Were Bohr and Compton right or weren’t they? Does quantum mechanics (specifically,
say, the No-Cloning Theorem or the uncertainty principle) put interesting limits on an
external agent’s ability to scan, copy, and predict human brains and other complicated
biological systems, or doesn’t it?
EY is mentioned once, for his work in popularizing cryonics, and not for anything fundamental to the paper. Several other LW luminaries like Silas Barta and Jaan Tallinn show up in the acknowledgements.
If you have followed Aaronson at all in the past couple years, the new stuff begins around section 3.3, page 36. His definition of “freedom” is at first glance interesting, and may dovetail slightly with the standard reduction of free will.
a) he’s overstating the level and kind of precision you would need when measuring a human for prediction; and
b) that the interesting philosophical implications of Newcomb’s problem follow from already-achievable predictor accuracies.
The other, about average-human performance on 3SAT, where I was skeptical the average person actually notices global symmetries like the pigeonhole principle. (And, to a lesser extent, whether the other in which you stack objects affects their height...)
A better summary of Aaronson’s paper:
EY is mentioned once, for his work in popularizing cryonics, and not for anything fundamental to the paper. Several other LW luminaries like Silas Barta and Jaan Tallinn show up in the acknowledgements.
If you have followed Aaronson at all in the past couple years, the new stuff begins around section 3.3, page 36. His definition of “freedom” is at first glance interesting, and may dovetail slightly with the standard reduction of free will.
Eh, I don’t think I count as a luminary, but thanks :-)
Aaronson’s crediting me is mostly due to our exchanges on the blog for his paper/class about philosophy and theoretical computer science.
One of them, about Newcomb’s problem where my main criticisms were
a) he’s overstating the level and kind of precision you would need when measuring a human for prediction; and
b) that the interesting philosophical implications of Newcomb’s problem follow from already-achievable predictor accuracies.
The other, about average-human performance on 3SAT, where I was skeptical the average person actually notices global symmetries like the pigeonhole principle. (And, to a lesser extent, whether the other in which you stack objects affects their height...)