Physicist and dabbler in writing fantasy/science fiction.
Ben
Karma: 2,883
What I find funny about this, is I work in quantum computing, and didn’t have much reaction to your position on that, but I couldn’t resist from arguing against your stance on trains.
Maybe my situation is weird, I took the London underground to and from school for 6 years. But where would you even put all those busses? In places like Oxford Street the roads are already fully saturated in busses, private cars aren’t allowed and the number of lanes is insufficient for the bus traffic. And, the lines of underground trains are clearly carrying many more people than those busses.
Its probably correct that if you are starting with a typical American suburb and you want to add some extra public transport then adding busses as the first thing makes the most sense. But, if you have a big city, then buses alone are never going to achieve the requisite scale or density.
For inter-city travel, its less obvious. Trains are far more comfortable than intercity busses. The train is temperature controlled, I have a large seat and a smooth journey. I can stand and walk around the carriage to stretch my legs. There is wifi, and a folding table and charger for my laptop. A trolley service offers me tea and coffee in my seat. Most of these things can be provided on a bus, but its either harder or less cost effective (eg. one trolley can server multiple hundreds of potential customers on a single train, hot drinks are no issue on the train). I don’t know how the economics of that stack up, the trains are nicer but I know the busses are half the price or less. (The busses also typically take 50% longer for the same journey).
There is the classic (probably apocryphal) story of a divorce case.
Lawyer: “Did you have extramarital sex with Mrs X on the night of the 23rd?”
Man : “I refuse to answer that question.”
Lawyer: “Did you have sex with her on the night of the 24rd?”
Man : “I refuse to answer that question.”
Lawyer: “The 25th?”
Man : “No.”
I think that only including anthropically aware observers is maybe kind of reasonable, if we want to take any version of the Doomsday argument seriously then the reference class is very important, and should almost certainly exclude ants for example, and where the boundary is put is not obvious to me.
I think the idea that Anthropically aware observers are such a recent phenomenon seems off to me. When I was about 12 I got really confused about “Why am I not an ant? Isn’t that really weird?”. Now, its possible that cartoons with people swapping bodies, and the modern ways of teaching children to be nice (“You wouldn’t like it if you were him would you?”), plus sayings like “what a time to be alive” kind of mean that anthropics is “in the water” these days and me thinking about it at 12 was a reaction to that. But like, Buddhists and Hindus have been thinking about reincarnation for millennia. I think in some versions they even have a “spin the wheel” thing to determine what you will incarnate as next. So I think that the anthropic reasoning goes back much further. Its probably the combination of mathematical language and the somewhat spiritual vibe together that is very post 60′s.
(By “spiritual vibe” I mean that all these arguments require some kind of cosmology where it makes sense to think that “I” “could” have been someone different. For some definitions of the words “I” and “could” that might be very hard to pin down).
Jokingly, a funny thing about having your limited reference class, is that we can imagine a secret society that forms and destroys all public record of anthropic arguments. They then only induce a small number of people to their secret group and assassinate anyone who re-invents anthropics. By rationing the reference class in this way they can improve the chances for humanity to make it.
I am curious, in the two hypothesis case, how much information do you think you get from the Doomsday argument? Like, is it a major update or a tiny suggestion? Even in the binary case, if we assume two universes play out in parallel, one where trillions of people are born over a long timescale and one where things go extinction moderately quickly. We are inserted into one of those people “at random”, and find ourselves here. If we are in the crowded universe its a weird coincidence we are so early in its history. But, if we are in the sparsely populated universe its a weird coincidence that we are not in the crowded one.
I see where you are coming from, but I am not convinced.
As a general rule, I subscribe to the idea that reasoning (or arguments) take in a set of observations and facts, and they output consequences of those observations. Information that we didn’t put in at the beginning, isn’t accounted for. The Doomsday argument doesn’t include any information about x-risks. It doesn’t include any knowledge about AI or nuclear weapons. It would give the same conclusion in a world without those things. Therefore, I argue, it is not accounting for them.
Your take on x-risks and 95% chance of human extinction in next millennia is one I can understand. But, to me, the idea that the Doomsday argument, that takes as its input no information at all about AI or x-risk, somehow produces data pertaining to AI or x-risk, seems kind of “magical”.
The counterargument to my position would look something like saying “I am not an impartial observer looking at the universe from the outside. I reside in a human mind, specifically this human mind born at this time, and that fact is an extra data point that I am updating on.” I still don’t buy the counterargument myself. Partly because (as in the post above) I think the information provided is miniscule even if we accept the premise. And partly because I don’t really accept the premise. The reasoning for why I don’t accept the premise is more hazy but it kind of comes down to the causal connection between the number of previous humans and x-risk seeming super dubious. In a world where the medieval period had lasted an extra few thousand years AIs wouldn’t necessarily be any safer. If an ancient person miraculously emerges from a block of ice alive, then I don’t think they should have different views on x-risk by virtue of having been born a few thousand years earlier. (I am sure their lived experience would give them different views on x-risk, but not their birth order). I really do think that the answer to the question “If their are going to be trillions of people in the future, isn’t it a weird coincidence that I find myself born all the way back here in history” is “You were never a disembodied soul that was inserted into a human selected randomly from all humans in all determinisitic history. If we swapped “you” and Julius Ceaser’s souls around, moving no information at all, then that isn’t a distinct timeline that we should account for when counting possible worlds, its just the same timeline up to a re-labeling.”
I argued something similar to your position in a recent post. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LhsteuSNFfWRoXBjz/randomness-and-doomsday-for-weak-agents
I would also point out that, I do actually kind of know facts like (1) The population is growing and (2) its like 8 Billion or something, (3) Nuclear weapons are scary. But, I didn’t know my approximate position in the human birth order (how many people have come before), I had to look that up. So its an especially artificial situation, I am not just interpolating based on a tiny subset of the information available, but I am actually seeking out some new information (me in the birth order) and then interpolating based only on that thing I previously didn’t know.
″ and 2023 was eons ago in college student time.”
It may be that, in objective terms (years) they predict progress at the same rate you do. Its just that what they consider a “long time” is different.
Slow, incremental progress to a person who considers 3 years to feel like “eons”, might look like lightning progress to an adult who expects their life in 3 years to look basically the same as it does now.
Randomness and Doomsday for Weak agents
If the party wants an ‘average joe’ they need to (1) find someone who aligns to the party’s values, because winning on your opponent’s platform isn’t winning. (2) they need someone who is happy to stop doing whatever they were doing already and start doing politics. (3) they wouldn’t be able to help themselves from choosing the ‘best’ average joe from the hundreds available.
At that point they dont have an average joe anymore, and even if they skip step (3) no one would beleive that they had skipped it. However, in the thought experiment, our person was actually chosen at random and probably don’t even have a party afiliation.
I think the thought experiment has a higher chance of going weird than other answers think. If you end up in a race between Trump and some kind of centerist conservative republican chruchgoer, maybe that guy gets the democrat vote and steals a few republicans. Maybe Trump faces a Qanon beleiver who is more Maga than he is (perhaps confusing his ordinary tactics) but also is black or trans and thus confuses some democrats. Besides all that, this rando from no party is the obvious place for any protest votes to go which might add a few percent.
If I am buying a piece of art to put in my house, I want something that I think “looks nice”.
If I go to an art gallery with a friend, I want to see art that functions as a conversation starter that gets us into a fun conversation. Imagine if everything looked very good, but gave us no plot hooks of things to actually talk about!
For me the strongest example of this was when I (as a child) went to a birthday party for another child, we watched Star Wars Episode 2 in the cinema, then went to a pizza place—where we talked about various things but NOT star wars. We had enjoyed the film I think, its just that the CGI battles had been nice to look at but didn’t give us anything to talk about.
There are other things at work, and your suggestion that its kind of high-brow signaling and Emperor’s new clothes I think has a lot of truth to it. But I wanted to point out that galleries have quite a different target than putting up stuff that looks good.
I think that the worlds as it looks when we are growing up is forever set as the ‘normal’ world, and everything else is weird.
So, older people are probably more happy to think of the world as weird.
‘Normal’ and ‘likely’ are not the same. I always knew that in some sense the world we are in is unlikely but for me, the moment I really felt that I was in an unlikely world was when Trump’s ear was brushed by that bullet. Like, in the he dies or lives coin toss that is ‘it lands on the edge’ territory. And it plausibly had a huge impact on the world.
I think this sounds surface-level convincing but for me it seems to fall down on further analysis.
Lets say you are a mob boss. You can rob someone and make money. You can also employ underlings to rob more people. In a sense the underlings are middle men you cost you money compared to the counterfactual where you robbed just as many people single-handedly.
You are a sugar or cotton consumer is 1700′s England. You can get cheaper goods by stealing the labour to produce them. But moving to the carribean and buying wips isnt conveninet for you so you use plantation owners as middle men.
If you dont care at all about the misery of the slaves, the extra labour taken from them is kind of just added economy. Like, in some imaginary world where we could trade with chickens would we be better of doing that than employing battery farm owners as ‘parasitic middle men’. The point is, we are all parasiting on the chickens (egg and chicken consumers). Similarly, the sugar buyers of the past were part of the parasite that stole slave labour.
I had a vaguely analagous experience where an AI interviewed me for a job last week, surface level appearance of sanity (mostly) somewhat hilarious dysfunction underneath. I think companies think they can get away with it through some combination of hype and AIs getting better
Maybe if they have a call centre abroad where most operators speak very poor English, then poeple leave bad reveiws complaining about it, those reviews are still online and embarasing 2 years later.
They deploy an AI. Equally bad reviews, but this time they are only brefily embarasing because 2 years later anyone reading them thinks ‘oh, this review is 2 years old, of course the AI was bad then, but now...’
Hopefully its short lived, people like your doctor will hopefully write to the company and say something like ‘as a matter of patient safety we will no longer be accepting drug requests unless they are made by a human being. Please sign our updated terms indicating that all drug requests made to us in future are finalised by a human.’ That rules like this will be set by businesses, insurance companies and governments is kind of the obvious blowback against premature deployment.
Contrary to most comments here, I was actually quite surprised at how good the LLMs story was. It actually had a premise, a core idea, that seemed novel and prefectly serviceble that is something I haven’t seen one manage before.
I was forced to stop reading halfway, but came back to finish it. Which means that for me it passes some kind of natural test.
Also, on a meta level the most obvious joke in the world is to say the story is perfect, but complain about the perfection. So the LLM is inviting us to call its work perfect. Clever robot. Good social engineering.
I agree that their posaibly are situations where belief influences outcomes in such a way that factually incorrect beleifs can produce better outcomes. For the most part I think these situations are comtrived and rare, but accept they do exist.
However, in real life, we don’t encounter one choice ever, but many choices one after the other. In the long run its not about how good the initial descion making is, but what we learn. Something goes well, we ask what we did right. Something goes wrong, we ask what we could have done better. Learning well is the long term best strategy.
If I have somehow adopted wrong beleifs on purpose how can I ever assess if this is working or not? I preumably no longer know that those beleifs are wrong.
Ben’s Shortform
A dumb thought I had the other day “I suppose I am not totally convinced of empiricism, if I saw strong enough evidence against it I could change my mind.”
What is weird about this, is that in an eternal steady state universe the number of living observers in a given time period is much larger than the number of observers (including Boltzman brains) in a simialr slice of a universe approaching thermal equilibrium. So, depedning on how your Anthropic reasoning work, you could argue from the fact of your own existance that the universe must be steady state, regardless of any evidence otherwise.
(This is kind of a tension inherent in all Anthropic arguments, I am more likely to ‘be me’ (as opposed to someone else, like a Boltzman brain) in a universe with fewer people, but most possible observers are in the crowded universes, so I am more likely to be in a crowded one. Similar logic, threading oppsosite conclusions.)
A sort of opposite conversational thing I see which I hate is something like:
Bob : I am really sorry, I made a big mistake and (something has gone wrong).
Alice : How did this go wrong?
Bob : We had that event that day and we were all distracted talking to the visitors and eating the cake. I wasn’t used to the new UI yet, and it looks like I must have muddled some of the inputs.
Alice : Well, that is no excuse.
Bob : I never said it was. You asked for an explanation. I owned this mistake in my first line of this dialogue.
The issue here is that Bob is trying to provide a real explanation, of the kind that would be useful in providing a plan to avoid similar issues in the future. But, Alice is instead trying to give him a dresssing down for his mistakes. Possibly both conversations should happen, but not at the same time and both parties should know which one they are in.
(Although I still think asking for an explanation, and then complaining about excuses is a jerk play that is surprisingly common.)
I think leogao meant that the readers were being pretentious in their discusions of the book (looking at tea leaves).
I agree that “something weird happens at the boundaries” (reflections, or something) is a very likely reason for the proposed drive in the footnote to not work.
I originally thought that the drive would not work because when people spoke about momentum and energy transport going opposite directions in left-handed materials, that they were somehow abusing the term “momentum” (maybe talking about the crystal momentum for example). One reason I felt this was because the left-handed material (with a negative refractive index at the appropriate optical frequency) is made of ordinary (atomic) matter, and if we “zoom in” enough those ordinary atomic matter components have normal refractive indices. [1] (This operation of “zooming in” may not be valid however, as we cannot reasonably zoom in to a level smaller than the wavelength of the light in question). However, their are several papers on the topic of better Cherenkov detectors using such materials, and the basic model of these papers seems to be that the actual, real physical momentum of the radioactive particles would do an actual Newton’s second law interaction with these photons whose momentum pointed backwards. (https://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/91), suggesting that it is supposed to be the real, proper momentum, that points backwards.
Assuming this all checks out, the most likely remaining way of refuting the drive is your suggestion that something fishy is going on at the edges.
To get your refractive index of zero you don’t need to just make a continuity argument at the edges. The same techniques that people use to make negative index meta materials can also be applied to make materials with refractive indices of zero. (Zero index meta-materials). In these materials the phase velocity of the light becomes infinite. (But the propegation speed remains bound). These zero-index materials (I believe) have all the same issues as the negative index ones in that my brain insists that it must somehow be an accounting trick, or redefinition of the word “momentum”, (again on the basis that each part of the zero index material is itself comprised of ordinary matter). But, again, papers on the topic appear to weigh against this interpretation.
[1] For an example of my confusion, the zero-index metamaterial described at this link (https://mazur.harvard.edu/presentations/surprising-world-zero-index-materials), is “an in-plane metamaterial design consisting of silicon pillar arrays, embedded within a polymer matrix and sandwiched between gold layers.” But, light in silicon, polymer or gold would all have an ordinary momentum-energy flow direction relationship! So the behaviour in the composite is opposite to the behaviour in all of the ingredients. Which I find super suspicious.