Dach

If I try to answer that question as written, I'd say that any time I see a probability estimate with on-the-order-of-hundreds of zeroes, when I know that event actually happened (at least) once in Earth's past light cone, I'm going to assume there is an error in the model that generated the estimate, whether I know what it is or not.

I would agree for pretty much any other topic. This is an event required for people to be around to observe it. Imagine a universe in which abiogenesis events really were absurdly rare- unlikely to ever occur in a given observable universe sized area. Every observer in this universe would still look... (read more)

Replying toHow common are abiogenesis events?

Dach4y

I'm not aware of an argument that there was only on abiogenesis event on Earth, just the observation that all known surviving lineages come from a universal common ancestor fairly early on. In principle that would be compatible with any number of initial events. It's just that once a given lineage evolved enough adaptions/improvements, it would spread and take over, and then no new lineage would be able to compete/get started.

Your observation is an argument for only one abiogenesis event, and your claim that one would spread and take over and no new lineages would be able to compete is a counterargument. I think mentally using this wording is helpful for properly probabilistic thinking.

I didn't mean for the opening comments of my question to be interpreted as justification for the structure of my vague estimate. Said estimate (although plausibly off by several hundred orders of magnitude) says abiogenesis events are cosmically unlikely, and this notion was used in the presentation of the question.

Replying toHow common are abiogenesis events?

Dach4y

While cool, I didn't expect indefinite self-replication to be hard under these circumstances. The enzymes work by combining two halves of the other enzyme- i.e. they are not self-replicating using materials we would expect to ever naturally occur, they are self-replicating using bisected versions of themselves.

I've slightly downgraded my estimate for the minimum viable genome size for self-replicating RNA because I wasn't thinking about complicated groups of cross-catalyzing RNA.

Replying toMy experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

As far as I'm aware, only one abiogenesis event has happened on earth- a place with copious amounts of the exact right molecules in cosmically unique quantity, density, and environment to form self-replicating RNA. If abiogenesis has happened anywhere else, it hasn't evolved into intelligent life whose work has intercepted our light cone. My current model for how abiogenesis went down in our world begins with the semi-random coalescence of more than a thousand nucleotides- for reference, the smallest known self-replicating bacterium has a roughly 580,000 base-pair genome. Assuming each additional required nucleotide introduces a 1/2 chance of failure, each random coalescence event has a less than (1/2)^1000 ~= 10^-300 chance of... (read more)

Dach4y

My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi's writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Scott: if you believe that people have auras that can implant demons into your mind then you're clearly insane and you should seek medical help.
Also Scott: beware this charismatic Vassar guy, he can give you psychosis!

These so obviously aren't the same thing- what's your point here? If just general nonsense snark, I would be more inclined to appreciate it if it weren't masquerading as an actual argument.

People do not have auras that implant demons into your mind, and alleging so is... I wish I could be more measured somehow. But it's insane and you should probably seek medical help. On the other hand, people who are really charismatic can in fact manipulate... (read more)

Replying toHumans are the universal economic bottleneck

Dach4y

Why is this limit unique? Why can't we be working on "distribution inefficiencies and similar" for the next 100 years?

In the case of real GDP per capita per hour worked, this limit is exactly unique- "distribution inefficiencies and similar" doesn't apply. Indeed, this is tautologically true as you say. Think about what it would look like for an increase in real GDP per capita per hour worked to not have the form of "Something allowed for more work to be done per hour per person". It wouldn't look like anything- that doesn't make any sense.

I would completely ignore my comment on "distribution inefficiencies and similar" until you know what I mean by... (read more)

Replying toHumans are the universal economic bottleneck

Dach4y

Self-driving technology is advancing and will soon(ish) allow us to move cars without humans being directly involved, except in terms of maintenance and management. This will be a major boon because it will partially remove humans from the equation- the bottleneck is partially removed. This has no real bearing on the title statement- I even remark about this in my post.

The "universality" here is trivial- here is a copy-paste of part of my response to a similar comment:

For everyone to become richer without working harder, we must develop technologies that allow more work to be done per man-hour. Aside from working out distribution inefficiencies and similar, this is the unique limit on

Dach4y

For everyone to become richer without working harder, we must develop technologies that allow more work to be done per man-hour. Aside from working out distribution inefficiencies and similar, this is the unique limit on prosperity. This is what I mean by "humans are the universal bottleneck"- we only have so many man-hours, and any growth is going to be of the form "With the same amount of hours, we do more".

Some segments of the economy have not had as much growth in the above department. For example, houses are assembled manually- all major parts must be done by hand, many with the assistance of only hand-held tools. Because we require shelter... (read more)

Replying toHumans are the universal economic bottleneck

Dach4y

Interesting, thank you.

Is the quadrupling of drag and octupling of rolling resistance related to the assumption that drag is proportional to the surface area of the side on which the drag is produced, and that rolling resistance is proportional to weight? Either way, cost would still decrease due to larger and more complex engines, as rolling resistance per kg would not change.

Of course, railway sizes are fixed, so there is little to be done. I was just speculating where the relative efficiency of cargo ships comes from. I made an edit at the end of the post which contains a very rough approximation of how large savings on wages are in the case of cargo container ships.

There's this idea in computer science wherein the maximum theoretical speedup that can be acquired with an arbitrary number of processors is related to the percentage of the program which can be parallelized. If we have two segments of code that take the same amount of time to execute with one CPU core in which the first segment can't be parallelized at all and the second segment is perfectly parallelizable, we can only run the program twice as fast, no matter how many CPU cores we have.

There's a similar idea in economics. It seems like the most powerful and civilizationally relevant feature controlling the medium to long term change in the price... (read 497 more words →)

Surface Thoughts Suck

I've been thinking about the differences between the ways in which people typically pursue wealth and the ways in which people typically pursue their altruistic goals. Charity is significantly signalling, and so on... But, there's something else I noticed.

Whenever you want wealth, you pursue a high paying career, open a business, and so on. Whenever you (a hypothetical average person unfamiliar with the rationalist or effective altruism community) want to accomplish some altruistic goal, you're going to consider personally volunteering yourself to perform the associated cheap labor. If you decide to donate instead, you probably see it as the less impactful option. It would be better (you would think) to go to... (read 869 more words →)

Not Even Evidence

Introduction.

I've been thinking about Anthropic Arguments recently, and noticed a disturbing lack of hard hitting (as in, can be shown to be true or false given our knowledge of physics and such) thought experiments on the topic.

The self sampling assumption is as follows:

All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all actually existent observers (past, present and future) in their reference class.

In this post, I'm using the reference class of "Algorithms identical to you, but perhaps in different times and places"- that seems the least objectionable. This includes exact simulated copies of you and exact physical duplicates of you.

The self sampling assumption... (read 2353 more words →)

(2020 - 10 - 03) EDIT: I have found the solution: the way I was thinking about identity turns out to be silly.

In general, if you update your probability estimates of non-local phenomenon based on anthropic arguments, you're (probably? I'm sure someone has come up with smart counterexamples) doing something that includes the sneaky implication that you're conducting FTL communication. I consider this to be a reductio ad absurdum on the whole idea of updating your probability estimates of non-local phenomena based on anthropic arguments, regardless of the validity of the specific scenario in this post.

If you conduct some experiment which tries to determine which world you're in, and you observe x... (read 615 more words →)

Dach's Shortform

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Outcome Terminology?