Toby_Ord2
109
40
Toby_Ord2 has not written any posts yet.
OK. That makes more sense then. I'm not sure why you call it 'Fun Theory' though. It sounds like you intend it to be a theory of 'the good life', but a non-hedonistic one. Strangely it is one where people having 'fun' in the ordinary sense is not what matters, despite the name of the theory.
This is a moral theory about what should be fun
I don't think that can be right. You are not saying that there is a moral imperative for certain things to be fun, or to not be fun, as that doesn't really make sense (at least I can't make sense of it). You are instead saying that certain... (read more)
Eliezer,
Are you saying that one's brain state can be identical in two different scenarios but that you are having a different amount of fun in each? If so, I'm not sure you are talking about what most people call fun (ie a property of your experiences). If not, then what quantity are you talking about in this post where you have less of it if certain counterfactuals are true?
I would drop dead of shock
Eliezer, just as it was interesting to ask what probability estimate 'Nuts!' amounted to, I think it would be very useful for the forum of Overcoming Bias to ask what your implicit probability estimate for a 500 state TM being able to solve the halting problem for all TMs of up to 50 states.
I imagine that 'I would drop dead of shock' was intended to convey a probability of less than 1 in 10,000, or maybe 1 in 1,000,000?
Sorry, I didn't see that you had answered most of this question in the other thread where I first asked it.
Toby, if you were too dumb to see the closed-form solution to problem 1, it might take an intense effort to tweak the bit on each occasion, or perhaps you might have trouble turning the global criterion of total success or failure into a local bit-fixer; now imagine that you are also a mind that finds it very easy to sing MP3s...
The reason you think one problem is simple is that you perceive a solution in closed form; you can imagine a short program, much shorter than 10 million bits, that solves... (read more)
Eliezer,
I'm afraid that I'm not sure precisely what your measure is, and I think this is because you have given zero precise examples: even of its subcomponents. For example, here are two optimization problems:
1) You have to output 10 million bits. The goal is to output them so that no two consecutive bits are different.
2) You have to output 10 million bits. The goal is to output them so that when interpreted as an MP3 file, they would make a nice sounding song.
Now, the solution space for (1) consists of two possibilities (all 1s, all 0s) out of 2^10000000, for a total of 9,999,999 bits. The solution space for (2) is millions... (read more)
I agree with David's points about the roughness of the search space being a crucial factor in a meaningful definition of optimization power.
I'm not sure that I get this. Perhaps I understand the maths, but not the point of it. Here are two optimization problems:
1) You have to output 10 million bits. The goal is to output them so that no two consecutive bits are different.
2) You have to output 10 million bits. The goal is to output them so that when interpreted as an MP3 file, they would make a nice sounding song.
Now, the solution space for (1) consists of two possibilities (all 1s, all 0s) out of 2^10000000, for a total of 9,999,999 bits. The solution space for (2) is millions of times wider, leading to fewer bits. However, intuitively, (2) is a much harder problem and things that optimized (2) are actually doing more of the work of intelligence, after all (1) can be achieved in a few lines of code and very little time or space, while (2) takes much more of these resources.
But if you say "Shut up and do what seems impossible!", then that, to me, sounds like dispelling part of the essential message - that what seems impossible doesn't look like it "seems impossible", it just looks impossible.
"Shut up and do what seems impossible!" is the literally correct message. The other one is the exaggerated form. Sometimes exaggeration is a good rhetorical device, but it does turn off some serious readers.
"Don't do it, even if it seems right" sounds merely clever by comparison
This was my point. This advice is useful and clever, though not profound. This literal presentation is both more clear in what it is saying and clear that it is... (read more)
Eliezer,
Crossman and Crowley make very good points above, delineating three possible types of justification for some of the things you say:
1) Don't turn him in because the negative effects of the undermining of the institution will outweigh the benefits
2) Don't turn him in because [some non-consequentialist reason on non-consequentialist grounds]
3) Don't turn him in because you will have rationally/consequentialistly tied yourself to the mast making it impossible to turn him in to achieve greater benefits.
(1) and (3) are classic pieces of consequentialism, the first dating back at least to Mill. If your reason is like those, then you are probably a consequentialist and there is no need to reinvent the wheel: I... (read more)
the value of this memory card, was worth more than the rest of the entire observable universe minus the card
I doubt this would be true. I think the value of the card would actually be close to zero (though I'm not completely sure). It does let one solve the halting problem up to 10,000 states, but it does so in time and space complexity O(busy_beaver(n)). In other words, using the entire observable universe as computing power and the card as an oracle, you might be able to solve the halting problem for 7 state machines or so. Not that good... The same goes for having the first 10,000 bits of Omega. What you really want are the bits of Tau, which directly encode whether the nth machine halts. Sure you need exponentially more of them, but your computation is then much faster.