andrew sauer

• andrew sauer 5 Apr 2022 21:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Søren Elverlin’s comment on: Ukraine Post #8: Risk of Nu­clear War

  As a first approximation, if the food production falls to a level of X% of the required calories for the population, your probability of surviving is roughly X%.

  I mean, today food production is significantly more than 100% of the required calories for the population and many people are still food insecure

• andrew sauer 4 Apr 2022 17:31 UTC

  8 points

  on: Ukraine Post #8: Risk of Nu­clear War

  If a full scale nuclear exchange occurs, the probability of death does not come mostly from the nuclear blasts themselves, or even the nuclear fallout from those blasts. Rather it comes from the breakdown of critical infrastructure needed to produce food for a population. If every major city is destroyed at once, you almost certainly won’t survive a year even if you are nowhere near a blast zone. Your only chance is if you already have the means to farm sustainably without buying manufactured goods. Even most farmers these days can’t do this, at least not easily, because they need gas. Even if you are one of the few in a position to survive in this way, everyone who can’t will be gunning for you, because they don’t want to starve.

  I don’t want to live through nuclear war. The worst parts have nothing to do with the explosions. The worst part comes after. It will essentially be a siege, everywhere in the world at once. People will eat each other.

• andrew sauer 14 Mar 2022 5:24 UTC

  −10 points

  on: Challenges to Yud­kowsky’s Pro­noun Re­form Proposal

  This is altogether too many words to be spending on this topic holy crap

• andrew sauer 8 Mar 2022 4:41 UTC

  2 points

  on: You can tell a draw­ing from a painting

  Reminds me of the fact that kolmogorov complexity depends on the model of computation: two turing-complete systems can do the same set of things, but it may be far simpler to do something in one than the other.

• andrew sauer 13 Feb 2022 2:05 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: To Change the World

  She should read this: https://​​www.gutenberg.org/​​files/​​26184/​​page-images/​​26184-images.pdf

• andrew sauer 21 Oct 2021 16:18 UTC

  0 points

  on: NATO: Cog­ni­tive War­fare Project

  Holy shit I have rarely seen anything this terrifying. Every country is already doing this

• andrew sauer 21 Oct 2021 16:12 UTC

  −2 points

  on: NATO: Cog­ni­tive War­fare Project

  Man, I feel like everyone is eventually going to get got by things like this

• andrew sauer 21 Oct 2021 15:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is moral duty/​blame ir­ra­tional be­cause a per­son does only what they must?

  Sure that would fall into the category of “justice for practical reasons rather than for its own sake”

• andrew sauer 16 Oct 2021 17:40 UTC

  2 points

  on: Is moral duty/​blame ir­ra­tional be­cause a per­son does only what they must?

  And so I have concluded that there is no basis on which to judge others as “to blame” or as “morally wrong”. Thus punishment makes no sense in terms of being “deserved”, and neither does vengeance (except possibly in terms of the vengeance seeker seeking their own emotional pleasure/​relief/​closure).

  I think this is a pretty commonly held view on this site, and Yudkowsky would probably agree, especially since you clarified that you still see utility in justice for practical reasons, rather than for its own sake.

  I unfortunately can’t find where right now, but I think Yudkowsky has said somewhere that he wants AI to create a utopia for everybody, and not punish criminals, no matter how horrible of people they were. After all, once an FAI has taken power, those criminals are no more threat to society because the FAI can always stop them from doing evil things, and thus there is no reason to try to rein them in with punishment, except for what is essentially spite/​arbitrary emotional pleasure.

  As for free will, I think it does exist, but not in the sense that libertarians want it to. It exists in a more practical sense, it’s more something like “if we made a law against this thing it might actually deter people” than “people are metaphysically able to take different choices in a way which somehow is neither deterministic nor random”.

• andrew sauer 12 Oct 2021 19:45 UTC

  1 point

  on: The scourge of per­verse-mindedness

  I dunno, man, my angst at the state of the universe isn’t that it is meaningless, but that it is all too meaningful and horrible and there is no reason for the horror to ever stop.

• andrew sauer 29 Sep 2021 15:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Fas­cists and Rakes

  Surely the one with the bumper sticker didn’t like it either, and was using it as an analogy to attack some other argument?

  At least, that’s what I’d hope.

• andrew sauer 22 Sep 2021 0:41 UTC

  1 point

  on: Out­law­ing An­throp­ics: An Up­date­less Dilemma

  I think this is a confusion of two different types of thinking. One is the classical thought of one being responsible only for the consequences of one’s individual actions. If you think of yourself as an individual making independent decisions like this, then you are justified in thinking that there is a 90% chance of heads upon seeing a green room: 90% of individuals in green rooms, in expectation, are there when the coin flips heads.(note that if you modify the problem so that the outcomes of the bet only apply to the people making it, the bet becomes favorable even in advance, regardless of whether the agents are altruistic or selfish).

  However, in this case you cannot claim that your “yes” decision has utility based on the result of the entire group’s response to the question. If you did, then in heads flips, if all 18 people say “yes”, all 18 people will claim that the utility of their action was $18, but only $18 of utility was gained by the group in total as a consequence of all these decisions, so they cannot all be right.(Note that if you modify the problem so that you really are the only one responsible for the decision, like by saying that everyone in green rooms except one person is mind-controlled to say “yes”, then saying “yes” really is the right decision for that free-willed person, even in advance.)

  It is also possible to reason in a TDT sort of way, acting as though you are making decisions for all identical copies of yourself. This is effectively defining yourself, as an agent, as the set of all identical copies of yourself with identical input. In this case, it does make sense to take responsibility for the decision of the entire group, but it no longer makes sense to do an anthropic update: you as an agent, as a set of copies of yourself seeing green rooms, would exist whether or not the coin came up heads, and would make the same observations.

  In conclusion, it makes sense to do an anthropic update if you think of yourself as an individual, it makes sense to take utilitarian responsibility for the whole group of actions if you think of yourself as a group of identical copies, but in neither case does it make sense to do both, which is what you would need to justify saying “yes” in this situation.

A simu­la­tion basilisk

• andrew sauer 2 Aug 2021 23:10 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: theme_arrow’s comment on: Tor­ture vs Specks: Sadist version

  Okay, maybe the NUs wouldn’t interpret the problem as I phrased it in this way, but the problem can be slightly changed to have a similar conclusion, by saying that the sadists are mildly annoyed when the guy isn’t being tortured, instead of wanting it for their pleasure.

• andrew sauer 2 Aug 2021 0:16 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Jews and Nazis: a ver­sion of dust specks vs torture

  This situation is more like “they eat babies, but they don’t eat that many, to the extent that it produces net utility given their preferences for continuing to do it.”

• andrew sauer 1 Aug 2021 23:54 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: theme_arrow’s comment on: Tor­ture vs Specks: Sadist version

  I’m referring to the fact that utility functions are equivalent under positive affine transformations (if you add a constant and multiply it by a positive constant, the UF remains the same in the sense that it has the same preference in every situation)

  Assuming we are computing the utility of an outcome by assigning a utility to each person and then summing them, adding a constant value to any person’s utility doesn’t change the comparison between outcomes, because the net effect is just to add a constant to the utility of each outcome(as long as the person we are adding a constant value to exists in every outcome).

  Therefore, we can convert the situation to negative utilitarian without functionally changing it, by subtracting the maximum utility from each person, ensuring that everyone’s utility will be negative in every outcome. We can also convert it to positive utilitarian by subtracting the minimum in a similar way.

  This analysis assumes that there is a maximum and a minimum utility, and that every outcome has the same set of people in it, so if these assumptions break there may be relevant differences.

• andrew sauer 1 Aug 2021 15:08 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: theme_arrow’s comment on: Tor­ture vs Specks: Sadist version

  I’m not sure how negative utilitarianism changes things. Positive and negative utilitarianism are equivalent whenever UFs are bounded and there are no births or deaths as a result of the decision.

  Negative utilitarianism interprets this situation as the sadists suffering from boredom which can be slightly alleviated by knowing that the guy they hate is suffering.

• andrew sauer 1 Aug 2021 1:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Tao Lin’s comment on: Tor­ture vs Specks: Sadist version

  Although under strict preference utilitarianism, wouldn’t change in values/​moral progress be considered bad, for the same reason a paperclip maximizer would consider it bad?

• andrew sauer 1 Aug 2021 0:56 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Tao Lin’s comment on: Tor­ture vs Specks: Sadist version

  I should say we assume that we’re deciding which one a stable, incorruptible AI should choose. I’m pretty sure any moral system which chose torture in situations like this would not lead to good outcomes if applied in a practical circumstance, but that’s not what I’m wondering about, I’m just trying to figure out which outcome is better. In short, I’m asking an axiological question, not a moral one. https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2017/​​08/​​28/​​contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/​​

  My intuition strongly says that the torture is worse here even though I choose torture in the original, but I don’t have an argument for this because my normal axiological system, preference utilitarianism, seems to unavoidably say torture is better.

[Question] Tor­ture vs Specks: Sadist version