cousin_it
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why do you think there are other common paths
For example, the Sequences or HPMOR don’t read like they were written in an obsessive headspace. They have plenty of free-wheeling moments, remember the bit about Greengrass of Sunshine?
Aren’t you describing obsessive-compulsiveness? Sure, it’s one possible path to a certain kind of creativity, but I don’t think it’s the happiest or most fruitful path. Sorry for being a bit harsh—I’m just afraid that calling it “intellectual honesty” might make people double down on their obsessive ways, when they could’ve been better off cultivating acceptance habits.
I think sometimes people end up in some activity because they accidentally had a defining moment of fun with that activity. Their mind was in the right shape at the right moment and something clicked. It can happen at any age, but I’m not sure you can engineer it. I still remember exactly how math clicked with me as a child—what time of the year it was, what the room looked like, etc. The same with guitar when I was a teenager—I was watching someone play and I even remember the exact chord when my mind went click.
Sorry about the late reply, I’m on vacation and not using the internet much. By have heart I meant stay strong. By decidability I meant this:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-provability/#AritComp
Solovay’s theorem is so significant because it shows that an interesting fragment of an undecidable formal theory like Peano Arithmetic—namely that which arithmetic can express in propositional terms about its own provability predicate—can be studied by means of a decidable modal logic, GL, with a perspicuous possible worlds semantics.
The post I linked is based on GL.
In your scenario with two reasoners, I think they will be unpredictable to each other, and both will fail to find enough counterfactuals to choose an action. Modal UDT is single player only.
More generally I think single player decision theory will never make game theory fall out for free—that dream should be abandoned. But that’s a different conversation.
Yeah, we figured out sometime later that the chicken rule isn’t needed. Also we switched to using provability logic (a kind of modal logic), because it leads to a more natural formulation than halting oracles. As a bonus, that logic is decidable, so the whole thing can be implemented on a computer.
https://agentfoundations.org/item?id=4
That idea is known as “modal UDT” and I’m happy to have come up with it, because it seems to be a local peak in the space of ideas. But unfortunately that’s as far as it goes. Our world doesn’t look like a modal formula, it’s more like a cellular automaton, so we need decision theories that can work with that. Hence all the research on logical inductors etc.
Then I think you’ve reinvented this. And there were many advances after this, so have heart :-)
With “find some f”, it’s clear when the algorithm should stop. With “find all f” it’s not as clear. If you stop after finding the first f, the problem comes back. If you search for all proofs up to some max length, nobody knows if the problem comes back or not.
Hope you get better soon!
humans’ built-in safety mechanisms (such as moral and philosophical reflection)
I feel the opposite way: reflection is divergent and unsafe, while low-level instincts are safety checks. For example, “my grand theory of society says we must kill a class of people to usher in a golden age, but my gut says killing so many people is wrong.”
Why call it “social reality”? If you lived alone on an island, you could be just as bad at drawing bikes.
Yeah, if you treat your mind as a TM predicting the next experience, you run into the problem of witches. I prefer to think about TMs that could’ve generated my mind, and what these TMs will give me as my next experience. That way you don’t get witches. Though it’s still a mystery how to measure “simplicity” of such TMs.
Conformity is about perceptions too: it doesn’t just stop you from cutting in line, it makes you feel that cutting in line is inappropriate. Isn’t that a central example of what “social reality” is about?
I was overcomplicating things. The answer is much simpler: friendships are the result of a shared stressor, and they last as long as the stressor lasts. Yesterday I was standing in line to the US embassy, it was moving kinda slow with lots of delays. So I just started talking to the people next to me, and soon the whole queue was chatting with each other. Then we all in turn got our visa interviews and left the embassy without saying a word to each other. A microcosm of school friendships. That’s probably also why many couples break up when children leave the home.
I think “conformity” is a better word because it describes behavior, not some special kind of reality (wha?)
I’m mostly the same (had some drug trips though). You’re probably not an outlier. It’s just that most discussion of psychological problems comes from people with psychological problems.
Abridging feels so bad to me that I’d probably just stop reading LW if GW didn’t exist. Thanks to Said :-)
If someone sees computers and virtual reality as an escape from the real world, opposed to sweat under the warm sun and the scent of real flowers, they will think that transhumanists must surely hate the body
Do you like the body?
I guess this applies mostly to politicized topics? I also like Robin’s advice to “pull the rope sideways”.
Thanks for the response! I’m happy to hear that.
Last year you wrote you fixed your depression and anxiety. Why do you still need psychotherapy? Did that fix stop working? If so, are you sure you have something working now?
I think anthropic probabilities are a well-posed question. Since copying is physically possible in our universe, there must be billions of tiny “anthropic events” happening to me every second, same as with probabilistic events. And the frequencies must be turning out some stable way, because the world looks stable to me. So if I wasn’t so stupid, I could probably settle SSA vs SIA just by looking at my memories!
You could say that’s not fair: it would only settle the question for myself and for those who share enough of my memories. But that’s what settling a question means. The theory of gravity isn’t true for for all possible observers either—only for you and for those who share enough of your memories.