I’m not entirely sure what’s being asked here. Is this asking “if we do experiment 1000001 and see k Rs in the first four trials, then what credence do you assign to the 5th trial being R?”
Or is it “if we take a random experiment out of the million and see k Rs in the first four trials, then what credence do you assign to the 5th trial being R”? This isn’t the same question as the first.
Or is it something else again?
In my opinion, Project Lawful / planecrash is a terrible reference in addition to being written in a seriously annoying format. Although I have read it, I don’t recommend that anyone else read it. If any of the material in it should become some sort of shared culture that we should assume others in the community have read, it would require completely rewriting the entire thing from beginning to end.
I am not one of the two voters who initially downvoted, but I understand why they might have done so. I have weakly downvoted your comment for having made a load-bearing link between someone not having read Project Lawful and calling them “an NPC” in your sense, which is not the standard of discourse I want to see.
If you were expecting this person to have read this extremely niche and frankly bizarre work of fiction without having confirmed that they have actually read it and understood and fully agree with some relevant decision theory parts in it, then that seems pretty unwise of you and their not having done so does not reflect in any way poorly upon them.
“You didn’t act like I think the fictional character Keltham would have” is not a reasonable criticism of anyone.
There may or may not be some other unspecified actions they may have performed that do reflect poorly upon them, but those do not appear to connect in any way with this post.
the authors have made a compelling case that even if >95% of their specific arguments are incorrect, the core claim “if anyone builds it, everyone dies” still holds true
I don’t believe this at all, and I’m not sure that you do either. I do believe that the title claim IABIED is largely true, but believe very much more strongly that it would be false if >95% of the arguments in the book were incorrect.
I’m not sure whether you are being hyperbolic with the “>95%” claim, or have actually gone through a sample of at least 40 arguments in the book and seriously examined what the world would look like if at most 2 of those were correct with all the rest failing to hold.
From what I’ve seen, the title claim would be seriously in doubt if even half of the arguments failed. Mainly because the world would necessarily be extraordinarily different in major respects from the way I or the authors believe that it is.
It is a predictable consequence of saying “lol no I didn’t agree to that prior to being told thanks for telling me” that Keltham (and other people with similar expressed views regarding information and coordination) won’t be told information intended for coordination in future, including information that Keltham and similar people would have wanted to be able to use in order to coordinate instead of using it against the interests of those giving them the information.
So the question is: just how strongly does Keltham value using this information against the priest, when weighed against the cost of decreasing future opportunities for coordination for himself and others who are perceived to be similar to him?
There are plenty of other factors, such as whether there are established protocols for receiving such information in a way that binds priests of Abadar to not use it against the interests of those conveying it, whether the priest and the adventurer (and future others) could have been expected to know those protocols, and so on.
“Imagine there’s a child drowning in a shallow pond. You’re wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Don’t believe me? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there’s also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you’d have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?”
This seems very incoherent.
It starts with “Imagine” and then two sentences later asks “Don’t believe me?”
Believe what? Believe that I was asked to imagine something? I look back up a bit on the page, and I can have rather high credence that I was asked to imagine something.
Believe that I have imagined the scenario? I can have pretty high credence of imagining something that matches the description so that doesn’t fit either.
Believe that the imaginary scenario is real? Agreed, I definitely don’t believe that and there’s a lot of evidence that it’s false, but what relevance does it have? The text didn’t ask me to believe that.
Maybe believe that I could one day be in such a situation? Well, that’s definitely more believable but still very unlikely. I’m very much not in a habit of wearing swimsuits near ponds, though if it had been a swimming pool that would be more believable (while still being very unbelievable). So yes I don’t believe it.
Then the text goes on to posit a wildly more improbable scenario, prefaced with “let me make it more believable”. What? No, that just made it massively more unbelievable, so the writer of this story probably has terrible epistemics, or at best is authoring an unreliable narrator character that does. Pretty much any further detail would make it less believable by conjunction.
What’s worse, that particular conjunction is pretty ridiculous. I can still imagine it happening in some amazingly contrived scenario, but brings up so many other questions like “how” that make even suspension of disbelief for a fictional situation difficult. In what manner would I have to kill it to rescue the child? Is it basically a full-grown dog (but still cute) that would threaten my own life if I approach, and I happen to have a gun with my swimsuit? Maybe there’s a supernatural barrier that’s tied to its life? In what way is any of this more believable even for a very unreliable narrator?
Is it plausible that the two different sources of valuation are actually one source? For example, could On Point valuations have formed the basis of the CARES Act filings, or vice versa, or both used data from a common source?
It also seems likely that any borrower has a strong incentive to talk up the value of their collateral, especially so if they get to choose who has access to the data used for valuations.
No problem, if it’s tangential then we can agree that it’s tangential. We also appear to agree that the zombie argument may not be a useful way of thinking about things, as referred to in the last sentence of my first comment.
I agree that if a p-zombie of me can exist, then my consciousness would not be the sole cause for things with my pattern of matter saying that they are conscious. It may still be a cause, in that my consciousness may be causally upstream of having a pattern of matter that emits such utterances, but there may be other ways that such patterns of matter can come to exist as well.
You didn’t (rhetorically) ask what a zombie would say. You asked how do I know. That fact that something else might say the same thing as I did is not at all disconcerting to me, and I’m not sure why it’s disconcerting to you.
You don’t need to go anything like as far as p-zombies to get something that says the same thing. A program consisting of print(“I know that I’m not a zombie since I have consciousness”) etc does the same thing.
The rhetorical point you’re making is simply false. A p-zombie would not believe anything, since it has no mind with which to believe. It would merely act in the same manner as something that has a mind.
Zombies would also not be able to tell they’re not zombies – which leads to the disconcerting question – how do you know you’re not a zombie?
I know that I’m not a zombie since I have consciousness, which in my case at this moment includes consciousness of knowing that I have consciousness. Anything that can be conscious of knowing that they are conscious is not a zombie by definition.
A zombie would not know that it is conscious. It would also not know that it is not conscious. It would not even know that it is uncertain about being conscious or not. Knowing is a property of a mind, and by definition of “zombie” there is no mind there to know with.
Naturally a p-zombie behaves as if it can know things to all levels of external inspection, though whether p-zombies can exist is an unsettled question.
Wouldn’t that require all states to have identical laws, taxes, etc on residents? It seems likely to me that people care a lot more about those than differential influence on federal politics.
Edit: More precisely, a story in which most people do not care at least an order of magnitude more about laws on residents than on changing their federal political representation from 0.0000001 to 0.0000002 would strain my suspension of disbelief. People who care that much more about federal politics are much more likely to do something other than just move to another state to get microscopically more influence in very infrequent votes for representatives. If a large fraction of the population feels that way and the federal politics is extremely resistant to change, you probably get revolution or civil war, not mass migration to change vote strength.
The former inequality seems almost certain, but I’m not sure that that the latter inequality holds even over the long term. It probably does hold conditional on long-term non-extinction of humanity, since P(ABI) probably gets very close to 1 even if P(IABIED) is high and remains high.
From your description, I have no idea what you mean by “treadmill speed dynamically matches the wheel radius * wheel angular velocity”. From your conclusion, I can guarantee that it doesn’t mean anything that matches most other people’s constraints. Did someone somewhere post a particularly bad physical model that you’re drawing on?
Okay, so no actual Bayesian calculation, just an intuition.
Your post made the claim that it was substantially likely that most downvotes had no corresponding comment. If we look at this as a set of probabilities over readers R, it seems reasonable to model in terms of P(F_r), P(D_r), P(U_r), P(C_r), and P(CFP_r) for each reader r. C_r is the event of a reader providing a comment at all (whether or not it is a CFP comment).
Your expectation required P(D_r) > P(U_r), since you expected the post to be overall downvoted. This condition also implies that at some point VN holds. You also expected P(F_r | D_r) to be low, say < 0.3. If P(F_r | D_r) were higher, then you could not reasonably expect to see multiple downvotes with no corresponding explanatory comment.
Now let us examine P(CFP_r | C_r). Looking over the site, almost all comments are in some way reactionary to the thing they are commenting on, and all but a tiny minority are >= 30 characters. So P(CFP_r | C_r) > 0.8 is likely in the background and not just under condition F_r. Also looking at other posts, the number of votes seems to be on average about half the number of comments so P(C_r) ~= (1/2) (P(D_r) + P(U_r)).
Having made a specific request (that you did not expect to be followed), did you expect to see fewer comments as a fraction of votes overall, compared with other posts? You didn’t appear to think so, or it should have shown in your reasoning above. Likewise for P(CFP_r | C_r, R).
The condition VN is roughly the case D-U=2 (in this case I think it was exactly D=2, U=0), so your expectation E[C | VN, R] should have been around 1 to 3, and E[CFP | VN, R] about 1 to 2. You should also have expected E[F | VN, R] < 0.6.
So it seems to me to be quite a mistake to conclude P(F_r | CFP_r, R, VN) > 0.75.
That’s even without considering the nature of the comment itself, which made no criticism of your post at all and appeared to be more informative linking it to a previous discussion on the matter than anything else.
I note that in your leading argument, you do not claim that you did do a Bayesian evaluation, nor even that someone could have done one and received a result that aligns with your conclusion. Just that it’s possible that someone could be presented with a probability to evaluate (which could have any result). That seems like a bad-faith evasion to me.
Did you actually evaluate the probability?
I have downvoted your comment but will revert it if you actually did do a Bayesian evaluation and present it in a follow-up comment, and it looks correct, and in line with your statement that “It is reasonable that I would conclude that”. That’s the norm you’re establishing in this comment chain, after all. A norm that, if it’s not obvious already, I think is both harmful to constructive discussion and wasteful of people’s time.
After that, then we can move on to the rest of the discussion with the results in mind.
One failure of logic is that you explicitly stated in your post that you already expected people to not follow this principle:
“I’m anticipating this post to be a straight shot to meta-irony: I have confidently made a non-normative claim, so expect a couple of negative post votes, absent of material feedback.”
You cannot then claim that using it was reasonable.
Furthermore: regardless of whether the comment was in fact a response to your request in line with your requested guidelines, your first action in this discussion was to publically punish the one person who you believed to be following the guidelines you requested. You clearly have not examined the incentives you are creating here.
Edit: For the meta-meta-irony, I will also state that I downvoted and disagree-voted your comment replying to thenoviceoof for these reasons.
One huge difference between the forest example and the society example is that we know forest ecosystems evolved over millions of years to be at least somewhat robust to perturbations. Likewise for individual plants. If you can arrange for their external conditions to at least roughly approximate the conditions they evolved into, they’ll probably be fine.
We have no such guarantee for anything whatsoever in human society. We have no precedents that can tell us whether “the network” is even capable of correcting any problems to maintain any decent quality of life without intensive management. History gives some mild hope for optimism, but also a great number of examples of catastrophic failure. Similar concerns apply to AI neural networks, and essentially everything else that humanity has been involved with in the past tens of thousands of years.
Some curves that start exponential are actual unimodal, in the long run. Some are oscillatory. Some are chaotic, some have undefined behaviour because the thing being plotted ceases to make sense.
Why do you think all of them are eventually S curves in particular?
There are ancient texts on this matter, such as
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line
Short answer: once you know that you are listening to someone who wrote the bottom line first, then anything they wrote (or said) above the bottom line is worthless toward determining whether the bottom line is true.
It is still possible that they present information that is of some use in other respects, but only to the extent that it is not correlated with the truth or falsity of the bottom line.
Now, in some world it may be that if the bottom line were false, then fewer people would argue for it and such arguments would be less likely to appear on daytime television. That does not appear to be the world we live in.
But, I do think that we should prepare to have initiating the catpocalypse as a contingency.
I prefer the term “cataclysm”. Though perhaps tiling the lightcone with some fraction of cats should be called a “catastrophe” given both the textual similarity and its intended meaning being related to some form of “cat-astrophysics”.
There aren’t discrete “splits” in quantum mechanics, and consequently no way to accelerate them. Branches are a lies-to-children simplification that you can employ in a few toy scenarios, but fail to be useful in pretty much everything else.