You probably meant prefix sums instead of pairwise sums.
In any case, Bayesian reasoning is not symmetrical with respect to any given automorphism, unless the hypotheses space is.
Svyatoslav Usachev
Karma: 65
The All-Knowing doesn’t need to punish, for He can not be threatened.
Real markets mostly have it covered, because they have something close to [aggregated] utilons—money, and so exchanges between 2 different goods rarely take place.
Also, any business can be seen as a “side-channel trade”—the market value of one individual’s time is often lower than the value they can produce in cooperation with others.
What if we suppose that wealth doesn’t track merit that well, and accumulating 51% of wealth most likely signals the measurement error due to noise/randomness/luck?
And even inasmuch as it tracks capitalistic merit, it might not track other things we care about, which makes it problematic leaving all eggs in one basket.
What if we simply provide a magnetic field detector, aka compass, as an input device to our AI?
If that seems insufficient, how far before simulating full physics of a bird’s body as-is would be sufficient? (It also seems that such simulation is completely outside of scope for AI, because it has nothing to do with intelligence per se).
Thank you, Duncan. I’ve never met you, but you seem very real and very existing to me. I don’t quite share the same history as you, I think I got used to defensively ignoring what the world implied about me pretty early, but I am aiming to become a psychotherapist, and attempting to connect with how people actually are, rather than what I think they might be, seems central to my journey. Your post is an inspiration to me.
I must say I am quite taken aback by the condescending tone of your comment (suggesting that I am 15 years old etc).
But since you’ve got some upvotes I wonder if disagreement “with the current consensus” indeed was implied by my phrasing. In case it needs clarification, obviously, I suggest that nobody tries heroin. And even though this question seems much easier to answer, it was listed by the OP and so it would be helpful if he could first answer it himself.
UPD In case you’re interested in my stance on the above substances, it’s this:
-- Heroin is quite harmful.
-- Amphetamines are sometimes useful as prescription drugs, but I wouldn’t recommend them otherwise.
-- I strongly encourage any adult to have LSD at least once, but with great care for the setting and risk-factors, such as relatives with schizophrenia etc.
But my stance is not the point. It’s up to the OP to find his.
A couple of quick thoughts.
First, and most importantly, I think, it would be very valuable for you to try to answer these questions for yourself. Not with a goal of convincing him, but as if they had arisen in your own thoughts. Why, indeed, LSD is criminalized? What is the difference between alcohol and LSD? What is difference between coffee and amphetamines? Why not try heroin? If you are courageous enough to ponder these questions honestly, discerning what you do know from what you don’t know, it will be much easier to discuss them with your son.
Second, my personal opinion is that the substances mentioned have vastly different effects, risks, and side-effects, and only in trying to rigorously outline what they are we can learn how to deal (or not to deal) with each particular one of them.
… or don’t, it’s a post, not a cop. I empathise with its message though.
If we look at 17!Austin and 27!Austin as two different people, then I don’t see why 27!Austin would have any obligation to do anything for 17!Austin if 27!Austin doesn’t want to do it.
But that’s not true! Even if I don’t feel obliged to 100% comply with what other people want, I certainly am affected by their desires and want to compromise. Yes, maybe it’s not quite an “obligation”, but I rarely experience those towards whoever anyway.
But how is it different from real life?
Apologies, I realise I might’ve misunderstood your comment. Do you actually mean that you shouldn’t worry about being a BB because it is sort of inconsequential, not that you are sure you are not one because you’ve got the “next observer-moment”?
I agree with the former, but was arguing against the latter.
I wish it could work, but it doesn’t. You only experience the single moment (which includes memories of the past and expectations of the future), and at this present moment you can’t tell from your observations whether you are located in a proper casually-affected body, or in a BB. What’s more, assuming you’re a real human, your consciousness actually is not continuous, as you imply, but has intermittent gaps from 10s to 100s of ms (can’t find a good citation), which you don’t notice in the same way as you don’t notice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade FWIW, you could be losing consciousness every other quantum of time, and still not notice it (and you probably do, we just can’t measure it).
You obviously shouldn’t care, but because it doesn’t make sense to care, not due to observation.
PS Maybe you’d want to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City by Greg Egan—he takes the idea of simulation and discontinuity of consciousness to a lovely extreme.
I really appreciate you showing the problems with Type 1 arguments, but what I don’t understand is how Type 2 arguments can seem convincing to you.
Type 2 arguments fully rely on priors, which is what you are supposed to have before any observations, in this case, before anything that happened to you in this life. The first problem is that these true priors are unchangeable, because they already existed on the first second of your life. But more importantly, I feel that arguing what the priors should be is the complete misuse of the concept. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it eventually converges, regardless of the priors, and without observations you cannot possibly prefer one prior to another. If I “change my priors” after reading this post, these are not true priors anymore—it is me updating on the evidence/observation. And so we are back to Type I.
It is as if, recognizing that you can’t argue for something from observation, you are trying to find the support from outside of observation, but it doesn’t really work in this case. What would you base the argument on, if everything, including your thoughts and intuitions, is either based on observation or isn’t based on anything at all?
What does? On the surface it seems that plants don’t have sexual selection as they don’t seem to be able to affect the choice of their “partner”, so they don’t have the advantage of proper sexual species. But maybe I don’t know enough about plants.
Because it is probably hard to isolate the applications for each behaviour from each other. “Compete with A and mate with B as much as you can” is much easier to encode than “Compete with everyone, but then maybe at some point switch to mating with however you are fighting (but be careful that they don’t take advantage of it)”. You get the prisoner’s dilemma at the very minimum.
PS If you think about it, even in humans, who do have sexual differentiation and are capable of very complex behaviour, those behaviours are not perfectly isolated, and external aggressiveness often leaks into the family. For me it is almost out of the question that such careful delineation could exist among primitive hermaphrodites.
But in your scenario the offspring has only one “successful” parent. The best outcome for hermaphrodites would be for the “winners” to mate with each other, but then it might be unstable to switch between mating and competing behaviour between the same two creatures.
I’m surprised that the major role of sexual selection seems to be overlooked. Sexual species can speed up evolution by magnitudes of order, because the selection can happen culturally, “in the minds” (only a metaphor!). In theory, any adaptive change can happen in a single generation at once, provided that the selective behaviour is able to change unanimously. Hermaphrodites wouldn’t work that well, because there is no clear distinction between the group that you are competing with and the group you are competing for, which would probably make any behavioral strategy unstable.
Well, the reason usually is “I fear it will make me look bad in the eyes of others”. What next?
I think it’s quite in line with the attitude most porn takes.