I agree that there are many reasons that prevent us from explicitly exerting significant control, but I’m at least interested in theurgy. Turning yourself into a better institution, contributing only to the support of not-needlessly-suboptimal institutions, etc. In the absence of knowing what “utility function” is going to ultimately decide what justification is for those who care about what the future thinks, I think building better institutions might be a way to improve the probabilities of statistical-computational miracles. I think this with really low probability but it’s not an insane hypothesis even if it is literally magical thinking. (The decision theory and physics backing the intuitions are probably sound, it’s just that it doesn’t have the feel of well-motivatedness yet. It’s more one of those “If I have to choose to spend a few hours either reading about dark matter or reading about where decision theory meets human deciion policies I think it’s a potentially more fruitful idea to think about the latter” things.)
I really appreciate that you responded at roughly the right level of abstraction. It seems clear that the debate should be over the extent to which thaumaturgy is possible (including thaumaturgy that helps you build FAIs faster) because that’s the only way “theism” or “atheism” should affect our decision policy. (Outside of deciding which object level moral principles to pursue. I like traditional Anglican Christianity when it comes to object level morality even if I mostly ignore it.)
The decision theory and physics backing the intuitions are probably sound
Not by a long shot. Physics is probably mostly irrelevant here, it focuses only on our world; and decision theory is so flimsy and poorly understood that any related effort should be spent on improving it, for it’s not even clear what it suggests to be the case, much less how to make use of its suggestions.
I’ve seen QM become important because of decision problems where agents have to coordinate between quantum branches in order to reverse time. I can’t go into that here but I’d at least like to flag that there are decision theory problems where things like quantum information theory shows up.
Physics focuses on worlds across the entire quantum superposition. That’s a pretty big neighborhood, no? Agreed about decision theory. When I said “choose to spend” I meant “I have a few hours to kill but I’m too lazy to do problem sets at the moment”, not “I choose thaumaturgy as the optimal thing to study”.
Physics focuses on worlds across the entire quantum superposition. That’s a pretty big neighborhood, no?
Okay, that makes sense as a rich playground for acausal interaction. I don’t know what pieces of intuition about physics you refer to as useful for reasoning about acausal effects of human decisions though.
I agree that there are many reasons that prevent us from explicitly exerting significant control, but I’m at least interested in theurgy. Turning yourself into a better institution, contributing only to the support of not-needlessly-suboptimal institutions, etc. In the absence of knowing what “utility function” is going to ultimately decide what justification is for those who care about what the future thinks, I think building better institutions might be a way to improve the probabilities of statistical-computational miracles. I think this with really low probability but it’s not an insane hypothesis even if it is literally magical thinking. (The decision theory and physics backing the intuitions are probably sound, it’s just that it doesn’t have the feel of well-motivatedness yet. It’s more one of those “If I have to choose to spend a few hours either reading about dark matter or reading about where decision theory meets human deciion policies I think it’s a potentially more fruitful idea to think about the latter” things.)
I really appreciate that you responded at roughly the right level of abstraction. It seems clear that the debate should be over the extent to which thaumaturgy is possible (including thaumaturgy that helps you build FAIs faster) because that’s the only way “theism” or “atheism” should affect our decision policy. (Outside of deciding which object level moral principles to pursue. I like traditional Anglican Christianity when it comes to object level morality even if I mostly ignore it.)
Not by a long shot. Physics is probably mostly irrelevant here, it focuses only on our world; and decision theory is so flimsy and poorly understood that any related effort should be spent on improving it, for it’s not even clear what it suggests to be the case, much less how to make use of its suggestions.
I’ve seen QM become important because of decision problems where agents have to coordinate between quantum branches in order to reverse time. I can’t go into that here but I’d at least like to flag that there are decision theory problems where things like quantum information theory shows up.
That actually sounds like it has a possibility of being interesting.
Physics focuses on worlds across the entire quantum superposition. That’s a pretty big neighborhood, no? Agreed about decision theory. When I said “choose to spend” I meant “I have a few hours to kill but I’m too lazy to do problem sets at the moment”, not “I choose thaumaturgy as the optimal thing to study”.
Okay, that makes sense as a rich playground for acausal interaction. I don’t know what pieces of intuition about physics you refer to as useful for reasoning about acausal effects of human decisions though.