I don’t mean that rationalists deny thermodynamics, just that it’s not taking a sufficient center-stage, in particular when reasoning on large-scale phenomena than physics or chemistry where it’s hard to precisely quantify the energies, or especially when considering mathematical models of agency (as mentioned rationalists usually use argmax + Bayes).
I think this is as far away from truth as it can possibly be.
This post takes a funky left turn at the end, making it a lesson that forming accurate beliefs requires observations. That’s a strange conclusion because that also applies to systems where thermodynamics doesn’t hold.
Also, conservation of energy is a consequence of pretty much simple and nice properties of environment, not arbitrary.
Conservation of energy doesn’t just follow from time symmetry (as otherwise it would be pretty nice). It follows from time symmetry combined with either Lagrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics or quantum mechanics. There’s several problems here:
The usual representations used in rationalist toy models, e.g. MDPs, do not get conservation of energy.
Lagrangian/Hamiltonian/quantum mechanics don’t really model dissipative phenomena. I’ve heard that there are some extensions that do, but they seem obscure.
Partly the above but also partly just the intrinsic reductionism of these models imply that we don’t have anything even resembling these models for higher phenomena like politics, nutrition or programming, even though the point about energy and agency holds in those areas too.
Energy accounting is uninteresting unless it can be localized to specific phenomena, which is not guaranteed by this theorem.
I think you are wrong in purely practical sense. We don’t care about most of energy. Oceans have a lot of energy in them, but we don’t care because 99%+ of it is unavailable, because it is in high-entropy state. We care about exploitation of free energy, which is present only low-entropy high-information states. And, as expected, we learn to notice such states very quickly because they are very cheap sources of uncertainty reduction in world model.
It’s true that free energy is especially important, but I’m unconvinced rationalists jump as strongly onto it as you say. Free energy is pretty cheap, so between your power outlet and your snack cabinet you are pretty unconstrained by it.
I don’t mean that rationalists deny thermodynamics, just that it’s not taking a sufficient center-stage, in particular when reasoning on large-scale phenomena than physics or chemistry where it’s hard to precisely quantify the energies, or especially when considering mathematical models of agency (as mentioned rationalists usually use argmax + Bayes).
This post takes a funky left turn at the end, making it a lesson that forming accurate beliefs requires observations. That’s a strange conclusion because that also applies to systems where thermodynamics doesn’t hold.
Conservation of energy doesn’t just follow from time symmetry (as otherwise it would be pretty nice). It follows from time symmetry combined with either Lagrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics or quantum mechanics. There’s several problems here:
The usual representations used in rationalist toy models, e.g. MDPs, do not get conservation of energy.
Lagrangian/Hamiltonian/quantum mechanics don’t really model dissipative phenomena. I’ve heard that there are some extensions that do, but they seem obscure.
Partly the above but also partly just the intrinsic reductionism of these models imply that we don’t have anything even resembling these models for higher phenomena like politics, nutrition or programming, even though the point about energy and agency holds in those areas too.
Energy accounting is uninteresting unless it can be localized to specific phenomena, which is not guaranteed by this theorem.
It’s true that free energy is especially important, but I’m unconvinced rationalists jump as strongly onto it as you say. Free energy is pretty cheap, so between your power outlet and your snack cabinet you are pretty unconstrained by it.