All of Bunthut's Comments + Replies

The audible links don't function for me, propably not for many outside America.

>To show how weird English is: English is the only proto indo european language that doesn't think the moon is female ("la luna") and spoons are male (“der Löffel”).

In the most of those speeches, gender is downleadable from the form of the word, with outtakes naturally. In German it really makes neither semantic nor phonetic sense - secondlanguagelers often don't learn it at all, but here chaos shows no weakness: It is rather the strong verbs that are currently going lost, bu... (read more)

>Sentence lengths have declined.

Data: I looked for similar data on sentence lengths in german, and the first result I found covering a similar timeframe was wikipedia referencing Kurt Möslein: Einige Entwicklungstendenzen in der Syntax der wissenschaftlich-technischen Literatur seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. (1974), which does not find the same trend:

This data on scientific writing starts lower than any of your english examples from that time, and increases initially, but arrives... (read more)

6 picolightcones as well, don't think that changed.

Before logging in I had 200 LW-Bux, and 3 virtues. Now I have 50 LW and 8 virtues, and I didn't do anything. Whats that? Is there any explanation of how this stuff works?

I think your disagreement can be made clear with more formalism. First, the point for your opponents:

When the animals are in a cold place, they are selected for a long fur coat, and also for IGF, (and other things as well). To some extent, these are just different ways of describing the same process. Now, if they move to a warmer place, they are now selected for a shorter fur instead, and they are still selected for IGF. And there's also a more concrete correspondence to this: they have also been selected for "IF cold long fur, ELSE short fur" the entire t... (read more)

for AIs, more robust adversarial examples - especially ones that work on AIs trained on different datasets - do seem to look more "reasonable" to humans.

Then I would expect they are also more objectively similar. In any case that finding is strong evidence against manipulative adversarial examples for humans - your argument is basically "there's just this huge mess of neurons, surely somewhere in there is a way", but if the same adversarial examples work on minds with very different architectures, then that's clearly not why they exist. Instead, they have ... (read more)

Ok, thats mostly what I've heard before. I'm skeptical because:

1. If something like classical adversarial examples existed for humans, it likely wouldn't have the same effects on different people, or even just viewed from different angles, or maybe even in a different mood.
2. No known adversarial examples of the kind you describe for humans. We could tell if we had found them because we have metrics of "looking similar" which are not based on our intuitive sense of similarity, like pixelwise differences and convolutions. All examples of "easily confused" images

Elaborate.

This isn't my area of expertise, but I think I have a sketch for a very simple weak proof:

The conjecture states that V runtime and $\pi$ length are polynomial in C size, but leaves the constant open. Therefore a counterexample would have to be an infinite family of circuits satisfying P(C), with their corresponding $\pi$ growing faster than polynomial. To prove the existence of such a counterexample, you would need a proof that each member of the family satisfies P(C). But that proof has finite length, and can be used as the $\pi$ fo... (read more)

I think the solution to this is to add something to your wealth to account for inalienable human capital, and count costs only by how much you will actually be forced to pay. This is a good idea in general; else most people with student loans or a mortage are "in the red", and couldnt use this at all.

What are real numbers then? On the standard account, real numbers are equivalence classes of sequences of rationals, the finite diagonals being one such sequence. I mean, "Real numbers don't exist" is one way to avoid the diagonal argument, but I don't thinks that's what cubefox is going for.

The society’s stance towards crime- preventing it via the threat of punishment- is not what would work on smarter people

This is one of two claims here that I'm not convinced by. Informal disproof: If you are a smart individual in todays society, you shouldn't ignore threats of punishment, because it is in the states interest to follow through anyway, pour encourager les autres. If crime prevention is in peoples interest, intelligence monotonicity implies that a smart population should be able to make punishment work at least this well. Now I don't trust in... (read more)

The timescale for improvement is dreadfully long and the day-to-day changes are imperceptible.

This sounded wrong, but I guess is technically true? I had great in-session improvements as I'm warming up the area and getting into it, and the difference between a session where I missed the previous day, and one where I didn't, is absolutely preceptible. Now after that initial boost, it's true that I couldn't tell if the "high point" was improving day to day, but that was never a concern - the above was enough to give me confidence. Plus with your external rotations, was there not perceptible strength improvement week to week?

So I've reread your section on this, and I think I follow that, but its arguing a different claim. In the post, you argue that a trader that correctly identifies a fixed point, but doesn't have enough weight to get it played, might not profit from this knowledge. That I agree with.

But now you're saying that even if you do play the new fixed point, that trader still won't gain?

I'm not really calling this a proof because it's so basic that something else must have gone wrong, but:

$b_{true}$ has a fixed point at $p$, and $b_{false}$ doesn't. Then... (read more)

That prediction may be true. My argument is that "I know this by introspection" (or, introspection-and-generalization-to-others) is insufficient. For a concrete example, consider your 5-year-old self. I remember some pretty definite beliefs I had about my future self that turned out wrong, and if I ask myself how aligned I am with it I don't even know how to answer, he just seems way too confused and incoherent.

I think it's also not absurd that you do have perfect caring in the sense relevant to the argument. This does not require that you don't make mista... (read more)

The idea is that we can break any decision problem down by cases (like "insofar as the predictor is accurate, ..." and "insofar as the predictor is inaccurate, ...") and that all the competing decision theories (CDT, EDT, LDT) agree about how to aggregate cases.

Doesn't this also require that all the decision theories agree that the conditioning fact is independent of your decision?

Otherwise you could break down the normal prisoners dilemma into "insofar as the opponent makes the same move as me" and "insofar as the opponent makes the opposite move" and con... (read more)

Would a decision theory like this count as "giving up on probabilities" in the sense in which you mean it here?

I think your assessments of whats psychologically realistic are off.

I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.

I think before writing that, Yud imagined calling [unambiguously gendered friend] either pronoun, and asked himself if it felt wrong, and found that it didn't. This seems realistic to me: I've experienced my emotional introspection becoming blank on topics I've put a lot of thinking into. This... (read more)

I don't think the analogy to biological brains is quite as strong. For example, biological brains need to be "robust" not only to variations in the input, but also in a literal sense, to forceful impact or to parasites trying to control it. It intentionally has very bad suppressability, and this means there needs to be a lot of redundancy, which makes "just stick an electrode in that area" work. More generally, it is under many constraints that a ML system isn't, probably too many for us to think of, and it generally prioritizes safety over performance. Bo... (read more)

Probably way too old here, but I had multible experiences relevant to the thread.

Once I had a dream and then, in the dream, I remembered I had dreamt this exact thing before, and wondered if I was dreaming now, and everything looked so real and vivid that I concluded I was not.

I can create a kind of half-dream, where I see random images and moving sequences at most 3 seconds or so long, in succession. I am really dimmed but not sleeping, and I am aware in the back of my head that they are only schematic and vague.

I would say the backstories in dreams are d... (read more)

I think its still possible to have a scenario like this. Lets say each trader would buy or sell a certain amount when the price is below/above what they think it to be, but the transition being very steep instead of instant. Then you could still have long price intervalls where the amounts bought and sold remain constant, and then every point in there could be the market price.

I'm not sure if this is significant. I see no reason to set the traders up this way other than the result in the particular scenario that kicked this off, and adding traders who don'... (read more)

So I'm not sure what's going on with my mental sim. Maybe I just have a super-broad 'crypto-moral detector' that goes off way more often than yours (w/o explicitly labeling things as crypto-moral for me).

Maybe. How were your intuitions before you encountered LW? If you already had a hypocrisy intuition, then trying to internalize the rationalist perspective might have lead it to ignore the morality-distinction.

My father playing golf with me today, telling me to lean down more to stop them going out left so much.

I don't strongly relate to any of these descriptions. I can say that I don't feel like I have to pretend advice from equals is more helpful than it is, which I suppose means its not face. The most common way to reject advice is a comment like "eh, whatever" and ignoring it. Some nerds get really mad at this and seem to demand intellectual debate. This is not well received. Most people give advice with the expectation of intellectual debate only on crypto-moral topics (this is also not well received generally, but the speaker seems to accept that as an "identity cost"), or not at all.

You mean advice to diet, or "technical" advice once its established that person wants to diet? I don't have experience with either, but the first is definitely crypto-moral.

This excludes worlds which the deductive process has ruled out, so for example if $A\vee B$ has been proved, all worlds will have either A or B. So if you had a bet which would pay $10 on A, and a bet which would pay $2 on B, you're treated as if you have $2 to spend.

I agree you can arbitrage inconsistencies this way, but it seems very questionable. For one, it means the market maker needs to interpret the output of the deductive process semantically. And it makes him go bankrupt if that logic is inconsistent. And there could be a case where a proposit... (read more)

But now, you seem to be complaining that a method that explicitly avoids Troll Bridge would be too restrictive?

No, I think finding such a no-learning-needed method would be great. It just means your learning-based approach wouldn't be needed.

You seem to be arguing that being susceptible to Troll Bridge should be judged as a necessary/positive trait of a decision theory.

No. I'm saying if our "good" reasoning can't tell us where in Troll Bridge the mistake is, then something that learns to make "good" inferences would have to fall for it.

But there are decisi

So your social experience is different in this respect?

I've never experienced this example in particular, but I would not expect such a backlash. Can you think of another scenario with non-moral advice that I have likely experienced?

It seems to me that this habit is universal in American culture, and I'd be surprised (and intrigued!) to hear about any culture where it isn't.

I live in Austria. I would say we do have norms against hypocrisy, but your example with the drivers license seems absurd to me. I would be surprised (and intrigued!) if agreement with this one in particular is actually universal in American culture. In my experience, hypocrisy norms are for moral and crypto-moral topics.

For normies, morality is an imposition. Telling them of new moral requirements increases how mu... (read more)

Hum, then I'm not sure I understand in what way classical game theory is neater here?

Changing the labels doesn't make a difference classically.

As long as the probabilistic coin flips are independent on both sides

Yes.

Do you have examples of problems with copies that I could look at and that you think would be useful to study?

No, I think you should take the problems of distributed computing, and translate them into decision problems, that you then have a solution to.

The link would have been to better illustrate how the proposed system works, not about motivation. So, it seems that you understood the proposal, and wouldn't have needed it.

I don't exactly want to learn the cartesian boundary. A cartesian agent believes that its input set fully screens off any other influence on its thinking, and the outputs screen off any influence of the thinking on the world. Its very hard to find things that actually fulfill this. I explain how PDT can learn cartesian boundaries, if there are any, as a sanity/conservative extension check. But it can also learn that it controls copies or predictions of itself for example.

The apparent difference is based on the incoherent counterfactual "what if I say heads and my copy says tails"

I don't need counterfactuals like that to describe the game, only implications. If you say heads and your copy tails, you will get one util, just like how if 1+1=3, the circle can be squared.

The interesting thing here is that superrationality breaks up an equivalence class relative to classical game theory, and peoples intuitions don't seem to have incorporated this.

What is and isn't an isomorphism depends on what you want to be preserved under isomorphism. If you want everything thats game-theoretically relevant to be preserved, then of course those games won't turn out equivalent. But that doesn't explain anything. If my argument had been that the correct action in the prisoners dilemma depends on sunspot activity, you could have written your comment just as well.

...the one outlined in the post?

Right, but then, are all other variables unchanged? Or are they influenced somehow? The obvious proposal is EDT -- assume influence goes with correlation.

I'm not sure why you think there would be a decision theory in that as well. Obviously when BDT decides its output, it will have some theory about how its output nodes propagate. But the hypothesis as a whole doesn't think about influence. Its just a total probability distribution, and it includes that some things inside it are distributed according to BDT. It doesn't have beliefs about "if the output of ... (read more)

Adding other hypothesis doesn't fix the problem. For every hypothesis you can think of, theres a version of it that says "but I survive for sure" tacked on. This hypothesis can never lose evidence relative to the base version, but it can gain evidence anthropically. Eventually, these will get you. Yes, theres all sorts of considerations that are more relevant in a realistic scenario, thats not the point.

The problem, as I understand it, is that there seem to be magical hypothesis you can't update against from ordinary observation, because by construction the only time they make a difference is in your odds of survival. So you can't update them from observation, and anthropics can only update in their favour, so eventually you end up believing one and then you die.

Maybe the disagreement is in how we consider the alternative hypothesis to be? I'm not imagining a broken gun - you could examine your gun and notice it isn't, or just shoot into the air a few times and see it firing. But even after you eliminate all of those, theres still the hypothesis "I'm special for no discernible reason" (or is there?) that can only be tested anthropically, if at all. And this seems worrying.

Maybe heres a stronger way to formulate it: Consider all the copies of yourself across the multiverse. They will sometimes face situations where... (read more)

To clarify, do you think I was wrong to say UDT would play the game? I've read the two posts you linked. I think I understand Weis, and I think the UDT described there would play. I don't quite understand yours.