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All of shirisaya's Comments + Replies

Where Does Adversarial Pressure Come From?
shirisaya1-3

This is a very good and perfectly clear post! Great job on cleaning cutting to the heart of the matter in a way that is also a good intuition pump.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
shirisaya4-20

Sadly, I don’t have the time to properly engage with your arguments. However, I have been finding your recent posts to be of unusually high quality in the direction of truth-seeking and explaining clear thinking. Please keep it up and give Scott Alexander some competition.

Please take this compliment. Despite being old enough to be your parent, I think discussions over beer with you would be a delight.

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2omnizoid
I really appreciate that!  Though if you like the things I write, you can find my blog at benthams.substack.com
Playing shell games with definitions
shirisaya30

This is a very good tip and one of Richard Feynman’s better known tricks in physics.

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1weverka
Yes it is.  When I took Feynman's class on computation, he presented an argument on Landauer's limit.  It involved a multi-well quantum potential where the barrier between the wells was slowly lowered and the well depths adjusted.  During the argument, one of the students asked if he had not just introduced a Maxwell's demon.  Feynman got very defensive.
Bathing Machines and the Lindy Effect
shirisaya100

Without doing the math to check, nothing that you said seems wrong. However, I take a very different lesson from the idea of the Lindy Effect than you do. Specifically, the Lindy Effect tells us that when making predictions about future lifetimes of non-perishable things, we should assume a power law distribution. If you've never dealt with predictions under thick-tail assumptions, you might be surprised how little intuition you will have for it. (The 80-20 rule is another example of assuming thick-tails.)

For example, a Pareto distribution (the easies... (read more)

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1DirectedEvolution
If I'm reading you right (low confidence), then I think our lessons are compatible. The longer something's been around, the longer we should expect it to continue, in absolute terms. At the same time, our best outside view guess is always that the thing is getting toward the end of its life, in relative terms. I notice the Lindy Effect getting tossed out often as a counterargument to an inside view. So for example, if John says "the Catholic church is on its last legs," Alice might say "it's been around for almost two millennia, so the Lindy Effect suggests it'll probably be around for a long time to come." I think the way to synthesize their approaches is to start with Alice's point of view, then modify it with John's. And this makes perfect sense. If you told me that X has been around for 2,000 years, then . without knowing what X is, I'd feel pretty confident that it's not going to disappear tomorrow. But I'd also want to know what X is, so I can modify my expectations accordingly. The Lindy Effect makes a little less intuitive sense when X is only a few seconds old. But that's because I can't stop my imagination from filling in what X might be by imagining the social circumstances. Anything you can tell me is 2 seconds old is probably something you made, and it's probably an object. Most objects don't self-destruct seconds after they were manufactured. More generally, anything that requires work to make requires an input of energy. That means evolution's fighting entropy for it, and probably wouldn't invest in it if it was likely to be fragile. Anything the living make has a life expectancy in proportion to the energy it took to build it. But likewise, the more energy it takes to make a thing, the smaller a fraction of the total output of things per unit time. If the Lindy Effect doesn't seem intuitive, that's because we're so used to paying attention to big, old things that we don't think to use the countless small and temporary things as examples.
How to validate research ideas?
Answer by shirisaya200

Let me try to point you in the direction that has been useful for me. I figured getting an answer to you was more important than getting a well-edited reply. Sorry for my logorrhea. If you would like to have a one-on-one conversation let me know.

10 second background: I spent most of my 20s in a good Ph.D. program in Applied Physics. I've spent the last 10 years in the corporate world and devoted a lot of time developing new statistical models. My answer is going to be colored by that past.

You correctly pointed out that having a good network to bo... (read more)

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7Daniel V
Also a PhD here - read, read, read. You need to know what's been done to see what the gaps are and how your project would fit in. You will also build up that intuition. Sure, it's also helpful to be able to bounce ideas around your network, but the less well-formed the idea is, the more likely it is to go to friends who aren't just going to shoot you down or for it to get the benefit of the doubt as "early-stage." You need to get the idea formed to the point where someone can feel comfortable pointing out issues, which will take independent research. You also see that here at LW, where ideas/points are usually more than a paragraph long.
Insights from the randomness/ignorance model are genuine
shirisaya20

The typical answer is that this is a result of the Poincaré recurrence theorem

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2Thelo
Thanks for the mention, I had never heard of that concept before. I have strong reflexes of revulsion against this idea that everything must reoccur (aren't plenty of processes irreversible in our world?), but it's getting too off-topic for the original article, and I need to think more about this.
2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
shirisaya280

I took the survey and answered every question. As usual, I found my ability to correctly answer the calibration questions comically bad . . . but hopefully well calibrated.

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2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
shirisaya500

I completed every question on the survey that I could.

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3Benquo
And was that at least one?
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
shirisaya330

I took the survey and answered everything through the political compass.

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2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
shirisaya100

I took the survey and was annoyed to realize that I didn't have a strong enough background to have informed answers to several questions.

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0windmil
That's about how I felt when I took it. Still fun whipping out those uninformed estimates to show what silly things I think.
Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds
shirisaya10

You say Eliezer's posts didn't do it for you, but how much of it did you read?

I have read every post on overcomingbias and I'm pretty sure I've ready every top-level post by Eliezer on less wrong. Although I very much enjoyed Eliezer's posts on the issue, they were intended for a wide audience and I'm looking for a technical discussion.

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Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds
shirisaya10

OK, if that's really what it takes I guess I'll leave it at that. But I don't see the loss of generality from conservation laws operating on any closed system as a good thing, and I can't understand how weighting a world (that is claimed to actually exist) by a probability measure (that I've seen claimed to be meant as observed frequencies) is actually a reasonable thing to do.

I would actually like to understand this, and I suspect strongly that I'm missing something basic. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to make my ignorance suitable for public consumption, but if anyone would like to help enlighten me privately, I'd be delighted.

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Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds
shirisaya00

Sure, I'm certainly not saying that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, and my understanding is that a decoherence view is both more useful and simpler. MWI (at least as I understand it) is a significantly stronger claim. When we take the probabilities that come from wave state amplitudes as observed frequencies among actually existing "worlds" then we are claiming that there are many different versions of me that actually exist. It's this last part that I find a bit of a stretch.

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3Douglas_Knight
If many different versions of you existing bothers you, does Schroedinger's cat bother you? The extent to which MWI is a stronger claim than "no collapse," it's purely interpretative. It certainly doesn't posit any "splitting" beyond vanilla QM. Questions about conservation of energy suggest that you don't get this.
Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds
shirisaya00

Thank you, this is exactly the type of linking that I was looking for. Unfortunately, the FAQ that you so kindly provided isn't providing the rigor that I'm looking for. In fact, for the energy conservation portion, I think (although I'm by no means certain) that the argument has been simplified to the point that the explanation being offered isn't true.

I guess what I'd really like is an explanation of MWI that actually ties the math and the explanations together closely. (I think that I'm expressing myself poorly, so I'm sorry if my point seems muddled, but I'd actually like to really understand what Eliezer seems to find so obvious.)

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0timtyler
The first sentence lays out the issue: "the law conservation of energy is based on observations within each world. All observations within each world are consistent with conservation of energy, therefore energy is conserved." Conservation of energy takes place within worlds, not between them. FWIW, I first learned about the MWI from: Paul C.W. Davies' book: "Other Worlds" - waay back in the 1980s. It was quite readable - and one of the better popular books on QM from that era. It succeeded in conveying the "Occam" advantage of the theory.
Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds
shirisaya00

In my understanding, what you have presented is an argument for why MWI is interesting (is has strong aesthetic appeal) and why it's worth looking into seriously (it doesn't seem to have spontaneous breaking of symmetry).

What I'm looking for is a compilation of reasons that I should believe that it is true, basically a list of problems with other interpretations and how MWI fixes it along with refutations of common objections to MWI. I should also note that I'm explicitly asking for rigorous arguments (I actually am a physicist and I'd like to see the math) and not just casual arguments that make things seem plausible.

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0byrnema
Many worlds is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. QM stays exactly the same; mathematics, evidence and everything. Whether an interpretation is plausible really just depends on what is aesthetic and what makes sense to you. I explained why some other physicists find Many Worlds reasonable. It's always going to be this nebulous opinion-based "support" because it's not a matter of empirical fact -- unless it ever turned out there is some way the worlds interact. You've made a distinction between MWI being aesthetic and MWI being worth looking into seriously, which makes it sounds like you view that the argument to avoid spontaneous breaking of symmetry is more than just an aesthetic one. Can you pinpoint the physical reason why we like to avoid it? (I was wondering before.) And then a question for the physical materialists: Why do you feel comfortable discussing multiple worlds; with it being an interpretation rather than an empirical fact? Or do you think there could ever be evidence one way or the other? (I just read Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable and I believe Eliezer is saying that Many Worlds is a logical deduction of QM, so that having a non-many-world-theory would require additional postulates and evidence.)
Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds
shirisaya10

On the issue of many-world, I must just be slow because I can't see how it is "obviously" correct. It certainly seems both self consistent and consistent with observation, but I don't see how this in particular puts it so far ahead of other ways of understanding QM as to be the default view. If anyone knows of a really good summary for somebody who's actually studied physics on why MWI is so great (and sadly, Eliezer's posts here and on overcomingbias don't do it for me) I would greatly appreciate the pointer.

In particular, two things that I ha... (read more)

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0timtyler
It mostly revolves around the idea of collapse. There's no expermental evidence for a collapse. In the MWI, there's no collapse. If we find evidence for a collapse someday, we will have to discard the MWI. However, people have been looking for a while now - and there's no sign of a collapse so far. So, applying Occam's razor, you get the MWI - or something similar.
3Douglas_Knight
What if instead of talking about "many worlds" we just said "no collapse"? If there's just this state and it evolves according to Schroedinger's equation. Then then of course there's conservation of energy.
2Z_M_Davis
You say Eliezer's posts didn't do it for you, but how much of it did you read? In particular, the point about parsimony favoring MWI is explained in "Decoherence is Simple". As for the mechanism of world divergence, I think the answer is that "worlds" are not an ontologically basic element of the theory. Rather, the theory is about complex amplitude in configuration space, and then from our perspective embedded within the physics, the evolution of the wavefunction seems like "worlds" "splitting."
2byrnema
I think that the many world hypothesis is aesthetic because it doesn't break symmetry. Suppose that in some set-up a particle can move down one path to the right or another path to the left and there are exactly equal probabilities of either path being taken. Choosing one of the paths -- by any mechanism -- seems arbitrary. It is more logical that both paths are taken. But the two possibilities can't interact: two different worlds. In the world we experience, objects do occasionally move to the right. If there is not an alternate reality in which the object moved to the left, eventually, with either that object's movement, or the object that pushed it, or the object that pushed that, and so on, you have to explain how symmetry was ever broken in the first place. Physicists don't like spontaneous breaking of symmetry. So much so, that the idea of many worlds suddenly seems totally reasonable. Later edit: This is similar to the argument Eliezer made, in more detail and with more physics here.
3timtyler
For energy conservation see: http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#violate The main reason for following the MWI is Occam's razor: http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#ockham%27s