All of Jim Pivarski's Comments + Replies

I have heard of versions of many-worlds that are supposed to be testable, and you're probably referring to one of them. The one that I'm most familiar with ("classic many-worlds"?) is much more of a pure interpretation, though: in that version, there is no collapse and the apparent collapse is a matter of perspective. A component of the wavefunction that I perceive as me sees the electron in the spin-down state, but in the big superposition, there's another component like me but seeing the spin-up state. I can't communicate with the other me (or "mes," plu... (read more)

Most of the interpretations aren't "pure" in the sense of being completely independent of empirical constraints. Decoherence is one that posits a physical process (unlike many worlds and quantum Bayesianism) that doesn't require new laws of physics (unlike objective collapse theories, including gravity mediated). It requires a collective effect from the environment, which is why I say it's like thermodynamics.

However, it isn't as well-understood as thermodynamics. I've read some papers in which the authors describe a simple, special-case example of an envi... (read more)

This sounds like it's using Russell's theory of descriptions, in that you're replacing "Colorless green ideas do Y" with "For all X such that X is a colorless green idea, X does Y." Not everyone agrees that this is a correct interpretation, in part because it seems that statements like "Dragons are attacking Paris" should be false.

I think it would be reasonable to say that "colorless green ideas" is not just a set of objects in which there are no existing members, but meaningless (for two reasons: "colorless" and "green" conflict, and ideas can't be colored, anyway). I think that was Chomsky's intention—not to write a false sentence, but a meaningless one.

I'm surprised that Scott Alexander's blog post didn't go for what I think is a more obvious connection between conservatism and conservationism: religious fundamentalism.

The way man acts these days... [shakes head, downcast] forswears a God-given charge to protect this God-given Earth. The way he chokes the air with smokestacks, plunders the oceans of her fishes, and paves the green hills flat with concrete—it sickens me. Gets me [thumps chest with mic] right through the heart. His vainglorious pride to try to change the natural order of things, the intric

This is both interesting and (I think) an important thing to know about science: plans and strategies are systematic, but discoveries sometimes are and sometimes aren't. In particle physics, the Omega baryon and Higgs boson were discovered in deliberate hunts, but the muon and J/psi were serendipitous. The ratio might be about half-and-half (depending on how you count particles).

Thinking about this, I have two half-answers, which may be leads as to why sweetener discovery might be discovered by serendipity, even though there are systematic searches for new... (read more)

This story from the perspective of the Thing did get into the notion of what it would be like to be an amorphous consciousness (and how odd it is that Earthlings aren't). It's still a little different, though, from the trajectory of being human and then realizing what it's like to be multi-human. A version with Pod People would be a different kind of story...

Cool! I'll read that one, too, thanks!

What I was thinking about with the pod people was their group mentality. (After all, it has long been considered a metaphor for communism.) I'd like to see someone imagine—or do it myself—the poddified people not as soulless outer shells of their former selves, but as themselves, "melted" into a group consciousness. As an example of something similar, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "The Wish" did an excellent job showing characters who remained themselves, but as evil versions of themselves, as vampires.

In the I... (read more)

But if that observer is in the universe, then there's more in the universe than just the circle.

I was examining this universe from the outside. We can't actually do that, though we act as though we do in the physical sciences. (One idea in the physical sciences that takes seriously the fact that experimenters are a part of the universe they observe is superdeterminism, and it's one of the possible loopholes for Bell's Inequality.)

Panpsychism! (Sort of!) But I guess that makes sense, since panpsychism is trying to make sense of divisibility of consciousness, too.

I will read it, thanks!

Sorry that I didn't notice your comment before. You took it the one extra step of getting kinetic and rotational energy in the same units. (I had been trying to compare potential and rotational energy and gave up when there were quantities that would have to be numerically evaluated.)

Yeah, I follow your algebra. The radius of the ball cancels and we only have to compare $\frac{1}{2}$ and $\frac{1}{5}$. Indeed, a uniformly solid sphere (an assumption I made) rolling without sliding without change in potential energy (at the end of the ramp) has 29% rotational ener... (read more)

Sorry—I addressed one bout of undisciplined thinking (in physics) and then tacked on a whole lot more undisciplined thinking in a different subject (AI alignment, which I haven't thought about nearly as much as people here have).

I could delete the last two paragraphs, but I want to think about it more and maybe bring it up in a place that's dedicated to the subject.

It might not matter in the grand scheme of things, but my comment above has been on my mind for the last few days. I didn't do a good job of demonstrating the thing I set out to argue for, that effect X is negligible and can be ignored. That's the first step in any physics problem, since there are infinitely many effects that could be considered, but only enough time to compute a few of them in detail.

The first respondent made the mistake of using the challenger's intentions as data—she knew it was a puzzle that was expected to be solvable in a reasonable ... (read more)

This looks a lot like a typical high school/college freshman physics problem, and I guess the moral of the story is that it leads us to think that we should solve it that way. But if you were to work it out,

Wow! That looks like a great book. Although one can find out by following the links you provided, I'd like to tell everyone here that the book is available for free on the author's website (PDF, epub, mobi).

They're similar-sounding questions, but different.

• "Do I have a headache when I'm not noticing it?" is a question about the definition of a headache. One definition is in the physical reality-box: a headache is neurological state that can be detected by a scientific instrument. Another definition is in the subjective reality-box: a headache is what I feel—I'm the only one who can say whether or not I have a headache. Some people deny that subjective reality is a kind of reality, and for them, the only real thing that can be called a headache is the one that

Interesting: I've had the same thought and did the same experiment, though it wasn't a tooth removal, but some tooth-drilling that I was assured would not be touching a nerve. The normal anesthesia would have been local Novocaine, and I hate how Novocaine feels for the rest of the day. (So it was a choice between two sensations, over two different time periods.) Without the Novocaine, it was like a distant, dull pounding, like falling on a bone, which can be managed. I did this more than once, but my current dentist argued more strongly against it and I ac... (read more)

I understand the softness of categories, and I don't mind that you would use the available data to not put me in the Christian box. Some things that you don't see are that I engage in Catholic practices, like going to mass (which is precisely why I canned an earlier draft and I'm writing again now).

If I gave the impression that Jesus is an iteration in general improvement of morality, then I mischaracterized my belief and my community's: we believe that Jesus is God—whatever that means. I have to add the "whatever that means" because it seems like a doctri... (read more)

Thank you for this response! (I have a few more books to add to my reading list.) Your post from 13 years ago is a very good explanation, too.

Ironically, though:

Here's an experiment for everyone to try: think it good to eat babies. Don't merely imagine thinking that: actually think it.

I have heard of an indigenous Australian tradition in which children were carefully, reverently turned into a blood-soup and consumed by the community (read in a book years ago, but there's this online). And I do try to imagine what it's like to live in this way. (I don't thi... (read more)

A quibble: arguments against God in the gaps are arguments against God as an explanation of some physical phenomena. "Does the universe have a face?" (poetically speaking) is not a gap that could ever be discovered by experiment.

As you (and Yudkowsky, and eventually Hofstadter) rightly point out, there isn't a universally compelling foundation to logic or reasons for things in general. In Reality and reality-boxes, I called the unifying feature among the uses of the word "reality" as a "degree of undeniableness," since anything can be flat-out denied, it's... (read more)

Have you ever been stuck debugging code and made a breakthrough by explaining it to someone else, even if they weren't following what you're saying? I think that's happened here, so thanks for asking me the question!

The religious community I'm in is not keen on proving the physical reality of miracles, the way that some will put a lot of effort into explaining, for instance, how and why the sun stayed still in the sky when Joshua prayed for it. (My community would quickly call something like that mythological.) The miracles that my community does assert—I ... (read more)

Right, as far as I know. Years ago, someone confided in me (I'm not saying who) that they experienced a perceptual miracle: something they could see that no one else could see. That kind of miracle is consistent with physical facts—it's a subjective decision to conclude whether the vision is meaningful or not.

I once asked at that Faith and Reason study group "if angels have backs." That is, if Mary is seeing Gabriel talking to her, whether only as much as she needs to see is manifested—namely, the front. Everyone else was of the opinion that this was besid... (read more)

As a statement about "What is the most fundamental type of thing?", it can't be justified by deduction or an appeal to observation the way that a statement about a particular physical thing in the universe can be. Like, if you want to find out why phosphorescent rocks glow, you can look at them under microscopes, experiment with them chemically, apply theories of molecular structure taken from other observations, etc. But if you ask things like, "Do phosphorescent rocks glow for any reason at all?" "Is nature comprehensible?" "Does it all resolve to mathem... (read more)

I was answering a question, and I took it out of the comments stream to keep from derailing that stream. But perhaps doing that made it more visible, which is not what I had intended.

It seems that religion is just an off-limits topic here, regardless of whether it seems like it might be relevant in some conversation. At the very least, I'll never bring it up again.

I'm still Catholic. I was answering your question and it got long, so I moved it to a post: Answer to a question: what do I think about God's communication patterns?

I think it would be more correct to say that a focus on believing particular assertions is a fairly recent trend in religion, encompassing the past millennium or two, but really picking up in the last few centuries.

It happened in or between Christianity and Islam (as isusr points out), and they probably both influenced each other. For example, Protestant Christianity focuses a lot more on a holy book than Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, but in a way that resembles Islam's veneration of the Quran: citing verses to prove points. Since then, Catholics ... (read more)

And even more deeply than door-to-door conversations, political and religious beliefs spread through long-term friend and romantic relationships, even unintentionally.

I can attest to this first-hand because I converted from atheism to Catholicism (25 years ago) by the unintended example of my girlfriend-then-wife, and then I saw the pattern repeat as a volunteer in RCIA, an education program for people who have decided to become Catholic (during the months before confirmation), and pre-Cana, another program for couples who plan to be married in the church ... (read more)

You might not be able to wiggle it enough to get what you want (depending on what you want), but you need to be able to wiggle it, yes.

Given the way "A causes B" is used in everyday speech and among philosophers, it seems that it needs to have some notion of "if A, then B" (with a possible addition of "is more likely"). To use "casual" to mean "deterministic" would be confusing—different enough, anyway, that this usage needs to be called out as unrelated, to avoid confusion. "Smoking causes cancer" is not deterministic (some smokers are lucky) and includes... (read more)

I had seen Tegmark's four multiverses before, but relating it to this is something I hadn't considered. The first level of multiverses, with different initial conditions but the same laws, is a lot like how I understand Pearl's ensemble of possible worlds.

As for the universe being a mathematical structure, that seems to be pretty much what physicists assume by default. The formulations of string theory that I've seen (casually—I've never worked in that area) replace the space-time manifold with a non-geometric matrix, making it math all the way down.

Even i... (read more)

If you replace "true" with "accurate," what does "accurate" mean?

I would have thought that "accurate" means that the distance between the model result and the true result is small, so it contains a notion of truth and a notion of distance.

I wasn't intending to take a side in utilitarianism/consequentialism; I just meant that, ultimately, a decision is made from intuition. It can't be deductive all the way down.

Okay, I take the word "should" to refer to a spectrum with ethics on one end (strong "should") and aesthetics on the other (weak "should"). It's possible that this is a wider use of the word "ethics" or "aesthetics" as others would have. Maybe those other things people are thinking about don't lie on a linear spectrum?

So, for example, when you're doing an algebra problem, "you should subtract the same amount from both sides of the equation, not just one side," is a choice to stay within the rules of algebra. Not doing so leads to less interesting results (... (read more)

This is a good example of needing to watch my words: the same sentence, interpreted from the point of view of no-free-will, could mean the complex function of biochemical determinism playing out, resulting in what the human organism actually does.

What I meant was the utility function of consequentialism: for each possible goal $x$, you have some preference of how good that is $f\left(x\right)$, and so what you're trying to do is to maximize $f\left(x\right)$ over $x$. It's presupposing that you have some ability to choose $x_1$ instead of $x_2$, althou... (read more)

Okay, I just did a deep-dive on the AI alignment problem and the Singularity on Wikipedia, and it will take me a while to digest all of that. My first impression is that it seems like an outlandish thing to worry about, but I am going to think about it more because I can easily imagine the situation reversed.

Among the things I came across was that Eliezer was writing about this in 1996, and predicted

Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers m

No, but I can see how it may be necessary. I guess I've been lucky that so far my interests have aligned with jobs that pay well enough for it to not be an issue—I'm sure some fields are more constrained than others. I didn't think that this would apply to programming, though. (That's my field, too.)

I don't know why I get these Less Wrong articles in my email, but I read this one because of a startling premise: choosing a job based on its monetary value as an investment. I don't suppose there's anything wrong with that, it's just a bit mind-blowing for me. Maybe culture shock? But if so, what culture is this?

Making judgments with limited information is a thing, and what you say about asymmetric loss functions makes total sense. (In other words, I'm on board with the point you were trying to make with this article.) It's just the idea of applying it to... (read more)