Ape in the coat

Karma: 1,288

Ape in the coat May 16, 2025, 9:36 AM
15 points
13
in reply to: SurfingOrca’s comment on: Doomers Should try Much Harder to get Famous
That has been the default strategy for many years and it failed dramatically.
All the “convinced influential people in tech”, started making their own AI start-ups, while comming up with galaxy-brained rationalizations why everything will be okay with their idea in particular. We tried to be nice to them in order not to lose our influence with them. Turned out we didn’t have any. While we carefully and respectfully showed the problems with their reasoning, they likewise respectfully nodded their heads and continued to burn the AI timelines. Who could’ve though that people who have a real chance to become incredibly rich and important at the cost of dooming human civilization a bit later, are going to take this awesome opportunity?
Meanwhile, surprisingly enough, it turned out that regular “100 IQ individuals” with no prospect to become absurdly rich and powerful actually do not want an apocalypse! Too bad that we have already stained our reputation quite a bit, while appearing as bootlickers to the tech-billionares for all these years, but better late than never.
There is a lesson about naivity/cynycism and personal bias here. How it’s much more pleasant to persuade influential elites than common masses. The former feels like respectable intellectual activity, while the latter like—gah! - politics, something what crazy activists would do. And it’s good that we’ve managed to learn it, diversifying our activity and trying to appeal to common people more. Would’ve been even better if managed to win initially, instead of making this kind of fascinating mistake, but sadly we are not that good at rationality yet.

Ape in the coat May 15, 2025, 6:23 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: rogersbacon’s comment on: Behold the Pale Child (escaping Moloch’s Mad Maze)
I will take blame for not making it clear that this is an introduction to a much larger body of thought
I’ll have another essay in a few weeks—I will send it to you and I look forward to your criticism.
This does provide the necessary context absolving the post from the main blow of my critique, for the time being. Looking forward for your next essay!
I would be glad if your future reasoning gave me some novel insight, and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt about it and will do my best to approach it open-mindedly. But as of now, I’m afraid, your conclusions are going to be based on a false premise. I’m going to highlight what I think it is—feel free to address this concern in your future essays.
But first, let’s establish some common ground.
I want to live in a universe where surprising things happen and the aforementioned delusions still have a place. In some sense, I want to turn the world and its ways upside down—I want the weak and the deluded to win—but how?
I agree with the sentiment. That’s why the whole “How to get rid of Moloch” question is important to me.
Then you say:
Not through rational intelligence or “work” because that is exactly how the null hypothesis becomes fulfilled. Reality is like a chinese finger trap, struggling only deepens your entrapment.
And this is wrong. The Molochian equilibrium appeared long before any rational intelligences came into existence and thought about it in terms of game theory. Evolution through natural selection—the creator of our brains—is already a facet of Moloch. It’s not rational thought that traps us in the maze of Moloch—as you mention yourself, the rational approach to reality is a relatively late thing. Moloch predates it by millions of years.
All the playfullness and childiness and dramatic dimensions work to Molochs goals just as much as workfullness and adultness and straightforward approach. That’s the horror of the situation to begin with. It’s not that everyone is just doing their best to be a profit maximizer and noone has ever thought about chilling a bit and appreciating the beauty of the sunrize and as soon as we try, the grip of Moloch fails on us. It’s that those who try that are systematically eliminated and the survivors become even more enslaved by Moloch as a result.
I think Scott did a very good job at explaining this point, so I’m not sure why you are making this mistake. My current best guess is wishful thinking. That’s what I got from reading your essay and it didn’t change after this comment. But, once again, I would be happy to be proven wrong in this regard, so waiting for your next essay on the topic.

Ape in the coat May 14, 2025, 6:27 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: rogersbacon’s comment on: Behold the Pale Child (escaping Moloch’s Mad Maze)
Metaphors and poetry are great when they highlight a valid intellectual point you are trying to make, allowing to engage with it on emotional level. Meditations on Moloch, that you cite, have quite a lot of that and are beloved.
It’s even okay when metaphors and poetry obfuscate your point a little. Indeed, some people prefer their reading material to be less on the nose, and enjoy deciphering hidden meanings. There are both pros and cons and matters of taste here. But ultimately you won’t be ostracised for that.
What is not okay, is when your post lacks substance and hides this in flowerly language. When you have nothing to say on the topic beyond cashed “deep wisdom” and pleasant vibes but still pretend as if you do. This can feel offensive, especially if your post managed to create an expectation of some interesting insight into a complicated problem and then failed to deliver.
If you feel that I’ve misjudged you, and actually there is a valid and interesting point in this post, which I failed to grasp due to the artlessness of my intelligence, here is my offer: write your answer to the problem of Moloch in the plainest language possible so that even someone who truly abhors metaphor and poetry would be able to get it. And then if, it turns out to be good, I’ll replace my downvote on this post with a strong upvote. Alternatively, I’ll give you an explanation why your point is bad and how you could’ve seen it yourself.

Ape in the coat May 13, 2025, 10:53 AM
3 points
1
on: Game theory of “Nuclear Prisoner’s Dilemma”—on nuking rocks
The optimal strategy seems to be Prudent Extorter:
1. Extort agents vulnerable to extortion
2. Cooperate with agents that are not vulnerable to extortions and will cooperate back.
3. Defect against everyone else.
Such agents perform better than your Naive Extorter as they would be able to cooperate with each other and do not nuke a Defection Rock.
When Naive Extorter meets Prudent Extorter they die in a nuclear fire.

Ape in the coat May 12, 2025, 11:43 AM
4 points
3
on: a confusion about preference orderings
You can in fact have an agent who prefers to be money pumped. And from their perspective there is no problem with that.
Money pumps isn’t a universal argument that could persuade a rock to turn into a brain. It’s just an appeal to our own human intuitions.

Ape in the coat May 11, 2025, 7:27 PM
3 points
−2
on: Behold the Pale Child (escaping Moloch’s Mad Maze)
It really seemed that you are going somewhere with all this, and then it turned out that you are not. All these beautiful metaphors, complicated topics, all the reference to works of other authors—all for naught. Form without a substance. Question was raised and then a complete lack of answer was produced.
That’s quite dissapointing. And makes this post a poor story.

Ape in the coat Apr 28, 2025, 4:18 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Experimental testing: can I treat myself as a random sample?
hich For example, If I use self-sampling to estimate the number of seconds in the year, I will get a correct answer of around several tens of millions. But using word generator will never output a word longer than 100 letters.
Using the month of your birth to estimate the number of seconds in the year also won’t work well, unless you multiply it by number of seconds in a month.
Likewise here. You can estimate the number of months in a year by number of letters in the world and then multiply it by number of seconds in a months.
I didn’t understand your idea here
Consider this.
Parents of person A tried really hard to give birth to A on the first of January and indeed it happened
Person B just so happened to be born on the first of January
Parents of person C tried really hard to give birth to C on the 15th of June and indeed it happened
Person D just so happened to be born on the 15th of June
Here date of births of B and D can be approximated as randomly sampled, while A and C are not. Your test, however will return that C and D can treat themselves as random sample, making both false positive and false negative errors.
This is because your test simply checks the distance from the mean value which, while somewhat correlated to being a result of random sampling, is a completely different thing.

Ape in the coat Apr 23, 2025, 7:01 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Experimental testing: can I treat myself as a random sample?
You chose word length generator as you know that typical length of words is 1-10. Thus not random.
This is not relevant to my point. After all you also know that typical month is 1-12
No, the point is that I specifically selected a number via an algorithm that has nothing to do with sampling months. And yet your test outputs positive result anyway. Therefore your test is unreliable.
I didn’t rejected any results – it works in any test I have imagined
That’s exactly the problem. Essentially you are playing a 2,4,6 game, got no negative result yet and are already confident about the rule.
Note that alphabet letter count is not cyclical as well as my distance to equator.
Distance to equator is in fact cyclical in a very literal sense. Alphabet letters do not have anything to do with random sampling of you through time.
If I were born 1 of January, I would get years duration 2 days which is very wrong.
It’s not more wrong for a person whose parents specifically tried to give birth at this date than for a person who just happened to be born at this time without any planning. And even in this extreme situation your mistake is limited by two orders of magnitude. There is no such guarantee in DA.

Ape in the coat Apr 23, 2025, 5:11 AM
4 points
0
on: Experimental testing: can I treat myself as a random sample?
First of all, your experimental method can really benefit from a control group. Pick a setting where a thing is definitely not randomly sampled from a set. Perform your experiment and see what happens.
Consider. I generated a random word using this site https://randomwordgenerator.com/
This word turned out to be “mosaic”. It has 6 letters. Let’s test whether it’s length is randomly sampled from the number of months in a year.
As 6*2=12, this actually works perfectly, even better than estimating the number of months in a year based on your birth month!
It also works decently to estimate several other things. The number of hours in a day, number of days in a months. Number of minutes in an hour. It gets the order of magnitude right! If we use the number of minutes in your 15:14 timestamp to estimate the number of minutes in an hour we are simularly off.
Worse with number of days in a week and number of days in a year. But it’s mistaken by only one order of magnitude, maybe it’s also okay?
At this point the problems with your methodology should be clear:
- You didn’t describe beforehand the criterions for accepting or rejecting a hypothesis.
- You didn’t describe beforehand which hypothesis you were planning to test.
- You were testing only hypothesis where you expected a positive answer.
Secondly, if we want to talk about DA or SH, there is the whole jump from
“I can approximate my birth date as a random sample from all the days in the month/months in a year”
to
“I can approximate my birth rank as a random sample from all the births of people throughout history/starting from the moment of knowing about DA”.
The latter doesn’t follow from the former, even though in semantic terms both can potentially be described as random sampling of a person throughout time.
The cyclical nature of days in a months and months in a year never allows you to be off more than by an order of magnitude. Even if your parents specifically timed your conception to give you birth on the first of January, therefore putting you in a very specific “reference class”, you won’t be extremely mistaken about these numbers following your methodology.
On the other hand, there is no such gurantee for birth orders of a people which work as natural numbers, not as elements of a finite field.

Ape in the coat Apr 21, 2025, 4:49 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Prediction Markets Are Mediocre
I personally didn’t expect Trump to do any tarrifs at all
Just curious, how comes? Were you simply not paying attention to what he was saying? Or were you not believing in his promises?

Ape in the coat Apr 21, 2025, 4:46 AM
3 points
−1
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Prediction Markets Are Mediocre
I think “mediocre” is a quite appropriate adjective when describing a thing that we had high hopes for, but now received evidence, according to which while the thing technically works, it performs worse than expected, and the most exciting use cases are not validated.
I indeed used a single example here, so the strength of the evidence is arguable, but I don’t see why this case should be an outlier. I could’ve searched for more, like this one, that is particularly bad:

In any case, you can consider this post my public prediction that other policy prediction markets would also follow a similar thread.

Ape in the coat Apr 21, 2025, 4:35 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: Probability Theory Fundamentals 102: Territory that Probability is in the Map of
I think the problem here is that you do not quite understand the problem.
There is definetely some kind of misunderstanding that is going on, and I’d like to figure it out.
It’s not that we “imagine that we’ve imagined the whole world, do not notice any contradictions and call it a day”.
How it’s not the case? Citing you from here:
When you are conditioning on empirical fact, you are imaging set of logically consistent worlds where this empirical fact is true and ask yourself about frequency of other empirical facts inside this set.
How do you know which worlds are logically consistent with your observations and which are not? For that you need to hold them in your mind one by one with all their details and checks for inconsistencies. Which requires you to be a logically omniscient supercomputator with unlimited memory. And none of us is that.
So you have to be doing something else. Only validate the consistency to the best of your cognitive resources, therefore—“imagine that we’ve imagined the whole world, do not notice any contradictions and call it a day”.
It’s that we know there exists idealized procedure which doesn’t produce stupid answers, like, it can’t be money-pumped.
Well, yes. That’s the goal. What I’m doing is trying to pinpoint this procedure without the framework of possible worlds which, among other things, doesn’t allow reasoning about logical uncertainty. I replace it with a better framework, of iterations of probability experiment that does allow that.
The whole computationally unbounded Bayesian business is more about “here is an idealized procedure X, and if we don’t do anything visibly for us stupid from perspective of X, then we can hope that our losses won’t be unbounded from certain notion of boundedness”. It is not obvious that your procedure can be understood this way.
The bayesian procedure is the same, we’ve just got rid of all the bizarre metaphysics and now explicitly talking about values of a function approximating something in the real world. What is not obvious for you here? Do you expect that there is some case in which my framework fails, where framework of possible worlds doesn’t? If so I’d like to see this example. But I’m also currious where such belief would even come from, considering that, once again, we simply talk about iterations of probability experiment instead of possible worlds.

Ape in the coat Apr 19, 2025, 7:20 AM
2 points
0
on: What’s the Deal with Logical Uncertainty?
In this post I’ve described a unified framework that allows to reason about any type of uncertainty be it logical or empirical. I would appreciate engagement from people who think that logical uncertainty is still unsolved.

Ape in the coat Apr 17, 2025, 5:18 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Six reasons why objective morality is nonsense
Are you arguing that the distinction between objective and subjective are “very unhelpful,” because the state of people’s subjective beliefs are technically an objective fact of the world?
It’s unhelpful due to a an implicit (and in our case somewhat explicit) assumption that “subjective” and “objective” are in opposition to each other. That it’s two different magisteriums and things are either one or the other.
why don’t you argue that all similar categorizations are unhelpful, e.g. map vs. territory
Map and territory framework lacks this assumption. It’s core insight is that maps can and indeed quite often are embedded in the territory. Of course if one does not understand it and uses “map and territory” simply as synonyms to “subjective and objective” then it doesn’t matter which terms are used and they are equally unhelpful.

Ape in the coat Apr 11, 2025, 5:24 AM
4 points
0
on: Six reasons why objective morality is nonsense
This debate seems hampered by a lack of clarity on what “objective” and “subjective” moralities are.
Absolutely.
Coyne gave a sensible definition of “objective” morality as being the stance that something can be discerned to be “morally wrong” through reasoning about facts about the world, rather than by reference to human opinion.
That’s a poor definition. It tries to oppose facts about the worlds to human opinions. While whether humans have particular opinions or not is also a matter of facts about the world.
The fault here lies on the terms itself. Such dychotomies as “objective/subjective” or “real/non-real” or “stance-independent/stance-dependent” are very unhelpful. Artifacts of ancient philosophy which didn’t understand map-territory relations, treated mind and matter as separate magisteriums and therefore were tremendously confused about basically everything, unable to separate baby from the bathwater.
I don’t think we need content on LessWrong that keeps perpetuating this confusion. Therefore, I’m downvoting this post even though I seem to agree with about 80% of it.

Ape in the coat Apr 10, 2025, 5:28 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Markvy’s comment on: Zombies! Substance Dualist Zombies?
Yes, you are correct! Thanks for noticing it.

Ape in the coat Apr 2, 2025, 9:20 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: The g-Zombie Formal Argument
Actually… I will say it: This feels like a fast rebranding of the Halting Problem, like without actually knowing what it implies.
Being able to rebrand an argument so that it could talk about a different problem in a valid way is exactly what is to understand it—not just repeat the same words in the same context that the teacher said but generalize it. We can go into the realm of second order logic and say that
For every property that at least one program has, a universal detector of this property has to itself have this property on at least some input.
Mind you, I wasn’t trying to prove you that I understand Turing’s proof. Previously, you claimed that your “argument follows exactly the same syllogistic structure (“If this, then that”) as Turing’s proof”. So I showed you what it actually is when an argument does follow the same structure. If what you are talking was just like that then you could simply do the same.
How would a virus (B) know what the antivirus (A) predicts about B?
By running a copy of antivirus software on its own code and checking its output. That’s a valid program.
it’s unintuitive — almost so that it’s false.
It can’t quarry an antivirus software.
Why not? Anivirus software is a valid program, it has some code that can be executed on some input. You can include execution of this code on a particular input in your own program. If this is not intuitive for you, then maybe it’s you who do not understand Turing’s proof?
But seems people here are not versed in classical computer science only shouting “Bayeism! Bayeism!”
Well, I’m not making any claims about an average LessWronger here, but between the two of us, it’s me who has written an explicit logical proof of a theorem and you who is shouting “Turing proof!”, “Halting machine!” “Godel incompletness!” without going into the substance of them.
Maybe there is an actual gear-level model inside your mind how all this things together build up to your conclusion but you are not doing a good job at communicating it. You present metaphors, saying that thinking that we are conscious, while not actually being conscious is like being a merely halting machine, thinking that it’s a universal halting machine. But it’s not clear how this is applicable. What does it even mean for a machine to have a belief about something? That’s not something Turing defines in his proof. It’s possible to formally prove that universal halting machine is impossible. Can you do the same for having consciousness? If you can—then just do it, that would be very helpful and allow us to talk about the substance, not just vibes.
which is proven to be effectively wrong by the sleeping beauty paradox (frequentist “thirder’s” get more money in simulations.)
Oh boy, do I have an opinion. Here you are wrong in three different ways.
1. Disagreement in Sleeping Beauty is not between bayesianism and frequentism. Thirdism is not frequentist. Halfism is not bayesian. One can make a bayesian argument in favor of thirdism: how you learn that you are awaken ‘today’ which is, alledgedly, new information. Or frequentist argument in favor of halfism: how if we repeat the experiment a lot of times, in about ¹⁄₂ of such iterations of it, where at least one awakening happens, the coin is Heads.
2. In general frequentism and bayesianism do not have disagreement of such kind. There are sitiations (unfair coin toss without any other details) where frequentist claim that probability is undefined, where bayesians are ready to assign a numerical value to it, but not ones where two different numerical values are assigned.
3. While following lewisian halfers betting odds in Sleeping Beauty indeed performs terribly, double halfers do no worse than thirders. There are also some cases where thirdism gives very stupid answers, like betting on whether at least one of the awakening happens on Monday.

Ape in the coat Mar 31, 2025, 5:17 AM
5 points
1
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: I, G(Zombie)
You basically left our other more formal conversation to engage in the critique of prose.
Not at all. I’m doing both. I specifically started the conversation in the post which is less… prose. But I suspect you may also be interested in engagement with the long post that you put so much effort to write. If it’s not the case—nevermind and let’s continue the discussion in the argument thread.
These are metaphors to lead the reader slowly to the idea...
If you require flawed metaphors, what does it say about the idea?
Now you might say I have a psychotic fit
Frankly speaking, that does indeed look like that. From my perspective you are not being particularly coherent, keep jumping from point to point, with nearly no engagement with what I write. But this can be an artifact of large inferential distances. So you have my benefit of the doubt and I’m eager to learn whether there is some profound substance in your reasoning.

Ape in the coat Mar 31, 2025, 4:59 AM
7 points
1
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: The g-Zombie Formal Argument
So, essentially, it’s like trying to explain to a halting machine—which believes it is a universal halting machine—that it is not, in fact, a universal halting machine.
Don’t tell me what it’s like. Construct the actual argument, that is isomorphic to Turing proof.
Let me give you an example. Let’s prove that no perfect antivirus is possible.
Let a perfect antivirus A be a program that receives some program P and it’s input X as arguments and returns 1 if P is malevolent on input X and 0 otherwise. And A itself is not malevolent on any input.
Suppose A exists. Then there has to exist another program B with such code:
if A(B, X) == 1:
return 0
else:
V(X)
Where V is a trivial virus, a program malevolent on any input.
If A(B, X) == 0, then a virus is executed but A didn’t detect it. Which contradicts our premise.
If A(B, X) == 1 nothing else is executed beyond program A on some input. So either A is malevolent on input B,X, or it is mistaken. Both options contradict or premise. Therefore A doesn’t exist.

Ape in the coat Mar 30, 2025, 8:57 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: milanrosko’s comment on: The g-Zombie Formal Argument
If you are familiar with it, just say “yes,” and we’ll proceed.
Yes.