The_Duck

Karma: 421

The_Duck Nov 30, 2012, 1:38 AM
0 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Causal Universes
I compute utility as a function of the entire future history of the universe and not just its state at a given time. I don’t see why this can’t fall under the umbrella of “utilitarianism.” Anyway, if your utility function doesn’t do this, how do you decide at what time to compute utility? Are you optimizing the expected value of the state of the universe 10 years from now? 10,000? 10^100? Just optimize all of it.

The_Duck Nov 29, 2012, 2:51 AM
6 points
in reply to: The Dao of Bayes’s comment on: Causal Universes

If you could push a button and avert nuclear war, saving billions, would you?

Of course.

Why does that answer change if the button works via transporting you back in time with the knowledge necessary to avert the war?

Because if time travel works by destroying universes, it causes many more deaths than it averts. To be explicit about assumptions, if our universe is being simulated on someone’s computer I think it’s immoral for the simulator to discard the current state of the simulation and restart it from a modified version of a past saved state, because this is tantamount to killing everyone in the current state.

[A qualification: erasing, say, the last 150 years is at least as bad as killing billions of humans, since there’s essentially zero chance that the people alive today will still exist in the new timeline. But the badness of reverting and overwriting the last N seconds of the universe probably tends to zero as N tends to zero.]

The_Duck Nov 28, 2012, 9:35 PM
4 points
in reply to: The Dao of Bayes’s comment on: Causal Universes

either way there is an equal set of people-who-won’t-exist. It’s only a bad thing if you have some reason to favor the status-quo of “A exists”

My morality has a significant “status quo bias” in this sense. I don’t feel bad about not bringing into being people who don’t currently exist, which is why I’m not on a long-term crusade to increase the population as much as possible. Meanwhile I do feel bad about ending the existence of people who do exist, even if it’s quick and painless.

More generally, I care about the process by which we get to some world-state, not just the desirability of the world-state. Even if B is better than A, getting from A to B requires a lot of deaths.

The_Duck Nov 28, 2012, 9:23 PM
2 points
on: Causal Universes

Suppose we pick out one of the histories marked with a 1 and look at it. It seems to contain a description of people who remember experiencing time travel.

Now, were their experiences real? Did we make them real by marking them with a 1 - by applying the logical filter using a causal computer?

I’d suggest that if this is a meaningful question at all, it’s a question about morality. There’s no doubt about the outcome of any empirical test we could perform in this situation. The only reason we care about the answer to such questions is to decide whether it’s morally right to run this sort of simulation, and what moral obligations we would have to the simulated people.

Looked at this way, I think the answer to the original question is to write out your moral code, look at the part where it talks about something like “the well-being of conscious entities,” taboo “conscious entities,” and then rewrite that section of your moral code in clearer language. If you do this properly you will get something that tells you whether the simulated people are morally significant.

The_Duck Nov 28, 2012, 2:03 AM
2 points
on: Should correlation coefficients be expressed as angles?
Thanks, I wish someone had pointed out this isomorphism to me earlier. I think angles might well be more intuitive than correlation coefficients.

The_Duck Nov 24, 2012, 1:20 AM
11 points
on: Overconfident Pessimism
The examples make the point that it’s possible to be too pessimistic, and too confident in that pessimism. However, maybe we can figure out when we should be confidently pessimistic.

For example, we can be very confidently pessimistic about the prospects for squaring the circle or inventing perpetual motion. Here we have mathematical proofs of impossibility. I think we can be almost as confidently pessimistic about the near-term prospects for practical near-light-speed travel. Here we have a good understanding of the scope of the problem and of the capabilities of all practical sources of propulsion, and we can see that those capabilities are nowhere near enough.

Let’s not just leave it at “it’s possible to be too pessimistic.” How can we identify problems about which we can be confidently pessimistic?

The_Duck Nov 20, 2012, 10:19 PM
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Checklist of Rationality Habits

How can utilities not be comparable in terms of multiplication?

“The utility of A is twice the utility of B” is not a statement that remains true if we add the same constant to both utilities, so it’s not an obviously meaningful statement. We can make the ratio come out however we want by performing an overall shift of the utility function. The fact that we think of utilities as cardinal numbers doesn’t mean we assign any meaning to ratios of utilities. But it seemed that you were trying to say that a person with a logarithmic utility function assesses $10^9 as having twice the utility of $50k.

The_Duck Nov 12, 2012, 8:22 AM
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012
Yes, clearly my Google-fu is lacking. I think I searched for phrases like “sun went around the Earth,” which fails because your quote has “sun went round the Earth.”

The_Duck Nov 12, 2012, 6:43 AM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012
Thanks; I thought it was likely to have been posted, but I tried to search for it and didn’t find it.

The_Duck Nov 12, 2012, 4:43 AM
0 points
on: Rationality Quotes November 2012

“Tell me,” the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?”

His friend replied, “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth.”

Wittgenstein responded, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

-related by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion

The_Duck Nov 11, 2012, 1:54 AM
3 points
in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: If MWI is correct, should we expect to experience Quantum Torment?
I have an objection to this:

So branching is the consequence of a particular type of physical process: the “measurement” of a microscopic superposition by its macroscopic environment. Not all physical processes are of this type, and its not at all obvious to me that the sorts of processes usually involved in our deaths are of this sort.

I think that essentially all processes involving macroscopic objects are of this type. My understanding is that the wave function of a macroscopic system at nonzero temperature is constantly fissioning into vastly huge numbers of decoherent sub-regions, i.e., “worlds.” These worlds start out similar to each other, but we should expect differences to amplify over time. And, of course, each new world immediately begins fissioning into vast numbers of “sub-worlds.”

So, while in one world you might get run over by a bus, there is e.g. another world that separated from that one a year ago in which the bus is late and you survive. Plus huge numbers of other possibilities.

In this vast profusion of different worlds, for any given death there’s essentially always another branch in which that death was averted.

The_Duck Nov 10, 2012, 1:44 AM
6 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: What would you do if blood glucose theory of willpower was true?
That essay on scurvy is fascinating, thank you for posting it.

The_Duck Nov 5, 2012, 8:58 PM
10 points
on: Please don’t vote because democracy is a local optimum
Downvoted because this post doesn’t actually make an argument. Something this short belongs on Twitter, hashtag and all.

The_Duck Nov 2, 2012, 8:53 PM
0 points
on: POLL : Aging research booster
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Va gur ybat eha V fhfcrpg jr jvyy fuvsg gb rneyvre vagreiragvbaf gung jvyy cerirag gur yvsrgvzr bs npphzhyngrq qnzntr gung V haqrefgnaq gb or gur pnhfr bs byq-ntr qvfrnfr. Ohg vs jr eha gur grfg ba sbegl-lrne-byqf, ubj qb jr xabj vs jr’er npghnyyl ceriragvat gur qvfrnfrf bs byq ntr?

The_Duck Oct 30, 2012, 9:43 PM
1 point
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition)
Sorry, what? I’m missing how this is relevant. Is it that you expect to need significantly more kindness if you are below average in an IQ 140 society than a IQ 100 society? Or do you expect the “kindness waterline” to fall as IQs rise?

The_Duck Oct 21, 2012, 4:55 AM
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Causal Reference
On its own, mathematics is just the study of various systems of rules for symbol manipulation. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in more practical areas like physics allows us to conclude something about the structure of physical law. Whatever the true laws of physics are, we conclude, they seem to be well described by certain systems of rules for symbol manipulation.

In our causal models, this is an arrow between “laws of physics” and “observations about the behavior of collections of objects” [subject to Eliezer’s caveat about a “laws of physics” node]. Once we include this arrow, we can do neat tricks like counting the numbers of rocks in piles A and B, encoding those numbers in symbols, manipulating those symbols, and finally using the result to correctly predict how many rocks we will have once we combine the two piles.

The_Duck Oct 17, 2012, 3:57 AM
3 points
in reply to: folkTheory’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things

The Territory just is. It doesn’t have causality, laws of physics or anything else.

How do you know that?

The_Duck Oct 13, 2012, 3:43 AM
4 points
in reply to: BerryPick6’s comment on: A possible solution to pascals mugging.
Does this mean you’ll pay up if you get Pascal-mugged, because it’s a “valid quirk in the system”? If so, I have an amazing offer for you.

If you won’t pay up, why not?

The_Duck 12 Oct 2012 7:48 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things

Does the idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrain experience?

No. For any set of observations O1, O2, …, O_N, you can construct an overprecise causal model that links some central cause to nodes O1, O2, …, O_N. [That is, our causal model is: “You observed O1 because God willed it. Then you observed O2 because God willed it...”] Thus causal models can explain any set of observations. Constraining experience requires in addition some sort of Occam’s Razor that prefers simpler causal models.

The_Duck 12 Oct 2012 7:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
As I read it, the rule does not forbid epiphenomena. Epiphenomena are caused by ordinary things that we can observe, so they are connected to us by causal links, even though we can never discover these links, since epiphenomena do not themselves cause anything we can observe.

This seems like a coherent way the universe could be, but isn’t. The machine simulating the universe could constantly scan it for blue objects and populate a list of all blue objects—but without using that list for anything further. This would be an epiphenomal blue-ness tag.