Ape in the coat

Karma: 1,565

Ape in the coat 26 Apr 2026 9:15 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Horosphere’s comment on: Mathematics and Empiricism
The word real is rather important and I don’t think the conversation can proceed without it unless it is replaced with something else. I would suggest ‘existent’ as such a replacement.
You are failing at the rationalist taboo game. Read this, please, and try again.
The word itself is just a label. The meaning is important. Try explaining the gears behind it, instead of comming up with a synonym.

Ape in the coat 25 Apr 2026 4:48 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Horosphere’s comment on: Mathematics and Empiricism
this implies that mathematics itself is not real, which has not been demonstrated at all.
Taboo the word “real”. What exactly do you mean here?
it is unconditionally true that, for example, the inscribed angle theorem follows from the axioms of Euclidean geometry
What is meant by “follows” is not unconditional. Implication is itself conditional on logical axioms.
However, empiricism doesn’t explain the relative simplicity of the mathematical axioms required to describe reality.
Our brains evolved in the reality and developped the kind of reasoning that is useful for it. No more explanation is required.

Ape in the coat 25 Apr 2026 4:37 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: kbear’s comment on: Mathematics and Empiricism
i’m just saying that “mathematics is a language, so of course it can be used to describe reality” is arguing against something the surprising-effectiveness crowd does not claim. they do not say “it is surprising that mathematical language can be used to describe reality”, but rather that “it is surprising that specific mathematical objects of interest to mathematicians often end up useful in physics or other empirical sciences.”^[1]
Do I understand correctly that you claim that the surprising part is that mathematical objects are “discovered” first for their own sake and only later are revealed to be physically relevant? Because if this is the case, I address this here:
We can still be somewhat surprised if the language has necessary words to describe certain parts of reality before they were encountered. But this is an improbability of a much smaller degree, reduced by the fact that creating new words in this language is an interesting and rewarded activity, which people tend to do for its own sake, as exactly is the case with mathematics.
I’ve met people just generally confused why math can describe reality at all. And math being a language is a part of the answer here. I think Lorenzo Elijah, whose post I’m answering to, is confused in a similar manner. He acknowledges that math is a language but then thinks this is problematic and uses the middle-earth-planaet analogy which would make sense only if math was a story. So I think it’s totally appropriate to point that math is a language and not a story and that this resolves the huge part of the apparent improbability, before addressing the smaller improbability related to the order in which mathematical objects are invented/discovered.
i feel the original essay—in this section—elides the difference between “mathematical language” and “mathematical object”, and thereby argues against a strawman.
Mathematical objects are parts of the language. Like words pr other semantic constructions. I think it’s pretty straightforward.

Ape in the coat 24 Apr 2026 17:49 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: kbear’s comment on: Mathematics and Empiricism
Can you come up with an example of a mathematical statement that describes reality while not being physically relevant?

Ape in the coat 9 Apr 2026 5:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Against Possible Worlds
Okay, but I don’t think you’ve clarified how to make that choice yet then.
Which choice? What are the possible outcomes of a given experiment? Check this post of mine, I explain the application of the framework of probability experiments in more details.
Like, what if I decide my outcomes are logically possible worlds?
Can you give me an example? I’m not sure I understand your question.
My own view is that you formally need a semantic theory, e.g. model theory. “All logically consistent possible worlds” is often not well-founded as a set (depending on how unconstrained “world” is), so you’d need to clarify this first before trying to do anything with it (which no one does, so no wonder it’s confusing).
Well, yes. That’s why the framework is bad and we should use a better one.
But it doesn’t seem inherently wrong, conceptually, to me.
I don’t understand what you mean by “inherently”. I’m not trying to make any metaphysical claims about essence of the idea of possible worlds or some such. I just notice that it works poorly for what we need from a framework for probability theory and propose a better one.

Ape in the coat 9 Apr 2026 2:48 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Against Possible Worlds
Interpreted as “all philosophers who talk about possible worlds believe they are real”, that isn’t true. The belief that possible world are real, modal realism, is contentious.
Yes, you shouldn’t interpret it this way. Modal realism is not the point of contention of this post. The whole framework of “possible worlds” is, regardless of whether one thinks they are somehow real or not.
I don’t know how you manage to keep misinterpreting me about it, even though I’ve already explained it to you under a different post.
Talk of possible worlds is common, because of the popularity of modal logic, and modal logic is …old … the sort of thing rationalists should approve of?
Why? Are we suppose to endource everything that’s old? Somehow I didn’t get the memo.
It allows you to put the notions of necessity and possibility on a formal basis, instead of leaving them as vague metaphysical notions.
The sentiment is good the implementation, is not. To be useful such formalization should be based on the framework of probability experiments and not possible worlds, for the reasons described in the post

Ape in the coat 9 Apr 2026 2:32 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Against Possible Worlds
My issue is with the interpretation of Ω as a set of “all logically consistent possible worlds” instead of set of “all possible elementary outcomes of a probability experiment”.
The difference is that the former idea is untenable, doesn’t work for logical uncertainty and confused everybody about self-location, while the latter provides a clear way to know, what should our Ω be for every specific case.

Ape in the coat 26 Mar 2026 5:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JeffJo’s comment on: The Solution to Sleeping Beauty
The issue with the Sleeping Beauty Problem, that makes it unique, is that each running of the experiment produces two outcomes. One on Monday, and another on Tuesday. These are different, and independent, outcomes because an outcome is defined by SB’s ability to experience it
That’s not what an “outcome” means. From Wikipedia:
In probability theory, an outcome is a possible result of an experiment or trial.^[1] Each possible outcome of a particular experiment is unique, and different outcomes are mutually exclusive (only one outcome will occur on each trial of the experiment). All of the possible outcomes of an experiment form the elements of a sample space.^[2]
We are, of course, free to talk about something else, that isn’t outcomes, and even build an alternative mathematical model with a different measure function, that isn’t probability, using them. I explicitly do it here. It’s not really necessary, there is no advantages in doing it, but it can be done.
When you are logically pinpointing Y instead of X, you are, quite obvioiusly, talking about Y and not X anymore. This doesn’t change even if some philosophers, in attempt to confuse everyone, insist on calling both X and Y the same name.
According to this modified framework the answer is ¹⁄₃. But according to probability theory the answer is ¹⁄₂. And we are interested in probability due to the fact that it correspond to the rational credences of an agent.
And it doesn’t matter how many more alternative problems about memory loss you can come up with. They are all solved in a similar manner that I describe in this post.

Ape in the coat 21 Mar 2026 17:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: No, You Don’t Need Self-Locating Evidence.
Thanks for the tip.
The abstract looks promising.

Ape in the coat 20 Mar 2026 11:52 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Canaletto’s comment on: No, You Don’t Need Self-Locating Evidence.
That’s weird, I’ve made it as a link post, but for some reasons it’s not shown as one. Will edit it immediately.

Ape in the coat 10 Mar 2026 13:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JeffJo’s comment on: Lessons from Failed Attempts to Model Sleeping Beauty Problem
I really don’t know why you keep coming up with these alternative formulations of the same problem, an answer to which I’ve already given. Can’t you just apply the logic I’ve very explicitly described in the posts and derive the answer for your modified problem yourself? But surething, here is how one supposed to reason:
There are 4 equiprobable outcomes of the experiment for the Sleeping Beauty:
HH_HT; HT_HH; TH_TT; TT_TH
Meanwhile for the person who randomly observes one of the days of the experiment there are these 4 equiprobable outcomes:
HH; HT; TH; TT
When the person learns that the Beauty is awaken, outcome HH is eliminated and now they are ¹⁄₃ confident that the first coin is Heads.
See the Observer Problem.
For this problem the conditional probability of HT is indeed ¹⁄₃
This, however, gives no new information to the Sleeping Beauty herself as she is participating in a different probability experiment—the one with either one or two awakenings, where she observes them in order. She has different sample space and no outcome is eliminated by her awakening.
For this problem HT isn’t an event and, therefore, doesn’t have any probability and the answers to Q3C and Q3D are “No”.

Ape in the coat 22 Feb 2026 5:54 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: The Problem of Counterevidence and the Futility of Theodicy
I’m really interested in figuring out your objections to the post, but for now they seem quite incoherent to me. As if some words were wrongly changed by autocomplete, and, in case with this reply, as if your message was sent before you finished writing it.
Could you try once again and present me a simple and and explicit real world example where my math fails, writing your post not from a phone?

Ape in the coat 21 Feb 2026 11:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
That was really not what I’ve been trying to communicate here.
My point was that people can have some notion of “obscene wealth” and you would not even know about it before this mark is reached. Therefore saying that we definetely have a social contract 1. is unjustified.
I’d also like to know what do you consider weak or poorly reasoned in my point about counterfactual mobbing and French revolution. Or at the least what you disagree with.

Ape in the coat 21 Feb 2026 4:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: The Problem of Counterevidence and the Futility of Theodicy
pretty often a naive compute limited estimate of P(G & E) will be zero with high probability unless you importance sample using T
I’m having troubles parsing what you said here.
The classic case is trying to work out the probability that a photon will hit a speck of dust in a raytraced scene, where introducing the theodicy that a photon will zing straight from the lightbulb filament to your speck produces the correct probability through an expression just like P(G&E) = P(G&E|T)P(T) + P(G&E| ¬T)P(¬T)
Of course it produces the correct probability. Why would anything I said imply that it doesn’t? I’m explicitly appealing to Law of Total Probability, after all.

Ape in the coat 20 Feb 2026 9:28 UTC
2 points
−3
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: The Problem of Counterevidence and the Futility of Theodicy
But this is the entire crux of the debate! The whole question is whether reality (i.e. a reality that appears to contain evil) looks like what the theory (i.e. the world is created by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God) would predict.
When the theory really predicts the outcome it’s pretty clear, no one needs to write bazillion papers to persuade anyone that it’s indeed the case.
On the other hand, such behavior happens, when you try to argue that your theory “totally has predicted the evidence” but only after the evidence was already revealed can you say what exactly it “had predicted”.
I grant that some people may be confused about these two cases and maybe I’ll even have to dedicate a separate post to it in the future, but at least to Mathew’s credit, he has publicly acknowledged that he would expect a world created by omnipotent and omnibenevolent God to be a paradise which our world is not. So whether unconditional P(G&E) ~ 0 is not, in fact, a crux of disagreement.

Ape in the coat 20 Feb 2026 7:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
Downvoted for obviously begging the question about what the standard here is.
I don’t think this is a fair description of what I’m doing. Which of my conclusions am I assuming?
I’m not rigorously specifying what exactly is meant by “obsenely rich” and “poverty” here, because the whole point is that people can have different generalizations of the principle and different definitions. It’s indeed the case that same of these definitions will lead to civilizational collapse. However some will not. Can we agree this much?
I’d also like to mention that while actual mob justice is bad and anti-civilization, counterfactual mob justice has a lot of civilization-building advantages. And then there are instances of what can be described as mob justice which establishes the civilization in the first place, i.e. French Revolution.

Ape in the coat 20 Feb 2026 7:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Eneasz’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
This is how people in poor countries view people in rich countries as well. And how people in grievance cultures view the outgroup they hold a grudge against when that outgroup is doing better than them.
No disagreement here. But this doesn’t make the object level claims I’m making less true. Grievances can be justified.

Ape in the coat 17 Feb 2026 8:41 UTC
0 points
−2
in reply to: Eneasz’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
No, that misses the core argument. “Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably” is a vital component of the engine. You can’t remove it and keep the engine working.
Consider two codes:
1. “Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably”
2. “Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably, unless they are obsenely rich while a lot of people are still in poverty”
Whether it’s possible to remodel the code from 1. to 2. without “engine stopping running” is an empirical question about the slipperiness of this particular slope works. Your proclamation that it can’t be done isn’t actually an argument.
In fact, maybe even this framing is already giving too much ground. Are we even sure that the the initial code was closer to 1 than 2 in the first place? You never know for sure with such implicit societal contracts. It seems that at least a sizeble portion of people generalized it the second way. I don’t think we should be this quick to proclaim their perspective invalid.
You hit actual counter argument here
The term “honorably” is really vague and up to interpretation even more so than whether we have codes 1. or 2.. There is a plausible interpretation of it where UHC CEO did not earn his wealth honorably and so his assassination was not against the code 1. In fact, it may have even improved the insentives for billionaires to be more honarable so the assassin should be celebrated for their public service.
Likewise there is not an entierly outlandish interpretation where absolute majority or maybe even all of billionaires did not earn their wealth honorably.
I agree that is the case for some billionaires, and where that is the case they should be punished and their wealth confiscated. But that must be demonstrated, it cannot simply be assumed to be true because they are billionaires.
I agree that that would be the best course of action.
But good luck doing that in a world where a minority of people have spare billions of dollars to steer the world to their end. In practice decisions of CEOs of large corporations routinely lead to harming a great lot of people and they get very minor reprecussions for it if any.
I agree that just assuming that because someone is a billionare it means that they haven’t earned their money honorably isn’t right in principle. I don’t exactly endorse it. But I’m very understanding why people may think that in our world and I suspect that predictive power of this heuristic is impressive.

Ape in the coat 13 Feb 2026 9:47 UTC
6 points
1
on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
Coming after those billionaires isn’t just bad for those billionaires. It is revoking the Code of Honorable Wealth. It is returning to Rule of the Violent, and slave economies, and grinding global poverty. Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.
In a nutshell, this is slippery slope argument. “First they came for the billionaires...” And I don’t think this argument works in this case.
Slopes are slippery only when people have trouble arriving to a stable coordination equilibrium without the general restriction, for instance:
Murder is illegal. Legalization of murder of people with a particular name is a horrible idea. What would prevent us from legalizing murder of people with any other name?
On the other hand, capital punishment—government sanctioned murder of some criminals—is legal in some places. Even though, it’s not a particularly good idea in its own right, it doesn’t lead to the legalization of other kinds of murder. How comes? Because we have a coordination equilibrium around the notion that only worst criminals deserve this kind of thing and only after due process.
Likewise with “taking billioneres stuff”. People who propose it—usually in terms of rasing taxes on ultra wealthy in particular—have a pretty clear cut line. People are already coordinated around the notion that billionares are not “honorably wealth” and are net negative for society. The risk that it will somehow lead to everyone ending up below the level of 16th century peasant is miniscule.

Ape in the coat 13 Feb 2026 9:17 UTC
3 points
6
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
Yes, but important caveats are in order:
- Individual people having billions of dollars for steering the world, while others struggling with basic needs is inherently undemocratic situation.
- If you actually manage to get to a position where you have billions of dollars to spare, most of your networth would be going into optimizing Moloch’s values and not your own.