We’re just about to enter the “words” sequence and Eliezer wants to remind us that words carry no information unless we know why they were written.
Restatement: The meaning of words is entirely mediated by their entanglement with reality; beware of drawing new inferences about reality from arguments about words alone.
We’re just about to enter the “words” sequence and Eliezer wants to remind us that words carry no information unless we know why they were written.
I have always interpreted it in a similar way, and I believe that this post is included on the wiki with the words sequence. However, when I posted it yesterday, a different interpretation occurred to me, given that it immediately followed Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality. In this interpretation, there is a “reasonable” reason to pick the second box, but that doesn’t matter. The point of logic is to avoid finding the dagger, and if it fails, use a different logic.
(I think that the jester problem only has one solution, the one that the jester intended.)
The important bit is this bit:
We’re just about to enter the “words” sequence and Eliezer wants to remind us that words carry no information unless we know why they were written.
Restatement: The meaning of words is entirely mediated by their entanglement with reality; beware of drawing new inferences about reality from arguments about words alone.
I have always interpreted it in a similar way, and I believe that this post is included on the wiki with the words sequence. However, when I posted it yesterday, a different interpretation occurred to me, given that it immediately followed Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality. In this interpretation, there is a “reasonable” reason to pick the second box, but that doesn’t matter. The point of logic is to avoid finding the dagger, and if it fails, use a different logic.
Sometimes the relevant logic is the one with this axiom: “The King is a fink!”
(I believe this may fairly be called Idiotic logic.)