Hahaha, thanks for writing this.
Elias Schmied
Karma: 473
Ah, I see—gotcha. Do you also care about the dramaticness (or beauty, or truth) of all moments in the multiverse weighted by how simple they are? (Since you care about the happiness of all moments weighted by how simple they are, the happiness of all moments weighted by how happy they are, and the happiness of all moments weighted by how dramatic they are—if I am understanding correctly)
(EDIT: e.g. you seem to be endorsing an “all possible combinations” approach here: “I care about bringing more goodness to the worlds where truth is the most knowable, more understanding of truth to the most beautiful worlds, and more beauty to the best of worlds”)
So is “caring about about happy experiences” a mystical distribution? But it just doesn’t matter much in practice or something? Or… it’s a subpart of the “caring about simple things” distribution? That’s what I’m confused about. (Also, I added an edit to my original message FYI).
Trying to digest this once again—the “Updates on the mystical and mathematical” section still feels very confusing to me. (by the way, I think “mystical” is a very bad naming choice, since IIUC it includes things as mundane as feeling happy—there has to be something better. What about, just spitballing… “moral”? “Virtuous”? “Abstract”? Vague, fuzzy, imprecise? Non-naturalistic? Informal? Squishy? Tacit? I think I like informal the most.)
If I am understanding the Boltzmann brain section correctly, the key move that allows you to not act as if you are a Boltzmann brain (i.e. not never unpleasantly force yourself to do stuff) is that you are bounding your utility for each distribution. Which you can’t do if you have one single “objective” ethical/metaphysical theory that puts a nontrivial amount of weight on them (since it will get overwhelmed by astronomicals/infinities) instead of a parliament. That makes sense—just writing out my understanding.
That actually seems like a good argument for moral uncertainty / parliament views in general. I guess it’s the metaphysical version of the selling point that it’s supposed to reduce fanaticism.
(EDIT: Although it seems worth noting that this is independent of the “caring measure” approach itself. You might also just decide ad hoc that Boltzmann brains just don’t matter that much to you, even within one distribution, and deal with infinite ethics / fanaticism generally in that way, i.e. wish them away ad hoc. I was previously thinking of OSAC as just the caring measure approach, fully written up, but that seems wrong now. Or maybe not—I feel confused. I guess it’s the natural way to make the caring measure approach a little less ad hoc / systematize it, or something?).
Thanks for writing this up.
So you think the Great Stagnation manifested that quickly (it’s generally taken to start in the 70s), and in military tech to boot? (to develop better ICBM interception). That feels a bit implausible to me since nuclear bombs became so much more powerful. It feels more like an offense-defense balance intrinsic to the technology + coordination of exactly the type that he didn’t expect (the ABM treaty capping defense systems). But I feel a bit out of my depth here.
I don’t know what probability we should translate to his statement that “unless something quite unforeseen occurs”. 90% maybe
I assume you mean 10% on “something unforeseen”? Opus 5 estimates “5% and possibly less”, for what it’s worth.
I think he would be surprised that in 2000 hydrogen bombs were still the most powerful weapons
To be fair, nuclear bombs in 2000 were a thousand times more powerful than in 1951.
I think you’re underselling how much of Russell’s concern was the apparent instability of the equilibrium at the time, even without further technological progress:
“If things are allowed to drift, it is obvious that the bickering between Russia and the Western democracies will continue until Russia has a considerable store of atomic bombs, and that when that time comes there will be an atomic war.”
It doesn’t seem like this is conditional on further technological progress. The passage you’re quoting is specifically about human extinction, not about world war.
Didn’t know about the plankton thing either and I asked Claude, it’s actually pretty interesting.
On the general historical point, it’s something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time—for me, it’s on the Pareto frontier of how important of a question it is vs how little explicit study it has received. I think it’s more thorny than it might first appear, because while the “maximal size/power” of entities increases (companies and economies of scale, nations and the consolidation process that you mention), there is also some vague intuition that technology and the information age has given some power back to flexible, smaller entities like startups or the individual. (see e.g. this old Claude chat).
As of now, I feel relatively undecided and want to think more about it.
Come on, that’s obviously not what Russell meant. His prediction was clearly extremely flawed. This is consensus—Opus 5 agrees with me.
I’ve been kind of moved by Richard Ngo’s argument (e.g. here and in this thread) that the seeming naturalness of unipolarity might be a semi-ideological artifact of centralized solutions being easier to imagine. I’d be curious to hear you say how you think Bertrand Russell’s similar infamous 1950 prediction of either a global war or a world government (or population collapse) by 2000 went wrong, and what the key dissimilarity to your prediction of unipolarity is.
Really interesting post, thanks for linking. Hm, but this is still a simplicity thing, so I don”t think anyone would classify it as a caring measure. Like, the non-arbitrariness is still intended to be objective.
Ah, I thought there was some larger scenario intended.
The offer doesn’t even need to be coming from Omega for the d20 to be a permissible choice
Did you mean to introduce Omega before this?
That makes sense to me at first glance, thanks.
Cool, thanks for looking into it! But wouldn’t the program that locates our obelisk / the world summoning text also take a while? If it’s one of the natural short description length programs like “find the largest obelisk” or “find the most common string”, then it might take extremely long since you’d have to run the universe very far into the future. (I may be missing something obvious).
I’ve only talked to Fable about it, so I don’t have a favorite explanation. (and I can’t say I actually understand it).
Schmidhuber is the other guy (other than Tegmark) that influenced the everything-list people and Wei Dai, to my understanding. But he eventually switched from a simplicity prior to a simplicity+speed prior. It seems interesting and underexplored on LessWrong. But it also seems, at first glance, less motivated than a pure beautiful Solomonoff induction thing. So I don’t know.
Coming back to this again—still really useful, thank you. The obelisk and world-summoning points are quite strong.
Have you looked into Schmidhuber’s speed prior at all? It seems to at least ward off those. (although other problems remain, of course).
Hm, interesting point. What are these epistemological norms, out of curiosity? (Feel free to just link me to something you’ve already written.)
Sure, it’s a continuum—I’m down to bite the bullet that probabilities are very slightly metaphysical too. But believing your own reality might be impossible / changing the past / caring about alternate realities is a huge difference in degree—intuitively like 100x more metaphysical than probabilities, or something like that.
Was there meant to be more at the end of the last footnote?