Explain.
itaibn0
I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare
An impious road to realms of thought profane;
But ’tis that same religion oftener far
Hath bred the foul impieties of men:
As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,
Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana’s altar, virgin queen,
With Agamemnon’s daughter, foully slain.
She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks
And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,
And at the altar marked her grieving sire,
The priests beside him who concealed the knife,
And all the folk in tears at sight of her.
With a dumb terror and a sinking knee
She dropped; nor might avail her now that first
’Twas she who gave the king a father’s name.
They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
On to the altar—hither led not now
With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,
But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,
A parent felled her on her bridal day,
Making his child a sacrificial beast
To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:
Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.Lucrecius, De rerum natura
How do you make newlines work inside quotes? The formatting when I made this comment is bad.
Thanks.
I would like to say that I agree with the arguments presented in this post, even though the OP eventually retracted them. I think the arguments for why EDT leads to the wrong decision are themselves wrong.
As mentioned by others, EY referred to this argument as the ‘tickle defense’ in section 9.1 of his TDT paper. I am not defending the advocates which EY attacked, since (assuming EY hasn’t misrepresented them) they have made some mistakes of their own. In particular they argue for two-boxing.
I will start by talking about the ability to introspect. Imagine God promised Solomon that Solomon won’t be overthrown. Then the decision of weather or not to sleep with other men’s wives is easy, and Solomon can just act on his preferences. Yet if Solomon can’t introspect then in the original situation he doesn’t know weather he prefers sleeping with others’ wives or not. So Solomon not being able to introspect means that there is information that he can rationally react to in some situations and not in others. While a problems like that can occur in real people, I don’t expect a theory of rational behavior to have to deal with them. So I assume an agent knows what its preferences are, or if not fails to act on them in consistently.
In fact, the meta-tickle defense doesn’t really deal with lack of introspection either. It assumes an agent can think about an issue and ‘decide’ on it, only to not act on that decision but rather to use that ‘decision’ as information. An agent that really couldn’t introspect wouldn’t be able to do that.
The tickle defense has been used to defend two-boxing. While this argument isn’t mentioned in the paper, it is described in one of the comments here. This argument has been rebutted by the original poster AlexMennen. I would like to add to that something: For an agent to find out for sure weather it is a one-boxer or a two-boxer, the agent must make a complete simulation of itself in Newcomb’s problem. If they try to find this out as part of their strategy for Newcomb’s problem, they will get into an infinite loop.
benelliott raised a final argument here. He postulated that charisma is not related to preference for screwing wives, but rather to weather a king’s reasoning would lead them to actually do it. Here I have to question weather the hypothetical situation makes sense. For real people an intrinsic personality trait might change their bottom line conclusion, but this behavior is irrational. A ideal rational agent cannot have a trait of the form charisma is postulated to have. benelliott also left the possibility the populace have Omega-like abilities, but then situation is really just another form of Newcomb’s problem, and the rational choice is to not screw wives.
Overall I think that EDT actually does lead to rational behavior in these sorts of situations. In fact I think it is better than TDT, because TDT relies on computations with one right answer to not only have probabilities and correlations, but also on there being causality between them. I am unconvinced of this and unsatisfied with the various attempts to deal with it.
- 9 Jul 2013 23:11 UTC; -1 points) 's comment on Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes by (
Indeed. The impression I get is that in calling Objectivism “the unlikeliest cult in the world”, the intent of “unlikeliest” isn’t as a further insult to Objectivism. Rather, it’s to show that the author is discussing something exceptional, and therefore interesting.
It’s also worth noting that human “cultures” behave remarkably like...
What you’re describing is the definition of “culture” (more precisely, a definition of “culture”, and a good one). I’m not sure why you’re giving the weaker qualification of “behave remarkably like” rather than “are”.
I think the problem of enumerating these possibilities is impossible. You should notice that even the conventional possibility, quantum field theory somehow modified to have gravity and cosmology, is incomplete. It describes a mathematical construct, but it doesn’t describe how our experiences fit into that construct. It’s possible that just by looking at this mathematical object in a different way, you can find a different universe. That’s why this point-of-view information is actually important. Looking just at the possibilities where the universe is computable, enumerating Turing machines looks sufficient, but it is not. Turing machines don’t describe where we should look for ourselves in them, which is the most important part of the business. If we allow this, we should also allow the universe to be described by finite binary strings, which at times code for a Turing machine where we can be found in a certain point of view, but at other times code for various more powerful modes of computation. We can even say there is only one possibility, the totality of mathematical objects being the universe, which we can find ourselves in in very many different ways (this is the Tegmark level 4 multiverse theory).
So we can’t truly enumerate all the possibilities, even assuming a casual universe, since a casual diagram isn’t really capable of fully describing a possibility. It might be reasonable at certain times to enumerate these things anyways, and deal with this degeneracy in a ad hoc way. In that case, there would be nothing wrong with also making an ad hoc assumption along the lines of saying that the universe must be Turing computable (in which case you can simply list Turing machines).
Before you feel too proud for postdicting the successors of Newtonian dynamics, I’d like to point out that as soon as Newton proposed his theory of gravitation, it was criticised for proposing instantaneous action at a distance.
Lest you think this a trivial ability, remember how rare it is in the animal kingdom.
I disagree with the notion that the ability to distinguish the map and the territory separates humans from other animals. Consider this: I am nearsighted. When I look a sign from far away, I can’t make out the letters. However, when I look at a human from a similar distance, I can recognize the face. Clearly my facial recognition system has adaptions for working with nearsighted eyes. A lens that can see its own flaws. And this couldn’t have evolved only in humans. Mice probably have similar adaptions.
And think about this optical illusion: Nearby objects look bigger than distant objects. Yet we don’t think this as an illusion at all, because we are so good at adjusting to it.
What about this: we have mechanisms to make proteins based on DNA sequences, but do we have any mechanisms for telling weather we have the right DNA sequence? Yes we do. Nearly every organism has error-correcting processes right after replication (where errors are most likely to be created), and many ways to avoid getting viruses to fool them.
In none of these cases does the organism make a theory about how their lens is flawed, and then correct themselves based on the theory. But here the difference is not in seeing flaws, but in that humans make theories to a much higher amount of sophistication than other animals.
I came up with a different solution:
Znxr vgf tbny gb or “Znxr 32 cncrepyvcf, naq unyg nf dhvpxyl nf cbffvoyr”. Gura vg jvyy pbagvahr irevslvat hagvy gur hgvyvgl bs unygvat birepbzrf gur qvfhgvyvgl bs orvat hapregnva.
- 5 Feb 2013 22:23 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on A Little Puzzle about Termination by (
re-axiomizing set theory
Now I’m tempted to spread a meme. Have you heard Martin-Loef type theory? In my opinion, it’s a much better foundation of mathematics than ZFC.
My name is Itai Bar-Natan. I have been lurking here for a long time, more recently I start posting some things, but only now do I formally introduce myself.
I am in grade 11, and I began reading less wrong at grade 8 (introduced by Scott Aaronson’s blog). I am a former math prodigy, and am currently taking one graduate-level course in it. This is the first time I am learning math under the school system (although I not the first time I attended math classes under the school system). Before that, I would learn from my parents, who are both mathematicians, or (later on) from books and internet articles.
Heedless of Feynman, I believe I understand quantum mechanics.
One weakness I am working to improve on is the inability to write in large quantities.
I have a blog here: http://itaibn.wordpress.com/
I consider less wrong as a fun time-waster and a community which is relatively sane.
Yes, I am his son.
I upvoted this because I agree with this perspective, although I would like to add a caveat: In most situations, most of this thought process is cached.
Typo fixed.
I don’t think the last one is that useful either. Really, anything that can fit in a twitter is unlikely to be useful. And if someone wants to make useful advice that does, they shouldn’t be giving generalised messages that can be applied anywhere, but rather highly specific advice with a narrow target audience.
Just to be clear, twitter-length messages do have uses in ballast, flammable material, English grammar exercises, signalling wit, quining the message’s originator, paper mache, etc. However, patio11 referring to using them as strategies, and here my point stands.
To all commenters who observed that I don’t seem to stand out from 10 other smart people they know, either you didn’t comprehend the entirety of today’s post, or you have very high confidence that you occupy the highest possible rank of human ability.
The only thing that’s certain is that somebody has trouble properly apprehending your intelligence.
You and amy1987 responding seem to think that math is the same thing as formulas. While there is a lot that can be done without formulas, physics is impossible without math. For instance, to understand spin one needs to understand representation theory. amy1987 mentioned QED. Well, QED certainly does have math. It presents complex numbers and path integrals and the stationary phase approximation. Math is just thinking that is absolutely and completely precise.
ADDED: I forgot to take the statements I reference in their context: responding to James_Miller. He clearly used ‘math’ to mean what appears in math textbooks. This makes my criticism invalid. I’m sorry.