If that were literally more efficient, evolution would have designed humans to have four chimpanzee heads that argued with each other.
No! This is what a human engineer would have done. Evolution cannot do that! (Though the premise is still correct.)
1000000 x 0.99 + 0 x 0.01 > 1001000 x 0.01 + 1000 * 0.99 so yes. But this is rather besides (my) point. As I pointed out if my aim is to make money I do everything to make Omega’s job as easy as possible (by precommiting) and then onebox (if Omega is any better than random).
My point is rather that Omega can be fooled regardless of it’s power. - And fooled throughly enough that Omegas percision can be no better than random
Newcomb’s problem is in my reading about how an agent A should decide in a contrafactual in which another agent B decides conditional on the outcome of a future decision of A.
I tried to show that it is under certain conditions (deliberate noncompliance of A) not possible for B to know A’s future decision any better than random (what—in the limit of atomic resolution scanning and practically infinite processing power—is only possible due to “quantum mumbo-jumbo”). This is IMHO a form of “dissolving” the Question, though perhaps the meaning of “dissolving” is somewhat streched here.
This is of cause not applicable to all Newcomblike Problems—namely all these where A complies and B can gather enough data about A and processing power.
I do not see any way how Omega and the boxes now can be entangeled with a photon passing or not passing through a semitransparent mirror in 5 min.
ad 1: As I pointed out in my post twice, in this case he percommits to oneboxing and and that’s it, since assuming atomic resolution scanning and practically infinite processing power he cannot hide his intention to cheat if he wants to twobox.
ad 2: You can, I did not, I suspect—as pointed out—that he could do that with his own brain too, but of course if so Omega woud know and still exclude him.
ad 3:
First of all I want to point out, that I would still one box after seeing Omega predicting 50 or 100 other people correctly, > since 50 to 100 bits of evidence are enough to ovecome (nearly) any prior I have about how the universe works.
This assumed that I could somehow rule out stage magic. Did not say that, my mistake.
On terminology: See my response to shiminux. Yes there is probably an aspect of fighting the hypo, but I think not primarily, since I think it is rather interesting to establish, that you can pervent to be perdicted in a newcomblike problem
In particular, I am extremely sceptical that simply not making your mind up, and then at the last minute doing something that feels random, would actually correspond to making use of quantum nondeterminism. In particular, if individual neurons are reasonably deterministic, then regardless of quantum physics any human’s actions can be predicted pretty perfectly, at least on a 5⁄10 minute scale.
As stated in my post I am not sure about this either, though my reasoning is, that while memory is probably easy to read out, thinking is probably a chaotic process, where the outcome may depend on single action potentials, especially if the process does not heavily rely on things stored in memory. If a single action potential occurs can be determined by few—in the limit one—sodium ion(s) passing or not passing a channel. If a sodium Ion passes a channel is a quantum probabilistic process. Though as I said before I am not sure of this, so precommit to use a suitable device.
Alternatively, even if it is possible to be delibrately non-cooperative, the problem can just be changed so that if Omega notices you are deliberately making its judgement hard, then it just doesn’t fill the box. The problem in this version seems exactly as hard as Newcomb’s.
Yep! Omega can of course do so.
Newcomb’s problem doesn’t rely on existence of predictors who can predict any agent in any situation. It relies on existence of rational agents that can be predicted at least in certain situations including the scenario with boxes.
This was probably just me (how I read / what I think is interesting about Newcomb’s problem). As I understand the responses most people think the main point of Newcomb’s problem is that you rationally should cooperate given the 1000000 / 1000 payoff matrix. I emphazised in my post, that I take that as a given. I thought most about the question if you can successfully twobox at all, so this was the “point” of Newcomb’s problem for me. To formalize this say I replaced the payoff matrix by 1000/1000 or even device A / device B where device A corresponds to $1000, device B corresponds to $1000 but device A + device B correspond to= $100000 (E.g. they have a combined function).
I still don’t understand why would you be so much surprised if you saw Omega doing the trick hundred times, assuming no stage magic. Do you find it so improbable that out of the hundred people Omega has questioned not a single one had a quantum coin by him and a desire to toss it on the occasion? Even game-theoretical experiment volunteers usually don’t carry quantum widgets.
Well, I thought about people actively resisting prediction, so some of them flipping a coin or using at least a mental process with severeal recursion levels (I think, that Omega thinks, that I think...). I am pretty though not absolutely sure that these processes are partly quantum random or at least chaotic enough to be computationally intractable for evrything within our universe. Though Omega would probably do much better than random (except if everyone flipps a coin, I am not sure if that is precictable with computational power levels realizable in our universe).
If we can build a self sufficient small scale economy which is independent from earth’s ecosystem services and industry base—i.e. an independent martian colony—most listed existential risks a martian colony might mitigate cease to be existential. This is since the mechanism of these existential risks is reduction of ecosystem services provided by earth’s biosphere triggering a breakdown of our interconnected world economy with subsequent starvation of most people or even a breakdown of our interconnected world economy without significantly reduced ecosystem services.
This obviously applies to: < 20km diameter impactors, (current tech) wars, famine, super volcanoes, (nearly all) climate change scenarios, global computer failure.
It also applyes to: most pandemics (sub 100% lethality or shelter avaiable or some region spared), most supernova scenarios (breakdown of agriculture due to Ozone layer disruption, far away enough to not instantly fry the earth), some bio- and nanoweapons (sub 100% lethality or shelter avaiable or some region spared).
So a Mars colony will only exclusively survive some highly specific and thus unlikely scenarios: A nano-outbreak which can break into an earthbound shelter, but does not spread through space, a very intense GRB which hits earth but not Mars (is this even possible?), an earth impactor large enough to heat the atmosphere to several hundred °C, perhaps some weird physics disaster.
So what we should do to mitigate x-risks is building a self sufficient small scale economy which is independent from earth’s ecosystem services and industry base, not ship it to Mars. Though I fear this is not possible at our current tech level.
In most cases of “conventional” xrisks (< 10km diameter impactors, (current tech) wars, famine, super volcanoes, (nearly all) climate change scenarios, global computer failure, most pandemics (sub 100% lethality), most supernova scenarios) you don’t even need the shelter.
It is sufficient to have the tech necessary to be self sufficient in a small (say 1000 people) group independently from ecosystem services (i.e. food, water, maybe air—not an issue in most scenarios, organic raw materials, fossil fuels). This is the minimum requirement for a martian colony or a deep shelter anyway and much easier, especially if you use outside air. Though it is still very hard—today we don’t come close to be independent form ecosystem services even with a supply chain of 7 billion people. I doubt it is possible at all short of some sort of MNT.
As long as we are not independent form ecosystem services in a small group a space- or underground- or oceanic colony as protection from xrisks is a pipe dream, because any settlement not completely independent from the mother civilisation will die long before the mother civilisation breaks down. Especially if transport is as demanding as to Mars.
10-5-10 against veteran by trying to predict the computer and occasionally changing levels of recursion.
Second try: 14-16-15 by trying to act randomly (without conciously using an algorithm).
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
Me and probably my girlfriend too. Awesome somone finally did it. I wanted to start a meetup too, but kept procrastinating about it.
Surveyed, including bonus.
I really liked the monetary reward prisoners dillema. I am really curious how this turns out. Given the demographic here, I would predict ~ 85% cooperate.
The free text options were rendered in german (Sonstige). Was that a bug or does it serve some hidden purpose?
Supernatural: AFAIK there is no agreed-on definition of “supernatural” events other than “physically impossible” ones which of course have a probability of 0 (epsilon). OTOH, if you specify “events that the average human observer would use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe”, the probability is very high.
Somewhere on LessWrong I have seen supernatural defined as “involving ontologically basic mental entities”. This is imho the best deffinition of supernatural I have ever seen and should probably be included into this question in the future. Other definitions do not really make sense with this question, as you allready pointed out.
My confidence bounds were 75% and 98% for defect, so my estimate was diametrically opposed to yours. If the admittedly low sample size of these comments is any indication, we were both way off.
I expected most of the LessWrong comunity to cooperate for two reasons:
I model them as altruistic as in Kurros comment.
I model them as oneboxing in newcombs problem.
One consideration I did not factor into my prediction is, that—judging from the comments—many people refuse to cooperate in transfering money form CFAR/Yvain to a random community member.
I personally think it’s a strawman...
Why?
Here I understand “ontologically basic” to mean “having no Kolmogorov complexity / not amenable to reductionistic exlanations / does not posses an internal mechanism”. Why do you think this is not coherent?
Before I knew of Hilbert space and the universal wave function, I would have said 1, now I am somewhat confused about that.
Hello,
I found this site via HPMOR, which was the most awesome book I have read for several years. Besides being awesome as a book there were a lot of moments during reading I thought wow, there is someone who really thinks quite like myself. (Which is unfortunately something I do not experience too often.) Thus I was interested in who the author of HPMOR is, so I googled “less wrong”.
This site really held what HPMOR promised, so I spend quite some time reading through many articles absorbing a lot of new and interesting concepts.
Regarding my own person, I am a 30 years old biochemist currently working on my master thesis in structural biology. I grew up and live in Cologne, Germany.
I am, since early childhood very interested in everything science, engineering and philosophy related, thus inferential distances to most topics discussed here were not too large. On the downside most people perceive me as quite nerdy. This is reinforced by my rather poor social skill(I am possibly on the spectrum) so I was bullied a lot during childhood. Thus my social life was quite dim, though it improved quite a lot during my twenties, mostly due to having a relationship.
I was raised with an agnostic respectively weakly catholic (maybe there is a god, perhaps or something) worldview, and became increasingly atheistic during my teen-years, though this is not really remarkable and pretty much the default for scientifically educated people in Germany. Further on a lot of transhumanistic idea(l)s have a lot of appeal to me.
Besides the clarity and high intellectual level of discourse on this site I really like the technophilic / progress optimistic worldview of most people here. The general technology is evil meme held by a lot of “intellectuals” really puts me of, especially if they do not realize, that their entire live depends utterly on the very technology they shun.
My main criticism is an (IMHO) over-representation of the ai-foom scenario as a projected future, though this is a post on its own (which I hope to write up soon).
I have been lurking the site for quite some time now (> 1 year) mostly due to akrasia related reasons. First I really like reading interesting ideas and dislike writing so if I can spend time on less wrong this time has a much higher hedonic quality for me if I read articles than if I write my own article or comments. Second, whenever I read a post here and find something missing or imprecise or even wrong, in most cases someone already pointed it out often more precisely and eloquently than I could have done, so I mostly did not feel to much need to comment anyway.
I decided to delurk now anyway, because I have several ideas for posts in mind, which I hope to write up over the next few weeks or month, hopefully contributing to the awesomeness of this site. Further on I contemplate starting an LW meet-up group in my hometown (I could use som help / advise there).
Cudos and an unconditional upvote to the person who first guesses the meaning of my username.