I thought it was sampling from the quantum wavefunction, and still I think my argument works, unless this was a building that was basically deterministically going to kill your mother if you run physics from that point forward, or already had hazardous materials with a significant chance of exploding. I agree that you can’t use your own prior probabilities.
Maybe I’m wrong about how much quantum randomness can influence events at a 5 minute timescale and the universe is actually very deterministic? If it’s very little such that you have to condition very hard to get anything to happen, then maybe the building does explode, but I’m not really sure what would happen.
As I said, the best approximation I have is “move particles the smallest joint distance from my highest prior configuration”. Some particles are in people’s brains, but changing people’s beliefs or intentions seems like it’s very unlikely to happen via this operation, since my guess is the brain is highly redundant and works on ion channels that would require actually a quite substantial amount of matter to be displaced (comparatively). Very locally causing a chemical cain reaction somewhere seems easier, though that’s just a guess.
I am not really sure what happens here, since I think overall physics is highly deterministic even taking into account quantumness, and my guess is for a macro-level outcome here you would need to go very quickly into astronomically low probabilities if you sample from the wave-function, and I don’t trust my reasoning for what happens in 0.00000000000000000000001% scenarios.
My best guess is something pretty close to what Eliezer describes happens, but I couldn’t prove it to you.
my guess is the brain is highly redundant and works on ion channels that would require actually a quite substantial amount of matter to be displaced (comparatively)
Neurons are very small, though, compared with the size of a hole in a gas pipe that would be necessary to cause an explosive gas leak. (Especially because you then can’t control where the gas goes after leaking, so it could take a lot of intervention to give the person a bunch of away-from-building momentum.)
I would probably agree with you if the building happened to have a ton of TNT sitting around in the basement.
Oh, I was definitely not thinking of a hole in a gas pipe. I was expecting something much much subtler than that (more like very highly localized temperature-increases which then chain-react). You are dealing with omniscient levels of consequence-control here.
I thought it was sampling from the quantum wavefunction, and still I think my argument works, unless this was a building that was basically deterministically going to kill your mother if you run physics from that point forward, or already had hazardous materials with a significant chance of exploding. I agree that you can’t use your own prior probabilities.
Maybe I’m wrong about how much quantum randomness can influence events at a 5 minute timescale and the universe is actually very deterministic? If it’s very little such that you have to condition very hard to get anything to happen, then maybe the building does explode, but I’m not really sure what would happen.
As I said, the best approximation I have is “move particles the smallest joint distance from my highest prior configuration”. Some particles are in people’s brains, but changing people’s beliefs or intentions seems like it’s very unlikely to happen via this operation, since my guess is the brain is highly redundant and works on ion channels that would require actually a quite substantial amount of matter to be displaced (comparatively). Very locally causing a chemical cain reaction somewhere seems easier, though that’s just a guess.
I am not really sure what happens here, since I think overall physics is highly deterministic even taking into account quantumness, and my guess is for a macro-level outcome here you would need to go very quickly into astronomically low probabilities if you sample from the wave-function, and I don’t trust my reasoning for what happens in 0.00000000000000000000001% scenarios.
My best guess is something pretty close to what Eliezer describes happens, but I couldn’t prove it to you.
Neurons are very small, though, compared with the size of a hole in a gas pipe that would be necessary to cause an explosive gas leak. (Especially because you then can’t control where the gas goes after leaking, so it could take a lot of intervention to give the person a bunch of away-from-building momentum.)
I would probably agree with you if the building happened to have a ton of TNT sitting around in the basement.
Oh, I was definitely not thinking of a hole in a gas pipe. I was expecting something much much subtler than that (more like very highly localized temperature-increases which then chain-react). You are dealing with omniscient levels of consequence-control here.