anon85

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 5:40 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  What utility do you think is gained by discussing the basilisk?

  An interesting discussion that leads to better understanding of decision theories? Like, the same utility as is gained by any other discussion on LW, pretty much.

  Strawman. This forum is not a place where things get habitually banned.

  Sure, but you’re the one that was going on about the importance of the mindset and culture; since you brought it up in the context of banning discussion, it sounded like you were saying that such censorship was part of a mindset/​culture that you approve of.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 5:35 PM

  −5 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  I find TDT to be basically bullshit except possibly when it is applied to entities which literally see each others’ code, in which case I’m not sure (I’m not even sure if the concept of “decision” even makes sense in that case).

  I’d go so far as to say that anyone who advocates cooperating in a one-shot prisoners’ dilemma simply doesn’t understand the setting. By definition, defecting gives you a better outcome than cooperating. Anyone who claims otherwise is changing the definition of the prisoners’ dilemma.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 5:29 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  I agree that resolving paradoxes is an important intellectual exercise, and that I wouldn’t be satisfied with simply ignoring an ontological argument (I’d want to find the flaw). But the best way to find such flaws is to discuss the ideas with others. At no point should one assign such a high probability to ideas like Roko’s basilisk being actually sound that one refuses to discuss them with others.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 5:24 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  It seems unlikely that they would, if their gun is some philosophical decision theory stuff about blackmail from their future. I don’t expect that gun to ever fire, no matter how many times you click the trigger.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 5:23 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  Probably not a quick fix, but I would definitely say Eliezer gives significant chances (say, 10%) to there being some viable version of the Basilisk, which is why he actively avoids thinking about it.

  If Eliezer was just angry at Roko, he would have yelled or banned Roko; instead, he banned all discussion of the subject. That doesn’t even make sense as a “slashing out” reaction against Roko.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 12:57 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  Somehow, blackmail from the future seems less plausible to me than every single one of your examples. Not sure why exactly.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 12:56 AM

  −1 points

  0

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  If you are a programmer and think your code is safe because you see no way things could go wrong, it’s still not good to believe that it isn’t plausible that there’s a security hole in your code.

  Let’s go with this analogy. The good thing to do is ask a variety of experts for safety evaluations, run the code through a wide variety of tests, etc. The think NOT to do is keep the code a secret while looking for mistakes all by yourself. If you keep your code out of the public domain, it is more likely to have security issues, since it was not scrutinized by the public. Banning discussion is almost never correct, and it’s certainly not a good habit.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 12:50 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  Ideas that aren’t proven to be impossible are possible. They don’t have to be plausible.

• anon85Oct 7, 2015, 12:44 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  That even seems to be false in Eliezer’s case, and Eliezer definitely isn’t ‘LessWrong’.

  It seems we disagree on this factual issue. Eliezer does think there is a risk of acausal blackmail, or else he wouldn’t have banned discussion of it.

• anon85Oct 6, 2015, 5:38 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  I’m not the person you replied to, but I mostly agree with (a) and reject (b). There’s no way you can could possibly know enough about a not-yet-existing entity to understand any of its motivations; the entities that you’re thinking about and the entities that will exist in the future are not even close to the same. I outlined some more thoughts here.

• anon85Oct 6, 2015, 5:25 PM

  −5 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  If a philosophical framework causes you to accept a basilisk, I view that as grounds for rejecting the framework, not for accepting the basilisk. The basilisk therefore poses no danger at all to me: if someone presented me with a valid version, it would merely cause me to reconsider my decision theory or something. As a consequence, I’m in favor of discussing basilisks as much as possible (the opposite of EY’s philosophy).

  One of my main problems with LWers is that they swallow too many bullets. Sometimes bullets should be dodged. Sometimes you should apply modus tollens and not modus ponens. The basilisk is so a priori implausible that you should be extremely suspicious of fancy arguments claiming to prove it.

  To state it yet another way: to me, the basilisk has the same status as an ontological argument for God. Even if I can’t find the flaw in the argument, I’m confident in rejecting it anyway.

  What links here?

  • anon85's comment on A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk by Rob Bensinger (Oct 6, 2015, 5:38 PM; -2 points)

• anon85Oct 6, 2015, 5:16 PM

  −6 points

  in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  I’m not sure what your point is here. Would you mind re-phrasing? (I’m pretty sure I understand the history of Roko’s Basilisk, so your explanation can start with that assumption.)

  For example, someone who thinks LWers are overly panicky about AI and overly fixated on decision theory should still reject Auerbach’s assumption that LWers are irrationally panicky about Newcomb’s Problem or acausal blackmail; the one doesn’t follow from the other.

  My point was that LWers are irrationally panicky about acausal blackmail: they think Basilisks are plausible enough that they ban all discussion of them!

  (Not all LWers, of course.)

• anon85Oct 6, 2015, 4:22 AM

  0 points

  on: A few mis­con­cep­tions sur­round­ing Roko’s basilisk

  I think saying “Roko’s arguments [...] weren’t generally accepted by other Less Wrong users” is not giving the whole story. Yes, it is true that essentially nobody accepts Roko’s arguments exactly as presented. But a lot of LW users at least thought something along these lines was plausible. Eliezer thought it was so plausible that he banned discussion of it (instead of saying “obviously, information hazards cannot exist in real life, so there is no danger discussing them”).

  In other words, while it is true that LWers didn’t believe Roko’s basilisk, they thought is was plausible instead of ridiculous. When people mock LW or Eliezer for believing in Roko’s Basilisk, they are mistaken, but not completely mistaken—if they simply switched to mocking LW for believing the basilisk is plausible, they would be correct (though the mocking would still be mean, of course).

• anon85Sep 30, 2015, 8:17 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Elo’s comment on: The ap­pli­ca­tion of the sec­re­tary prob­lem to real life dating

  my variation: choose the next candidate after 1/​e trials that is better than 90% of existing trials. Why?: if you have a low number of candidates: worked solution − 10 candidates. you should (according to the secretary problem) interview 4 candidates, then select the next one that is better than the ones before.

  Why n/​e, and not some other number? Why 90%, and not some other amount? Come to think of it, shouldn’t the value of the candidates matter, and not just the rank? For example, if I know my candidates’ utility is sampled from [-1000,1000] and the first candidate I see has value 1000, would you recommend that I discard her? Or if I don’t know the range, do I at least have a prior distribution for it?

• anon85Sep 30, 2015, 2:52 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Elo’s comment on: The ap­pli­ca­tion of the sec­re­tary prob­lem to real life dating

  By changing the strategy from “first candidate better than the ones seen in the first n/​e” to anything else, you lose all the rigorous mathematical backing that made the secretary problem cool in the first place. Is your solution optimal? Near-optimal? Who knows; it depends on your utility function and the distribution of candidates, and probably involves ugly integrals with no closed-form solution.

  The whole point of the secretary problem is that a very precise way of stating the problem has a cool mathematical answer (the n/​e strategy). But this precise statement of the problem is almost always useless in practice, so there’s very little insight gained.

• anon85Sep 29, 2015, 11:25 PM

  12 points

  on: The ap­pli­ca­tion of the sec­re­tary prob­lem to real life dating

  The secretary problem is way overused, and very rarely has any application in practice. This is because it maximizes the probability of finding the best match, and NOT the expectation over the utility of the match your get. This is almost never what you want in practice; in practice, you don’t care much between a match with utility 1000 and a match with utility 999, you just want to avoid a match with utility −1000.

• anon85Sep 17, 2015, 5:20 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: AndreInfante’s comment on: MIT Tech­nol­ogy Re­view—Michael Hen­dricks opinion on Cryonics

  You might be interested in Aaronson’s proposed theory for why it might be physically impossible to copy a human brain. He outlined it in “The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine”: http://​​arxiv.org/​​abs/​​1306.0159

  In that essay he discusses a falsifiable theory of the brain that, if true, would mean brain states are un-copyable. So Yudkowsky’s counter-argument may be a little too strong: it is indeed consistent with modern physics for brain simulation to be impossible.

• anon85 15 Sep 2015 6:42 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: How To Win The AI Box Ex­per­i­ment (Some­times)

  That might be Eliezer’s stated objection. I highly doubt it’s his real one (which seems to be something like “not releasing the logs makes me seem like a mysterious magician, which is awesome”). After all, if the goal was to make the AI-box escape seem plausible to someone like me, then releasing the logs—as in this post—helps much more than saying “nya nya, I won’t tell you”.

• anon85 16 Jun 2015 20:16 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Gleb_Tsipursky’s comment on: Sup­port­ing Effec­tive Altru­ism through spread­ing rationality

  Okay, let’s suppose for a second that I buy that teaching students to be goal oriented helps them significantly. That still leaves quite a few questions:

  1. Many school boards already try to teach students to be goal oriented. Certainly “list out realistic goals” was said to me countless times in my own schooling. What do you plan to do differently?

  2. There seems to be no evidence at all that LW material is better for life outcomes than any other self-help program, and some evidence that it’s worse. Consider this post (again by Scott): http://​​lesswrong.com/​​lw/​​9p/​​extreme_rationality_its_not_that_great/​​

• anon85 16 Jun 2015 5:13 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Gleb_Tsipursky’s comment on: Sup­port­ing Effec­tive Altru­ism through spread­ing rationality

  There’s also quite a bit of reason to be skeptical of that evidence. Here’s slatestarcodex’s take: http://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2015/​​03/​​11/​​too-good-to-be-true/​​