A friend recently mentioned (deterministic) Newcomb paradox discussions as we were talking about LessWrong having both recently become aware of the community despite being grad students in computation sciences over 20 years ago and reading these kind of blogs.
I was surprised and in disbelief that a significant subset of the community was engaged in discussing the deterministic case. I turned to various AI to see if they thought this was indeed true and they all seemed to think that yes there was a significant probability of a large proporiton of the community engaging in discussion about this at some point.
My most charitable interpretation is that the verbiage is muddled and there are multiple possible “clear” interpretations of the problem and one might have different probability weights to assign to each clear problem, but within each clear version there should be absolute agreement on what an optimal action is given some objective. This is what we in the industry might call “problem binding” perhaps. And I would expect that the LW community should quickly converge to this kind of multi-interpretation state where there is no real disagreement except on the probabilities for each interpretation.
However, by my quick sweek this does not really seem to be the case. Is it really possible there is a persisten confused/muddled/disagreement state on this problem?
And then I began to think about the construction of the problem and what did an imagined creator intend?
We start with a trivial problem: which do you prefer, 1k or 1M payoff? But then instead of saying that you rewrite the payoff in terms of some complex structure with some stochasticity that is actually “cancelled” out by something in the complexity. You perhaps add some confusing word choices or not. This feels like the classic kind of word problems one might complain about in high school. I understand they serve a purpose (are you able to unpick language) but in terms of content for LW it feels strange unless one jumps to the metaproblem of asking is this actually some kind of filter or experiment on the LW community itself.
I recently read the political reading list of LW and the Eliezer quote of “human evil and muddled thinking intertwine like conjugate strands of DNA” comes to mind. Not that this particular example (if my observations are broadly true) is actually evil, but it does seem to be a bit muddled.
If we resign ourselves to “the purpose of a system is what it does” then are to we to think of this as a kind of time jail, or perhaps just entertainment for certain subset of the LW community? Am I in time jail on the metaproblem?
Encounters with Newcomb
A friend recently mentioned (deterministic) Newcomb paradox discussions as we were talking about LessWrong having both recently become aware of the community despite being grad students in computation sciences over 20 years ago and reading these kind of blogs.
I was surprised and in disbelief that a significant subset of the community was engaged in discussing the deterministic case. I turned to various AI to see if they thought this was indeed true and they all seemed to think that yes there was a significant probability of a large proporiton of the community engaging in discussion about this at some point.
My most charitable interpretation is that the verbiage is muddled and there are multiple possible “clear” interpretations of the problem and one might have different probability weights to assign to each clear problem, but within each clear version there should be absolute agreement on what an optimal action is given some objective. This is what we in the industry might call “problem binding” perhaps. And I would expect that the LW community should quickly converge to this kind of multi-interpretation state where there is no real disagreement except on the probabilities for each interpretation.
However, by my quick sweek this does not really seem to be the case. Is it really possible there is a persisten confused/muddled/disagreement state on this problem?
And then I began to think about the construction of the problem and what did an imagined creator intend?
We start with a trivial problem: which do you prefer, 1k or 1M payoff? But then instead of saying that you rewrite the payoff in terms of some complex structure with some stochasticity that is actually “cancelled” out by something in the complexity. You perhaps add some confusing word choices or not. This feels like the classic kind of word problems one might complain about in high school. I understand they serve a purpose (are you able to unpick language) but in terms of content for LW it feels strange unless one jumps to the metaproblem of asking is this actually some kind of filter or experiment on the LW community itself.
I recently read the political reading list of LW and the Eliezer quote of “human evil and muddled thinking intertwine like conjugate strands of DNA” comes to mind. Not that this particular example (if my observations are broadly true) is actually evil, but it does seem to be a bit muddled.
If we resign ourselves to “the purpose of a system is what it does” then are to we to think of this as a kind of time jail, or perhaps just entertainment for certain subset of the LW community? Am I in time jail on the metaproblem?
What am I missing?