JBlack

Karma: 745

JBlack 24 May 2022 4:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: green_leaf’s comment on: Wormy the Worm
There are some objective means by which we can test properties associated with “X is a continuation of Y”, such as finding out whether X can answer questions consistently with having been Y. Those aspects are in the territory, but I don’t think they capture anybody’s concept of personal identity usefully.
With strong enough models of the mind we may even be able to objectively predict whether X considers themself to be a continuation of Y. This still does not mean that personal identity is in the territory, any more than the blegg/rube distinction is in the territory in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside.
If you can imagine doing every possible test and still not knowing the answer, that seems likely to be a sign that the question is referring to a distinction that is only in a model and isn’t in the territory at all.
That seems to be the case here. Most of humanity has a model of personal identity that works well for their ordinary experience: for each person X_now, and for each time t > now, there is exactly one person X_t such that X_t is a continuation of X_now and reversed for birth/conception < t < now. Many even extrapolate it past bodily destruction.
This relation has nice properties such as its symmetric extension (X continues Y or Y continues X) being an equivalence relation that partitions the world of people into distinct equivalence classes.
It is a less useful model in the presence of probably physically possible but currently implausible circumstances such as minds that can be copied, edited, overwritten, or merged. If a question is based on such a restricted model applied to the wider space of possibilities, it isn’t likely to have any answer.

JBlack 22 May 2022 8:36 UTC
4 points
on: Philosophical considerations of cessation of brain activity
I find amnesia and impaired mental states more interesting cases than anaesthesia from a personal identity point of view, although I do recall one instance when they overlapped: I was in the recovery room, and wondering how long I had been out. I lifted my head up to look at the clock on the other side of the room, which read 1:06 pm. I then (slightly fuzzily) tried to remember when I went under and how many minutes ago that was, and then double checked the clock because clearly my mental arithmetic wasn’t reliable, and it said 1:17 pm!
I had no memory of anything like 11 minutes having passed—it felt like maybe 10 seconds, and my head was still up so I don’t think I passed out. I asked the nurse whether the clock was working, and she told me that yes it was correct, like last time I asked. Err what? Last time? I put my head back down and thought about that for a bit and went to sleep. When I woke (just a few minutes later) I could much more easily subtract the times, but still couldn’t remember more than a few seconds between the times I looked at the clock, nor asking about the clock the first time.
From a personal identity point of view, what sort of consciousness existed during those missing 11 minutes? Is it part of “me” now? Is there a fact of the matter or is it simply a point of view?

JBlack 22 May 2022 7:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: green_leaf’s comment on: Wormy the Worm
We don’t need to talk about splits to consider this sort of question.
Suppose a person at 2:00 viscerally feels that they aren’t the same person as a second earlier, even despite having all the same memories from before 2:00, personality, skills, values, beliefs, and so on, except that they are utterly convinced that they came into existence just now with all of those.
Should we believe that the previous person has died? Is there anything in the territory that can make it either a fact or a delusion?
Going further: does it make any sense to say that a person could die and be replaced by another who does not have that belief, so seamlessly that nobody could possibly ever tell the difference including the person who replaced the deceased?
My strong suspicion is that there isn’t anything in the territory that could make either of these true or false. That it’s a mental illusion, a belief that points to nothing fundamental but is just a byproduct of a model with an extraneous parameter.
Even if something like souls exist, then in the first scenario there is still no reason to expect this sudden belief to be strong evidence of truth that a new soul was inserted into the body. I don’t think souls are likely to come with clocks saying how long they’ve been present in a body, whereas people do observably experience hallucinations and delusions about all sorts of things.
In the second scenario, I’m not sure that it makes a difference at all, even if souls exist. If some entity has all the memories, personality, skills, values, beliefs, feelings and so on of a person, then as far as I can tell they simply are that person, regardless of whether or not they have the same “soul”. Instantly destroying a soul and replacing it with another having all of those properties seems to be an operation that makes absolutely no observable difference to anyone, both objectively and subjectively.

JBlack 17 May 2022 7:23 UTC
1 point
on: China Covid #3
Cases per million over a country does not automatically follow exponential growth. An overall average figure ignores the likelihood that some regions will be virus-free, and that people in those areas can largely normal lives until the next outbreak comes in from the outside.
I do think China’s zero COVID goal is at least sane, even though the cost is high and some of their policy details are pretty terrible from the points of view of both effectiveness and tolerability. I am very glad that elimination is still being attempted by at least one country in the world. We may need to learn from their measures if (or more realistically when) some strain with substantially greater lethality starts spreading.

JBlack 16 May 2022 1:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Caridorc Tergilti’s comment on: The Economics of a New Energy Source
Oh yes, there is no question at all that they would make back the fuel energy cost. In money terms the fuel is a tiny fraction of launch costs (less than 1%). In fuel energy terms it costs about 400 MJ/kg to get payload into orbit via Falcon-9.
With fairly standard terrestrial designs you can get about 5 W/kg rated power (mass including support electronics), which in space would be available nearly continuously. That gives a energy payback time of about 2.5 years. With solar power designs more suited to space use, I would be very surprised if that couldn’t be reduced to weeks.

JBlack 15 May 2022 5:56 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Caridorc Tergilti’s comment on: The Economics of a New Energy Source
This is probably the worst-case comparison for space solar, since it assumes you’re just going to pack a bunch of terrestrial systems onto a rocket and shoot them into space, where they will (just like terrestrial systems) only work at a fraction of capacity due to clouds, bad sun angles, getting dirty, and night-time.
In practice they would provide a lot more power per unit mass by at least one order of magnitude and possibly two. Mirrors in space can be relatively flimsy thin things and still work since they don’t need to withstand winds and other loads, giving relatively lightweight concentrated solar power options at much lower masses than terrestrial systems.
The conclusion is the same though: space launched solar is still not worth it for us now. It could be in the future or with some alternative history.

JBlack 14 May 2022 2:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MackGopherSena’s comment on: Positive outcomes under an unaligned AGI takeover
Initially, yes. In the long term, no.
Though even initially, the risk of interacting with humans in any way that reveals capabilities (aligned or not!) that could even potentially be perceived as dangerous may be too high to be worth the resources gained by doing so.

JBlack 14 May 2022 2:16 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Dath Ilani Rule of Law
With the purchase, it seems more like splitting the surplus. It does benefit you to have a store nearby that sells things at a lower price than you would have to pay in total by going to the less convenient store. The question is, how much of that gain is being captured by the store owner, and how much by you? If you think that they are capturing “too much” of the gains by the prices they set, then it can be rational to refuse the offer (just as in the Ultimatum Game).
One question is whether they can provide enough evidence that the division is reasonably fair. Maybe it is! There may be legitimate costs or extra risk that the local shop owner incurs versus the alternative.
Another question is what the other potential customers are likely to do. If most of them will shop there even when the owner is capturing 80% of the surplus and leaving the customers with only 20%, then it is likely not in the owner’s interest to lower the prices much below 80% surplus capture. If the other customers are likely to recognize when the shop owner is capturing too much surplus (as would happen in dath ilan), then it may not be worthwhile to set the prices higher than 50% capture.

JBlack 14 May 2022 1:07 UTC
3 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Algorithmic formalization of FDT?
Mostly they can’t, which is why there are a lot more questions posted about it than people who answer correctly. I can’t think of any FDT problem that has been answered correctly where there were more than 3 binary inputs to the decision function, and even some with 2 bits have been controversial.
For the few cases where they can, it’s the same way that humans solve any mathematical problem: via an ill defined bunch of heuristics, symmetry arguments, experience with similar problems, and some sort of intuition or insight.

JBlack 12 May 2022 5:00 UTC
3 points
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: Algorithmic formalization of FDT?
Just to follow up on that third point a little more: FDT depends upon counterfactual responses, how you would have responded to inputs that you didn’t in fact observe.
If you go into a scenario where you can observe even as little as 6 bits of information, then there are 2^6 = 64 possible inputs to your decision function. FDT requires that you adopt the function with the greatest expected value over the weighted probabilities of every input, not just the one you actually observed. In the simplest possible case, each output is just one of two deterministic actions and there are only 2^(2^6) = 18446744073709551616 such functions to evaluate. If your space of possible actions is any larger than a deterministic binary action, then there will be vastly more such functions to evaluate.
Unlike both CDT and EDT, FDT is massively super-exponential in computational complexity. Pruning the space down to something that is feasibly solvable by actual computers is not something that we know how to do for any but the most ridiculously simple scenarios.

JBlack 12 May 2022 4:08 UTC
1 point
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Dath Ilani Rule of Law
In the stated terms, Alice is the robber, Bob is the victim, X is “Bob resists Alice”, Y is “Alice kills Bob and takes his stuff anyway”, and not-Y is “Alice gives up”.
It is uncontroversial that Bob is worse off under Y than not-Y, but much less certain that Alice is also worse off. If Bob resists Alice and Alice gives up, then Alice is probably going to prison for a very long time. Alice seems much better off killing Bob and taking his stuff, so this was not a “threat” under the proposed definition.

JBlack 11 May 2022 9:14 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Wei_Dai’s comment on: Dath Ilani Rule of Law
By this definition any statement that sets any conditions whatsoever in the Ultimatum Game is a threat. Or indeed any statement setting conditions under which you might withdraw from otherwise mutually beneficial trade.

JBlack 11 May 2022 9:09 UTC
1 point
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Dath Ilani Rule of Law
While I have seen the word used in that context in some game theory, it doesn’t fit the meaning intended in the story at all. It’s almost the exact opposite.
It also doesn’t fit the use of the term in more general practice, where a great many “RL threats” in real life are not “GT threats” in this very different game theory definition.

JBlack 11 May 2022 8:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Dath Ilani Rule of Law
It is definitely true that the author was not using the word “threat” in this way. ~~One~~ ~~Two~~ Some of the explicitly given examples fit this definition and were provided as an example of strategies that were not considered threats.
Though also consider: the character there is not from Earth, does not know what words Earth people use, they are communicating via a translation system that is known to be imprecise, the target language is also not from Earth, and that language already known to be missing words for many simple game theory concepts. The use of the word “threat” in the text is definitely not to be taken as exactly the same meaning as used in Earth game theory.

JBlack 11 May 2022 0:17 UTC
31 points
on: Crises Don’t Need Your Software
But even if the charity you pick only yields 1 euro of value from the 1000 you send, it’s still be better to send the money.
That’s up to your own personal utility function of course, but another option is to donate somewhere else instead. There are still a great many causes that can do a lot more good for a lot more people in similarly dire situations than getting €1 worth of help out of every €1000 to the people who need it.
Yes, this sucks for people who are in terrible situations where helping them is also orders of magnitude more inefficient and/or dangerous to those trying to help than others in similar need. Maybe it feels better to spend your €1000 to give €1 of help to someone in such a situation, than to give hundreds of times more help to people in situations elsewhere that are just as bad but more accessible.

JBlack 10 May 2022 11:20 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Dath Ilani Rule of Law
The word “threat” here is used as a loose translation for a mathematically much more precise concept in dath ilan. I am pretty sure that the real world doesn’t have the mathematical sophistication to support such a definition, and perhaps such a distinction doesn’t actually make mathematical sense after all. Multipolar game theory is very far from solved.
On the other hand, the author’s description “foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally” provides a guideline for how such a criterion might be intended to work, in simple cases. It seems to point toward an attempt to get more than the best coordinated rational actors could get, at the expense of ensuring that other parties always get less.
“I will reject any offer below 50%” seems to be not a threat in this sense for the usual formulation of the Ultimatum Game, since it allows for the respondent to get 50%, which is the best result that coordinating rational actors can get on average anyway. I’d call it a borderline threat in that arbitrarily small perturbations in the game could make it a threat, though. It’s too sharp and fragile.
“I will ignore all threats” also fails to be a threat by this criterion, since it allows both parties to attain the coordinating optimum, but it also seems overly sharp. “I will reject threats with enough probability that on average it’s not worth your while making them” seems like a smoother strategy.

JBlack 10 May 2022 0:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MackGopherSena’s comment on: MackGopherSena’s Shortform
What is “auto-desynchronization”? What does it mean to “look achieve maximum synchronization”? What connection do either of these have to do with veganism, if any?

JBlack 9 May 2022 23:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Demonstrating MWI by interfering human simulations
You can find out some aggregate property of the output of functions that have equivalent output to a million conscious beings. It is far from obvious that this is equivalent to there actually being a million conscious beings, or even one conscious being.
Also, equivalence of one output is definitely not the same thing as equivalence of consciousness, as even a moment’s thought will show.

JBlack 9 May 2022 0:51 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Quintin Pope’s comment on: But What’s Your *New Alignment Insight,* out of a Future-Textbook Paragraph?
I think that a 95% success rate in not destroying the human world would also be fantastic, though I note that there are plenty more potential totalitarian hellscapes that some people would apparently rate even worse than extinction.
Note that I’m not saying that they would deliberately destroy the world for shits and giggles, just that if the rest of the human world was any impediment to anything they valued more, then its destruction would just be a side effect of what had to be done.
I also don’t have any illusion that a superintelligent agent will be infallible. The laws of the universe are not kind, and great power brings the opportunity for causing great disasters. I fully expect that any super-civilizational entity of any level of intelligence could very well destroy the human world by mistake.

JBlack 8 May 2022 3:11 UTC
4 points
on: Algorithmic formalization of FDT?
The main obstacle is that these problems are almost always grossly underspecified. FDT depends a lot more upon the structure of a scenario than simpler decision theories.
A lesser but still valid obstacle is that there is no specification language for describing all the interrelations between the components of the scenario.
A third obstacle is that while FDT is relatively simple to define in mathematical theory, in practice it can result in enormous state spaces to search even when there is only one binary action to decide.
What links here?
- Algorithmic formalization of FDT? by shminux (8 May 2022 1:36 UTC; 12 points)