I’m not sure what you mean. If you use an anthropic theory like what Eliezer is using here (e.g. SSA, UDASSA)
A comment: it is not clear to me that Eliezer is intending to use SSA or UDASSA here. The “magic reality fluid” measure looks more like SIA, but with a prior based on Levin complexity rather than Kolmogorov complexity—see my comment here. Or—in an equivalent formulation—he’s using Kolmogorov + SSA but with an extremely broad “reference class” (the class of all causal nodes, most of which aren’t observers in any anthropic sense). This is still not UDASSA.
To get something like UDASSA, we shouldn’t distribute the weight 2^-#p of each program p uniformly among its execution steps. Instead we should consider using another program q to pick out an execution step or a sequence of steps (i.e. a sub-program s) from p, and then give the combination of q,p a weight 2^-(#p+#q). This means each sub-program s will get a total prior weight of Sum {p, q: q(p) = s & s is a sub-program of p} 2^-(#p + #q).
When updating on your evidence E, consider the class S(E) of all sub-programs which correspond to an AI program having that evidence, and normalize. The posterior probability you are in a particular universe p’ then becomes proportional to Sum {q: q(p’) is a sub-program of p’ and a member of S(E)} 2^-(#p’ + #q).
This looks rather different to what I discussed in my other comment, and it maybe handles anthropic problems a bit better. I can’t see there is any shift either towards very big universes (no presumptuous philosopher) or towards dense computronium universes, where we are simulations. There does appear to be a Great Filter or “Doomsday” shift, since it is still a form of SSA, but this is mitigated by the consideration that we may be part of a reference class (program q) which preferentially selects pre-AI biological observers, as opposed to any old observers.
I agree with this; the ‘e.g.’ was meant to point toward the most similar theories that have names, not pin down exactly what Eliezer is doing here. I though that it would be better to refer to the class of similar theories here since there is enough uncertainty that we don’t really have details.
A comment: it is not clear to me that Eliezer is intending to use SSA or UDASSA here. The “magic reality fluid” measure looks more like SIA, but with a prior based on Levin complexity rather than Kolmogorov complexity—see my comment here. Or—in an equivalent formulation—he’s using Kolmogorov + SSA but with an extremely broad “reference class” (the class of all causal nodes, most of which aren’t observers in any anthropic sense). This is still not UDASSA.
To get something like UDASSA, we shouldn’t distribute the weight 2^-#p of each program p uniformly among its execution steps. Instead we should consider using another program q to pick out an execution step or a sequence of steps (i.e. a sub-program s) from p, and then give the combination of q,p a weight 2^-(#p+#q). This means each sub-program s will get a total prior weight of Sum {p, q: q(p) = s & s is a sub-program of p} 2^-(#p + #q).
When updating on your evidence E, consider the class S(E) of all sub-programs which correspond to an AI program having that evidence, and normalize. The posterior probability you are in a particular universe p’ then becomes proportional to Sum {q: q(p’) is a sub-program of p’ and a member of S(E)} 2^-(#p’ + #q).
This looks rather different to what I discussed in my other comment, and it maybe handles anthropic problems a bit better. I can’t see there is any shift either towards very big universes (no presumptuous philosopher) or towards dense computronium universes, where we are simulations. There does appear to be a Great Filter or “Doomsday” shift, since it is still a form of SSA, but this is mitigated by the consideration that we may be part of a reference class (program q) which preferentially selects pre-AI biological observers, as opposed to any old observers.
I agree with this; the ‘e.g.’ was meant to point toward the most similar theories that have names, not pin down exactly what Eliezer is doing here. I though that it would be better to refer to the class of similar theories here since there is enough uncertainty that we don’t really have details.