Also, see my post on Natural Structures
Chris_Leong
Karma: 3,000
Counterfactuals are actually much harder to define than you might think.
“If” is in the map
Well, I’ll actually apply this to truth values. Stay tuned!
Shambhala? Could you link?
I can’t say I fully understood this comment, but you make a good point that sometimes you can create a novel expression and be fairly certain that people will follow you. I guess that’s not the kind of freedom I’m trying to highlight either, rather the freedom we have to decide on what the conventions of language will be.
(Non-conventional uses of language actually aren’t as incompatible with conventions as it looks. Like we could imagine conventions relating to non-conventional use).
Linguistic Freedom
It seems to me a bit strange to say that an online scene that’s fulled by the pandemic driving people to communicate online via going to each other’s podcasts has a stronger understanding of the importance of local community.
The pandemic is pushing people to connect online, but many of the main figures are very focused shifting more towards local community, although most of the projects haven’t really spun up yet.
The Deep Code Dialogos with Jordan Hall which is supposed to be partly about the future of governance seems to have gone till now without anyone speaking about experiences and lessons drawn from local governance.
Jordan Hall has his Civium project which is trying to combine the best of local and global community.
The plan of the LessWrong team is to focus more energy on building local community
They seem focused on building the online community from what I can tell.
Metamoderna sees the state as the central unit we should think about in our efforts of governance when we speaks about democratication politics.
It’s hard to make generalisations about a whole scene and there will be exceptions. Metamoderna wants to reform the state, but I think I heard an interview where Hanzi said that he thought reforms were more likely at a local level and could then be copied to higher levels.
I’ll write another post soon with links that will provide something of an extensive (in the philosophical sense) definition.
Any other clusters that you’d list?
The Sense-Making Web
I argue for this approach on the basis that Agent Foundations is really hard to do right and that the fact that we have run into difficulties suggests a need to go right back to the philosophical foundations to confirm they are on solid ground.
I already tried to address this, although maybe I could have been clearer. If you are just calculating what is the utility from defecting, what is the utility from losing the opportunity and co-operating and building/maintaining trust, then people will see you as manipulative and not trust you. So you need to value co-operation more than that.
But then, maybe your point is that you can include this in the utility calculation too? If so, it would be useful for you to confirm.
Thanks for writing this. I’ve started to shift away from utilitarianism to something that is more a combination of utilitarianism and contract-theory which the utilitarianism being about being altruistic and contract-theory being about building co-operation. I haven’t thought out the specifics of how to make this work in detail yet, only the vague outline.
I guess the way you’ve justified focusing on co-operation in the above seems to be in terms of consequences, however people are often reluctant to co-operate with people who will use consequential justifications to break co-operation, so I think it’s necessary to place some intrinsic value on co-operation.
Actually, I do appreciate you highlighting this, however, it’s because I think that Eliezer’s solution is somewhat underappreciated, which seems to be the opposite of what you think.
If we live in a simulation, then it’s likely to be turned off at some point, breaking the induction hypothesis. But then, maybe it doesn’t matter as we wouldn’t be able to observe this.
“Hm, I see this claim as potentially beyond the scope of a discussion of the Problem of Induction.”
Not quite—because in order to avoid the problem of induction you need the universe to be following these patterns in the specific sense that these patterns are what is causing what we observed—not just for the universe to appear to follow these patterns.
Okay, it’s making a bit more sense now that I’ve reread It’s Not About Past And Future. If you just looked at the position of each particle at time t, we’d all be in different places due to the rotation of the Earth and electrons would be in a different part of their orbit. So we aren’t really making a similarity claim about primitives, but about the higher-level patterns and your claim is that if we admit that the universe follows these patterns then this automatically means that these patterns will apply in the future.
I don’t know. I don’t think we know that the universe follows these patterns as opposed to appearing to follow these patterns. And even if the universe has matched these patterns, it doesn’t mean that it has followed it in terms of these patterns being the causal reason for our observations, as opposed to some more complex pattern that would also explain it.
I guess people are upvoting this because they found it useful, but the statement that you don’t need to directly prove induction, but that you can indirectly prove it via proving Occam’s Razor seems kind of obvious and not particularly interesting to me. And it seems to me that you’re reducing it to a harder problem in that resemblance of the past to the present is just one particular way in which a model can be simple. Indeed, you could use the counting argument directly on induction. Anyway, I’ll give this a second read and see if there’s anything I missed.
EDIT: See my second comment, as I didn’t fully understand it after my first read.
Fixed now. I really should have checked my post for mistakes like this.