Christopher King
Note that “Being counterfactually dead is just like counterfactually making a different observation” can also be derived from the Ghosts are as good as gone principle! By reinterpreting the decision tree you can treat death like a normal observation.
Hmm, seems like a bit of a leap to the conclusion based on those arguments. Surely there are a large number of people who are literate and like self-improvement groups, even if it isn’t 100% of the US population!
I guess for illiterate people they could watch How to systematically approach truth—Bayes’ rule by Rational Animations? (To be clear I think that’s a great video for anyone!) The main advantage of a pamphlet is that you can just hand it out, but I’m by no means advocating it as the sole form of promotion! (Or that the final pamphlet should be written by gen AI lol.)
There are examples about bitcoin, covid and AI, but being able to be right about something once in a decade doesn’t seem like enough justification to read the Sequences
Perhaps, but surely it is enough justification to read a pamphlet! I don’t think you’d need to read all the sequences to predict things of COVID scale importance.
That’s kind of the point of “map is not the territory”! We only experience the map directly, so we often don’t have a good concept of there existing a territory which is different.
(This metaphor is from Alfred Korzybski by the way; Claude just plagiarized it.)
Guess on why rationality is not more popular (there are no pamphlets)
How about “Dark Scatter”, by taking the antonym of the words you still have a synonym for the phrase!
The human brain has a prior that puts a non-neglible probability on the proposition that we aren’t Boltzmann brains, but rather that our experiences are orderly. As you noted, even half a second of evidence then completely destroys the probability of our experiences being random.
What we are left with is a high probability of being an observer in the early universe, before the big bang.
The concerning bit is that the Boltzmann brains to follow have the same prior, but that is just a “problem” with the human brain’s prior (if you wish to call it a problem), not with its Bayesian reasoning.
The post appears to be arguing that there is a paradox with the Bayesian reasoning side, is that correct?
It can go the other way too: a predictive process can create a selective one.
For example, a libertarian economist encouraging free markets, a programmer using genetic algorithms, someone setting up an art contest to find the best art, etc...
The art contest actually has multiple layers:
An art lover predicting that an art contest is a good way to find good art
The art contest selecting good art
The artists predicting what art will be best at winning the contest
Frankly I expect almost nobody to correctly identify those words of mine as internally visible mental phenomena after reading them
One of the ways you can get up in the morning, if you are me, is by looking in the internal direction of your motor plans, and writing into your pending motor plan the image of you getting out of bed in a few moments, and then letting that image get sent to motor output and happen.
Hmm, isn’t that just psychocybernetics? From Wikipedia:
What’s traditionally called the “subconscious mind” isn’t a “mind” but a cybernetic mechanism built on our nervous system.
it can accept a goal—image and an emotion determines if it accepts it
The mechanism has sensing equipment like the eyes and ears
The various systems, primarily the musculature and nervous systems, propel the mechanism
The nervous system works with other systems as the correcting device
The memory can be used to see past successes, making future success more likely
Hmm true. A random permutation oracle I guess? Or “random preimage” of SHA-3?
The Bellman equation does not apply to bounded rationality
I’m a bit confused. What happens in a concrete example where CDT and EDT normally give a different answer?
For example, would a futarchy one-box (evidential decision theory) or two-box (casual decision theory)?
I think market mechanisms in general are an interesting example of group rationality, and thus worthy of study even if we do not advocate for them directly.
For example, here is how studying futarchy could indirectly benefit LessWrong. We could simulate a barter market for impact certificates on posts, so we could retroactively incentivise people to write good posts. And this simulated economy could have simulated futarchy hedge funds in it to make it more efficient.
Also call markets don’t aggregate info as well as continuous double auctions, and you aren’t offering any incentives to find and add info.
Yes, this mechanism does sacrifice some info-gathering abilities. This is the trade-off of not adding liquidity. Two responses to that!
The short one: the currently existing stock market does well enough of without adding liquidity, because people hedging add liquidity for free. This effect will be present for this system as well. For example, if an investor Sylvester’s portfolio has a lot of chemical manufacturing companies, and a futarchy proposal directs ACME to start manufacturing chemicals, than Sylvester will undervalue the proposal slightly since it increases the risk of his portfolio. These myriad of small price differences between investors gives free liquidity.
The long, more interestingly one: you can add back in the incentives from the standard futarchy into the sealed-bid futarchy, and I think this has unique advantages over the standard futarchy!
Your Futarchy Liquidity Details post details how to turn money into information, but you also seem to indicate you are not confident in the robustness of the system. On the other hand, my system does not incentive information gathering, but is robust enough that even a shareholder with 999,999 shares cannot scam a shareholder with only 1! How do we combine these?
We can combine these systems into one where, if someone manipulates the prediction market, only their prediction market counterparts suffer and the futarchy participants do not!
Here is the combined system: When ACME is founded, their starting policy is to send, say, $1000 a week to a prediction market to provide liquidity for markets predicting the values of their proposals. (The sealed-bid futarchy can change this policy at any of time.) The prediction market, in turn, will arbitrage between their prediction contracts and the sealed-bid futarchy. If they do things poorly and get manipulated, participants of the prediction market will get scammed, but the futarchy will still be robust. If a foolish proposal C is gaining traction, all of the current investors can put in sell-bids. C can only pass if its price is higher than any reasonable proposal, so the investors are happy selling. When the prediction market is operating properly, however, it incentives people to collect valuable information about the value of the futarchy proposals, and this information flows to the futarchy thanks to the arbitrage.
Essentially, the sealed-bid futarchy is a robust, simplistic core that investors can trust, and the conditional prediction market is a turbo-boost on top for gathering information.
Moreover, the futarchy doesn’t need to be tied to one prediction market. They could choose to start sending funds to other prediction markets, each employing different liquidity strategies. In particular, they would do so if the added information from that market is worth the money they would pay to that prediction market.
So, the sealed-bid futarchy + prediction market is very similar to the standard futarchy, but with a wall of robustness separating the investors from the “games” the predictors use against each other.
“if a investor doesn’t review a proposal, we assume that they are submitting an unconditional sell bid.” Of ALL of their shares, at any price?
Yes!
Seems a way to force a sale at a low price.
This only happens if the all the proposals have a low price, including the “Change Nothing” proposal. The hope is that at least one proposal will be valued at at least the true current value of the company. The “Interaction with a stock market” section even includes a mechanism to force the winning proposal value and the price on the stock market to match.
More abstractly, here’s an argument that if a group of actors could force a shareholder to sell at a low price under my sealed-bid formulation, they could do a similar amount of damage to that shareholder in a standard futarchy. They would have to suppress the value of every proposal. To do so, they must themselves be shareholders (so they can submit sell bids) and convince people not to submit buy bids. This is extremely difficult and costly. But if they are power enough to control the bids in this way, then in the standard futarchy they could force through a proposal that gives away all of the value of the company.
I think if the entire market (buyers and sellers) was super lazy, this might happen by default. If this laziness is a problem, I think there are ways to modify the convention (or even let each market participant set their own convention). Overall, I think this risk is still worth the benefit of being able to accept unlimited bids!
Futarchy using a sealed-bid auction to avoid liquidity problems
In the first case, the problem is “symmetrical ultimatum game against X”, in which $9 rock does get $9.
In the second case you are correct, in the problem “symmetrical ultimatum game against $9 rock” $9 rock gets $0.
Okay, I think I figured out the dark room thing: The Way You Go Depends A Good Deal On Where You Want To Get: FEP minimizes surprise about actions using preferences about the future as evidence
Yeah my understanding is that FEP is meant to be quite general, the P and Q are doing a lot of the theory’s work for it.
Chapter 5 describes how you might apply it to the human brain in particular.
I think the following would be an intermediate case between simple networks and LLMs: chess AIs
In a world where ARC is successful, what does a mechanistic explanation of, say, Leela Chess Zero or Stockfish NNUE look like?
In traditional mechanistic interpretability, the answer is “a chess playing algorithm that isn’t a black box”.
With ARC’s approach, is it just that we could find adversarial inputs faster than sampling? We could eliminate adversarial inputs? Can we somehow “align” the models better to chess based on the explanation?
Since the explanation isn’t human readable, I’m assuming we wouldn’t actually be able to find the rules of chess in the explanation. Like we could find an “explanation” for why it only plays legal moves but that explanation would itself be a giant mathematical artifact. And the explanation for why it wins against non-NN chess AIs would be even more inscrutable!