It seems quite likely that weak force follows most simply from some underlying theory that we don’t have yet.
In fact I think we already have this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction (Disclaimer: I don’t grok this at all, just going by the summary)
ETA: Based on the link in the top comment, the hypothetical ‘weakless universe’ is constructed by varying the ‘electroweak breaking scale’ parameter, not by eliminating the weak force on a fundamental level.
Doesn’t intelligence require a low-entropy setting to be useful? If your surroundings are all random noise then no-free-lunch theorem applies.
That’s a reasonable position, though I’m not sure if it’s OP’s.
My own sense is that even for novel physical systems, the ‘how could we have foreseen these results’ question tends to get answered—the difference being it maybe gets answered a few decades later by a physicist instead of immediately by the engineering team.
I was under the impression those other particles might be a consequence of a deeper mathematical structure?
Such that asking for a universe without the ‘unnecessary’ particles would be kind of like asking for one without ‘unnecessary’ chemical elements?
Often when humans make a discovery through trial and error, they also find a way they could have figured it out without the experiments.
This is basically always the case in software engineering—any failure, from a routine failed unit test up to a major company outage, was obviously-in-restrospective avoidable by being smarter.
Humans are nonetheless incapable of developing large complex software systems without lots of trial and error.
I know less of physical engineering, so I ask non-rhetorically: does it not have the ‘empirical results are foreseeable in retrospect’ property?
Suspected mistake:
She was about to break all her rules against pretending she was supposed to be wherever she happened to be?
Do the co-authors currently plan things out together off-forum, or is what we read both the story and the process of creating it?
I wonder this too. My impression is that it’s some of both.
‘Efficiency’ may be the wrong word for it, but Paul’s formula accurately describes what you might call the ‘infiltration tax’ for a energy-conserving/entropy-ignoring model: when you pump out heat proportional to (exhaust—indoor), heat proportional to (outdoor—indoor) infiltrates back in.
How wrong is “completely wrong”? I’ve only read Cummings up to the paywall. His two examples are 1) that the USSR planned to use nuclear weapons quickly if war broke out and 2) that B-59 almost used a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re: 1), this is significant, but AIUI NATO planners never had all that much hope of avoiding the conventional war → nuclear war escalation. The core of the strategy was avoiding the big conventional war in the first place, and this succeeded.
Re: 2), Cummings leaves out some very important context on B-59: the captain ordered a nuclear attack specifically because he did not know what was going on and thought war might have already broken out. It’s scary that it happened, but it’s a huge leap to claim this falsifies the ‘myth’ of Kennedy successfully negotiating with Khrushchev.
Wasn’t Attlee wrong?
In reality, rather than banishing the conception of war, the Cold War powers adopted a strategy of “If you want (nuclear) peace, prepare for (nuclear) war.” It did not render strategic bases around the world obsolete. It absolutely did not involve the US or the USSR giving up their geopolitical dreams.
It worked. There were close calls (e.g. Petrov), suggesting it had a significant chance of failure. Attlee doesn’t predict a significant chance of failure; he predicts a near-certainty.
We don’t get to see the counterfactual where we tried things Attlee’s way, but it’s not at all clear it would have worked. My lay understanding of history is that a vision of resolving all conflicts peacefully led to the Munich agreement and ultimately the very war it had aimed to prevent.
does seem like a bad assumption. I tried instead assuming a constant difference between the intake and the cold output, and the result surprised me. (The rest of this comment assumes this model holds exactly, which it definitely doesn’t).
Let be the temperature of the room (also intake temperature for a one-hose model). Then at equilibrium,
i.e. no loss in cooling power at all! (Energy efficiency and time to reach equilibrium would probably be much worse, though)
In the case of an underpowered one-hose unit handling a heat wave (), you’d get and —nice and cool in front of the unit but uncomfortably hot in the rest of the room, just as you observed. Adding a second hose would resolve this disparity in the wrong direction, making . So if you disproportionately care about the area directly in front of the AC, adding the second hose could be actively harmful.
What would a frequentist analysis of the developing war look like?
Exactly the same.
I’m confused by this claim? I thought the whole thing where you state your priors and conditional probabilities and perform updates to arrive at a posterior was… not frequentism?
Eliezer, at least, now seems quite pessimistic about that object-level approach. And in the last few months he’s been writing a ton of fiction about introducing a Friendly hypercreature to an unfriendly world.
I didn’t get the ‘first person’ thing at first (and the terminal diagnosis metaphor wasn’t helpful to me). I think I do now.
I’d rephrase it as “In your story about how the Friendly hypercreature you create gains power, make sure the characters are level one intelligent”. That means creating a hypercreature you’d want to host. Which means you will be its host.
To ensure it’s a good hypercreature, you need to have good taste in hypercreatures. Rejecting all hypercreatures doesn’t work—you need to selectively reject bad hypercreatures.
Maybe have them handle the pen though a glove box?
Ridiculous, yes, but possibly the kind of ridiculous that happens in real life.
Memnuela alludes to a ‘Death chamber’ before that, so pending resolution by the author I’m assuming ‘Life and Death’ is the missing pair.
If Mars values a coup at 5M, and Earth values a coup at −5M, Earth can buy contracts to win 5M if there is a coup, Mars can buy contracts to win 5M if there isn’t a coup, and they can both cancel their clandestine programs on Ceres, making the interaction positive-sum.
...Not sure that actually works, but it’s an interesting thought.
Thanks, I consider this fully answered.
I agree the human simulator will predictably have an anticorrelation. But the direct simulator might also have an anticorrelation, perhaps a larger one, depending on what reality looks like.
Is the assumption that it’s unlikely that most identifiable X actually imply large anticorrelations?
Thanks for the reply, that makes sense.