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All of danielmartin0's Comments + Replies

AMA Conjecture, A New Alignment Startup
danielmartin020

There are no guarantees in the affairs of sentient beings, I’m afraid.

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1psb777
This may be usually true, but that's all.
How to prevent authoritarian revolts?
danielmartin030

You can more-or-less prove that that paradox has no mechanical solution. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a citizenry with a widespread culture of moderation that makes them resistant to bad violent memes.

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4tailcalled
I agree, I think. I sort of imagine an unstable equillibrium, where even small perturbations can put you off track, or aiming a ship in hyperbolic geometry for some exponentially small subset of the space. However, I think for doing this, since it is so unstable, it is important to think carefully about building the foundations. Hence why I bring up concepts like mistake theory, I find that people often treat mistake theory as a counter to revolts, but it doesn't seem to me that it even attempts to accurately describe the social dynamics involved in democratic debate, and so I feel like this may be a foundation that needs improving.
Is Grabby Aliens built on good anthropic reasoning?
Answer by danielmartin0120

Hi, coauthor of the Grabby Aliens paper here.

In my view, the correct way to calculate in many anthropic problems is along the lines of the well-explored case of Everett physics: by operationalising the problem in decision theoretic terms.

For the sleeping beauty problem, if one embeds the problem in a repeated series involving bets, and if each bet feeds into a single pot, you arrive at the Thirder position. There is then a consistency argument to make the single-shot problem match that.

Similarily, for the Grabby Aliens problem, consider that civilisations ... (read more)

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SIA is basically just Bayesian updating on existence
danielmartin010

I don’t understand how it could be something I’ve left out. If I’m considering whether the world is a certain way, but I know that I can’t exist in that world, I reject the theory.

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SIA is basically just Bayesian updating on existence
danielmartin030

I have a simple question. You claim I should update my theories based on the fact I exist. Why would I update on something I already know?

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3Stuart_Armstrong
Depends; when you constructed your priors, did you already take that fact into explicit account? You can "know" things, but not have taken them into account.