I am interested in what Scott Aaronson says to this.
I am unconvinced, and I agree with both the commenters g and R above. I would say Eliezer is underestimating the number of problems where the environment gives you correlated data and where the correlation is essentially a distraction. Hash functions are, e.g., widely used in programming tasks and not just by cryptographers. Randomized algorithms often are based on non-trivial insights into the problem at hand. For example, the insight in hashing and related approaches is that “two (different) objects are highly unlikely to give the exact same result when (the same) random function (from a certain class of functions) is applied to both of them, and hence the result of this function can be used to distinguish the two objects.”
I am interested in what Scott Aaronson says to this.
I am unconvinced, and I agree with both the commenters g and R above. I would say Eliezer is underestimating the number of problems where the environment gives you correlated data and where the correlation is essentially a distraction. Hash functions are, e.g., widely used in programming tasks and not just by cryptographers. Randomized algorithms often are based on non-trivial insights into the problem at hand. For example, the insight in hashing and related approaches is that “two (different) objects are highly unlikely to give the exact same result when (the same) random function (from a certain class of functions) is applied to both of them, and hence the result of this function can be used to distinguish the two objects.”