Just before she is able to open the envelope, a freak magical-electrical accident sends a shower of sparks down, setting it alight. Or some other thing necessiated by Time to ensure that the loop is consistent. Similar kinds of problems to what would happen if Harry was more committed to not copying “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME”.
Tetraspace Grouping
Karma: 429
I have used this post quite a few times as a citation when I want to motivate the use of expected utility theory as an ideal for making decisions, because it explains how it’s not just an elegant decisionmaking procedure from nowhere but a mathematical inevitability of the requirements to not leave money on the table or to accept guaranteed losses. I find the concept of coherence theorems a better foundation than the normal way this is explained, by pointing at the von Neumann-Morgensten axioms and saying “they look true”.
The number of observers in a universe is solely a function of the physics of that universe, so the claim that a theory that implies 2Y observers is a third as likely as a theory that implies Y observers (even before the anthropic update) is just a claim that the two theories don’t have an equal posterior probability of being true.
This post uses the example of GPT-2 to highlight something that’s very important generally—that if you’re not concentrating, you can’t distinguish GPT-2 generated text that is known to be gibberish from non-gibberish.
And hence gives the important lesson, which might be hard to learn oneself if they’re not concentrating, that you can’t really get away with not concentrating.
This is self-sampling assumption-like reasoning: you are reasoning as if experience is chosen from a random point in your life, and since most of an immortal’s life is spent being old, but most of a mortal’s life is spent being young, you should hence update away from being immortal.
You could apply self-indication assumption-like reasoning to this: as if your experience is chosen from a random point in any life. Then, since you are also conditioning on being young, and both immortals and mortals have one youthhood each, just being young doesn’t give you any evidence for or against being immortal that you don’t already have. (This is somewhat in line with your intuitions about civilisations: immortal people live longer, so they have more Measure/prior probability, and this cancels out with the unlikelihood of being young given you’re immortal)
Yes requiring the possibility of no has been something I’ve intuitively been aware of in social situations (anywhere where one could claim “you would have said that anyway”).
This post does a good job of applying more examples and consequences of this (the examples cover a wide range of decisions), and tying to to the mathematical law of conservation of evidence.
In The Age of Em, I was somewhat confused by the talk of reversible computing, since I assumed that the Laudauer limit was some distant sci-fi thing, probably derived by doing all your computation on the event horizon of a black hole. That we’re only three orders of magnitude away from it was surprising and definitely gives me something to give more consideration to. The future is reversible!
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what a Landauer limit computer would look like to rejiggle my intuitions with respect to this, because “amazing sci-fi future” to “15 years at current rates of progress” is quite an update.
Then, the lower limit is with or [...] A current estimate for the number of transistor switches per FLOP is .
The peak of human computational ingenuity is of course the games console. When doing something very intensive, the PS5 consumes 200 watts and does 10 teraFLOPs ( FLOPs). At the Landauer limit, that power would do bit erasures per second. The difference is − 6 orders of magnitude from FLOPs to bit erasure conversion, 1 order of magnitude from inefficiency, 3 orders of magnitude from physical limits, perhaps.
Indeed, OscillatingTwoThreeBot does behave like that. Thanks for the cooperation LiamGoddard!
:0, information on the original AI box games!
In that round, the ASI convinced me that I would not have created it if I wanted to keep it in a virtual jail.
What’s interesting about this is that, despite the framing of Player B being the creator of the AGI, they are not. They’re still only playing the AI box game, in which Player B loses by saying that they lose, and otherwise they win.
For a time I suspected that the only way that Player A could win a serious game is by going meta, but apparently this was done just by keeping Player B swept up in their role enough to act how they would think the creator of the AGI would act. (Well, saying “take on the role of [someone who would lose]” is meta, in a sense.)
Smarkets is currently selling shares in Trump conceding if he loses at 57.14%. The Good Judgement Project’s superforecasters predict that any major presidential candidate will concede with probability 88%. I assign <30% probability to Biden conceding* (scenarios where Biden concedes are probably overwhelmingly ones where court cases/recounts mean states were called wrong, which Betfair assigns ~10% probability to, and FTX kind of** assigns 15% probability to, and even these seem high), so I think it’s a good bet to take.
* I think that the Trump concedes if he loses market is now unconditional, because by Smarkets’ standards (projected electoral votes from major news networks) Biden has won.
** Kind of, because some TRUMP shares expired at 1 TRUMFEB share - $0.10, rather than $0 as expected, and some TRUMP shares haven’t expired yet, because TRUMP holders asked. So it’s possible that the value of a TRUMPFEB share might also include the value of a hypothetical TRUMPMAR share, or that TRUMPFEB trades will be nullified at some point, or some other retrospective rule change on FTX’s part.
UPDATE 2020-11-16: Trump… kind of conceded? Emphasis mine:
He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!
While he has retracted this, it met Smarkets’ standards, so I’m £22.34 richer.
I bet £10 on Biden winning on Smarkets upon reading the GJP prediction, because I trust superforecasters more than prediction markets. I bet another £10 after reading Demski’s post on Kelly betting—my bankroll is much larger than £33 (!! Kelly bets are enormous!) but as far as my System 1 is concerned I’m still a broke student who would have to sheepishly ask their parents to cover any losses.
Very pleased about the tenner I won, might spend it on a celebratory beer.
The problem I have and wish to solve is, of course, the accurséd Akrasia that stops me from working on AI safety.
Let’s begin with the easy ones:
1 Stop doing this babble challenge early and go try to solve AI safety.
2 Stop doing this babble challenge early; at 11 pm, specifically, and immediately sleep, in order to be better able to solve AI safety tomorrow.
In fact generally sleep seems to be a problem, I spend 10 hours doing it every day (could be spent solving AI safety) and if I fall short I am tired. No good! So working on this instrumental goal.
3 Get blackout curtains to improve sleep quality
4 Get sleep mask to improve sleep quality
5 Get better mattress to improve sleep quality
6 Find a beverage with more caffeine to reduce the need for sleep
7 Order modafinil online to reduce the need for sleep
And heck while we’re on the topic of stimulants
8 Order adderall online or from a friend to increase ability to focus
9 Look up good nootropics stacks to improve cognitive ability and hence ability to do AI safety
Now another constraint when doing AI safety is that I don’t have a good shovel-ready list of things to try, and it’s easy for me to get distracted if I can’t just pick something from the task list
10 Check if complice solves this problem
11 Check if some ordinary getting-things-done (that I can stick into roam) solves this problem
12 Make a giant checklist and go down this list
13 Make a personal kanban board of things that would be nice for solving AI safety
And instrumentally useful for creating these task lists?
14 Ask friends who know about AI safety for things to do
15 Apophatically ask for suggestions for things to do via an entry on a list of 50 items for a lesswrong babble challenge
Anyway, I digress. I’m here to solve akrasia, not make a checklist. Unless I need more items on this list, in which case I will go back to checklist construction. Is this pruning? Never mind. Back to the point:
16 Set up some desktop shortcut macro thing in order to automatically start pomodoros when I open my laptop
17 Track time spent doing things useful to AI safety on a spreadsheet
18 Hey, I said “laptop”! Get a better mouse to make using the laptop more fun so I’m more likely to do hard things when using it
19 Get a better desk for more space for notes and to require less expensive shifting into/out of AI safety mode
20 On notes, use the index cards I have to make a proper zettelkasten as a cognitive aid
(Does this solve akrasia? Well, if I have better cognitive aids, then doing cognitively expensive things is easier, so I’m less likely to fail even with my current levels of willpower)
21 Start doing accountability things like promising to review a paper every X time period
22 I said levels of willpower—Google for interventions that increase conscientiousness (there’s gotta be some dodgy big-5 based things) and do those?
Back to the top of the tree
23 Quit my job because it’s using up energy that I could be using to do AI safety
24 Instead of doing my job, pretend to do my job while actually doing AI safety
25 Set up an AI safety screen on work laptop so it’s easy to switch over to doing AI safety during breaks or lunches
Hey, I said lunch
26 Use nutritionally complete meal replacements to save time/willpower that would be spent on food preparation
27 Use nutritionally complete meal replacements to ensure that nutrient intake keeps me in top physical form
28 Exercise (this improves everything, apparently) by running on a treadmill
29 By lifting weights
30 By jogging in a large circle
31 Become a monk and live an austere lifestyle without the distractions of rich food, wine, and lust
32 Become an anti-monk and live a rich lifestyle to ensure that no willpower is wasted on distractions
33 Specifically in vice use nicotine as a performance enhancing stimulant by smoking. Back to stimulants again I guess
34 … or by using nicotine patches or gum or something
35 By using nicotine only if I do AI safety things, in order to develop an addiction to AI safety
Hey, develop an addiction to doing AI safety! People go to serious lengths for addictions, so why not gate it on math?
36 Do so with something very addictive, like opioids
37 Use electric shocks to do classical conditioning
etc. there was a short sci-fi story about this kind of thing let me see if I can find it. Hey, actually, since I said sci-fi, adn this is a babble challenge:
38 Promise very hard to time travel back to this exact point in time, meet future self, recieve advice
(They’re not here :( Oh well) Back on that akrasia-solving:
39 Make up a far-future person who I am specifically working to save (they’re called Dub See Wun). Get invested in their internal life (they want to make their own star!). Feel an emotional connection to them. I’m doing it for them!
40 Specifically put up a “do it for them” poster modelled off the one in the Simpsons
41 DuckDuckGo “how to beat akrasia” and do the top suggestion
42 Adopt strategic probably false beliefs (the world will end in 1 year!! :0) in order to encourage a more aggressive search for strategies
“Aggressive search for strategies” is the virtue that the Sequences call “actually trying”, so in the Sequences-sphere
43 Go to a CFAR workshop, which I heard might be kind of useful towards this sort of thing
44 Or just read the CFAR booklet and apply the wisdom found in there
45 Or some sequence on Lesswrong with exercises that applies some CFARy wisdom
Of course all this willpower boosting and efficiency and stuff wouldn’t help if I was just doing the wrong thing faster (like that one Shen comic, you know the one). So:
46 Consider how much of what I think is working on AI safety is actually just self-actualisy math/CS stuff, throw that out, and actually try to solve the problem
47 Deliberately create and encourage a subagent in my mind that wants to do AI safety (call em Dub See Wun)
48 Adopt strategic infohazards in order to encourage a more focused and aggressive search for strategies
49 Post a lot about AI safety in public forums like Lesswrong so that I feel compelled to do AI safety in my private life in order to maintain the illusion that I’m some kind of AI-safety-doing-person
50 Stop doing this babble challenge at the correct time, and continue to do AI safety or sleep as in 1) or 2). Hey, this one seems good. Think I might try it now!
This means you can build an action that says something like “if I am observable, then I am not observable. If I am not observable, I am observable” because the swapping doesn’t work properly.
Constructing this more explicitly: Suppose that and . Then must be empty. This is because for any action in the set , if was in then it would have to equal which is not in , and if was not in it would have to equal which is in .
Since is empty, is not observable.
Because the best part of a sporting event is the betting, I ask Metaculus: [Short-Fuse] Will AbstractSpyTreeBot win the Darwin Game on Lesswrong?
How does your CooperateBot work (if you want to share?). Mine is OscillatingTwoThreeBot which IIRC cooperates in the dumbest possible way by outputting the fixed string “2323232323...”.
I have two questions on Metaculus that compare how good elements of a pair of cryonics techniques are: preservation by Alcor vs preservation by CI, and preservation using fixatives vs preservation without fixatives. They are forecasts of the value (% of people preserved with technique A who are revived by 2200)/(% of people preserved with technique B who are revived by 2200), which barring weird things happening with identity is the likelihood ratio of someone waking up if you learn that they’ve been preserved with one technique vs the other.
Interpreting these predictions in a way that’s directly useful requires some extra work—you need some model for turning the ratio P(revival|technique A)/P(revival|technique B) into plain P(revival|technique X), which is the thing you care about when deciding how much to pay for a cryopreservation.
One toy model is to assume that one technique works (P(revival) = x), but the other technique may be flawed (P(revival) < x). If r < 1, it’s the technique in the numerator that’s flawed, and if r > 1, it’s the technique in the denominator that’s flawed. This is what I guess is behind the trimodality in the Metaculus community median: there are peaks at the high end, the low end, and at exactly 1, perhaps corresponding to one working, the other working, and both working.
For the current community medians (as of 2020-12-27), using that model, using the Ergo library, normalizing the working technique to 100%, I find:
-
Alcor vs CI:
-
EV(Preserved with Alcor) = 66%
-
EV(Preserved with Cryonics Institue) = 80%
-
Fixatives vs non-Fixatives
-
EV(Preserved using Fixatives) = 75%
-
EV(Preserved without using Fixatives) = 50%
-
The annotations that some other people have put on their lists to show their thinking process as well as the list of assumptions at the start, have been interesting—I haven’t done this this time, but it seems like something worth trying next time.
Keep it in my pocket the whole time.
Locked safe down the Marianas trench.
Am I a time traveller? Is that how I know? If so, hide it in dinosaur times, long before the evil forces lived.
Or hide it in the far future, long after the evil forces lived.
Send it into orbit.
Land it on the moon. Can’t quite think of a way to achieve this, though. Any ideas?
Bury it in a geologically stable location and dig it up later as if it were nuclear waste.
Hide it in a gangster’s treasure box hidden under some foliage, a la 20200.
Start a pen manufacturing company and create many, many identical pens. They won’t be able to tell which one it is.
Eat the pen. Repeatedly, each time it passes through. For 50 years.
Find the guy with 10 years’ worth of energy. Lock them in a room. Offer them their freedom if and only if they vow to protect the pen.
Surgically implant the pen under my skin (hope it’s not made of biologically active materials).
Hidden safe in the walls of the house.
Hidden safe in the attic of the house.
Swiss bank vault (we had those in 1855, right?).
Inside a bottle of wine that will be aged to become a 50-year vintage in 1950.
Write a book on effective altruism (using the pen, of course) - there are probably some good cause areas around in 1855 to use as examples. They will read it, and cease to be evil, thus removing their motivation to acquire the pen.
Give Babbage some pointers on making his difference engine not suck, beginning an early steampunk cybersingularity, and ask the Great Brass Mind how to hide the pen.
Give the pen to my well-connected close friend, [famous person who lived in 1855], providing them with the same evidence I used to find that Einstein would need it.
Select, completely randomly, a point on the surface of the Earth. Bury it under a small amount of earth. Security through obscurity!
Replace each component of the pen, one at a time, until you have two pens: the old pen, and a new pen that’s atom-for-item identical to the original pen. Let the evil forces find the new pen.
Create a replica of the first pen and let the evil forces find it, so that they stop looking.
Bribe every grunt of the evil forces who comes looking for your pen.
Like 10), but the other end; at that point they won’t want to find it, even if they know where it is.
Find Einstein’s parents. Offer them this treasured family heirloom. They will keep it safe and Einstein will inherit it.
Paint the pen black and put in in a soot-filled chimney.
Find Oliver Twist and Fagin, or some other group of Victorian urchins, who are ubiquitous in this age. Hire Fagin’s street urchins to come up with and then red-team test 50-year security plans for the pen.
Become a miserly industrialist, refusing even to give my workers a day off for Christmas. When three ghosts come to visit, use information from the Ghost of Christmas Future to divine the manner in which the evil forces retrieve the pen, and make countermeasures.
All of these plans have some chance of failing, so I can obviously tolerate that. Hence, bet my money at very, very long odds—in the small sliver of timelines in which I succeed, use my money to buy out the evil forces entirely.
Call my friends at the time commission for backup. C’mon, we can’t just forget about protocol here.
Go on an expedition to the Arctic and hide it in the inhospitable ice; I could probably talk some guys in pith helmets into giving me backup.
Or to the deepest jungles of the dark continent of Africa; likewise with the pith helments.
Or to the source of the Nile.
Or to the summit of the Mt. Everest or K2 or whatever’s going to be most awkward for the evil forces..
Or to the Antarctic, which is colder than the Arctic in the middle part.
Or to the deserts of Australia.
Found a cult of Defending the Pen, perhaps using song lyrics from the future as substitute mystical wisdom.
Ask the longer-haired, wiser, and older version of myself who just gave me this quest for advice, since they’re still standing there. Follow their advice.
Bury the pen deep in a coal mine.
Keep your head down and don’t tell anyone that it’s -you- who has the pen—it’s not like the evil forces have any reason to suspect that, unless you give them a good reason to, like boostrapping the world to nanotech using future knowledge or something. Haha. Heh.
Hide the pen under my top hat; since it’s 1855, that won’t look unusual.
Dismantle the pen and hide the seven components throughout the world using techniques described above and below; being smaller, they’ll be harder to find.
Join the evil forces as a simple masked minion; working for them, they won’t suspect you have the pen, until one day as the second-in-command you usurp the leader (as it tradition).
Message in a bottle to the North Sentinel Island, who will repel outsiders including the evil forces.
Give a speech that’s something like “evil forces, you really want to mess with me? I can leap to the moon in a single bound, and that’s just to save me pulling it to ground, which I can also do. You once tried to trap me in a room and I took down your mothership’s entire network before tearing it to shreds. This planet, and this pen specifically, is under my protection. Return to your galaxy,” probably with dramatic orchestral music playing in the background, and then the evil forces will leave.
Check your Messing-with-Time-Wongle, standard issue equipment for all time travellers with missions to defend artefacts that are important to the timeline. Notice that the LED on it flashes green. Precommit to only sending a “green” signal to your MwTW in 50 years if the pen reaches Einstein successfully. Now Time will bend to ensure the pen is not found.
Freeze the pen in liquid nitrogen. It will now be too cold for the evil forces to touch.
The evil forces that I’m leader of, remember. Obviously my disloyal second-in-command will take umbrage if I seem not to be looking for the pen at all—I’m fairly sure they’re a time traveller here to prevent Einstein from laying the physics foundations for the nuclear weapons that will destroy the world in the mid-20th century or something like that, and they keep scribbling notes on this list of about 50 items—but I can still direct them to the wrong place for 50 years. Hey, I think I saw the pen-keeper go into the middle of the Antarctic to launch a rocket!
Bury the pen in a large heap of explosives that only I know how to disarm—WWII mines are still dangerous so them being stable for 50 years should work.
Tie the pen to my ankle, everywhere I go—the traditional mores of the 19th century would make it scandalous for the evil forces to retrieve it from there!
Melt down the pen into a block of ordinary looking gunk. Remake the pen when needed years later.
The added resource constraints (I don’t have a space elevator with me in the room… yet) made this a bit more difficult, which is very nice.
Ask someone for help via the phone
Punch through the door
Unlock the door, go through it
Punch through the wall
Punch through the window
Unlock the window, go through it
Wait for someone to help
Wait for the room to be demolished
Climb up through the ceiling...
...or through one of the missing walls (does it still count as a room?)
Create a series of Lesswrong posts diguised as babble exercises to try to come up with a way out of this room; use the best suggestion
Wait for a friendly GPT-derived AGI to rescue you (admittedly a longshot)
Quantum tunnel out of the room (rare but possible)
Release all of the energy stored in your body in a single burst to destroy walls (10 years! That’s a lot!)
Release all of the energy stored in the phone’s battery in a single burst to destroy walls
Use friction from rubbing clothes against wall to wear through it
Hang self with clothes (morbid, but “I” am no longer in the room)
Wait ten years, starve to death (don’t worry; the GPT-derived AGI can read off my brain structures and revive me later)
Lifelog very accurately online via the phone; have myself be reconstructed outside of the room
I am already outside of the room, 10^10^100 light years away. No problem.
Release all energy stored in body in a single burst to jump through the ceiling and several miles into the sky—this might also allow me to bring a small object to the moon
Punch through the wall, but using phone to protect hands
Punch through the wall using shirt wrapped around to protect hands
Use the power armour that I am wearing as clothes to dismantle room
Wait sufficiently long that my personality is different enough that I am not in the room
Escape mentally via escapism (with help of phone games?)
Astral project
Use my cool utility-fog based sci-fi clothes to convert wall into nanobots
Redefine “inside” as “outside”, like that SCP that lets you do that
Is this a real room, or a metaphorical “you” video game character? Type the console command to teleport out.
Ask the server admin to teleport me out.
Ask the real life server admin of the simulation we are embedded in to teleport me out (Elon Musk does this with Telsa stock prices)
Tap on the wall of the room to send a Morse code message asking for help.
Use phone’s wifi to connect to the door’s bluetooth and unlock it via the app.
Run at the door really hard.
The phone is a Nokia. Drop it on the ground and the room crumbles.
The phone is that Samsung phone that has batteries that set on fire (with 10 years of charge, that might be bad news for me?) Do so, then use the automatic door unlocking (that happens as a fire safety measure) to leave the room.
Pull off a bit of the phone’s casing and use it as a lockpick.
The phone is that iPhone that can bend easily. Bend it into a shape that can prise the door open. Exit through door.
As above, but prise the window open. Exit through window.
Stop imagining the room.
Use lucid dream powers to escape the room.
Go to sleep and dream of a different place
Grow large enough to break through the room’s walls
The walls are made of air so I can walk through them.
The walls are made of antimatter and annihilate with the surrounding environment.
The walls are made of ice and will melt soon.
Rub together two stick-like objects (derived from my phone, probably) to start a fire, as fire safety measure the door unlocks, etc
Do the five movements to travel to another dimension where we are not trapped
Hack the wi-fi. As an expert hacker, my captors will thus have to recruit me in order to fix their wifi. As they open the door, slip past them.
The room is completely empty. The air pressure outside causes the walls to immediately buckle and break.
About halfway through I forgot that I was only meant to be bringing something to the moon rather than having to visit it myself, and some of my items are very broad (the first one could make up a whole list in itself).
This was very fun!
rocket
space elevator
jump really, really hard
electromagnetic cannon
accelerate the spin of the earth until it falls apart
decelerate the orbit of the moon until it falls, by flying comets past it
or by painting one side of the moon black
or by using a giant rocket
or by detonating enough antimatter weaponry
flap your arms, again really, really hard
shine a torch at the moon (photons reach there)
start in space and use an ion drive
project orion nuclear bomb detonated below you
program an AGI and ask the AGI how to get to the moon
build a very tall ladder
spaceplane
wings made of wax
throw it really, really hard
spin around and let go
stand under an asteroid strike and join the ejecta
wait for quantum fluctuations to teleport you there
wait for random gravitational solar system pertubations to bring the moon to you
wait for another civilisation to bring you to the moon
time travel to before Theia hit and join the original moon
teleport
add mass to the moon until it becomes the planet and you are on the moon
find the space rocks the apollo astronauts brought back and stand on them
project orion but with fusion
project orion but with antimatter
trigger false vacuum collapse with particle accelerator and use new physics to develop as yet unknowable way of travelling to moon
astral projection
bird with a spacesuit
space helicopter
vacuum-filled zepellin
submarine with reactionless thruster inside
perpetual motion machine
buy a ticket on musk’s starship
invest in dogecoin, use billions from dogecoin to start space program
stand above a supervolcano and hope ejecta takes you high enough
run very very fast reaching orbital velocity
very long space elevator reaching down from moon
very very long space elevator reaching down from mars
create microscopic black hole and use gravitational slingshot
carefully warp space to make a staircase built from the metric
make a normal staircase
wormhole
very, very fast bicycle with a ramp
add mass to moon until gravitational tide from moon lifts you from the surface of the earth
deorbit the earth-moon system into the sun and join it in the molten iron in the sun’s core
apollo 11 mission
The real number 0.20 isn’t a probability, it’s just the same odds but written in a different way to make it possible to multiply (specifically you want some odds product
*such thatA:B * C:D = AC:BD). You are right about how you would convert the odds into a probability at the end.