JBlack

Karma: 1,947

JBlack 7 Sep 2024 2:35 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ZY’s comment on: AliceZ’s Shortform
I’m not sure what work “to the best of personal ability” is doing here. If you execute to 95% of the best of personal ability, that seems to come to “no” in the chart and appears to count the same as doing nothing?
Or maybe does executing “to the best of personal ability” include considerations like “I don’t want to do that particular good very strongly and have other considerations to address, and that’s a fact about me that constrains my decisions, so anything I do about it at all is by definition to the best of my ability”?
The latter seems pretty weird, but it’s the only way I can make sense of “na” in the row “had intention, didn’t execute to the best of personal ability, did good”.

JBlack 4 Sep 2024 6:21 UTC
2 points
0
on: What are the effective utilitarian pros and cons of having children (in rich countries)?
There are many variants on utilitarian theories, each with very different answers. Even aside from that though, it can really only be answered by knowing at least some definite information about the aggregated utility functions of every ethically relevant entity, including your potential children and others.
Utilitarianism is not in general a practical decision theory. It states what general form ethical actions should take, but is unhelpfully silent on what actual decisions meet those criteria.

JBlack 23 Aug 2024 1:53 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
Yes, it’s definitely fishy.
It’s using the experimental evidence to privilege H’ (a strictly more complex hypothesis than H), and then using the same experimental evidence to support H’. That’s double-counting.
The more possibly relevant differences between the experiments, the worse this is. There are usually a lot of potentially relevant differences, which causes exponential explosion in the hypothesis space from which H’ is privileged.
What’s worse, Alice’s experiment gave only weak evidence for H against some non-H hypotheses. Since you mention p-value, I expect that it’s only comparing against one other hypothesis. That would make it weak evidence for H even if p < 0.0001 - but it couldn’t even manage that.
Are there no other hypotheses of comparable or lesser complexity than H’ matching the evidence as well or better? Did those formulating H’ even think for five minutes about whether there were or not?

JBlack 14 Aug 2024 23:59 UTC
3 points
0
on: Rabin’s Paradox
The claim is false.
Suppose we’re in a universe where a fixed 99% of “odds in your favour” bets are scams where I always lose (even if we accept the proposal that the coin is actually fair). This isn’t reflective of the world we’re actually in, but it’s certainly consistent with some utility function. We can even assume that money has linear utility if you like.
Then I should reject the first bet and accept the second.

JBlack 14 Aug 2024 1:02 UTC
14 points
1
in reply to: Michael Roe’s comment on: A computational complexity argument for many worlds
Quantum computers have been demonstrated to work with up to 50 interacting qubits, and verified to compute some functions that a classical supercomputer can verify but not compute.
Research prototypes with more than 1000 qubits exist, though the focus is more on quantum error correction so that larger quantum computations can be performed despite imperfect engineering. This comes at a pretty steep penalty in terms of “raw” qubits required, so these machines aren’t as much better as might be expected from the qubit count.

JBlack 8 Aug 2024 7:30 UTC
7 points
3
on: Meno’s Paradox
If you know how to solve this paradox, inquiry is unnecessary.
If you do not know how to solve this paradox, then inquiry is impossible.^[1]
So why are you asking?
1. ^
  Of course it’s not impossible.

JBlack 1 Aug 2024 1:19 UTC
4 points
0
on: What are your cruxes for imprecise probabilities / decision rules?
Sets of distributions are the natural elements of Bayesian reasoning: each distribution corresponds to a hypothesis. Some people pretend that you can collapse these down to a single distribution by some prior (and then argue about “correct” priors), but the actual machinery of Bayesian reasoning produces changes in relative hypothesis weightings. Those can be applied to any prior if you have reason to prefer a single one, or simply composed with future relative changes if you don’t.
Partially ordering options by EV over all hypotheses is likely to be a very weak order with nearly all options being incomparable (and thus permissible). However, it’s quite reasonable to have bounds on hypothesis weightings even if you don’t have good reason to choose a specific prior.
You can use prior bounds to form very much stronger partial orders in many cases.

JBlack 30 Jul 2024 6:36 UTC
2 points
1
on: New Blog Post Against AI Doom
The post isn’t even Against AI Doom. It is against the idea that you can communicate a high confidence in AI doom to policy makers.

JBlack 29 Jul 2024 7:14 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Relativity Theory for What the Future ‘You’ Is and Isn’t
Not in this case.
a) If you anticipated continuity of experience into upload and were right, then you experience being an upload and remember being you and and you believe that your prediction is borne out.
b) If you were wrong and the upload is conscious but isn’t you, then you’re dead and nothing is borne out to you. The upload experiences being an upload and remembers being you and believes that your prediction is borne out.
c) If you were wrong and the upload is not conscious, then you’re dead and nothing is borne out to you. Nothing is borne out to the upload either, since it was never able to experience anything being borne out or not. The upload unconsciously mimics everything you would have done if your prediction had been borne out.
Everyone else sees you continuing as you would have done if your prediction had been borne out.
So in all cases, everyone able to experience anything notices that your prediction is borne out.
The same is true if you had predicted (b).
The only case where there is a difference is if you predicted (c). If (a) or (b) was true then someone experiences you being wrong, whether or not that person is you is impossible to determine. If you’re right then the upload still behaves as if you were wrong. Everyone else’s experience is consistent with your prediction being borne out. Or not borne out, since they predict the same things from everyone else’s point of view.

JBlack 29 Jul 2024 6:48 UTC
3 points
0
on: Relativity Theory for What the Future ‘You’ Is and Isn’t
A thought experiment: Suppose that in some universe, continuity of self is exactly continuity of bodily consciousness. When your body sleeps, you die never to experience anything ever again. A new person comes into existence when the body awakens with your memories, personality, etc. (Except maybe for a few odd dream memories that mostly fade quickly)
Does it actually mean anything to say “a new person comes into existence when the body awakens with your memories, personality, etc.”? Presumably this would mean that if you are expecting to go to sleep, then you expect to have no further experiences after that. But that seems to be begging the question: who are you? Someone experiences life-after-sleep. In every determinable way, including their own internal experiences, that person will be you. If you expected to die soon after you closed your eyes, that person remembers expecting to die but actually continuing on. Pretty much everyone in the society remembers “continuing on” many thousands of times.
Is expecting to die as soon as you sleep a rational belief in such a universe?

JBlack 29 Jul 2024 4:08 UTC
8 points
1
on: Relativity Theory for What the Future ‘You’ Is and Isn’t
When it comes to questions like whether you “should” consider destructive uploading, it seems to me that it depends upon what the alternatives are, not just a position on personal identity.
If the only viable alternative is dying anyway in a short or horrible time and the future belongs only to entities that do not behave based on my memories, personality, beliefs, and values then I might consider uploading even in the case where that seems like suicide to the physical me. Having some expectation of personally experiencing being that entity is a bonus, but not entirely necessary.
Conversely if my expected lifespan is otherwise long and likely to be fairly good then I may decline destructive uploading even if I’m very confident (somehow?) in personally experiencing being that upload and it seems likely that the upload would on median have a better life. For one thing, people may devise non-destructive uploading later. For another, uploads seem more vulnerable to future s-risks or major changes in things that I currently consider part of my core identity.
Even non-destructive uploading might not be that attractive if it’s very expensive or otherwise onerous on the physical me, or likely to result in the upload having a poor quality of life or being very much not-me in measurable ways.
It seems extremely likely that the uploads would believe (or behave as if they believe, in the hypothetical where they’re not conscious beings) in continuity of personal identity across uploading.
It also seems like an adaptive belief even if false as it allows strictly more options for agents that hold it than for those that don’t.

JBlack 26 Jul 2024 6:26 UTC
5 points
0
on: What does a Gambler’s Verity world look like?
The Gambler’s Fallacy applies in both directions: if an event has happened more frequently in the past than expected, then the Fallacy states that it is less likely to occur in future as well. So for example, rolling a 6-sided die three times and getting two sixes in such a world should also decrease the probability of getting another six on the next roll by some unspecified amount.
That is, it’s a world in which steps in every random walk are biased toward the mean.
However, that does run into some difficulties. Suppose that person A is flipping coins and keeping track of the numbers of heads and tails. The count is 89 tails to 111 heads so far. Person B comes in watches for 100 more flips. They see 56 more tails and 44 heads, so that A’s count is now at 145 tails to 155 heads. Gambler’s Verity applied to A means that tails should still be more likely. Gambler’s Verity applied to B means that heads should be more likely. Which effect is stronger?
Now consider person C who isn’t told the outcomes of each flip, just whether the flip moved the counts more toward equal or further away. Gambler’s Verity for those who see each flip means that “toward equal” flips are more common than “more unequal” flips. But applied to C’s observations, Gambler’s Verity acts to cancel out any bias even more rapidly than independent chance would. So if you’re aware of Gambler’s Verity and try to study it, then it cancels itself out!

JBlack 19 Jul 2024 4:11 UTC
8 points
3
on: Me & My Clone
If this room is still on Earth (or on any other rotating body), you could in principle set up a Foucault pendulum to determine which way the rotation is going, which breaks mirror symmetry.
If the room is still in our Universe, you can (with enough equipment) measure any neutrinos that are passing through for helicity “handedness”. All observations of fusion neutrinos in our universe are left-handed, and these by far dominate due to production in stars. Mirror transformations reverse helicity, so you will disagree about the expected result.
If the room is somehow isolated from the rest of the universe by sufficiently magical technology, in principle you could even wait for long enough that enough of the radioactive atoms in your bodies and the room decay to produce detectable neutrinos or antineutrinos. By mirror symmetry the atoms that decay on each side of the room are the same, and so emit the same type (neutrino or antineutrino, with corresponding handedness). You would be waiting a long time with any known detection methods though.
This would fail if your clone’s half room was made of antimatter, but an experiment in which half the room is matter and half is antimatter won’t last long enough to be of concern about symmetry. The question of whether the explosion is mirror-symmetric or not will be irrelevant to the participants.

JBlack 10 Jul 2024 6:40 UTC
2 points
0
on: How bad would AI progress need to be for us to think general technological progress is also bad?
I don’t think your bolded conclusion holds. Why does there have to be such a threshold? There are reasonable world-models that have no such thing.
For example: suppose that we agreed not to research AI, and could enforce that if necessary. Then no matter how great our technological progress becomes, the risk from AI catastrophe remains at zero.
We can even suppose that increasing technological progress more generally includes a higher sanity waterline, and so makes such a coordination more likely to occur. Maybe we’re near the bottom of a curve of technology-vs-AI-risk, where we’re civilizationally smart enough to make destructive AI but not enough to coordinate to do something which is not that. That would be a case for accelerating technology that isn’t AI as risk from AI in the model increases.
A few minutes thought reveals other models where no such threshold exists.
So there is a case where there may exist such a threshold, and perhaps we are beyond it if so. I don’t see evidence that there must exist such a threshold.

JBlack 10 Jul 2024 6:20 UTC
−1 points
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Can agents coordinate on randomness without outside sources?
Oh, then I’m still confused. Agent B can want to coordinate with A but still be effectively a rock because they are guaranteed to pick the designer’s preferred option no matter what they see. Since agent A can analyze B’s source code arbitrarily powerfully they can determine this, and realize that the only option (if they want to coordinate) is to go along with that.
A’s algorithm can include “if my opponent is a rock, defect” but then we have different scenarios based on whether B’s designer gets to see A’s source code before designing B.

JBlack 9 Jul 2024 8:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Can agents coordinate on randomness without outside sources?
Oh then no, that’s obviously not possible. The parent can choose agent B to be a rock with “green” painted on it. The only way to coordinate with a rock is to read what’s painted on it.

JBlack 8 Jul 2024 6:37 UTC
5 points
4
on: Joint mandatory donation as a way to increase the number of donations
Option 3: Make it a tax expenditure. Taxes are the standard mandatory joint contributions to things where on average everyone is better off having done and the marginal benefit to any single contributor is less than their marginal contribution.

JBlack 8 Jul 2024 4:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Can agents coordinate on randomness without outside sources?
I’m still very confused about the scenario. Agent A and B and their respective environments may have been designed as a proxy by adversarial agents C and D respectively? Both C and D care about coordinating with each other by more than they care about having the sky colour match their preference? A can simulate B + environment, but can’t simulate D (and vice versa)? Presumably this means that D can no longer affect B or B’s environment, otherwise A wouldn’t be able to simulate.
Critical information: Did either C or D know the design of the other’s proxy before designing their own? Did they both know the other’s design and settle on a mutually-agreeable pair of designs?

JBlack 8 Jul 2024 3:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Can agents coordinate on randomness without outside sources?
I’m very confused what the model is here. Are you saying that agents A and B (with source code) are just proxies created by other agents C and D (internal details of which are unknown to the agents on the other side of the communication/acausal barrier)?
What is the actual mechanism by which A knows B’s source code and vice versa, without any communication or any causal links? How does A know that D won’t just ignore whatever decision B makes and vice versa?

JBlack 7 Jul 2024 6:04 UTC
1 point
0
on: Can agents coordinate on randomness without outside sources?
In principle (depending upon computation models) this should be possible.
With this very great degree of knowledge of how the other operates, it should be possible to get a binary result by each agent:
1. choosing some computable real number N and some digit position M,
2. that they have no current expectation of being biased,
3. compute it,
4. use the other’s source code to compute the other’s digit,
5. combine the digits (e.g. xor for binary),
6. verify that the other didn’t cheat,
7. use the result to enact the decision.
In principle, each agent can use the other’s source code to verify that the other will not cheat in any of these steps.
Even if B currently knows a lot more about values of specific numbers than A does, that doesn’t help B get the result they want. B has to choose a number+position that B doesn’t expect to be biased, and A can check whether they really did not expect it to be biased.
Note that this, like almost anything to do with agents verifying each other via source code, is purely theoretical and utterly useless in practice. In practice step 6 will be impossible for at least one party.