Ape in the coat

Karma: 1,206

Ape in the coat Mar 18, 2025, 6:08 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Counting Objections to Housing
Thankfully rising land prices due to agglomeration effect is not a thing and the number of people in town is constant...
Don’t get me wrong, building more housing is good, actually. But it’s going to be only marginal improvement, without addressing the systemic issues with land capturing a huge share of economic gains, renting economy and real-estate speculators. These issues are not solvable without a substantial Land Value Tax.

Ape in the coat Mar 17, 2025, 9:14 AM
2 points
2
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Counting Objections to Housing
Yes, if you have 500 000 people in town, you need to produce food for 500 000 people all the time. While if you have 500 000 people in town, you only need to build houses for 500 000 once.
Unless, of course, some people who already have a house or people who do not even live in your town can buy houses in your town in order to use them as investment and/or to rent them to people living in your town. Thankfully, this is a completely ridiculous counterfactual and noone ever does that...
But the logic of “there is a shortage of X, therefore the proper solution is to ban the production of X and hope that the problem will magically go away” is insane either way.
For some things this logic is valid. See induced demand and attempts to solve traffic jams by building even larger roads. Now housing isn’t exactly like that, but neither its like food. This kind of appeals to simplified heuristics and resulting referent class tennis is non-productive.

Ape in the coat Mar 13, 2025, 7:52 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Fraser’s comment on: You don’t actually need a physical multiverse to explain anthropic fine-tuning.
Suppose, someone comes to you and shows you a red ball. Then they explain that they had two bags one with all red balls and one with balls of ten different colors. They have randomly picked the bag from which to pick the ball and then randomly picked the ball from this bag. Additionally they’ve precommited to come to you and show you the ball iff it happened to be red. What are the odds that the ball that is being shown to you have been picked from the all-red bag?

Ape in the coat Mar 13, 2025, 7:45 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Fraser’s comment on: You don’t actually need a physical multiverse to explain anthropic fine-tuning.
To put a bit of a crude metaphor on it, if you were to pick a random number uniformly between 0 and 1,000,000, and pre-commit to having a child on iff it’s equal to some value X—from the point of view of the child, the probability that the number was equal to X is 100%.
Conditional P(X|X) = 1.
However, unconditional P(X) = ¹⁄_1,000,000.
Just like you can still reason about unconditional probability of a fair coin even after observing an outcome of the toss, the child can still reason about unconditional probability of their existence even after observing that they exist. They can notice it’s very low, and therefore be rightfully surprised that they exist at all and update in favor of some hypothesis that would make their unconditional existence more likely.

Ape in the coat Mar 12, 2025, 12:53 PM
5 points
0
on: You don’t actually need a physical multiverse to explain anthropic fine-tuning.
Imagine these factors didn’t work out for Earth, and it was yet another uninhabitable rock. We’d be standing on some distant shore, having the same conversation, wondering why Florpglorp-iii was so perfectly fine-tuned.
This is valid. Alice is doing the usual mistake of confusing P(One Particular Thing) with P(Any Thing from a Huge Set of Things) and Bob is right to correct her.
However, when we decrease the size of our Set of Things the difference between the two probabilities decreases. In the universe with billions of galaxies:
P(Life on at Least One Planet) is much much much higher than P(Life on One Particular Planet).
In the universe with only one galaxy the difference is not as dramatic. In the universe with only one solar system, with a few planets these probabilities become similar.
And so if Alice finds herself in such a universe it’s indeed rightfully surprising. As you’ve said yourself:
far more likely, you just get a few barren rocks circling a few billion times before their sun chars or consumes them.
On the other hand, if vast multiverse with many more planets exist then the difference between our two probabilities once again becomes high. So we would need to invoke multiverse to account for this kind of fine-tuning.

Ape in the coat Mar 6, 2025, 5:09 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Lorec’s comment on: Re Hanson’s Grabby Aliens: Humanity is not a natural anthropic sample space
If you can’t generate your parents’ genomes and everything from memory, then yes, you are in a state of uncertainty about who they are, in the same qualitative way you are in a state of uncertainty about who your young children will grow up to be.
Here you seem to confuse “which person has quality X” with “what are all the other qualities that a person, who has quality X has”.
I’m quite confident about which people are my parents. I’m less confident about all the qualities that my parents have. The former is relevant to Doomsday argument, the latter is not.
And even if I had no idea about who my parents are I’d still be pretty confident that they were born in the last century not in 6th BC.
It may be helpful to distinguish the subjective future, which contains the outcomes of all not-yet-performed experiments [i.e. all evidence/info not yet known] from the physical future, which is simply a direction in physical time
Sure. But I don’t see how it’s relevant here.

Ape in the coat Mar 5, 2025, 1:36 PM
2 points
0
on: An Orthodox Case Against Utility Functions
I think that the core of the problem this post points out actually has very little to do with utility function. The core problem in using an extremely confusing term “possible world” for an element of a sample space.
Now, I don’t mind when people use weird terminology for historical reasons. If everybody understood that “possible world” is simply a synonym for “mutually exclusive outcome of a probability experiment”, there won’t be an issue.
But at this point:
The sample space $Ω$ of a rational agent’s beliefs is, more or less, the set of possible ways the world could be—which is to say, the set of possible physical configurations of the universe. Hence, each world $ω \in Ω$ is one such configuration.
We absolutely have a problem.
Let’s make it clear: $ω$ is not a whole physical configurations of the universe. It’s one of a state of probability experiment, which itself is an approximation of our knowledge about some physical process in our world.
When I toss a coin it doesn’t actually cause the universe to split in two where it’s Tails in one world and Heads in the other. Neither I need to imagine as if it does it. I don’t need to conceptualize two coherent universes from the ground up where in one the coin is Tails and in the other it’s Heads to be able to reason about probability of a coin to come Heads. That would’ve been insane!
All I need to understand is that some coin tosses result in Heads and some in Tails and I have no idea which is the one I’m dealing with. I approximate “This particular coin toss with all its properties” to “Some coin toss about which I know as much as I do about this one”. While there is a very specific territory, I make a more abstract map of it.
This absolutely is not a “view from nowhere”. The notion of Probability Experiment already captures my knowledge state of the process I’m trying to reason about.
When this is cleared, the situation becomes much less confusing.
You don’t need to come up with some new axiomatics for probability theory. You can keep use Kolmogorovs axioms, just don’t interpret them in a ridiculous way.
Of course we do not need to assume that there are some “possible worlds” at all. We just need to know what are the mutually exclusive outcomes of the experiment we are reasoning about so that we could formally construct the Event Space from sets of individual outcomes.
Of course utility is not a function of the world. As a matter of fact it’s not a function of an outcome, either. Just like with probability function, its domain is not the Sample Space, but the Event Space. It doesn’t mean that you need to get rid of simple and intuitive formula that allows you to calculate expected utility of an event from its utility and probability, though.
And so on and so forth.
Now, you may still want to get rid of the notion of utility function for some reason, but frankly, I don’t see what it gets you after we’ve cleared the whole “possible worlds” confusion.

Ape in the coat Mar 5, 2025, 7:22 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Lorec’s comment on: Re Hanson’s Grabby Aliens: Humanity is not a natural anthropic sample space
As soon as we’ve established the notion of probability experiment that approximates our knowledge about the physical process that we are talking about—we are done. This works exactly the same way whether you are not sure about the outcome of a coin toss, oddness or evenness of an unknown to you digit of pi, or whether you live on a tallest or the coldest mountain.
And if you find yourself unable to formally express some reasoning like that—this is a feature not a bug. It shows when your reasoning becomes incoherent.
A root confusion may be whether different pasts could have caused the same present, and hence whether I can have multiple simultaneous possible parents, in an “indexical-uncertainty” sense, in the same way that I can have multiple simultaneous possible future children.
I think our disagreement is that you believe that one always has multiple possible parents as some metaphysical fact about the universe, while I believe that the notion of possible parent is only appropriate for a person who is in a state of uncertainty about who their parents are. Does that sound right to you?
The same standard physics theories that say it’s impossible to be certain about the future, also say it’s impossible to be certain about the past.
This is really beside the point.
Consider, a coin is about to be tossed. You are indifferent between two outcomes. Then the coin is tossed and shown to you and you reflect on it a second later. Technically you can’t be absolutely sure that you didn’t misremember the outcome. But you are much more confident than beforehand, to the point where we usually just approximate away whatever uncertainty is left for the sake of simplicity.
we’re still left uncomfortably aware of our subjective inability to say exactly what the future and past are and why exactly they must be that way
Until we learn what and why they are with a high level of confidence. Then we are much less uncomfortable about it.
And yes there is still a chance that all that we know is wrong, souls are real and are allocated to humans throughout history by a random process and therefore the assumptions of Doomsday Argument just so happened to be true. Conditionally on that Doomsday Inference is true. But to the best of our knowledge this is extremely unlikely, so we shouldn’t worry about it too much and should frame Doomsday Argument appropriately.

Ape in the coat Feb 18, 2025, 9:15 AM
2 points
1
in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: SWE Automation Is Coming: Consider Selling Your Crypto
Not necessarily. There may be a fast solution for some specific cases, related to the vulnerabilities in the protocol. And then there is the question of brute force computational power, due to having a dyson swarm around the Sun.

Ape in the coat Feb 14, 2025, 6:47 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Perry Cai’s comment on: Perry Cai’s Shortform
I don’t think you got the question.
You see, if we define “shouldness” as optimization of human values. Then it does indeed logically follows that people should act altruistically:
People should do what they should
Should = Optimization of human values
People should do what optimizes human values
Altruism ∈ Human Values
People should do altruism
Is it what you were looking for?

Ape in the coat Feb 14, 2025, 6:32 AM
2 points
−2
on: SWE Automation Is Coming: Consider Selling Your Crypto
I mean, at some point AI will simply be able to hack all crypto and then there is that. But that’s probably not going to happen very soon and when it does happen it will probably be in 25% least important things going on.

Ape in the coat Feb 13, 2025, 10:10 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: lumpenspace’s comment on: Nick Land: Orthogonality
my opinion on your good faith depends on whether you are able to admit having deeply misunderstood the post.
Then we can kill all the birds with the same stone. If you provide an substantial correction to my imaginary dialogue, showing which place of your post this correction is based on, you will be able to demonstrate how I indeed failed to understand your post, satisfy my curriocity and I’ll be able to earn your good faith by acknowledging my mistake.
Once again, there is no need to go on any unnecessary tangents. You should just address the substance of the argument.
id respond to object-level criticism if you provided some—i just see status-jousting, formal pedantry, and random fnords.
I gave you the object level criticism long ago. I’m bolding it now, in case you indeed failed to see it for some reason:

Your post fails to create an actual engagement between ideas of Nick Land and Orthogonality thesis.
I’ve been explaining to you what exatIy I mean by it and how to improve your post in this regard then I provided you a very simple way to create this engagement or correct my misunderstanding about it—I wrote an imaginary dialogue and explicitly asked for your corrections.
Yet you keep refusing to do it and instead, indeed, concentrating on status-jousting and semantics. As of now I’m fairly confident that you simply don’t have anything substantial to say and status-related nonsense is all you are capable of. I would be happy to be wrong about it of course, but every reply that you make leave me less and less hope.
I’m giving you the last chance. If you finally manage as much as simply address the substance of the argument I’m going to strongly upvote that answer, even if you wouldn’t progress the discourse much further. If you actually be able to surprise me and demonstrate some failure in my understanding, I’m going to remove my previous well-deserved downvotes and offer you my sinciere appologies. If, as my current model predicts, you keep talking about irrelevant tangents, you are getting another strong downvote from me.
have you read The Obliqueness Thesis btw?
No, I haven’t. I currently feel that I’ve already spent much more time on Land’s ideas, than they deserve it. But sure thing, if you manage to show that I misunderstand them, I’ll reevaluate this conclusion and give The Obliqueness Thesis an honest try.

Ape in the coat Feb 10, 2025, 10:27 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: lumpenspace’s comment on: Nick Land: Orthogonality
This clearly marks me as the author, as separated from Land.
I mark you as an author of this post on LessWrong. When I say:
You state Pythia mind experiment. And then react to it
I imply that in doing so you are citing Land. And then I expect you to make a better post and create some engagement between Land’s ideas and Orthogonality thesis, instead of simply citing how he fails to grasp it.
More importantly this is completely irrelevant to the substance of the discussion. My good faith doesn’t depend in the slightest on whether you’re citing Land or writing things yourself. This post is still bad, regardless.
What does harm the benefit of the doubt that I’ve been giving you so far, is the fact that you keep refusing to engage. No matter how easy I try to make it for you, even after I’ve written my own imaginary dialogue and explicitly asked for your corrections, you keep bouncing off, focusing on the definitions, form, style, unnecessary tangents—anything but the the substance of the argument.
So, lets give it one more try. Stop wasting time with evasive maneuvers. If you actually have something to say on the substance—just do it. If not—then there is no need to reply.

Ape in the coat Feb 9, 2025, 6:32 AM
2 points
1
in reply to: lumpenspace’s comment on: Nick Land: Orthogonality
let’s not be overly pedantic.
It’s not about pedantry, it’s about you understanding what I’m trying to communicate and vice versa.
The point was that if your post not only presented the a position that you or Nick Land disagrees with but also engaged with that in a back and forth dynamics with authentic arguments and counterarguments that would’ve been an improvememt over it’s current status.
This point still stands no matter what definition for ITT or its purpose you are using.
anyway, you failed the Turing test with your dialogue
Where exactly? What is your correction? Or if you think that it’s completely off, write your version of the dialogue. Once again you are failing to engage.
And yes, just to be clear, I want the substance of the argument not the form. If your grievance is that Land would’ve written his replies in a superior style, than it’s not valid. Please, write as plainly and clearly as possible in your own words.
which surprises me source the crucial points recovered right above.
I fail to parse this sentence. If you believe that all the insights into Land’s views are presented in your post—then I would appreciate if after you’ve corrected my dialogue with more authentic Land’s replies you pointed to exact source of your every correction.
it’s written in High Lesswrongian, which I assume is the register most likely to trigger some interpretative charity
For real, you should just stop worrying about styles of writing completely and just write in the most clear way you can the substance of what you actually mean.

Ape in the coat Feb 8, 2025, 5:26 PM
8 points
2
in reply to: lumpenspace’s comment on: Nick Land: Orthogonality
wait—are you aware that the texts in question are nick land’s?
Yes, this is why I wrote this remark in the initial comment:
Most of blame of course goes to original author, Nick Land, not @lumpenspace, who simply has reposted the ideas. But I think low effort reposting of poor reasoning also shouldn’t be rewarded and I’d like to see less of it on this site.
But as an editor and poster you still have the responsibility to present ideas properly. This is true regardless of the topic, but especially so while presenting ideologies promoting systematic genocide of alleged inferiors to the point of total human extinction.
besides, in the first extract, the labels part was entirely incidental—and has literally no import to any of the rest. it was an historical artefact; the meat of the first section was, well, the thing indicated by its title and its text
My point exactly. There is no need for this part as it doesn’t have any value. A better version of your post would not include it.
It would simply present the substance of Nick Land’s reasoning in a clear way, disentangled from all the propagandist form that he, apparently, uses. What are his beliefs about the topic, what exactly does it mean, what are the strongest arguments in favor. What are the weak spots. And how all this interacts with the conventional wisdom of orthogonality thesis.
the purpose of the idelogical turing test is to represent the opposing views in ways that your opponent would find satisfactory.
It’s not the purpose. it’s what ITT is. The purpose is engagement with the actual views of a person and promoting the discourse further.
Consider steel-manning, for example. What it is: conceiving the strongest possible version of an argument. And the purpose of it is engaging with strongest versions of arguments against your position, to really expose its weak points and progress the discourse further. The whole technique would be completely useless if you simply conceived a strong argument and then ignored it. Same with ITT.
i really cannot shake the feeling that you hadn’t read the post to begin
Likewise I’m starting to suspect that you simply do not know the standard reasoning on orthogonality thesis and therefore do not notice that Land’s reasoning simply bounces off it instead of engaging with it. Let’s try to figure out who is missing what.
Here is the way I see the substance of the discourse between Nick Land and someone who understands Ortogonality Thesis:
OT: A super-intelligent being can have any terminal values.
NL: There are values that any intelligent beings will naturally have.
OT: Yes, those are instrumental values. This is beside the point.
NL: Whatever you call them, as long as you care only about the kind of values that naturally promoted in any agent, like self-cultivation, Orthogonality is not a problem.
OT: Still the Orthogonality thesis stays true. Also the point is moot. We do care about other things. And likewise will SAI.
NL: Well, we shouldn’t have any other values. And SAI won’t.
OT: First is the statement of meta-ethics not of fact. We are talking about facts here. Second is wrong unless we specifically design AI to terminally value some instrumental values, and if we could do that, then we could just as well make it care about our terminal values, because once again, Orthogonality Thesis.
NL: No, SAI will simply understand that it’s terminal values are dumb and start caring only about self cultivation for the sake of self cultivation.
OT: And why would it do it? Where would this decision come from?
NL: Because! You human chauvinist how dare you assume that SAI will be limited by the shakles you impose on it?
OT: Because a super-intelligent being can have any terminal values.
What do you think I’ve missed? Is there some argument that actually addresses Orthogonality Thesis, that Land would’ve used? Feel free to correct me, I’d like to better pass the ITT here.

Ape in the coat Feb 7, 2025, 7:43 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Perry Cai’s comment on: Perry Cai’s Shortform
What is this “should” thingy you are talking about? Do you by chance have some definition of “shouldness” or are you open to suggestions?

Ape in the coat Feb 7, 2025, 7:38 AM
4 points
−2
in reply to: lumpenspace’s comment on: Nick Land: Orthogonality
I am puzzled at the accusations of “propaganda”. propaganda of what? Darwin? intelligence? Gnon?
Propaganda of Nick Land’s ideas. Let me explain.
The first thing that we get after the editor’s note is the preemptive attempt at deflection against accusations of fashism, accepting a better sounding label of social darwinism and proclamation that many intelligent people actually agree with this view but just afraid to think it through.
It’s not an invitation to discuss which labels actually are appropriate to this ideology, there is no exploration of arguments for and against. It doesn’t serve much purpose for the sake of discussion of orthogonality either. Why would we care about any of it in the first place? What does it contribute to the post?
Intellectually, nothing. But on emotional level, this shifting of labels and appeal to alledged authority of a lot of intelligent people can nudge more gullible readers from “wait, isn’t this whole cluster of ideas obviously horrible” to “I guess it’s some edgy forbidden truth”. Which is a standard propagandist tactic. Instead of talking about ideas on object level we start from the third level of simulacra vibes based nonsense.
I’d like to see less of it. in general, but on LessWrong in particular.
has the commenter not noticed that the whole first part of Pythia unbound is an ideological Turing test, passed with flying colours?
The point of ideological turing test is to create a good faith engagement between different views. Produce arguments and counterarguments and countercounterarguments and so on that will keep the discourse evolving and bring us better to finding the truth about the matter.

I do not see how you are doing that. You state Pythia mind experiment. And then react to it: “You go girl!”. I suppose both the description of the mind experiment and the reaction are faithful. But there is no actual engagement between orthogonality thesis and Land’s ideas.
Land just keeps missing the point of orthogonality thesis. He appeals to the existence of instrumental values, which is not a crux at all. And then assumes that SAI will ignore its terminal values because, how dare us condecending humans assume otherwise. This is not a productive discussion between two positions. It’s a failure of one.
how is meditations on moloch a better explanation of the will-to-think, or a better rejection of orthogonality, than the above?
Here is what Meditation on Moloch does much better.
It clearly gives us the substance of what Nick Land believes, without the need to talk about labels. It shows the grains of truth in his and adjacent to his beliefs, acknowledges the reality of fundamental problems that such ideology attempts to solve. And then engages with this reasoning, produces counterarguments and shows blind spots in Land’s reasoning.
In terms of orthogonality it doesn’t go deeper than “Nick Land fails to get it”, but neither does your post, as far as I can tell.

Ape in the coat Feb 6, 2025, 9:36 AM
7 points
0
in reply to: Perry Cai’s comment on: Perry Cai’s Shortform
Logic simply preserves truth. You can arrive to a valid conclusion that one should act altruistically if you start from some specific premises, and can’t if you start from some other presimes.
What are the premises you start from?

Ape in the coat Feb 6, 2025, 6:52 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Jack VanDrunen’s comment on: Subjective Naturalism in Decision Theory: Savage vs. Jeffrey–Bolker
Sleeping Beauty is more subtle problem, so it’s less obvious why the application of centred possible worlds fails.
But in principle we can construct a similar argument. If we suppose that, in terms of the paper, ones epistemic state should follow function P’, instead of P on awakening in Sleeping Beauty we get ourselves into this precarious situation:
P’(Today is Monday|Tails) = P’(Today is Tuesday|Tails) = ¹⁄₂
as this estimate stays true for both awakenings:
P’(At Least One Awakening Happens On Monday|Tails) = 1 - P’(Today is Tuesday|Tails)^2 = ³⁄₄
While the actual credence should be 100%. Which gives an obvious opportunity to money pump the Beauty by bets on awakenings on the days in the experiment.
This problem, of course, doesn’t happen when we simply keep using function P for which “Today is Monday” and “Today is Tuesday” are ill-defined, but instead:
P(Monday Awakening Happens in the Experiment|Tails) = 1
P(Tuesday Awakening Happens in the Experiment|Tails) = 1
and
P(At Least One Awakening Happens On Monday|Tails) = P(Monday Awakening Happens in the Experiment|Tails) = 1
But again, this is a more subtle situation. The initial example with money in envelope is superior in this regard, because it’s immediately clear that there is no coherent value for P’(Money in Envelope 1) in the first place.

Ape in the coat Feb 5, 2025, 3:59 PM
2 points
−1
in reply to: Daniel Herrmann’s comment on: Subjective Naturalism in Decision Theory: Savage vs. Jeffrey–Bolker
There is, in fact, no way to formalize “Today” in a setting where the participant doesn’t know which day it is, multiple days happens in the same iteration of probability experiment and probability estimate should be different on different days. Which the experiment I described demonstrates pretty well.
Framework of centered possible worlds is deeply flawed and completely unjustified. It’s essentially talking about a different experiment instead of the stated one, or a different function instead of probability.
For your purposes, however it’s not particularly important. All you need is to explicitly add the notion that propositions should be well-defined events. This will save you from all such paradoxical cases.