TruePath

Karma: 170

TruePath Aug 27, 2018, 9:28 PM
1 point
on: Formal vs. Effective Pre-Commitment
It doesn’t really make sense to talk about the agent idealization at the same time as talking about effective precommitment (i.e. deterministic/probabilistic determination of actions).
The notion of an agent is an idealization of actual actors in terms of free choices, e.g., idealizing individuals in terms of choices of functions on game theoretic trees. This is an incompatible idealization with thinking of such actors as being deterministically or probabilistically committed to actions for those same ‘choices.’
Of course, ultimately, actual actors (e.g. people) are only approximated by talk of agents but if you try and simultaneously use the agent idealization while regarding those *same* choices as being effectively precommited you risk contradiction and model absurdity (of course you can decide to reduce the set of actions you regard as free choices in the agent idealization but that doesn’t seem to be the way you are talking about things here).

TruePath Aug 19, 2018, 10:49 AM
12 points
on: The “semiosis reply” to the Chinese Room Argument
You are getting the statement of the Chinese room wrong. The claim isn’t that the human inside the room will learn Chinese. Indeed, it’s a key feature of the argument that the person *doesn’t* ever count as knowing Chinese. It is only the system consisting of the person plus all the rules written down in the room etc.. which knows Chinese. This is what’s supposed to (but not convincingly IMO) be an unpalatable conclusion.
Secondly, no one is suggesting that there isn’t an algorithm that can be followed which makes it appear as if the room understands Chinese. The question is whether or not there is some conscious entity corresponding to the system of the guy plus all the rules which has the qualitative experience of understanding the Chinese words submitted etc.. As such the points you raise don’t really address the main issue.

TruePath Aug 16, 2018, 9:13 AM
0 points
on: Is there a practitioner’s guide for rationality?
We can identify places we know (inductively) tend to lead us astray and even identify tricks that help us avoid being affected by common fallacies which often aflict humans. However, it’s not at all clear if this actually makes us more rational in any sense.
If you mean act-rationality we’d have to study if this was a good life choice. If you mean belief rationality you’d have to specify some kind of measure/notion of importance to decide when it really matters you believed the true thing. After all if it’s just maximizing the number of times you believe the truth the best way to be rational is just to memorize giant tables of dice rolls. If it’s minimizing false beliefs you might want to avoid forming any at all. Even if you find some more appropriate function to maximize some beliefs obviously should count more than others. I mean you don’t want to spend your time memorizing lists of dice roles and forget the facts about being killed by buses if you walk into the street.
But once you realize this point then who knows. It could be the most rational thing in the world to have a totally dogmatic, evidence irresponsive, belief in the existence of some beardy dude in the sky because it’s the belief that matters the most and the rule “always believe in God Beard” will thus maximize getting important beliefs right.
I know what you mean. You mean something like avoiding the kind of fallacies that people who always talk about fallacies care about avoiding. But why should those be the most important fallacies to combat etc..

TruePath Aug 16, 2018, 9:02 AM
5 points
on: Cause Awareness as a Factor against Cause Neutrality
The inveresly proportional thing is a bad move. Sorting through potential charitable causes is itself charitable work and it’s just crazy inefficient to do that by everyone voting on what tugs at their heartstrings but by paying someone smart to consider all the various pet causes and evaluate them. Worse, the causes that are least well known are often unknown for very good reason but will now get special attention.
The reason you are right about cases like the doctor example is that when you are actually in a location that then gets hit you *are* leveraging your superior knowledge of how to get things done there or even just understanding what’s happened. Thought, truthfully, the real reason it makes sense is the easier psychological motivation.

TruePath Aug 16, 2018, 8:56 AM
3 points
on: Cause Awareness as a Factor against Cause Neutrality
Note that your whole delegation argument rests on the idea that you have (and know you have) some kind of superior knowledge (or virtue) about what needs to get done and you’re just searching for the best way to get it done. The reason it made sense to stay involved in the local campaign was because you had the special advantage of being the person who knew the right way to improve the city so you could offer something more than any other equally virtuous person you might hand the money to instead..
In contrast, in the village case you *don’t* have any special knowledge. If we just assigned everyone randomly to someone else who got to spend their charitable givings on the causes they favored (absent fraud) we would expect the world to be no better or worse. Just picking *any* reputable (easy to find online) EA charity or cause or even person and send them all your money won’t make things worse and by amassing money from many people they avoid all the transaction costs of everyone trying to do the calculations.

TruePath Aug 15, 2018, 3:18 PM
3 points
in reply to: Saladin’s comment on: Evidence For Simulation
Why assume whatever beings simulated us evolved?
Now I’m sure you’re going to say well a universe where intelligent beings just pop into existence fully formed is surely less simple than one where they evolve. However, when you give it some more thought that’s not true and it’s doubtful if Occam’s razor even applies to initial conditions.
I mean supposed for a moment the universe is perfectly deterministic (newtonian or no-collapse interp). In that case the Kolmogorov complexity of a world starting with a big bang that gives rise to intelligent creatures can’t be much less and probably is much more than one with intelligent creatures simply popping into existence fully formed After all, I can always just augment the description of the big bang initial conditions with ‘and then run the laws of physics for x years’ when measuring the complexity.

TruePath Aug 15, 2018, 3:09 PM
1 point
in reply to: Dmytry’s comment on: Evidence For Simulation
No, because we want the probability of being a simulation conditional on having complex surroundings not the probability of having complex surroundings conditional on a simulation. The fact that a very great number of simulated beings are created in simple universes doesn’t mean that none is ever simulated in a complex one or tell us anything about whether being such a simulation is more likely than being in a physical universe.

TruePath Aug 15, 2018, 3:01 PM
1 point
in reply to: roystgnr’s comment on: Evidence For Simulation
Ok, this is a good point. I should have added a requirement that the true solution is C infinity on the part of the manifold that isn’t in our temporal past. The backward’s heat equation is ill-posed for this reason on...it can’t be propogated arbitrarily far forward (i.e. back).

TruePath Aug 15, 2018, 2:54 PM
1 point
in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: Evidence For Simulation
Which way you think this goes probably depends on just how strongly you think Occam’s razor should be applied. We are all compelled to let the probability of a theory’s truth go to zero as it’s kolmogorov complexity goes to infinity but there is no prima facia reason to think it drops off particularly fast or slow. If you think , as I do, that there is only relatively weak favoring of more simple scientific laws while intelligent creatures would favor simplicity as a cognitive technique for managing complexity quite strongly you get my conclusion. But I’ll admit the other direction isn’t implausible.

TruePath Aug 15, 2018, 2:46 PM
3 points
on: Logical Counterfactuals & the Cooperation Game
The problem with this kind of analysis is that one is using the intuition of a physical scenario to leverage an ambiguity in what we mean by agent and decision.
Ultimately, the notion of decisions and agents are idealizations. Any actual person or AI only acts as the laws of physics dictate and agents, decisions or choices don’t appear in any description in terms of fundamental physics. Since people (and programs) are complex systems that often make relatively sophisticated choices about their actions we introduce the idealization of agents and decisions.
That idealization is basically what one sees in the standard formulation of game theory in terms of trees, visibility conditions and payoffs with decisions simply being nodes on the tree and agents being a certain kind of function from visible outcomes and nodes to children of those nodes. The math is all perfectly clear and there is nothing paradoxical or troubling.
What makes it seem like there is a problem is when we redescribe the situation in terms of guarantees the other player will have predicted your choice in a certain way or the like. Formally, that doesn’t really make sense...or at least it corresponds to a radically different game, e.g., restricting the tree so that only those outcomes are allowed. However, because we have this other non-formal notion of choice and agent stuck in our heads (choice is something like picking what socks to wear agent is something like a person) we don’t realize that our idealization just changed drastically even though in common language we are still playing the same game.
In other words there are no extra facts to be found about which decision theory is best. There are facts about what actual physical systems will do and there are mathematical facts about trees and functions on them but there isn’t any room for further facts about what kind of decision theory is the true one.

TruePath Mar 29, 2017, 5:09 PM
0 points
on: I Want To Live In A Baugruppe
I worry such a plan will face significant legal hurdles. As suggested the building would probably not fall into the exceptions to the federal fair housing act (is that right) for choosing roommates (it’s not a single family dwelling but a group of apartments in some sense).

But you EXACTLY want to choose who lives there based on political/religious beliefs (almost by definition it’s impossible to be a rationalist and a dogmatic unquestioning conservative christian). Also by aspects of family makeup in that you don’t want people living in this community to import a large extended family to live with them if that family doesn’t share the values/concerns of the other people living in the community.

Basically, I think the degree of control you want over who lives in the building may be incompatible with various non-discrimination laws. However, one could probably find 20 families that could jointly purchase the building as condos to avoid this problem.

But I don’t see any way around these problems in the long run. As the original group breaks up it will be hard to replace them without legally problematic screening.

TruePath Feb 14, 2016, 7:50 PM
1 point
on: Say It Loud
Sorry, but you can’t get around the fact that humans are not well equipped to compute probabilities. We can’t even state what our priors are in any reasonable sense much less compute exact probabilities.

As a result using probabilities has come to be associated with having some kind of model. If you’ve never studied the question and are asked how likely you think it is there are intelligent aliens you say something like “I think it’s quite likely”. You only answer with a number if you’ve broken it down into a model (chance life evolves average time to evolve intelligencechance of disaster*..).

Thus, saying something like “70% chance” indicates to most people that you are claiming your knowledge is the result of some kind of detailed computation and can thus be seen as an attempt to claim authority. You can’t change this rule on your own.

Thankfully, there are easy verbal alternatives. “Ehh, I guess I would give 3:1 odds on it” and many others. But use of chance/probability language isn’t it.

TruePath Oct 11, 2015, 9:56 PM
1 point
on: The Temptation to Bubble
Uhh, why not just accept that you aren’t and can never be perfectly rational and use those facts in positive ways.

Bubbles are psychologically comforting and help generate communities. Rationalist bubbling (which ironically includes the idea that they don’t bubble) probably does more to build the community and correct other wrong beliefs than almost anything else.

Until and unless rationalist take over society the best strategy is probably just to push for a bubble that actively encourages breaking other (non-rationalist) bubbles.

TruePath Nov 14, 2014, 10:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: Fluttershy’s comment on: A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza
So the equations should be (definition of vaccine efficacy from wikipedia)

.6 * p(sick2) = p(sick2) - p(sick1)
p(sick1) - .4 p(sick2) = 0 . i.e. efficacy is the difference be the unvaccinated and vacinated rates of infection divided by the unvaccinated rate. You have to assume there is no selective pressure in terms of who gets the vaccine (they have the same risk pool as the normal population for flu which is surely untrue) to get your assumtion that

.42 p(sick1) + .58p(sick2) = .1 p(sick1) + 1.38p(sick2) = .238

or 1.78 p(sick2) = .238

p(sick2)=.13 (weird I getting a different result) p(sick1) = .05

Did I solve wrong or did you. I do math so I can’t actually manipulate numbers very well but I not seeing the mistake.

TruePath Nov 14, 2014, 10:12 PM
1 point
in reply to: dspeyer’s comment on: A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza
Not with respect to their revealed preferences for working in high risk jobs I understand. There are a bunch of economic papers on this but it was a surprisingly low number.

TruePath Nov 14, 2014, 8:01 PM
0 points
on: The Truth and Instrumental Rationality
Well it can’t still be instrumental rationality anymore. I mean suppose the value being minimized is overall suffering and you are offered a (non-zero probability one time...and you know there are no other possible infinitary outcomes) threat that if you don’t believe some false claim X god will create an infinite (no other infinite outcomes) amount of suffering. You know before the choice to believe the false claim that no effect of believing it will increase expected suffering to overwhelm the harm of not believing it.

But the real rub is what do you say about the situation where the rocks turn out to be rocks cleverly disguised as people. You still have every indication that your behavior convincing yourself is an attempt to believe a false statement but it is actually true.

Does the decision procedure which says whatever you want it to normally say but makes a special exception that you can deceive yourself if (description of this situation which happens to identify it uniquely in the world).

In other words is it a relation to truth that you demand. In which case the rule gets better whenever you make exceptions that happen (no matter how unlikely it is) in the actual world to generate true and instrumentally useful beliefs. Or is it some notion of approaching evidence?

If the latter you seem to be committed to the existence of something like Carnap’s logical probability, i.e., something deducible from pure reason that assigns priors to all possible theories of the world. This is a notoriously unsolvable (in the sense that it doesn’t have one) unsolvable problem.

At the very least can you state some formal conditions that constrain a rule for deciding between actions (or however you want to model it) that captures the constraint you want?

TruePath Nov 14, 2014, 12:29 PM
0 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: 9/26 is Petrov Day
Given that he would be dead otherwise (and the strong human survival drive) I don’t see how the incentives are perverse.

I mean to make the incentives positive for pushing the button requires some really strong conditioning or torture threats.

Utilitarianism and Relativity Realism

TruePathJun 23, 2014, 7:12 PM

−5 points

31 comments5 min readLW link

TruePath Jun 22, 2014, 1:00 AM
2 points
in reply to: Normal_Anomaly’s comment on: Evidence For Simulation
No since experientially we already know that we don’t perceive the world as if all everett branches are computed.

In other words what is up for discovery is not ‘not all everett branches are fully realized’....that’s something from our apparent standpoint as belonging to a single such branch we could never actually know. All we could discover was that the collapse of the wavefunction is observable inside our world.

In other words nothing stops the aliens from simply not computing plenty of everett branches but leaving no trace in our observables to tell us that only one branch is actually real.

TruePath Jun 22, 2014, 12:57 AM
0 points
in reply to: thakil’s comment on: Evidence For Simulation
I tried to avoid assuming this in the above discussion. You are correct that I do assume that the physics of the simulating world has two properties.

1) Effective physical computation (for the purposes of simulation) is the result of repeated essentially finite decisions. In other words the simulating world does not have access to a oracle that vastly aids in the computation of the simulated world. In other words they aren’t simulating us by merely measuring when atoms decay in their world and that just happens to tell them data about a coherent lawlike physical reality.

I don’t think this is so much an assumption as a definition of what it means to be simulated. If the description of our universe is embedded in the natural laws of the simulating universe we aren’t so much a simulation as just a tiny part of the simulating universe.

2) I do assume that serial computation is more difficult to perform than serial computation, i.e., information can’t be effectively transmitted infinitely fast in the simulating universe. Effectively is an important caveat there since even a world with an infinite speed of light would ultimately have to rely signals from sufficiently far off to avoid detection problems.

This is something that surely is plausible to be true. Maybe it isn’t. THAT IS WHY I DON’T CLAIM THESE CONSIDERATIONS CAN EVER GIVE US A STRONG REASON TO BELIEVE WE AREN’T A SIMULATION. I do think they could give us strong reasons to believe we are.

TruePath

Utili­tar­i­anism and Rel­a­tivity Realism

Utilitarianism and Relativity Realism