All of Dr. Jamchie's Comments + Replies

Well the only evidence I have in favor this theory about high IQ is anthropics itself. And it should not be taken as very strong evidence. But perhaps I could make a bit stronger case, if we assume version of anthropics, where only thinking about anthropics counts as observer moments. Then one would have to have at least as high IQ as it is required to understand anthropics in order to think about them.

2Raemon
Are you saying "I have a high IQ, I am an observer, therefore I have some reason to believe high IQs are more common"? Is there more to it than that?

Would it make sense to outlaw talking about doomsday argument?

2avturchin
You can't outlaw something without thinking about it and even promoting it - thus, no. However, some "counterfactual" solutions could have sense, if we know how to do this in practice; For example, if we somehow will be able to forget our birth rank, we will not be in able to identify our position in the timeline. From causal decision theory it doesn't make sense, as doomsday will happen or not independently of our "forgetting". However, it looks like a classical Newcomb-like problem, where Doomsday argument is Omega, so other decision theories may recommend to try to forget the birth rank or DA.
And then I might respond by slicing into the definition of observer, creating "half-observers", and moving smoothly between observer and non-observer...

Do you have this written down somewhere in more detail? It seems that for this to work one needs to assume the gradual appearance of consciousness, something like rock<beetle<mouse<ape<human. Will this work if one assumes consciousness to be binary, that it either is or it isn't?

2Stuart_Armstrong
If it's binary, I point out the binariness is arbitrary, start looking at states of uncertainty about whether there was consciousness or not (or observers or not), talk about video feeds that may or may not be observed, or start looking at disasters that kill the population gradually yet inevitably. It's... not a very fruitful avenue to explore, in my view.

So what you are saying, is, before one knows his birth rank, one should assume infinite universe? This does actually corresponds to evidence about universe size, but not about human population size.

2Stuart_Armstrong
Again, it's what question you're asking. "If a copy of me existed, would it be more likely to exist in small universe or in an infinite one" has a pretty clear answer :-)

Lets say you do not know your birth rank at first. Then someone asks you to guess whether the universe is around 200 billion or some very large number. Without any additional data you should estimate 50% for either one. Then you get to know that your birth rank is around 100 billion. Do you not then update, that smaller universe have bigger than 50% chance estimated previously?

3Stuart_Armstrong
Again, we have to be clear about the question. But if it's "what proportions of versions of me are likely to be in a large universe", then the answer is close to 1 (which is the SIA odds). Then you update on your birthrank, notice, to your great surprise, that it is sufficiently low to exist in both large and small universes, so update towards small and end up at 50:50.
Answer by Dr. Jamchie100

A guess: google docs comments does not have karma system, so participants are free to tell what they want without worrying about losing points.

If the universe was s.t. it is impossible to compute the trajectory of a tennis ball without string theory, we might have never discovered any physics.

Makes one wonder, what things we have not discovered, because they are in a such way?

5Liron
I believe the term "chaotic" refers to those things. E.g. for an airplane's lift, there are higher-level-than-particle-modeling physical principles you can explain it with, but for a 1-month weather forecast you have to go down to particle modeling, or close.
This may be the strongest argument to why publications that are agreed to be wrong should not be changed or commented after the fact.

Could you elaborate? How one should know which publications are agreed to be wrong?

There is a third alternative: being true about your preferences, but realizing you are not in power to do anything about it.

I.e. I prefer to win lottery, but there is nothing reasonable I can do to achieve that, so I drop the participating in lottery altogether. From the outside it might look like I have revealed that I do not want to win a lottery since I do not even buy the ticket. Caring about environment might fall into this category as well.

And moving factforward long enough we will go back to fact that earth is flat and then analogy does not work any more :/

"Whatever is stopping interference patterns, it looks like detectors, not consciousness."

That is not the case, as shows delayed quantum eraser experiments. Detector does not stop interference if detected information is deleted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser

What difference does memories make if you are already been told whether you are clone or original? I fail to understand this reasoning.

Another similar scenario:

Lets say laws are such that after cloning, both original and clone splits all the money that original has. Now first clone gets 50% of all wealth, second clone gets 25% and so on, while original is left with next to zero after 100 splits. That is same unfairness as in original problem, just instead of probability of having all the money you get the corresponding fraction of the money. There is no way for you to remain with 1% of your money if you are the one who keeps getting split.

What if both clone and original are told which one they are right after cloning? Then probability of being told that you are original twice is still 1/4.

Assume this real life scenario:

100 refugees are met by the king of host country, who says, only 1 of you will become our citizen and other 99 will be slaves. The procedure of selecting the citizen is as follows: we choose 2 of you randomly, then coin is tossed - the looser becomes slave and the winner goes for second round against another fellow randomly selected from remaining 98 and so on. The one who wi... (read more)

2Chris_Leong
Again, that doesn't make a difference. Everyone either experienced the first splitting or has a false memory of it and the Citizenship or Slavery ignores this

But that is not an actual analogy to sleeping beauty. Real analogy would be, that you are a "counted bet", what horse are you more likely to be on?

And counting bet twice only in case of horse winning is equivalent of betting with 2:1 odds. Bookmaker will only give such odds if probability of that horse winning is 1/3. Hence the 1/3 probability.

5Chris_Leong
You can model it as having 2:1 odds or 1:1 odds with the bet counted twice. The later requires a trivial change to your betting algorithm. It also has the advantage of not changing your probability of a horse winning due to a mistake in a bookmaking system.

Knowing that your bet on this horse will be counted twice does not help you win by bettin on him or against him. Analogy to sleeping beauty would be, that bet is counted twice only if this horse wins.

5Chris_Leong
You're right that it doesn't really affect single bets, but it becomes important if you try to do things such as arbitrage where you need to arrange bets in the correct ratios. "Analogy to sleeping beauty would be, that bet is counted twice only if this horse wins" - but yeah, I should have said that instead

Suppose there is roulette table. Host throws the ball. If red - beauty is woken up 1 time, if black - two times.

When woken, beauty is asked to bet 1 dollar on either red or black. Roulette betting rules applies. Now there are two beauties - red and black. Red always bets red, black always bets black. Both undergo experiment 100 times.

In roulette red number drops out ~50% of the time. So Red queen wins ~$50 and loses ~$100 as for every black number she bets and looses 1$ twice.

Black queen gets back with ~$50 plus. In halfer world both should end up at 0.

5Chris_Leong
I didn't address the betting odds argument as its been covered extensively in other posts, but instead of just calculating the odds based on the probability, you need to add an extra parameter for the number of repeats.

The one who has student loan to pay is less likely to quit job.

Although I do find this indeed an interesting parable, yet I fail to see any practical implications of this insight. Perhaps you could elaborate more on if there are any?

For me, personally, it was some combination of discovering other, at that time, stronger pleasures and motivators than pure bliss of chasing the truth; depleting most of available resources of interesting information and feeling already smart enough for all intents and purposes. Although curiosity have found it's way back to my life several times since.

My concern is that there are some share of people who might have internal desires to do harmful things to others and are smart enough to evade consequences, for whom "internalized should not" is the only thing keeping them from doing those things.

Moderation notice: User 'Dr. Jamchie' has been banned for 3 months. His comments have been rude, nasty, and very low quality (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), and this has not changed since being warned.

Lack of money does indeed lead to burn out. I hope you have not had the experience, but it is the way it is.

2gjm
I think you overstate how censor-y the site is. And I am not at all convinced that making up/down votes separately visible does anything to make censors' lives easier, so even conditional on your being right about that I don't see why we should expect not to get up/down separation at some point.
1roland
No. What I'm saying that a pseudonymous poster without any history, who pops out of nowhere gets credibility. Specifically do people take the following affirmation at face value?

My suggestion is to show up-votes and down-votes separately. Naturally the post that gets no votes at all and post that gets 50 downvotes and 50 upvotes are of different significance and that should be visible.

2gjm
This is indeed a valuable feature, and old-LW has something like it (it displays sum-of-votes and %positive, which is almost the same information but I think strictly worse than just displaying total-up and total-down). I would be surprised if it weren't in the LW2 roadmap.
It makes changing our minds less stressful

But what if it feels less stressful exactly because, you actually don't change them? You know how you remember moments in your life better if they there strongly emotional? This suggest that stronger the emotions the bigger the impact on the brain. Then what if something that is interesting, but not stressful, just gives you the warm feeling of changing your mind, but actual neural connections fades away in few days, just like memory about boring conversation you had with colleague at the coffee machine?

I ex
... (read more)
7habryka
I think it should be obvious that the moderators on this site are not huge fans of people being controversial for the sake of being controversial (it makes our jobs a lot harder and wastes a lot of people's time). Take this as a warning that if you continue trying to get attention by being primarily controversial, without actually having good arguments, we will ban you. You’ve displayed behavior like this a few times and a large number of your recent comments are very heavily downvoted for that reason.

In my experience, which is not this site and probably not a culture you are from, putting some aggresion is essential part to even start a discussion. I mean proper discussion, which makes people think hard and which makes people to aggree on important things. Everything else is just small talk.

Huh. That doesn't seem an unreasonable model, for much of the world. I definitely feel the "most conversation doesn't seem to be about figuring out what's true / changing anyone's plans".

But to respond about this site and culture: here, we strive to make it that our casual, everyday conversations, change our minds, beliefs, and (most importantly) plans. It's a vision of a group of humans who, with every piece of information that comes to them, immediately uses it to change their models in accordance with the evidence - an... (read more)

Nah. In my life, I don’t feel some things as rude as others do, but when I do feel someone is rude then it‘s very distracting, clouds my thinking, and makes me less likely to cooperate with the person being rude.

I certainly try to feel things as less rude, and when it’s important then I’ll put a special effort in, but it seems like a wasteful norm for all discussions. It just isn’t worth it.

So to again summarise this whole argument: Moloch is a problem, that made you exist and is impossible to solve by definition. So what are you going to do about it? (I suggest trying to answer this to your self at first, only then to me)

Let me put it this way - if this is a problem, you would probably want to solve it? Generally if you want to solve a problem you would prefer it to not have existed in the first place? If yes then you would also not have any of the values you want to save. Considering this, does Moloch still qualifies as a problem?

7query
This is incorrect and I think only sounds like an argument because of the language you're choosing; there's nothing incoherent about 1. preferring evolutionary pressures that look like Moloch to exist so that you end up existing rather than not existing, and 2. wanting to solve Moloch-like problems now that you exist. Also, there's nothing incoherent about wanting to solve Moloch-like problems now that you exist regardless of Moloch-like things causing you to come into existence. Our values are not evolution's values, if that even makes sense.
2Kaj_Sotala
Yes.

Slight but noticeable gain. It's a trade-off I'm happy with atm, though if it continues I will take action. I note that I have friends with similar diets who are very skinny, and I tend to try to eat very wholesome take-out, like the mexican restaurant over the road.

(Note: my responding to this comment doesn't mean I don't think it should've been downvoted. I expect most people to find a question like this rude most of the time.)

We might want to preseve those, but can we? By definition we will be outcompeted by those who do not.

5PeterBorah
And that problem is exactly what Scott refers to as Moloch.

I see a risk with this approach, that author will have oportunity to hide comments, that does not agree with his opinion. This might kill some discussions in favor of author.

Each agent is given an opportunity to sacrifice something important to them in order to gain competitive advantage over the other agents.

Yes, and what I am asking is why those things are important fot them in the first place? Probably because having these things important gave those agents competetive advantage. Love your children? Thats Moloch wants you to replicate your stomach so you could eat mode baby elephants, than you alone could. You only sacrifice those things that Molach himself has given you.

2Kaj_Sotala
The way I would put it is that agents evolve to make use of the regularities in the environment. If exploiting those regularities leads to increased success, then competition creates complexity that allows for those regularities to be taken advantage of. Whereas complexity which is no longer useful, either because the regularities no longer exist in the new environment or because there are more powerful regularities to exploit instead, will eventually be eaten away by competition. Thus it's true that competition gave us those things originally. But on the other hand, if you're looking from the perspective of what we have now and want to preserve it, then it's also fair to say that competition is a threat to it.

I have just recently read Meditations on Moloch and I agree it is fascinating post, but also entirely misses the point. Competition does not make you sacrifice your values, that's how these values came to existence in the first place. There was analogy with rats who came to live in the island and used their spare time to do art, but stopped when resources had depleted. That`s not how story goes. When rats first came to island they did not care about art or any such nonsense, all they did was eat and fuck all day and everyone was happy. But one da... (read more)

4Valentine
Scott wasn't suggesting that competition alone makes people sacrifice their values. He was suggesting (as I understand it) that the following configuration tends to suck for everyone pretty systematically: * You have a bunch of agents who are in competition for some resource. * Each agent is given an opportunity to sacrifice something important to them in order to gain competitive advantage over the other agents. * The agents can't coordinate about who will or won't take advantage of this opportunity. The net effect is generally that agents who accept this trade tend to win out over those who don't. This incentivizes each agent to make the trade so that they can at least stay in competition. In particular, this means that even if there's common knowledge of this whole setup, and there's common knowledge that it sucks, it's still the case that no one can do anything about it. That, personified, is Moloch.

Not directly related to topic, but I was interested: does this identification of oneself with either rider or elephant, somehow correlates to MBTI personality types?

I just came up with this name for the thing I think I am seeing here - it's artificial morality. It is when you feel some things are moral and some are not, then you come up with a theory on why some things are moral and others are not, then you apply that theory to come up with other things that should feel moral/immoral and then you try to impose these should feelings to others even though there might not be a single person on earth who actaully feels that.

1Said Achmiz
Indeed. This, essentially, describes utilitarianism as a whole, which one can summarize thus: Step 1: Notice a certain moral intuition (roughly—that it’s better when people’s lives are good than when they are bad; and it’s better when good things happen to more people, than to fewer). Step 2: Taking this moral intuition as an axiom, extrapolate it into an entire, self-consistent moral system, which addresses all possible questions of moral action. Step 3: Notice that one has other moral intuitions, and that some of them conflict with the dictates of the constructed system. Step 4: Dismiss these other moral intuitions as invalid, on the grounds of their conflict with the constructed system. Bonus Step: Conveniently forget that the whole edifice began with a moral intuition in the first place (and how otherwise—what else was there for it to have begun from?).
3habryka
I both resonate with this sentiment, but am also hesitant since you could say similar things about linear algebra or prime factorizations, or most of mathematics: You first come up with a theory of how to determine something is a prime number, based on the ones you know are primes, then you apply that theory to some numbers you intuitively thought were not primes to show that they are indeed prime, and then you impose that mathematical knowledge on others, even though there might currently not be a single person on earth who actually thinks the number you highlight is prime. Or maybe a more historically accurate example is non-euclidian geometry, which if I remember things correctly, was assumed to be inconsistent since the 16th century, and a lot of the people who developed non-euclidian geometry actually set out to prove its inconsistency. But based on the methods they applied to other mathematical theorems, they then applied those methods to non-euclidian geometry and found that it should actually be consistent, and then they imposed that feeling of shouldness onto others, even though at the time the dominant mode of thinking was to believe non-euclidian geometry was inconsistent.

I feel it strange that when you open Daily posts, you see something like 5 days worth of posts and then you need to click "show more days" button. In facebook I don`t need to click anything if I want to scroll down to post 5 years old. I think.

3habryka
Yeah, autoloading on scroll would be convenient. It's relatively easy to implement, so it might be worth doing.

They are more alligned with the actual wrongness of an act.

7Said Achmiz
I confess to some perplexity, as I specifically constructed them to be less aligned with the actual wrongness of an act!

To be honest, I like all of your new definitions better that conventional ones.

3Said Achmiz
Why?

Yes, but you see now, with enought details added, second question doesn`t seem to make a lot of sense. "Which" in the question implies that Bob is just on one of the lists, but most likely he isn't. That being said, natural language does not correspond 1:1 to math or statistics. Some ambiguities are expected and a lot of sentences are up for interpretation. Now who is to say that second question you prodived is the correct way to interpret the original problem, and first one is not? First is at least coherent, while second is condradicting itself.

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