I didn’t mean that an agenty Turing machine would find S and then decide that it wants you to correctly predict S. I meant that to the extent that predicting S is commonly useful, there should be a simple underlying reason why it is commonly useful, and this reason should give you a natural way of computing S that does not have the overhead of any agency that decides whether or not it wants you to correctly predict S.
How many bits do you think it takes to specify the property “people’s predictions about S, using universal prior P, are very important”?
(I think you’ll need to specify the universal prior P by reference to the universal prior that is actually used in the world containing the string S, if you spell out the prior P explicitly you are already sunk just from the ambiguity in the choice of language.)
It seems relatively unlikely to me that this will be cheaper than specifying some arbitrary degree of freedom in a computationally rich universe that life can control (+ the extra log(fraction of degrees of freedom the consequentialists actually choose to control)). Of course it might.
I agree that the entire game is in the constants—what is the cheapest way to pick out important strings.
I don’t think that specifying the property of importance is simple and helps narrow down S. I think that in order for predicting S to be important, S must be generated by a simple process. Processes that take large numbers of bits to specify are correspondingly rarely occurring, and thus less useful to predict.
I don’t buy it. A camera that some robot is using to make decisions is no simpler than any other place on Earth, just more important.
(This already gives the importance-weighted predictor a benefit of ~log(quadrillion))
Clearly you need to e.g. make the anthropic update and do stuff like that before you have any chance of competing with the consequentialist. This might just be a quantitative difference about how simple is simple—like I said elsewhere, all the action is in the additive constants, I agree that the important things are “simple” in some sense.
I didn’t mean that an agenty Turing machine would find S and then decide that it wants you to correctly predict S. I meant that to the extent that predicting S is commonly useful, there should be a simple underlying reason why it is commonly useful, and this reason should give you a natural way of computing S that does not have the overhead of any agency that decides whether or not it wants you to correctly predict S.
How many bits do you think it takes to specify the property “people’s predictions about S, using universal prior P, are very important”?
(I think you’ll need to specify the universal prior P by reference to the universal prior that is actually used in the world containing the string S, if you spell out the prior P explicitly you are already sunk just from the ambiguity in the choice of language.)
It seems relatively unlikely to me that this will be cheaper than specifying some arbitrary degree of freedom in a computationally rich universe that life can control (+ the extra log(fraction of degrees of freedom the consequentialists actually choose to control)). Of course it might.
I agree that the entire game is in the constants—what is the cheapest way to pick out important strings.
I don’t think that specifying the property of importance is simple and helps narrow down S. I think that in order for predicting S to be important, S must be generated by a simple process. Processes that take large numbers of bits to specify are correspondingly rarely occurring, and thus less useful to predict.
I don’t buy it. A camera that some robot is using to make decisions is no simpler than any other place on Earth, just more important.
(This already gives the importance-weighted predictor a benefit of ~log(quadrillion))
Clearly you need to e.g. make the anthropic update and do stuff like that before you have any chance of competing with the consequentialist. This might just be a quantitative difference about how simple is simple—like I said elsewhere, all the action is in the additive constants, I agree that the important things are “simple” in some sense.
Ok, I see what you’re getting at now.