rough estimations; some are better than others. It's better to use "all stones in the multiverse" than to use nothing, but if you have a choice between all stones in the multiverse and all stones on Earth, use the latter as the reference class.

But why is one reference class more preferable than the other? What does determine it? How do we know that it's better to use "all the stones on Earth" than "all the stones in the multiverse"? And even better still to use "all the stones in this ... (read more)

Maybe you have to consider all the info you have, so you can't use all the stones in the multiverse as a reference class if you already know what's in the bag?

Consider the information you have:

• There are stones in this particular bag
• There are stones in many other bags
• There may be other stones in this bag in the future
• There are stones in your neighbourhood within R meters
• There are stones in your country
• There are stones on your continen
• There are stones on the planet Earth
• ...
• There are stones all around the multiverse throughout time and space

And yet from all ... (read more)

Why I am not a randomly sampled person? 

≈all peoples who believe they live in 21st century actually don't. I believe that I live in 21nd century, so I don't live in the 21st century. It sounds like perfect logic.

In be honest, I don't understand your counterargument right now.

Okay, let's start from the beginning. What does it mean to be randomly sampled? How do we know that some things are randomly sampled from some set of things and why this set of things in particular?

Suppose you have a bag of stones. When you blindly pick a stone from this bag why a... (read more)

I'm afraid you didn't make it clearer what you mean by "complexity" with your explanation. Could you taboo the word?

Are you using "comlex" and "emergent" simply as synonims to "having low entropy"? Or is there some more nuanced relations between them?

By "aligned with" I mean not merely related to but, "following the same pattern as"

Okay then putting it into the sentence in question we get:

a system more closely follows the pattern of a macroscopic phenomenon than its components.

I'm afraid this is also not particularly comprehensible. What you seem to be say... (read more)

Glad that you've enjoyed the post and thank you for your kind words.

In case you've also missed it, I'm currently working on a sequence about general probability theoretic reasoning to provide a clear framework which would not produce this kind of confusions in the first place.

if peoples of future spend 0.01% of their time in simulation of the Earth of 21st century, most of peoples, who think they are living in 21st century are wrong.

Granted. 

Therefore, if you were a randomly sampled person from all people who has ever thought or will be thinking that they live in 21st century you should think that there is only a small chance that you indeed live in 21st century.

But, as you are not, in fact, a randomly sampled person, this whole reasoning is unsound.

It's like you have 2 bag of numbered pieces of paper, in the first one the

...Or we could realize that we've been using an inappropriate mathematical model and then everything adds up back to normality.

I’d like to make the case that emergent complexity is where…

• a whole system is more complex than the sum of its parts

Could you explain what exactly you mean by "complex" here? Surely you don't mean "how many lines of code is required to make a thing". But then what?

• a system is more closely aligned with a macroscopic phenomenon than with its component parts.

I'm not sure I understand this either. What does "aligned" mean in this context?

I'm looking at your example:

So, when we look at an eye, we can see that it can be understood as something that fits the purp

Because it isn't (yet), at least for those lucky enough not to be drafted, or living in the border regions.

True. And I think it speaks a lot about how bad the 90s were if several years of drop in a labor force, neccessity to bribe people to join the army and harsh sanctions by all the developped world is a cake walk compared to them.

You raise some problems with the current system:

Who polices the police? Voters can be ignorant. Elections can be rigged. 

None of them seem to be particularly bad, we do have standard ways to deal with them, but sure enough let's see your proposed solution.

But suppose that tax payers were able to vote for their own tax rates, and voting power was proportionate to taxes paid? And suppose the vote took place via crypto, so that the results of the vote could neither be rigged nor ignored?

I don't see how this proposal helps us with police taking protection... (read more)

The fact that sleep initially evolved for temporal niches doesn't mean that no important machinery was connected to it later. Evolution is not a programmer, following single responsibility principle. It has a tendency to hook more and more functionality to the same module with time.

So, while safe sleep reduction may be possible, it's very much not clear whether it's the case just based on this evolutional argument. And it can be quite dangerous in the worst case. Research in this direction is interesting and promising, but it seems we should start with better understanding of sleep in general before trying to reduce it.

This. Shock Therapy in Russia went so bad that it led to one of the worst quality of life drop in history, not related to war, and memetically innoculated whole generations from the ideas of free-market democracy, eventually leading to the current quasi-fashist state waging a war with a death toll in multiple hundreds of thousands.  And even now, during the afformentioned war, people still manage to claim that at least it's not as bad as the 90s.

In this sense, reasonable experts such as Joseph Stiglitz were completely vindicated.

You can treat is as a miracle, but don't pretend that observation selection effects explains it any better than divine intervention. Otherwise you may feel as if you actually became less confused about the problem just by using different terminology.

Good observations about Putin's "Gift". I would notice that reproducing this probably requires something similar to Russia's social political climate of poverty, fear, apathy and cynicism, with a strong memetic innoculation against overthrowing governments and most develloped countries do not share these properties. But, that said, getting there is much easier than may innitially seem and USA is currently speedrunning it.

It never stops fascinating me how otherwise reasonable people are ready to believe in literal magic just because we've renamed it. Sequences have called out this failure mode explicitly and yet here we.

If I say that psychic power of soul granted to us by God systematically protects our civilization from extinction, who would treat me seriously? Clearly this is just some New-Age quasi-religious nonsense.

But what if, instead, I say that anthropical effects of consciousness granted to us by metaphysics systematically protects our civilization from extinction?... (read more)

That has been the default strategy for many years and it failed dramatically. 

All the "convinced influential people in tech", started making their own AI start-ups, while comming up with galaxy-brained rationalizations why everything will be okay with their idea in particular. We tried to be nice to them in order not to lose our influence with them. Turned out we didn't have any. While we carefully and respectfully showed the problems with their reasoning, they likewise respectfully nodded their heads and continued to burn the AI timelines. Who could'... (read more)

I will take blame for not making it clear that this is an introduction to a much larger body of thought

I'll have another essay in a few weeks - I will send it to you and I look forward to your criticism. 

This does provide the necessary context absolving the post from the main blow of my critique, for the time being. Looking forward for your next essay!

I would be glad if your future reasoning gave me some novel insight, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt about it and will do my best to approach it open-mindedly. But as of now, I'm afraid, your... (read more)

Metaphors and poetry are great when they highlight a valid intellectual point you are trying to make, allowing to engage with it on emotional level. Meditations on Moloch, that you cite, have quite a lot of that and are beloved.

It's even okay when metaphors and poetry obfuscate your point a little. Indeed, some people prefer their reading material to be less on the nose, and enjoy deciphering hidden meanings. There are both pros and cons and matters of taste here. But ultimately you won't be ostracised for that.

What is not okay, is when your post lacks sub... (read more)

You can in fact have an agent who prefers to be money pumped. And from their perspective there is no problem with that.

Money pumps isn't a universal argument that could persuade a rock to turn into a brain. It's just an appeal to our own human intuitions.

It really seemed that you are going somewhere with all this, and then it turned out that you are not. All these beautiful metaphors, complicated topics, all the reference to works of other authors - all for naught. Form without a substance. Question was raised and then a complete lack of answer was produced. 

That's quite dissapointing. And makes this post a poor story. 

hich For example, If I use self-sampling to estimate the number of seconds in the year, I will get a correct answer of around several tens of millions. But using word generator will never output a word longer than 100 letters. 

Using the month of your birth to estimate the number of seconds in the year also won't work well, unless you multiply it by number of seconds in a month.

Likewise here. You can estimate the number of months in a year by number of letters in the world and then multiply it by number of seconds in a months.

I didn't understand your i

You chose word length generator as you know that typical length of words is 1-10. Thus not random.

This is not relevant to my point. After all you also know that typical month is 1-12

No, the point is that I specifically selected a number via an algorithm that has nothing to do with sampling months. And yet your test outputs positive result anyway. Therefore your test is unreliable.

I didn't rejected any results  – it works in any test I have imagined

That's exactly the problem. Essentially you are playing a 2,4,6 game, got no negative result yet and are ... (read more)

First of all, your experimental method can really benefit from a control group. Pick a setting where a thing is definitely not randomly sampled from a set. Perform your experiment and see what happens.

Consider. I generated a random word using this site https://randomwordgenerator.com/

This word turned out to be "mosaic". It has 6 letters. Let's test whether it's length is randomly sampled from the number of months in a year.

As 6*2=12, this actually works perfectly, even better than estimating the number of months in a year based on your birth month!

It also ... (read more)

I personally didn't expect Trump to do any tarrifs at all

Just curious, how comes? Were you simply not paying attention to what he was saying? Or were you not believing in his promises?

I think "mediocre" is a quite appropriate adjective when describing a thing that we had high hopes for, but now received evidence, according to which while the thing technically works, it performs worse than expected, and the most exciting use cases are not validated.

I indeed used a single example here, so the strength of the evidence is arguable, but I don't see why this case should be an outlier. I could've searched for more, like this one, that is particularly bad:

In any case, you can consider this post my public prediction that othe... (read more)

I think the problem here is that you do not quite understand the problem.

There is definetely some kind of misunderstanding that is going on, and I'd like to figure it out.

It's not that we "imagine that we've imagined the whole world, do not notice any contradictions and call it a day". 

How it's not the case? Citing you from here:

When you are conditioning on empirical fact, you are imaging set of logically consistent worlds where this empirical fact is true and ask yourself about frequency of other empirical facts inside this set.

How do you know which ... (read more)

In this post I've described a unified framework that allows to reason about any type of uncertainty be it logical or empirical. I would appreciate engagement from people who think that logical uncertainty is still unsolved.

Are you arguing that the distinction between objective and subjective are "very unhelpful," because the state of people's subjective beliefs are technically an objective fact of the world?

It's unhelpful due to a an implicit (and in our case somewhat explicit) assumption that "subjective" and "objective"  are in opposition to each other. That it's two different magisteriums and things are either one or the other.

why don't you argue that all similar categorizations are unhelpful, e.g. map vs. territory

Map and territory framework lacks this assumption. I... (read more)

This debate seems hampered by a lack of clarity on what “objective” and “subjective” moralities are.

Absolutely.

Coyne gave a sensible definition of “objective” morality as being the stance that something can be discerned to be “morally wrong” through reasoning about facts about the world, rather than by reference to human opinion.

That's a poor definition. It tries to oppose facts about the worlds to human opinions. While whether humans have particular opinions or not is also a matter of facts about the world.

The fault here lies on the terms itself. Such dyc... (read more)

Yes, you are correct! Thanks for noticing it.

Actually... I will say it: This feels like a fast rebranding of the Halting Problem, like without actually knowing what it implies.

Being able to rebrand an argument so that it could talk about a different problem in a valid way is exactly what is to understand it - not just repeat the same words in the same context that the teacher said but generalize it. We can go into the realm of second order logic and say that

For every property that at least one program has, a universal detector of this property has to itself have this property on at least some input.

M... (read more)

You basically left our other more formal conversation to engage in the critique of prose.

Not at all. I'm doing both. I specifically started the conversation in the post which is less... prose. But I suspect you may also be interested in engagement with the long post that you put so much effort to write. If it's not the case - nevermind and let's continue the discussion in the argument thread.

These are metaphors to lead the reader slowly to the idea...

If you require flawed metaphors, what does it say about the idea?

Now you might say I have a psychotic fit

Fr... (read more)

So, essentially, it's like trying to explain to a halting machine—which believes it is a universal halting machine—that it is not, in fact, a universal halting machine.

Don't tell me what it's like. Construct the actual argument, that is isomorphic to Turing proof.

Let me give you an example. Let's prove that no perfect antivirus is possible. 

Let a perfect antivirus A be a program that receives some program P and it's input X as arguments and returns 1 if P is malevolent on input X and 0 otherwise. And A itself is not malevolent on any input.

Suppose A e... (read more)

If you are familiar with it, just say “yes,” and we’ll proceed.

Yes.

In The Terminator, we often see the world through the machine’s perspective: a red-tinged overlay of cascading data, a synthetic gaze parsing its environment with cold precision. But this raises an unsettling question: Who—or what—actually experiences that view?

Is there an AI inside the AI, or is this merely a fallacy that invites us to project a mind where none exists?

Nothing is preventing us from designing a system consisting of a module generating a red-tinged video stream and image recognition software that looks at the stream and b... (read more)

 "This, if I'm not missing anything" Yes you This is called a Modus tollens. We are not concerned about the boolean of each of the statements.
 

1.
"if I'm not missing anything" it is likely you do let me explain. This is called a Modus Tollens. We are not concerned about Lisas logic as a boolean. We look each proposition its entirety. I advice you to read about Turings proof on the halting problem, because it is the same technique.

I struggle to parse this. In general the coherency of your reply is poor. Are you by chance using an LLM? 

I apprec... (read more)

First of all, I think you are confusing incompleteness with having false beliefs.

A. Lisa is not a P-Zombie
B. Lisa asserts that she is a not P-Zombie
C. Lisa would be complete: Not Possible ✗

C doesn't follow. Lisa would need to be able to formally prove that she is not P-Zombie, not merely assert that she is not one, so that completeness was relevant at all. Even then it's not clear that Lisa would be complete - maybe there is some other statement that Lisa can't prove which, nonetheless, has to be true?

A. Lisa is a P-Zombie
B. Lisa asserts that she is a not

I think picking axioms is not necessary here and in any case inconsequential.

By picking your axioms you logically pinpoint what you are talking in the first place. Have you read Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners? I'm noticing that our inferential distance is larger than it should be otherwise.

"Bachelors are unmarried" is true whether or not I regard it as some kind of axiom or not.

No, you are missing the point. I'm not saying that this phrase has to be axiom itself. I'm saying that you need to somehow axiomatically define your individual words... (read more)

Yes, the meaning of a statement depends causally on empirical facts. But this doesn't imply that the truth value of "Bachelors are unmarried" depends less than completely on its meaning.

I think we are in agreement here.

My point is that if your picking of particular axioms is entangled with reality, then you are already using a map to describe some territory. And then you can just as well describe this territory more accurately.

I think the instrumental justification (like Dutch book arguments) for laws of epistemic rationality (like logic and probability) i

Ok, let me see if I'm understanding this correctly: if the experiment is checking the X-th digit specifically, you know that it must be a specific digit, but you don't know which, so you can't make a coherent model. So you generalize up to checking an arbitrary digit, where you know that the results are distributed evenly among {0...9}, so you can use this as your model.

Basically yes. Strictly speaking it's not just any arbitrary digit, but any digit your knowledge about values of which works the same way as about value of X. 

For any digit you can exe... (read more)

Is there a formal way you'd define this? My first attempt is something like "information that, if it were different, would change my answer"

I'd say that the rule is: "To construct probability experiment use the minimum generalization that still allows you to model your uncertainty".

In the case with 1,253,725,569th digit of pi, if I try to construct a probability experiment consisting only of checking this paticular digit, I fail to model my uncertainty, as I don't know yet what is the value of this digit.

So instead I use a more general probability experime... (read more)