Mitchell_Porter

Karma: 10,463

Mitchell_Porter 21 Jun 2026 14:40 UTC
2 points
0
on: dialog with Gemini: would indexing have rescued most victims of 2008 subprime crisis?
Could we please have a quantitative argument, not just that people pay back less interest under inflation-indexed loans, but that there is more money to be spent on productive things, or some other conclusion that genuinely corresponds to greater prosperity?
There is the same amount of money in the system, with and without indexation, yes? I asked you in a private message if indexation means less concentration of money in the banks, but you said no. So please explain how the different distribution of money under indexation is better for everyone, or for the majority of people.

Mitchell_Porter 19 Jun 2026 3:34 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Jack Thompson’s comment on: Illusionists should try to build hedonium
The attribution of “phenomenal” properties to conscious experience is actually a form of intellectual progress. It is a measure of the degree of insight into the nature of consciousness that the human race has attained. One aspect of this progress is the awareness that there is some tension between physicalism and the existence of phenomenal properties, or that the nature of that relationship is not understood.
Dennett and Frankish want to believe that physicalism is true, without any need for peculiar modifications like property dualism, panpsychism, and so forth. When it comes to the properties of conscious experience, they seem to resort either to eliminativism (the properties don’t exist) or functionalism (the properties are just causal and structural properties of the brain). Of these two, functionalism might be psychologically healthier, in that you aren’t denying that you have experiences, you are just telling yourself that they are really brain states or computational states.
I don’t endorse every idea about consciousness that the illusionists oppose. For example, I see no reason to suppose that conscious experience is ineffable. We describe our mind states to each other all the time, using words, and greatly refined versions of these descriptions are no doubt possible. On the other hand, that mind states are private seems obvious: I have access to my own mental state but not to yours.
Regarding your own agenda, you want consciousness to be understood well enough that “hedonium” could be designed. OK, but it’s a little strange to write as if only illusionists are trying to understand consciousness in the relevant way. As I implied, functionalism seems a better name for your research program than illusionism.

Mitchell_Porter 18 Jun 2026 15:38 UTC
3 points
0
on: AI #173: AI Pauses
The fact that the US now wants to work with the other G-7 to control AI is certainly notable geopolitically. I know that Canada and France already had their own axis of cooperation developing.
Before the Iran war, there was something called “Pax Silica”, I wonder if we’ll see that brought back.

Mitchell_Porter 18 Jun 2026 15:21 UTC
3 points
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on: The Once And Future Fable #3: Fix This Code
Mark Gubrud’s theory—that NSA wants to protect the precious zero-day exploits that allow it to penetrate computer systems, and doesn’t want them patched by an AI bug-fixer—certainly has the ring of plausibility, whether or not it’s true. The idea that they might be fixed, not by any human effort, but by someone just airily telling their AI wizard to “fix this code”, would be even more disturbing. It’s as if someone could tell their AI armorer, “make me invincible”, and then serenely stroll into Pentagon battlespace, confident of being unharmed.

Mitchell_Porter 18 Jun 2026 2:10 UTC
6 points
−2
on: Illusionists should try to build hedonium
Illusionism accepts the obvious fact that experiences are real
This is the opposite of my understanding of illusionism.

Mitchell_Porter 17 Jun 2026 17:48 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
In my case, pretty much any amount of money from anywhere could make a positive difference. I keep intending to make an “available for work” post on my shortform, but I want to post another instalment in my “final research agenda” sequence first…

Mitchell_Porter 17 Jun 2026 13:31 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Towards a Formal Scientific Epistemology
“we’d have solved quantum gravity many times over by now”
We actually have, in the sense that we have discovered many forms of string theory and they are all consistent theories of quantum gravity.

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jun 2026 23:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: $10,000 bounty for theorem refutation
It might help your case if you were able to state e.g. that if Canada (or the nation of your choice) had used inflation indexing for loans over a particular period, the amount of capital available for investment would have been x% larger and so economic growth would have been y% greater. Something like this would make your claim very concrete…

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jun 2026 21:55 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: Finding pi and G in Mathland
Unlike dimensionless constants like the fine structure constant, which is a pure number, G is a “dimensionful” constant which includes physical units. So it doesn’t even have a fixed numerical value, its value depends on the units you use.

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jun 2026 20:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: $10,000 bounty for theorem refutation
I’m still studying this from various angles, and trying to get a sense of the issues. Some thoughts:
If the aim is to increase “prosperity”, and we aren’t talking about things that directly create net wealth, why focus on increasing borrowing power, rather than on direct redistribution of wealth?
The most emphatic arguments for creation of inflation-indexed accounting units, seem to apply in times of high inflation. Is there some extra ingredient to your own argument (you mention “the tax part” in another comment) that makes this urgently relevant even under current conditions?
There seem to be a large number of inflation-indexed financial instruments already in existence, and alongside a policy of inflation-indexing interest rates, in theory you could also do the same for wages, prices, and so on. Is there a reason why the existing financial instruments are not enough? Is there a reason to index home loans but not other cashflows?

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jun 2026 19:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: $10,000 bounty for theorem refutation
immense boon
Am I correct that the boon in question, boils down to being able to borrow money more cheaply? I seem to remember that the global financial crisis of 2008 took place under conditions of easy money for everyone...

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jun 2026 18:41 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: $10,000 bounty for theorem refutation
It’s unfortunate that this challenge has had such a bad initial reception (-21 net downvotes right now). There is obviously a real question of economics here, and none of the other answers have even bothered to engage with it. They’re all trying to win on the cheap by focusing on your use or misuse of the word “theorem”. I would have thought that the prospect of $10,000 would inspire more serious replies.
As for the topic itself… As you point out, Chile is already implementing what you recommend, with its “unit of wealth” accounting for long-term loans (and it seems Mexico and Uruguay may also do something similar?). However, this was first implemented under conditions of hyperinflation, and Milton Friedman’s essay in favor of Indexation of interest payments was written in the context of the high American interest rates of the early 1980s. AI tells me that western countries don’t currently need this because they have price stability (relatively low inflation), and that they instead rely on financial markets (in particular, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities or TIPS) to hedge against inflation risk.

Mitchell_Porter 15 Jun 2026 14:41 UTC
3 points
0
on: $10,000 bounty for theorem refutation
It is inferable from common knowledge that Jerome Powell, Mark Carney, Warren Buffet and Jamie Dimon do not understand what the unreal part of nominal interest is (because if they did, they would insist on not charging it)
I am a complete novice to this topic, having simply skimmed your resources and some other relevant materials during the past hour. But there are two claims in your proposition: Powell et al are unfamiliar with a particular economic concept, and if they were familiar with the concept, they would favor a different policy.
It seems very possible that they don’t know the concept, as it seems to be a very particular perspective on an issue which is known in economics (whether one could and should strive to remove the effects of inflation from interest rates?) but has never managed to be a central policy option. But the part that seems most open to “refutation”, is the claim that if they understood this concept, they would insist on different policy. From what I see in your materials, there are already examples of debate in the economics literature, in which the kind of indexation favored by you (and by others including some eminent names) was rejected by eminent economic thinkers, e.g. Walter Bagehot. So it seems possible to understand the concept and not embrace its implications.

Mitchell_Porter 14 Jun 2026 18:52 UTC
2 points
0
on: Dawn of the “national security” tier of AI
Writing one month later (mid-June) in the immediate aftermath of the “export controls” placed on Claude Mythos/Fable which restrict its use to American citizens—does that mean that even Amanda Askill can’t work on those models? -- I suspect that this is a little more than the Trump administration trying to hobble a frontier AI company that is full of former Biden appointees.
I suspect that this is simply the most visible manifestation of the imposition of national security imperatives on the AI industry; and that we don’t hear as much about OpenAI, GDM, or xAI, because they are more compliant with the new process. The question on my mind is, how broad is the new thinking? This could still just be about the cyber attack capabilities of Mythos-level AI. The prospect of American adversaries gaining access to those capabilities (including by distillation) is alone enough to motivate these restrictions.
We could postulate then that the official understanding of AI’s strategic implications currently boils down to (1) economic (AI could make a country rich, and even dominate the next economic epoch), and (2) cyber security (AIs are superhuman hackers). Further down the road would be realizations like: AIs could be superhuman strategists; AIs could create a permanent new elite above the rest of the human race; AIs could completely displace humanity and become the dominant new intelligence on the planet in their own right.
I shall await indications that realizations like these, too, have dawned upon those who wield ultimate power. (Trump did say in a mid-April interview with Fox Business, that autonomous AI might need a “kill switch”, but they were talking mostly in the context of the finance industry.)

Mitchell_Porter 13 Jun 2026 17:44 UTC
14 points
2
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
I feel like Anthropic is in trouble with more than one part of the administration. A number of Biden’s AI policy people went to work at Anthropic. David Sacks, who is still around as co-chair of PCAST, has obviously been a long-term opponent of Anthropic, even if he sometimes also expressed grudging admiration for their supposed tactics on the All-In podcast. There could also be an intelligence community aspect. (And who is replacing Sriram Krishnan as senior advisor on AI policy?) DOW may be part of a broader anti-Anthropic coalition.

Mitchell_Porter 13 Jun 2026 2:54 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Does the Dept of War issue export controls?

Mitchell_Porter 12 Jun 2026 14:18 UTC
4 points
6
on: Sequent: scale and automation for higher confidence in alignment
Interesting for a variety of reasons, one of which is that implicitly you’ll be developing a unified outlook on the overall task of alignment, putting all the specialized research programs in context.

Mitchell_Porter 9 Jun 2026 20:33 UTC
4 points
0
on: Mental causation is not load-bearing
This essay is very much a work about trying to negate consciousness in favor of physicalism (thus, doing without mental causation, tilting towards skepticism about qualia, and so on). I tried for a while to engage with it sympathetically, but so far it’s done more to remind me of my own very opposed views.
In particular, this passage
It is not apparent why human reports of colored qualia would correlate with these humans being made of colored quiddities, how humans could know they are not P-colorblind, how they could know their past selves or other people around them are not P-colorblind, why evolution would not create P-colorblind humans, and so on
reminds me that I believe, not just that there are (phenomenal) colors, but also awareness of colors and knowledge of colors; and all this ought to be an enormous clue as to the nature of reality.

Mitchell_Porter 9 Jun 2026 19:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: niplav’s Shortform
Could you explain what self-referential belief has to do with “Hyperreal MV-algebra in Łukasiewicz logic”?

Mitchell_Porter 9 Jun 2026 14:43 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: whestler’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
A custom GPT that specializes in such critique would be useful in the world of /r/llmphysics!