As of December 2025, I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
gilch
Karma: 2,753
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(The original version was working on April 1, but doesn’t seem to render now. This is a bugfix release.)
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The mods may have better overall data, but personally, I weak vote a lot more than I strong vote, and I don’t vote on everything I read either.
Seems like a signal-to-noise problem. Some amount seems like a useful signal, but too much is too hard to digest. Privileges based on karma make some sense but restricting it based on time (1/day/user or something) seems pretty crude, so I don’t like that idea.
Not sure if this is a good idea either, but the number of reacts allowed per post could be based on the amount of karma that user generated on comments on that post. That way, a user who’s doing too many reacts would be encouraged to just write a comment instead. That still doesn’t seem like exactly the right incentive, but I’m also not sure how I want it to work.
Maybe the ability to filter out reacts from a particular (prolific) user would suffice?
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
—E. O. Wilson“Medieval institutions” seem like they have a lot of room for improvement. Can we build high integrity/epistemics institutions at all? Or are we still lacking some key social tech we’ve yet to find or develop? (Do we e.g. need Rationalist alternatives to “mutual reputation alliances”?) There seem to have been several attempts by the Rationalists, with mixed results. LessWrong itself being one.
Can anyone suggest some of which have been the most successful and why? Which have failed spectacularly and why? Which are failing more subtly? (Or if this has been answered or partially answered already, can you link?)
Do we have a catalog of social tech that might help with institution building? E.g., I heard about prediction markets and dominant assurance contracts first on LW, etc. Seems like a lot of game theory is applicable.
When I first heard the recipe suggested by Yudkowsky, I thought, “That sounds not bad, actually.” Seems my prediction was correct. Although, he might have said “rock salt”, rather than flakes, which might be too much salt at once. The aliens should know better though.
Beware transparency’s illusion! Links help?
See the paper I linked in my other comment.
Eight years later, but we’re finally approaching the technical capability to perform my proposed experiment to elicit tetrachromacy in a human trichromat through eye tracking and targeting a subset of retinal cells: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052#sec-3
See the DISCUSSION section proposing further experiments.
Update: Claude made it to Cerulean City today, after wandering the Mt. Moon area for 69 hours.
See https://pauseai.info. They think lobbying efforts have been more successful than expected, but politicians are reluctant to act on it before they hear about it from their constituents. Individuals sending emails also helps more than expected. The more we can create common knowledge of the situation, the more likely the government acts.
It’s also available on Android.
Finitism doesn’t reject the existence of any given natural number (although ultrafinitism might), nor the validity of the successor function (counting), nor even the notion of a “potential” infinity (like time), just the idea of a completed one being an object in its own right (which can be put into a set). The Axiom of Infinity doesn’t let you escape the notion of classes which can’t themselves be an element of a set. Set theory runs into paradoxes if we allow it. Is it such an invalid move to disallow the class of Naturals as an element of a set, when even ZFC must disallow the Surreals for similar reasons?
Before Cantor, all mathematicians were finitists. It’s not a weird position historically.
We do model physics with “real” numbers, but that doesn’t mean the underlying reality is infinite or even infinitely divisible. My finitism is motivated by my understanding of physics and cosmology, not the other way around. Nature seems to cut us off from any access to any completed infinity, and it’s not clear that even potential infinities are allowed (hence my sympathy with ultrafinitism). I have no need of that axiom.
Quantum Field Theory, though traditionally modeled using continuous mathematics, implies the Bekenstein bound: a finite region of space contains a finite amount of information. There are no “infinite bits” available to build the real numbers with. However densely you store information, eventually, at some point, your media collapses into a black hole, and packing in more must take up more space.
Physical space can’t be a continuum like the “reals”. It’s not infinitely divisible. Measuring distance with increasing precision requires higher frequency waves, and thus higher energies, which eventually has enough effective mass to gravitationally distort the very space you are measuring, eventually collapsing into a black hole.
Below a certain limit, distance isn’t physically meaningful. If you assume an electron is a point particle with “infinitesimal” size and you zoom in enough, you should be able to get arbitrarily high electric field strength. But at some point, high enough field strength results in vacuum polarization: virtual electron/positron pairs get pushed around and finally one of the positrons annihilates whatever you thought the real electron was, and then one of the virtual electrons doesn’t have anything to pair with and becomes the real one. It’s as if the electron is jumping around. You can’t nail it down. It doesn’t physically have a position down below a certain scale in time and space. There are no infinite bits. All the fundamental particle types are like this. There are no infinitesimal point particles. They’re just waves.
There’s also a cosmological horizon limiting how much of the Universe we can see. There’s also a (related) past temporal horizon at the Big Bang. We can’t see a completed past-temporal or spacial infinity, in any direction. We’re not sure of the Ultimate Fate of the Universe, but it looks like Heat Death is probably it, given our current understanding of physics. So there’s a future limit as well. The other likely candidate Fates are finite in time as well.
But even supposing finite information content in a finite region seems to be enough to make potential-infinite time not really meaningful. There’s a finite number of states possible, so eventually all reachable states are reached. If physics is deterministic (it seems to be), then we get into a cycle. So time is better modeled as a finite circle, rather than an infinite line. And if it’s not deterministic? Then we still saturate all reachable states, the order just gets shuffled around a bit. There’s no phycial way to tell the difference.
Potential-infinite space is the same way. Any accessible region has a finite number of states, so at least some of them must repeat exactly in other regions. If there’s some determinism to the pattern, then it’s maybe better modeled as some curled-up finite space (although aperiodic tilings are also possible). If it’s random, then we still saturate all reachable states, the order just gets shuffled around a bit. There’s no physical way to tell the difference. Once all reachable states have been saturated, why does it matter if they appear only once or a googol or infinity times?
I installed Mindfulness Bell on my phone, and every time it chimes, I ask myself, “Should I be doing something else right now?” Sometimes I’m being productive and don’t need to stop. When I notice I’ve started ignoring it, I change the chime sound so I notice it again. The interval is adjustable. If I’m stuck scrolling social media, this often gives me the opportunity to stop. Doesn’t always work though. I also have it turned off at night so I can sleep. This is a problem if I get stuck on social media at night when I should be sleeping. Instead, after bed time, I progressively dim the lights and screen to the point where I can barely read it. That’s usually enough to let me fall asleep.
I’m hearing intuitions, not arguments here. Do you understand Cantor’s Diagonalization argument? This proves that the set of all integers is “smaller” (in a well-defined way) than the set of all real numbers, despite the set of all integers being already infinite in size. And it doesn’t end there. There is no largest set.
Russell’s paradox arises when a set definition refers to itself. For example, in a certain town, the barber is the one who shaves all those (and only those) who do not shave themselves. This seems to make sense its face. But who shaves the barber? Contradiction! Not all set definitions are valid, and this includes the universal one, which can be proved to not exist in many ways, at least in the usual ZFC (and similar).
There are two ways to construct a universal object. Either make it a non-set notion like a “proper class”, which can’t be an element of a set (and thus can’t contain itself or any other proper class), or restrict the axiom of comprehension in a way which results in a non-well-founded set theory. Cantor’s Theorem doesn’t hold for all sets in NF. The diagonal set argument can’t be constructed (in all cases) under its rules. NF has a universal set that contains itself, but it accomplishes this by restricting comprehension to stratified formulas. I’m not a set theorist, so I’m still not sure I understand this properly, but it looks like an infinite hierarchy of set types, each with its own universal set. Again, no end to the hierarchy, but in practice all the copies behave the same way. So instead of strictly two types of classes, the proper class and the small class, you have some kind of hyperset that can contain sets, but not other hypersets, and hyper-hypersets that can contain both, but not other hyper-hypersets, and so forth, ad infinitum.
Personally, I’m rather sympathetic to the ultrafinitists, and might be a finitist myself. I can accept the slope of a vertical line being “infinite” in the limit. That’s just an artifact of how we chose to measure something. Measure it differently, and the infinity disappears. I can also accept a potential infinity, like not having a largest integer, because the successor function can make a bigger one. We can make an abstract algorithm run on an abstract machine that can count, and it has a finite description. But taking the “completed” set of all integers as an object itself rubs me the wrong way. That had to be tacked on as a separate axiom. It’s unphysical. No operation could possibly construct a physical model of such a thing. It’s an impossible object. One could try to point to a pre-existing model, but we physically cannot verify it. It would take infinite time, space, or precision, which is again unphysical.
Similarly, there is no physical way to verify an infinite God exists, because we physically cannot distinguish it from a (sufficiently large, but) finite one. I might be willing to call such an alien a small-g “god”, but it’s not the big-G omni-everything one in valentinslepukhin’s definition. That only leaves some kind of a priori logical argument, because it can’t be an empirical one, but it has to be based on axioms I can accept, doesn’t it? I can entertain weird axioms for the sake of argument, but I’m not seeing one short of “God exists”, which is blatant question begging.
The main idea here is that one can always derive a “greater” set (in terms of cardinality) from any given set, even if the given set is already infinite, because there are higher degrees of infinity. There is no greatest infinity, just like there is no largest number. So even if (hypothetically) a Being with infinite knowledge exists, there could be Beings with greater knowledge than that. No matter which god you choose, there could be one greater than that, meaning there are things the god you chose doesn’t know (and hence He isn’t “omniscient”, and therefore isn’t “God”, because this was a required attribute.)
I don’t know how to interpret “all existing objects”, because I don’t know what counts as an “object” in your definition. Set theory doesn’t require ur-objects (although those are known variations) and just starts with the empty set, meaning all “objects” are themselves sets. The powerset operation evaluates to the set of all subsets of a set. The powerset of a set always has greater cardinality than the set you started with. That is, for any given collection of “objects”, the number of possible groupings of those objects is always a greater number than the number of objects, even if the collection of objects you started with had an infinite number to begin with. So no, this doesn’t prove that an infinite universe cannot exist, just that there are degrees of infinities (and no “greatest” one).
Naiive set theory leads to paradoxes when defining self-referential sets. The idea of “infinite” gods seem to have similar problems. There are various ways to resolve this. The typical one used in foundations of mathematics is the notion of a collection that is too large to be a set, a “proper class”. (“Class” used to be synonymous with “set”.) But later on in the discussion it was pointed out that this isn’t the only possible resolution.
I don’t know of any officially sanctioned way. But, hypothetically, meeting a publicly-known real human person in person and giving them your public pgp key might work. Said real human could vouch for you and your public key, and no one else could fake a message signed by you, assuming you protect your private key. It’s probably sufficient to sign and post one message proving this is your account (profile bio, probably), and then we just have to trust you to keep your account password secure.
Sentimental Cartography v2.1
Welcome to the LessWrong Archipelago! Zoom in to explore the Article Islands the with the scroll wheel.
Islands cluster by topic. Karma affects their size. Recency affects their climate. Comment activity is reflected as ship activity. Whether an island is a question, curated, or a link post is supposed to affect its shape.
(The 2.0 style has been tweaked to improve appearance.)