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All of l8c's Comments + Replies

Rabin's Paradox
l8c-20

Absolute nonsense. (I used a different word that's too impolite to post here.)

Other commenters have already explained why, I just wanted to share an authentic reaction.

I hope you are the blackmailer when I get blackmailed in a decision theoretic situation and I'll take you to the cleaners!

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l8c's Shortform
l8c10

Absolute Truth Revisited

Modern rationalists like those here don't seem to like questions such as "Is truth beauty and is beauty truth". However, they may have lost inferential distance to the people who posed those questions, and they may start asking questions like that again once superintelligence is created.

Simply put, the superintelligence may discover that there are multiple Universes, simulated, basement-level or at some intermediate stage (e.g. if our Universe is not being watched over by a pre-existing superintelligence, but grew from an ancient co... (read more)

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Open Thread – Autumn 2023
l8c-10

https://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/36449024/ting-ting-ting-ahem-i-have-a-story-to-tell

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2Dagon
[epistemic status: mostly priors about fantastic quantities being bullshit.  no clue what evidence would update me in any direction. ] I don't believe the universe is infinite.  It has a beginning, an end, and a finite (but large and perhaps growing) extent.  I further do not believe the term "exist" can apply to other universes.  
Do you believe "E=mc^2" is a correct and/or useful equation, and, whether yes or no, precisely what are your reasons for holding this belief (with such a degree of confidence)?
l8c10

Thanks for your thoughtful answer.

How much does it concern you that, previously in human history, "every book"/authority appears to have been systematically wrong about certain things for some reason? How many of these authors have directly experimented in physics, compared to how many just copied what someone else/ a small number of really clever scientists like Einstein said?

I guess maybe that accounts for the 1% doubt you assigned.

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3localdeity
Some things are easier to test than others.  Also, some phenomena are simpler than others.  In social sciences, experiments involve what is effectively a lot of human labor (hence expensive and slow), and observations tend to be very subjective (hence imprecise when you try to aggregate anything), and humans have a lot of complexity you can't subtract out while keeping them alive and free.  Also, there are political considerations / ideology that impinge on social science and economics results.  In physics, there is mainly just the potential for politics about supporting an individual physicist's career and prestige... and the more funding there is, I guess the more danger there is of that.  (String theory seems to be an example in which predictions aren't really testable, and some people do make a strong case that career politics has unduly influenced that subfield.)  But the danger of corruption seems smaller, at least.  Results from enormous supercolliders that cost zillions of dollars—sure, those are harder to verify.  But there's plenty of physics that's much cheaper to test. Einstein himself made mistakes.  He added an arbitrary "cosmological constant" into his theory of general relativity, and later called it the biggest mistake of his career (though, ironically, I think more evidence has arisen since then that points to something vaguely resembling it—"dark energy").  He also needed to have his front door painted red, else he would wander into the wrong house.  The Millikan oil drop experiment is a famous case of stupefaction... but I think it's well-known in physics because it's rare. I've heard that quantum electrodynamics is one of the most heavily verified sciences there is, with the theory matching observations out to something like 8 decimal places.  Now, we know that QED is "wrong" in the sense that it doesn't account for gravity, so there will hopefully be some future theory that replaces it like general relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics.  Bu
Infinite tower of meta-probability
l8c-10

OK. But if you yourself state that you "certainly know" -- certainly -- that p is fixed, then you have already accounted for that particular item of knowledge.

If you do not, in fact, "certainly know" the probability of p -- as could easily be the case if you picked up a coin in a mafia-run casino or whatever -- then your prior should be 0.5 but you should also be prepared to update that value according to Bayes' Theorem.

I see that you are gesturing towards assigning also the probability that the coin is a fair coin (or generally such a coin that has a p of... (read more)

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Infinite tower of meta-probability
l8c0-3

>Suppose that I have a coin with probability of heads . I certainly know that  is fixed and does not change as I toss the coin. I would like to express my degree of belief in  and then update it as I toss the coin.

It doesn't change, because as you said, you "certainly know" that p is fixed and you know the value of p.

So if you would like to express your degree of belief in p, it's just p.

>But let's say I'm a super-skeptic guy that avoids accepting any statement with certainty, and I am aware of the issue of parametrization... (read more)

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0fryolysis
Knowing (or assuming) that the value of p does not change between experiments is a different kind of knowledge than knowing the value of p.
l8c's Shortform
l8c30

Why do so many technophiles dislike the idea of world government?

I rarely see the concept of "world government", or governance, or a world court or any such thing, spoken of positively by anyone. That includes technophiles and futurists who are fully cognizant of and believe in the concept of a technological singularity that needs to be controlled, "aligned", made safe etc.

Solutions to AI safety usually focus on how the AI should be coded, and it seems to me that the idea of "cancelling war/ merely human economics" -- in a sense, dropping our tools whereve... (read more)

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5ChristianKl
The principle of subsidiarity is valued in a lot of political frameworks.  A world government likely means that decisions are made by bureaucrats that are more out of touch with ground reality and lobbyists who fight for the interests of their companies. 
4Dagon
[ epistemic status: a small slice of my model, likely misleading because it's not part of a much larger discussion.   It's a mistake to engage with most political/philosophical discussions from Hacker News, but that won't stop me! ] Technophiles (and really, most groups who want status to track intellectual prowess) have a weird and inconsistent relationship with governments.  They desperately seek government as an entity that can solve the hard/impossible problems of massive populations of humans who want stuff that's not consistent with what the technophiles (or other intellectuals) want for them.  They often call this "coordination problems", rather than the more accurate "conflicting misalignment of values and desires problem". At the same time, they see the clear costs, limits, and inefficiencies of government action in the real world, where government decisions are NOT made by the preferred elite (technophiles themselves), but by the masses, or by a different profile of elites.  This obviously gets worse as the government gets bigger and more distant, in part because bigger means "less capturable by my preferred mechanisms".   This makes it obvious that the best government is a loose federation of smaller, local (or even domain-specific) governments, which can be controlled easily by the "correct" elite.  Ideally, the federation does minimially-intrusive enforcement of exactly the correct property rights in order to prevent violence that threatens the privilege of the controllers of smaller governments.  "maintain order" in both the "prevent violence" and "prevent significant change of order" senses.
l8c's Shortform
l8c10

Spooky action at a distance, and the Universe as a cellular automaton

Suppose the author of a simulation wrote some code that would run a cellular automaton. Suppose further that unlike Conway's Game of Life, cells in this simulation could influence other cells that are not their immediate neighbour. This would be simple enough to code up, and the cellular automaton could still be Turing Complete, and indeed could perhaps be a highly efficient computational substrate for physics.

(Suppose that this automaton, instead of consisting of squares that would turn ... (read more)

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l8c's Shortform
l8c10

"""The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?

I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level elements. (Wikipedia: “The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”)

Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our uni... (read more)

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3Dagon
I prefer other words for it, but there is a legitimate world-modeling concept in there. "Chaotic" (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory ) or "one partial equilibrium in a dynamic non-linear system" are a bit more precise, but not as easy to use in some contexts/audiences. "very hard for human-accessible logic to calculate" is fine too. I have no opinion about whether "blues scale" is a useful concept or not, nor whether it's similar to emergent outcomes of complex systems.
Repairing Yudkowsky's anti-zombie argument
l8c10
[C]riticism fails because the being does not have omniscient level ability to make logical inferences and resolve confusions

To develop this point: if logical inferences are the "Ethereum" to the "Bitcoin" of mere omniscience about patterns of information; or, to use a more frivolous metaphor, David Bowie's "The Next Day" in comparison to "Heroes", then I think this was a concept that was missing from OP's headline argument.

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The Number Choosing Game: Against the existence of perfect theoretical rationality
l8c10

You are trying to apply realistic constraints to a hypothetical situation that is not intended to be realistic

Your thought experiment, as you want it to be interpreted, is too unrealistic for it to imply a new and surprising critique of Bayesian rationality in our world. However, the title of your post implies (at least to me) that it does form such a critique.

The gamesmaster has no desire to engage with any of your questions or your attempts to avoid directly naming a number. He simply tells you to just name a number.

If we interpret the thought exp... (read more)

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0casebash
"However, the title of your post" - titles need to be short so they can't convey all the complexity of the actual situation. "Which I think is more interesting" - To each their own.
The Number Choosing Game: Against the existence of perfect theoretical rationality
l8c00

I would like to extract the meaning of your thought experiment, but it's difficult because the concepts therein are problematic, or at least I don't think they have quite the effect you imagine.

We will define the number choosing game as follows. You name any single finite number x. You then gain x utility and the game then ends. You can only name a finite number, naming infinity is not allowed.

If I were asked (by whom?) to play this game, in the first place I would only be able to attach some probability less than 1 to the idea that the master of the g... (read more)

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0casebash
"Now when I go ahead and attach a probability less than 1—even if it be an extremely high probability—to the idea that the game works just as described" - You are trying to apply realistic constraints to a hypothetical situation that is not intended to be realistic nor where there are any claims that the results carry over to the real world (as of yet). Taking down an argument I haven't made doesn't accomplish anything. The gamesmaster has no desire to engage with any of your questions or your attempts to avoid directly naming a number. He simply tells you to just name a number.