ike

Karma: 1,406

ike 20 Jun 2026 18:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Bob Fischer’s comment on: Two critiques of Rethink Priorities’ Moral Weights project
Third, I’ve realized that my gut endorses some vague argument like this: Insects just don’t matter. But if they were sentient, they would. So, they must not be sentient.
That, of course, is a bad line of reasoning. We don’t learn facts by consulting our ethical intuitions. And it’s helpful — for me, anyway — to call that out explicitly. When I detach the idea of insect sentience from its moral significance — that is, when I consider the possibility completely isolated from any level of concern for nonhuman pain — it seems much more plausible to me that insects can hurt. And if so, I shouldn’t shy away from that conclusion just because of its possible moral consequences.
I disagree with this, and strongly disagree with your claim that it is obvious.
You are assuming that sentience/ability to suffer is a factual question, when it’s actually a moral question and it’s perfectly fine to apply moral evidence to moral questions.
The exact argument depends on definition. If you define suffering as only applicable to moral patients, then the question if something is suffering requires a determination of whether it is a moral patient , which is there a moral question. If you define suffering more broadly, then whether it is bad depends on whether it’s happening to a moral patient, which again is a moral question.

ike 26 May 2026 21:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ArtiFabian’s comment on: The Fundamentals of Cogitism: Grounding Ethics in the Nature of Consciousness
Step 8 is problematic. (I would also quibble with wording on others, including 2, but those are less critical.)
What exactly does “real” mean there?
11 is also problematic. At best you can get that a model which assumes other people are conscious similar to you will help your predictions be more accurate. This says nothing about whether other people actually are conscious.
You can’t actually bootstrap a refutation of solipsism.
I would claim that ultimately anti solipsism is a moral position, not a factual one. I.e. it is a moral good to treat others as conscious. I can’t write up a full argument for that though.

ike 26 May 2026 18:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
If “I” “exist” in multiple universes, I don’t view there being a fact of the matter as to which one I’m “really” in. I think at least some realists agree, and it is to that subset of realists that my argument is directed. Their worldview is internally inconsistent.
Any statement about external reality is true in some worlds and false in others. Almost all such statements will be false if you’re located in a Boltzmann brain world, for example.
I’m not using the multiverse as an axiom. It’s the possibility of a multiverse that undermines meaning of realism.
To be a realist, you need one of the following claims:
1. There is only one universe containing entities subjectively indistinguishable from us, or there are so few universes that we can effectively ignore them (MWI, or any other Big world theory implies otherwise)
2. There is a fact of the matter as to where we are under self locating uncertainty
I think e.g EY rejects both of these but is still a realist. You seem to be hinting that you believe in 2?
Note that you can further build on my QM example. Scott Aaronson has suggested that you can affect the past via your decisions in the present. I haven’t read his arguments recently but I think this is related to the self locating uncertainty point—there could be no fact of the matter as to what the initial conditions were that led to your decision until after it’s made.

ike 24 May 2026 22:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
>I don’t think that you can argue to anti realism by assuming a theory of the universe as a starting point. Even a very maximal large world theory allows sentences to correspond to local laws and conditions. A quantum multiverse, which is comparatively smaller, has QM true everywhere
Well again, this is not meant to be the actual argument. But if you have self-locating uncertainty as to where you are in a large world, you might say there’s no fact of the matter as to where you are, which is close enough for my purposes.
I gave a specific Sequences quote earlier, and you suggested you don’t disagree.
>What does that even mean? You observe what’s around you, and that characterises which branch your in. It’s the branch where Hitler lost
I meant no fact of the matter prior to observation. If you think you simultaneously exist in every branch, and then your consciousness splits, prior to the split there’s no fact of the matter as to which one you’ll end up in. You end up in both, and each side of the split has a different observation.
Then I’m saying something similar is going on if you believe in a large world where some universes have different ontologies. Stuff like “you live in a simulation” will be true in some, false in others, so there’s no fact of the matter as to whether that’s true. Same applies to any statement about external reality.
This isn’t quite what I think, because on my worldview it’s not even meaningful to talk about what large worlds “exist”.

ike 24 May 2026 15:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
I’m not particularly interested in debating the meaning of meaningless. It seems like you understand what I mean and are just using different labels for the same concepts.
You also appear to agree that unverifiable statements in my sense lack truth values. That’s already a highly controversial claim (realists typically either claim that realism is verifiable or that even if not, it has a truth value and is true.) From my point of view, agreeing with this point is most of the way towards agreeing with my worldview.
Like, if you agree with me that there’s no fact of the matter as to whether any claims about external reality are true (straightforward generalization from the quantum Level III example), I don’t have any substantive further disagreements, it’s just about what words mean.
>It is therefore paradoxical to appeal to QM to to establish philosophical anti realism.
I’m using it to build intuition, plus others have already gone on record with specific anti realist beliefs on QM. (More accurate to say that this is anti meaning of realism or whatever word you prefer to use, to distinguish from the skeptical position that believes that it has a truth value but is likely to be false.)
>MWI asserts they all are, CI asserts there are no branches. There doubt about which is metaphysically true, but how can you conclude anti-realism from a premise of realism?
Some interpretations are more realist than others. “Shut up and calculate” is not particularly realist. I interpret EY as adopting MWI and then being anti-realist about which branch we’re in.

ike 24 May 2026 11:57 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: small identity’s comment on: The Short Case for Verificationism
The argument goes through with any multiverse theory, including levels I through III and eternal recurrence.
It’s also somewhat of a reductio, because verificationism means that all these multiverse theories are meaningless. It’s meant more to build intuition.

ike 23 May 2026 13:51 UTC
3 points
−1
on: The Fundamentals of Cogitism: Grounding Ethics in the Nature of Consciousness
The arguments for external reality seem rather poor.
The inference from “I am having an experience” to “there is something out there causing that experience” is invalid. I’ve suggested elsewhere that the latter may be meaningless.

ike 22 May 2026 13:53 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
I think I did a poor job of laying out the argument there, although the topic is inherently difficult to reason about.
It might just be that my intuitions have shifted towards a form of verificationism and others haven’t.
But I do still have the intuition that unverifiable statements aren’t meaningful. I agree that they feel meaningful to many people, but that doesn’t seem sufficient.
To use an example from one of those post comments:
Do you think it’s meaningful to talk about where an electron is during a state of quantum uncertainty? EY has suggested that there’s no fact of the matter as to some of these, e.g.
>The notion of “an exact particular momentum” or “an exact particular position” is not something that can physically happen
From https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantum-physics-sequence
A strong realist perspective there conflicts with Bell’s theorem.
If you accept the anti-realist position—that we’re not merely uncertain over what branch of the wave function is real, but that there’s no fact of the matter, at least until we do more observations—then it’s pretty analogous to my argument, just with level IV multiverse instead of level III.

ike 19 May 2026 12:55 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
I don’t think it’s necessary to have a “metaphysics of reality fluid.” You can say that Solomonoff induction does a good job of making predictions, and then use it to conclude that you likely aren’t a Boltzmann brain, that you have no particular reason to think the universe ends one day purely due to anthropic reasoning, etc. I lean towards realityfluid being meaningless, as do concepts like “exist”, etc.
“But why would the ‘territory’ act like SI?” This is of questionable meaning, and even if meaningful may be inherently unanswerable. As you note, any sane UTM ends up in the same place; you could have a single randomly picked UTM that worked, you could have a weighted distribution over UTMs that gives enough weight to the sane ones. We clearly don’t have the kind of data that would let us discriminate between any of these possibilities.
But it does seem pretty suggestive that the BB problem and related ones you mention like dust theory go away once you’re working in SI. We can’t perfectly ground SI but we can’t perfectly ground anything else either.
If we were going to do an observation tomorrow that would somehow settle the question of if the universe will go on indefinitely with many BBs or not, would you predict that the observation says No with overwhelming probability? I would not.

ike 18 May 2026 14:13 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
To point to a BB that has the same experiences as a human, you need to go really far into the future. You essentially have to hardcode every bit of those experiences, none of it comes for free.
For a human on Earth, you get the order somewhat cheaply.
Compare two Earth humans, where one is like you, and the other introduces a bunch of ad-hoc changes. The changes reduce the amount of order in its experiences, which increases the complexity of the program. The fact that the experiences are less complex is what it means for them to be ordered.
Now suppose you have a BB that “cheats” a bit by coding in some of the order to reduce complexity. Instead of hardcoding a memory of the sun rising every day or whatever, it codes it once and copies it, to save some bits. Well then the prediction it makes for the future is also ordered! In order to get a “pure” BB that produces total randomness for the future predictions, you need to hardcode all of the order in the past and not use it to cheapen your complexity.

ike 17 May 2026 15:46 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: programjames’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
What it takes to simulate the brain is not really relevant here. What matters is how many bits you currently have access to. If something is not part of your direct consciousness, you don’t need to specify it in the program. This includes memories you are not currently thinking about.

ike 17 May 2026 15:00 UTC
1 point
3
in reply to: programjames’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
While I agree that SI dissolves the BB problem, this is overstated. When reasoning, you have direct access to far fewer than 1PB bits. You don’t even have direct access to all your memories. You can locate someone that’s indistinguishable from you by specifying orders of magnitude less information than 1PB.

ike 17 May 2026 14:47 UTC
17 points
5
in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
The Solomonoff Induction universal prior solves it because it takes a lot more bits to “locate” a Boltzmann brain than a human in a well ordered Earth environment.
I was previously skeptical that SI actually produces different results than SIA and wrote about that in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jqwb7vEqEFyC6sLLG/solomonoff-induction-and-sleeping-beauty but I’ve changed my mind. The argument there doesn’t generalize to large numbers of observers. (I still believe my other arguments posted that year that “reality” is a meaningless concept, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zm3Wgqfyf6E4tTkcG/the-short-case-for-verificationism and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PSichw8wqmbood6fj/this-territory-does-not-exist.)
The “locate” issue in SI solves both Boltzmann and the dust theory issues alluded to in OP—anything can implement any computation but you still need a computer program that outputs something and weird mappings will make that program longer.
You still have a puzzle about which language you use for the computer programs, and what exactly input and output mean, it doesn’t solve everything but does dissolve much of the mystery.

ike 29 Apr 2026 14:47 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: exmateriae’s comment on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
No offense, but your example is using a track record in forecasting to get a job where you post forecasts. I asked about success in other areas.

ike 26 Apr 2026 17:31 UTC
11 points
8
in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
Do you have any reason to think those people succeeded in other areas as a result of the screen from forecasting success ? Did someone give them opportunities they wouldn’t have had without being a top forecaster?
My guess is this is just positive selection.

ike 26 Apr 2026 15:02 UTC
2 points
0
on: Did anyone here used to hate exercise and learned to not hate it?
I was the same and settled on walking as well. Can listen to podcasts or music, get a good pair of noise cancelling earbuds.
Also good to walk with friends and talk.
Find a route that takes an hour to get back to starting point and walk daily if you can.

ike 23 Apr 2026 16:17 UTC
25 points
1
in reply to: Quinn’s comment on: Community misconduct disputes are not about facts
I was a defendant in a criminal trial and there were many personal attacks. They introduced many pieces of evidence that were irrelevant to whether a crime was committed. The rationale for most was it’s relevant to my “intent” but it was clear what they were trying to do.
(I was convicted and the judge overturned it partly for insufficient evidence. Appeal is ongoing so I don’t want to get into details. My case was somewhat unusual in that there was no dispute at to the main facts, but it was heavily disputed whether the facts made out the elements of the charges. There’s a lot of variance among cases and judges, I’m sure.)
I was also told many times by my lawyers that we had to stay on the judge’s good side and we shouldn’t make certain valid arguments or demand certain constitutional rights because we’d likely face retaliation from the government or judge. That’s a related way in which it’s not about the facts or the law.

ike 23 Apr 2026 2:46 UTC
8 points
14
on: Community misconduct disputes are not about facts
Criminal trials work similarly.
Read press releases by prosecutors talking about new cases, or speaking indictments. They often try to character assassinate the defendant, and they try to build up the “victim” when possible.

ike 18 Apr 2026 23:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Smaug123’s comment on: Claude knows who you are
When I tell my Claude that it’s British it gets it one shot. It doesn’t pick up on that otherwise.

ike 18 Apr 2026 22:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Smaug123’s comment on: Claude knows who you are
My current guess after going back and forth with Opus is that you’re leaking location or language as British. If your friends are also British that could explain why that clue was enough. Once it’s picked out the rationalist cluster there’s not that many British so that could be enough. For me it’s always picking rationalist names, often mentioning LW or EA explicitly in thinking.