“Among all these comments, I see no appreciation of the fact that the version of many worlds we have just been given CANNOT MAKE PREDICTIONS, whereas “collapse theories” DO.”
So far as I know, MWI and collapse both make the exact same predictions, although Eliezer has demonstrated that MWI is much cleaner in theoretical terms. If there’s any feasible experiment which can distinguish between the two, I’m sure quantum physicists would already have tried it.
To quote E.T. Jaynes:
“This example shows also that the major premise, “If A then B” expresses B only as a logical consequence of A; and not necessarily a causal physical consequence, which could be effective only at a later time. The rain at 10 AM is not the physical cause of the clouds at 9:45 AM. Nevertheless, the proper logical connection is not in the uncertain causal direction (clouds =⇒ rain), but rather (rain =⇒ clouds) which is certain, although noncausal. We emphasize at the outset that we are concerned here with logical connections, because some discussions and applications of inference have fallen into serious error through failure to see the distinction between logical implication and physical causation. The distinction is analyzed in some depth by H. A. Simon and N. Rescher (1966), who note that all attempts to interpret implication as expressing physical causation founder on the lack of contraposition expressed by the second syllogism (1–2). That is, if we tried to interpret the major premise as “A is the physical cause of B,” then we would hardly be able to accept that “not-B is the physical cause of not-A.” In Chapter 3 we shall see that attempts to interpret plausible inferences in terms of physical causation fare no better.”
“The same people who would never blindly accept a Bush Admin figure will blindly accept an anti-Bush figure.”
Notice how you assume, without bothering to Google it, that the million-casualties figure was “anti-Bush”. If it came from Clinton for President, or MoveOn, or the Democratic Party, you would have a case. In reality, the survey was conducted by Opinion Research Business, an independent polling agency which is not even US-based (their HQ is in London). The same group has published pro-Bush results in the past (eg, see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1530526.ece).
“The terrorists, with arms, attacked the unarmed. With intent to war, attacked those with no such intent. With planning, attacked those without notice.”
Uh, we do this all the time, and nobody here has called us cowardly. Air Force bombers, from thirty thousand feet, routinely drop bombs without prior warning on people who cannot possibly retaliate. Even assuming no civilians are killed (which is almost never the case), insurgents with AK-47s cannot realistically hurt B-52s.
“The big puzzle here is the inverse square of the mutation rate. The example of improvement in a starting population with a randomized genome of maximum variance, which can’t be used to send a strongly informative message, doesn’t explain the maintenance of nearly all information in a genome.”
(hacks program for asexual reproduction)
I’ve found that, assuming asexual reproduction, the genome’s useful information really does scale nice and linearly with the mutation rate. The amount of maintainable information decreases significantly (by a factor the three or so, in the original test data).
“Wei Dai, being able to send 10 bits each with a 60% probability of being correct, is not the same as being able to transmit 6 bits of mathematical information. It would be if you knew which 6 bits would be correct, but you don’t.”
“Given sexuality and chromosome assortment but no recombination, a species with 100 chromosomes can evolve much faster than an asexual bacterial population!”
No, it can’t. Suppose that you want to maintain the genome against a mutation pressure of one hundred bits per generation (one base flip/chromosome, to make it simple). Each member of the population, on average, will still have fifty good chromosomes. But you have to select on the individual level, and you can’t let only those organisms with no bad chromosomes reproduce: the chances of such an organism existing are astronomical. You would have to stop, say, anyone with more than forty bad chromosomes from reproducing, so maybe the next generation you’d have an average of 37 or so. But then you add fifty more the next generation… the species will quickly die out, because you can’t remove them as fast as they’re being introduced.
“Each individual chromosome can be selected, mostly independently of the others.”
All the chromosomes are packaged together in a single individual. Reproduction occurs at the individual level; you can’t reproduce some chromosomes and not others.
“This increases the potential number of semi-meaningful bases (bases such that some mutations have no effect but other mutations have detrimental effect) but cancels out the ability to store any increased information in such bases.”
If 27% of all mutations have absolutely no effect, the “one mutation = one death” rule is broken, and so more information can be stored because the effective mutation rate is lower (this also means, of course, that the rate of beneficial mutations is lower). So it may be a 40 MB bound instead of a 25 MB bound, but it doesn’t change the basic conclusion.
“If the environment shifts, the homogeneous population may be wiped out but part of the diverse population may survive.”
If you start postulating group selection arguments, you won’t be able to understand evolution clearly. And the professional evolutionary biologists will think of you as a crackpot. And your dog will get sick and die.
“But all species are considered to be descendants of the same LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), and there is no mathematical reason to consider each species separately.”
If the species have stopped interbreeding, deletrious mutations can accumulate in each species independently. Evolution is a mathematical process which does not care what happened ten million years ago.
“What you forget to take into account is that a growing population changes the conditions of the population, and changes selection pressure.”
Yes, that’s precisely the point. If you have a long period of weak selection pressure, the population will increase and selection pressure will increase. If you have a long period of strong selection pressure, the population will decrease (unless the species is driven to extinction). Hence, you can reliably predict an average selection pressure, because the two must balance each other out.
“The next step should be to try and find some mathematics that applies to non-equilibrium states. Maybe then you can draw some conclusions about the real world.”
This has probably already been done.
“The thing is that evolution is not just a thing of species, evolution takes places at all those levels”
I repeat: if you use group selection arguments, your dog will get sick and die.
“The notion of sacred values seems to lead to irrationality in a lot of cases, some of it gross irrationality like scope neglect over human lives and “Can’t Say No” spending.”
Could you post a scenario where most people would choose the option which unambiguously causes greater harm, without getting into these kinds of debates about what “harm” means? Eg., where option A ends with shooting one person, and option B ends with shooting ten people, but option B sounds better initially? We have a hard enough time getting rid of irrationality, even in cases where we know what is rational.
“An option that dominates in finite cases will always provably be part of the maximal option in finite problems; but in infinite problems, where there is no maximal option, the dominance of the option for the infinite case does not follow from its dominance in all finite cases.”
From Peter’s proof, it seems like you should be able to prove that an arbitrarily large (but finite) utility function will be dominated by events with arbitrarily large (but finite) improbabilities.
“Robin Hanson was correct, I do think that TORTURE is the obvious option, and I think the main instinct behind SPECKS is scope insensitivity.”
And so we come to the billion-dollar question: Will scope insensitivity of this type be eliminated under CEV? So far as I can tell, a utility function is arbitrary; there is no truth which destroys it, and so the FAI will be unable to change around our renormalized utility functions by correcting for factual inaccuracy.
“Which exact person in the chain should first refuse?”
The point at which the negative utility of people catching on fire exceeds the positive utility of skydiving. If the temperature is 20 C, nobody will notice an increase of 0.00000001 C. If the temperature is 70 C, the aggregate negative utility could start to outweigh the positive utility. This is not a new idea; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons.
“We face the real-world analogue of this problem every day, when we decide whether to tax everyone in the First World one penny in order to save one starving African child by mounting a large military rescue operation that swoops in, takes the one child, and leaves.”
According to http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/2006-2007/2006-2007-1/wider-wdhw-launch-5-12-2006/wider-wdhw-press-release-5-12-2006.pdf, 10% of the world’s adults, around 400 million people, own 85% of the world’s wealth. Taxing them each one penny would give a total of $4 million, more than enough to mount this kind of a rescue operation. While incredibly wasteful, this would actually be preferable to some of the stuff we spend our money on; my local school district just voted to spend $9 million (current US dollars) to build a swimming pool. I don’t even want to know how much we spend on $200 pants; probably more than $9 million in my town alone.
“For those who would pick SPECKS, would you pay a single penny to avoid the dust specks?”
Yes. Note that, for the obvious next question, I cannot think of an amount of money large enough such that I would rather keep it than use it to save a person from torture. Assuming that this is post-Singularity money which I cannot spend on other life-saving or torture-stopping efforts.
“You probably wouldn’t blind everyone on earth to save that one person from being tortured, and yet, there are (3^^^3)/(10^17) >> 7*10^9 people being blinded for each person you have saved from torture.”
This is cheating, to put it bluntly- my utility function does not assign the same value to blinding someone and putting six billion dust specks in everyone’s eye, even though six billion specks are enough to blind people if you force them into their eyes all at once.
“I’d still take the former. (10(10100))/(3^^^3) is still so close to zero that there’s no way I can tell the difference without getting a larger universe for storing my memory first.”
The probability is effectively much greater than that, because of complexity compression. If you have 3^^^^3 people with dust specks, almost all of them will be identical copies of each other, greatly reducing abs(U(specks)). abs(U(torture)) would also get reduced, but by a much smaller factor, because the number is much smaller to begin with.
“Wow. People sure are coming up with interesting ways of avoiding the question.”
My response was a real request for information- if this is a pure utility test, I would select the dust specks. If this were done to a complex, functioning society, adding dust specks into everyone’s eyes would disrupt a great deal of important stuff- someone would almost certainly get killed in an accident due to the distraction, even on a planet with only 10^15 people and not 3^^^^3.
“Congratulations, you made my brain asplode.”
Read http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=22 if you haven’t already. Your utility function should not be assigning things arbitrarily large additive utilities, or else you get precisely this problem (if pigs qualify as minds, use rocks), and your function will sum to infinity. If you “kill” by destroying the exact same information content over and over, it doesn’t seem to be as bad, or even bad at all. If I made a million identical copies of you, froze them into complete stasis, and then shot 999,999 with a cryonics-proof Super-Plasma-Vaporizer, would this be immoral? It would certainly be less immoral than killing a million ordinary individuals, at least as far as I see it.
“So how would you recognize a natural ethical process if you saw one?”
Suppose that you observe process A- maybe you look at it, or poke around a bit inside it, but you don’t make a precise model. If you extrapolate A forward in time, you will get a probability distribution over possible states (including the states of all the other stuff that A touches). If A consistently winds up in very small regions of this distribution, compared to what your model is, and there’s no way to fix your model without making it extremely complex, you can say A is an “ethical process”. Two galaxies, or two rocks, or two rivers, can easily collide; but if you look at humans, or zebras, or even fish, you will notice that they run into each other much less often than you would expect if you made a simple Newtonian model.
“(BTW, one of the reasons I don’t vote is that I am confident that I cannot, under any circumstances, EVER, have sufficient and reliable information about the candidates to allow me to make a good decision. So, I believe all voting decisions people actually make are irrational.)”
See http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/.
“Can anyone arrange to get money to this man or his family? I’m tempted to donate, to honor his deed.”
“I see man as made in the image of God.”
This does make some sense. If man is made in the image of God, and we know God is a mass murderer, then we can predict that some men will also be mass murderers. And lo, we have plenty of examples- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
“Sure God is not going to change natural law just because we are putting him to the test.”
If God does exist, as soon as we finish saving the world and whatnot, he should be immediately arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity, due to his failure to intervene in the Holocaust, the smallpox epidemics, WWI, etc.
“Twelve poor followers of Christ were able to convert the Roman empire.”
Aye. And Karl Marx must have had divine powers too- how else could a single person, with no political authority, cause a succession of revolutions in some of the largest countries on Earth?
“I could go into the lives of the saints for other examples but I wont.”
How do you know that large parts of their lives weren’t simply made up?
“You call the getting to the probability of nuclear war a simple question?”
Read the literature on heuristics and biases- researchers deliberately use simple questions with factual answers, so that the data unambiguously show the flaws in human reasoning.
“I would argue that they are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life.”
A fully human life, in the natural sense of the term, has an average span of sixteen years. That’s the environment we were designed to live in- nasty, brutal, and full of misery. By the standards of a typical human tribe, the Holocaust would have been notable for killing such a remarkably small percentage of the population. Why on Earth would we want to follow that example?
“It looks like this website has rejected the theistic understanding of faith and hope.”
Yes, for a very good reason- it does not work. If you stand in front of a truck, and you have faith that the truck will not run you over, and you hope that the truck will not run you over, your bones and vital organs will be sliced and diced and chopped and fried. The key factor in survival is not lack of hope, or lack of faith, but lack of doing stupid things such as standing in front of trucks.
“I don’t know how you can love something without it making you biased towards it.”
This is not what we mean by “biased”. By “bias”, we mean bugs in the human brain which lead us to give wrong answers to simple questions of fact, such as “What is the probability of X?”. See http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=30.
“”Fixed by evidence” != “simple”.”
This is certainly true in the general case, but all physics theories which I’ve studied in detail really are simple, in the bits of entropy sense.
“Please recall that my original contention was that Einstein must have had enough observational evidence to fix the information inherent in General Relativity as a solution. If you describe ways that the information in General Relativity can be fixed by evidence, you are not contradicting this.”
True; why do you have to contradict the main point of a post to comment on it? My point was that the space of possibilities was not vast; it was quite small, given the common-sense rules of gravity and math which were known at the time. Developing GR took years, not because Einstein has to sort through ten million different versions of the theory, but because developing a single version of the theory is difficult.
“You are also falling prey to hindsight by not making an equal effort to consider how you could have justified alternatives as unique obvious solutions using subsets of other knowledge known at the time, rather than the particular aspects that now obviously seem so prominent.”
This is mathematically impossible unless you assume false knowledge. If equations (A, B, C, D, E) are known at the time of Newton, and Newton’s theory of gravity is unique if you assume A, C and D, then any alternative theory of gravity must contradict A, C, or D. Suppose that you can construct an alternative theory of gravity, which is unique assuming equations B and E. If you assume that both B and E are true, then the alternative theory of gravity must be true, hence Newton’s theory must be false, hence either A, C, or D must be false. We know now that A, C, and D are all true, therefore, either B or E must be false.
“If only you had been around to solve the problem instead of Maxwell and Einstein, how much work could have been saved!”
Obvious != simple != easy to learn. You of all people should understand this. You seemed to understand it seven years ago, back during the days of your wild and reckless youth. To quote SitS:
“Let’s take a concrete example, the story Flowers for Algernon (later the movie Charly), by Daniel Keyes. (I’m afraid I’ll have to tell you how the story comes out, but it’s a Character story, not an Idea story, so that shouldn’t spoil it.) Flowers for Algernon is about a neurosurgical procedure for intelligence enhancement. This procedure was first tested on a mouse, Algernon, and later on a retarded human, Charlie Gordon. The enhanced Charlie has the standard science-fictional set of superhuman characteristics; he thinks fast, learns a lifetime of knowledge in a few weeks, and discusses arcane mathematics (not shown). Then the mouse, Algernon, gets sick and dies. Charlie analyzes the enhancement procedure (not shown) and concludes that the process is basically flawed. Later, Charlie dies.
That’s a science-fictional enhanced human. A real enhanced human would not have been taken by surprise. A real enhanced human would realize that any simple intelligence enhancement will be a net evolutionary disadvantage—if enhancing intelligence were a matter of a simple surgical procedure, it would have long ago occurred as a natural mutation. This goes double for a procedure that works on rats! (As far as I know, this never occurred to Keyes. I selected Flowers, out of all the famous stories of intelligence enhancement, because, for reasons of dramatic unity, this story shows what happens to be the correct outcome.)
Note that I didn’t dazzle you with an abstruse technobabble explanation for Charlie’s death; my explanation is two sentences long and can be understood by someone who isn’t an expert in the field. It’s the simplicity of smartness that’s so impossible to convey in fiction, and so shocking when we encounter it in person. All that science fiction can do to show intelligence is jargon and gadgetry. A truly ultrasmart Charlie Gordon wouldn’t have been taken by surprise; he would have deduced his probable fate using the above, very simple, line of reasoning. He would have accepted that probability, rearranged his priorities, and acted accordingly until his time ran out—or, more probably, figured out an equally simple and obvious-in-retrospect way to avoid his fate. If Charlie Gordon had really been ultrasmart, there would have been no story. ”
We know that Newton’s theory of gravity was hard to invent; it must not have been obvious, because nobody had solved it until Newton, and he was lauded as a hero for his great theory. And yet, it is so simple that we teach it to high school students, and some of them actually understand it. Newton’s equation is also a unique solution; the constant of proportionality is fixed by experiment, the m/r^2 term is fixed by the need to include Kepler’s laws (which were well known at the time), and extra terms are excluded, because F must vanish when M2 vanishes, or else you violate the laws of motion which Newton had just discovered.
“The Foresight Institute has the same problem: People want to donate time instead of money, but it’s really, really hard to use volunteers. If you know a solution to this, by all means share.”
There’s always Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome). It’s an inefficient use of people’s time, but it’s better than just telling people to go away. If people are reluctant to donate money, you can ask for donations of books- books are actually a fairly liquid asset (http://www.cash4books.net/).