Yeah, I just… stopped worrying about these kinds of things. (In my case, “these kinds of things” refer e.g. to very unlikely Everett branches, which I still consider more likely than gods.) You just can’t win this game. There are million possible horror scenarios, each of them extremely unlikely, but each of them extremely horrifying, so you would just spend all your life thinking about them; [...]
I see. In that case, I think we’re reacting differently to our situations due to being in different epistemic states. The uncertainty involved in Everett branches is much less Knightian—you can often say things like “if I drive to the supermarket today, then approximately 0.001% of my future Everett branches will die in a car crash, and I’ll just eat that cost; I need groceries!”. My state of uncertainty is that I’ve barely put five minutes of thought into the question “I wonder if there are any tremendously important things I should be doing right now, and particularly if any of the things might have infinite importance due to my future being infinitely long.”
And by the way, torturing people forever, because they did not believe in your illogical incoherent statements unsupported by evidence, that is 100% compatible with being an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god, right? Yet another theological mystery...
Well, that’s another reference to “popular” theism. Popular theism is a subset of theism in general, which itself is a subset of “worlds in which there’s something I should be doing that has infinite importance”.
On the other hand, if you assume an evil god, then… maybe the holy texts and promises of heaven are just a sadistic way he is toying with us, and then he will torture all of us forever regardless.
Yikes!! I wish LessWrong had emojis so I could react to this possibility properly :O
So… you can’t really win this game. Better to focus on things where you actually can gather evidence, and improve your actual outcomes in life.
This advice makes sense, though given the state of uncertainty described above, I would say I’m already on it.
Psychologically, if you can’t get rid of the idea of supernatural, maybe it would be better to believe in an actually good god. [...]
This is a good fallback plan for the contingency in which I can’t figure out the truth and then subsequently fail to acknowledge my ignorance. Fingers crossed that I can at least prevent the latter!
[...] your theory can still benefit from some concepts having shorter words for historical reasons [...]
Well, I would have said that an exactly analogous problem is present in normal Kolmogorov Complexity, but...
But historical evidence shows that humans are quite bad at this.
...but this, to me, explains the mystery. Being told to think in terms of computer programs generating different priors (or more accurately, computer programs generating different universes that entail different sets of perfect priors) really does influence my sense of what constitutes a “reasonable” set of priors.
I would still hesitate to call it a “formalism”, though IIRC I don’t think you’ve used that word. In my re-listen of the sequences, I’ve just gotten to the part where Eliezer uses that word. Well, I guess I’ll take it up with somebody who calls it that.
By the way, it’s just popped into my head that I might benefit from doing an adversarial collaboration with somebody about Occam’s razor. I’m nowhere near ready to commit to anything, but just as an offhand question, does that sound like the sort of thing you might be interested in?
[...] The answer is that the hypothetical best compression algorithm ever would transform each file into the shortest possible program that generates this file.
Insightful comments! I see the connection: really, every compression of a file is a compression into the shortest program that will output that file, where the programming language is the decompression algorithm and the search algorithm that finds the shortest program isn’t guaranteed to be perfect. So the best compression algorithm ever would simply be one with a really really apt decompression routine (one that captures the nuanced nonrandomness found in files humans care aboue very well) and an oracle for computing shortest programs (rather than a decent but imperfect search algorithm).
> But then my concern just transforms into “what if there’s a powerful entity living in this universe (rather than outside of it) who will punish me if I do X, etc”.
Then we are no longer talking about gods in the modern sense, but about powerful aliens.
Well, if the “inside/outside the universe” distinction is going to mean “is/isn’t causally connected to the universe at all” and a god is required to be outside the universe, then sure. But I think if I discovered that the universe was a simulation and there was a being constantly watching it and supplying a fresh bit of input every hundred Planck intervals in such a way that prayers were occasionally answered, I would say that being is closer to a god than an alien.
But in any case, the distinction isn’t too relevant. If I found out that there was a vessel with intelligent life headed for Earth right now, I’d be just as concerned about that life (actual aliens) as I would be about god-like creatures that should debatably also be called aliens.
By the way, it’s just popped into my head that I might benefit from doing an adversarial collaboration with somebody about Occam’s razor. I’m nowhere near ready to commit to anything, but just as an offhand question, does that sound like the sort of thing you might be interested in?
Definitely not interested. My understanding of these things is kinda intuitive (with intuition based on decent knowledge of math and computer science, but still), so I believe that “I’ll know it when I see it” (give me two options, and I’ll probably tell you whether one of them seems “simpler” than the other), but I wouldn’t try to put it into exact words.
I see. In that case, I think we’re reacting differently to our situations due to being in different epistemic states. The uncertainty involved in Everett branches is much less Knightian—you can often say things like “if I drive to the supermarket today, then approximately 0.001% of my future Everett branches will die in a car crash, and I’ll just eat that cost; I need groceries!”. My state of uncertainty is that I’ve barely put five minutes of thought into the question “I wonder if there are any tremendously important things I should be doing right now, and particularly if any of the things might have infinite importance due to my future being infinitely long.”
Well, that’s another reference to “popular” theism. Popular theism is a subset of theism in general, which itself is a subset of “worlds in which there’s something I should be doing that has infinite importance”.
Yikes!! I wish LessWrong had emojis so I could react to this possibility properly :O
This advice makes sense, though given the state of uncertainty described above, I would say I’m already on it.
This is a good fallback plan for the contingency in which I can’t figure out the truth and then subsequently fail to acknowledge my ignorance. Fingers crossed that I can at least prevent the latter!
Well, I would have said that an exactly analogous problem is present in normal Kolmogorov Complexity, but...
...but this, to me, explains the mystery. Being told to think in terms of computer programs generating different priors (or more accurately, computer programs generating different universes that entail different sets of perfect priors) really does influence my sense of what constitutes a “reasonable” set of priors.
I would still hesitate to call it a “formalism”, though IIRC I don’t think you’ve used that word. In my re-listen of the sequences, I’ve just gotten to the part where Eliezer uses that word. Well, I guess I’ll take it up with somebody who calls it that.
By the way, it’s just popped into my head that I might benefit from doing an adversarial collaboration with somebody about Occam’s razor. I’m nowhere near ready to commit to anything, but just as an offhand question, does that sound like the sort of thing you might be interested in?
Insightful comments! I see the connection: really, every compression of a file is a compression into the shortest program that will output that file, where the programming language is the decompression algorithm and the search algorithm that finds the shortest program isn’t guaranteed to be perfect. So the best compression algorithm ever would simply be one with a really really apt decompression routine (one that captures the nuanced nonrandomness found in files humans care aboue very well) and an oracle for computing shortest programs (rather than a decent but imperfect search algorithm).
Well, if the “inside/outside the universe” distinction is going to mean “is/isn’t causally connected to the universe at all” and a god is required to be outside the universe, then sure. But I think if I discovered that the universe was a simulation and there was a being constantly watching it and supplying a fresh bit of input every hundred Planck intervals in such a way that prayers were occasionally answered, I would say that being is closer to a god than an alien.
But in any case, the distinction isn’t too relevant. If I found out that there was a vessel with intelligent life headed for Earth right now, I’d be just as concerned about that life (actual aliens) as I would be about god-like creatures that should debatably also be called aliens.
Definitely not interested. My understanding of these things is kinda intuitive (with intuition based on decent knowledge of math and computer science, but still), so I believe that “I’ll know it when I see it” (give me two options, and I’ll probably tell you whether one of them seems “simpler” than the other), but I wouldn’t try to put it into exact words.
Kk! Thanks for the discussion :)