not see any novel substantive arguments or semi-plausible proofs.
Most LW readers don’t expect anything at the level of a formal mathematical or logical proof, but sketching out a defensible semi-plausible path to one would help a lot. Especially for a post of this length.
That was my mistake, when I said “mathematically provable”, I meant provable with math, not referring to a formal mathematical proof or logical proof. I used that term pretty frequently so it was a pretty big mistake.
The dynamic is pretty fundamental though. I refer to it in the “taking a step back” section:
If there were intelligent aliens, made of bundles of tentacles or crystals or plants that think incredibly slowly, their minds would also have zero days that could be exploited because any mind that evolved naturally would probably be like the human brain, a kludge of spaghetti code that is operating outside of its intended environment, and they would also would not even begin to scratch the surface of finding and labeling those zero days until, like human civilization today, they began surrounding thousands or millions of their kind with sensors that could record behavior several hours a day and find webs of correlations.
That was my mistake, when I said “mathematically provable”, I meant provable with math, not referring to a formal mathematical proof or logical proof. I used that term pretty frequently so it was a pretty big mistake.
The dynamic is pretty fundamental though. I refer to it in the “taking a step back” section: