LESSWRONG
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All of PeterKinnon's Comments + Replies

Open Problems Related to the Singularity (draft 1)
PeterKinnon-40

Unfortunately this entire discussion is deeply flawed.

Why? GIGO - Garbage in - Garbage out.

However good the logical systems used for processing information they are of no avail without meaningful input data.

Present technologies cannot be used as a basis for prediction because of the unexpected bifurcations and inherent non-linearities in technological developments.

Further problems stem from the use of the very inappropriate buzz-word "Singularity". Certainly a dramatic change is imminent, but this is better considered as a phase transition - t... (read more)

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Information theory and FOOM
PeterKinnon-40

Sadly we here observe a retreat within the simple language of mathematics. I am not decrying mathematics nor am I underestimating the great value of that language in extending knowledge of the physical world by bypassing the complexities and irrelevancies common to the natural languages.

It does, however, suffer from two major weaknesses:

Firstly, like all languages, it is capable of generating fictions - entities and scenarios which have no correspondence wit the real world.

Secondly, it is, like all reasoning or computational processes, raw data sensitive.... (read more)

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1PhilGoetz
Nope. If you'll look at the math, you'll see that I said "important knowledge" ranges somewhere between O(log(raw information)) and O(raw information). Important knowledge = O(raw information) means we do not make any distinction between raw information and "important" information. Some of the ancients would have said that human inventions and nature are fundamentally the same, since nature is the invention of God. Now some people say that technology and evolution are fundamentally the same, since humans are part of nature. Whatever. I just want to know if the curves match.
Generalizing From One Example
PeterKinnon00

I apologize for the diversion but would be most interested to hear your reasoning behind the attribution of computational power to evolution . (I presume you are referring to the process of evolution of living systems by natural selection) PK

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2gwern
I'd guess it goes something like this: the answer being computed is what set of genes is best adapted to the environment (a search problem over the space of reachable organism genomes); each organism is a possible answer; every generation, an organism producing more or fewer than the average # of offspring represents a computed 1 or 0; after enough generations... Not a Universal Turing Machine, no, but still computation. Eliezer gives a few examples of this kind of thinking in http://www.scribd.com/doc/2327578/Worlds-Most-Important-Math-Problem-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-Future-Salon and I gather it's a reasonably well-established way of mathematically approaching evolution.