DanArmak

Karma: 9,788

DanArmak Feb 6, 2022, 11:01 PM
3 points
in reply to: Grégory Lielens’s comment on: On Bounded Distrust

direct sources are more and more available to the public… But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy.

The former helps cause the latter. Sources that aren’t available to the public, or are not widely read by the public for whatever reason, don’t face the pressure to propagandize—either to influence the public, and/or to be seen as ideologically correct by the public.

Of course influencing the public only one of several drives to distort or ignore the truth, and less public fora are not automatically trustworthy.

DanArmak Feb 2, 2022, 2:06 PM
5 points
1
on: Before Colour TV, People Dreamed in Black and White
Suppose that TV experience does influence dreams—or the memories or self-reporting of dreams. Why would it affect specifically and only color?

Should we expect people who watch old TV to dream in low resolution and non-surround sound? Do people have poor reception and visual static in their black and white dreams? Would people who grew up with mostly over the border transmissions dream in foreign languages, or have their dreams subtitled or overdubbed? Would people who grew up with VCRs have pause and rewind controls in their dreams?

Some of these effects are plausible. Anecdotally, I watched a lot of anime, and I had some dreams in pseudo-Japanese (I don’t speak Japanese). I don’t remember ever dreaming subtitles though.

Does either the explanation of the black and white effect make predictions about which other effects should be present, and why?

DanArmak Feb 2, 2022, 1:50 PM
4 points
in reply to: davidad’s comment on: Before Colour TV, People Dreamed in Black and White
Epistemic status: anecdote.

Most of the dreams I’ve ever had (and remembered in the morning) were not about any kind of received story (media, told to me, etc). They were all modified versions of my own experiences, like school, army, or work, sometimes fantastically distorted, but recognizably about my experiences. A minority of dreams has been about stories (eg a book I read), usually from a first person point of view (eg. a self insert into the book).

So for me, dreams are stories about myself. And I wonder: if these people had their dreams influenced by the form of media, were they influenced by the content as well? Or did they dream about their own lives in black and white? The latter would be quite odd.

DanArmak Oct 15, 2021, 7:08 AM
2 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book Review: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite

He’s saying that it’s extremely hard to answer those questions about edge detectors. We have little agreement on whether we should be concerned about the experiences of bats or insects, and it’s similarly unobvious whether we should worry about the suffering of edge detectors.

Being concerned implies 1) something has experiences 2) they can be negative / disliked in a meaningful way 3) we morally care about that.

I’d like to ask about the first condition: what is the set of things that might have experience, things whose experiences we might try to understand? Is there a principled or at least reasonable and consistent definition? Is there a reason to privilege edge detectors made from neurons over, say, a simple edge detector program made from code? Could other (complex, input-processing) tissues and organs have experience, or only those made from neurons?

Could the brain be logically divided in N different ways, such that we’d worry about the experience of a certain sub-network using division A, and not worry about a different sub-network using division B, but actually they’re composed mostly of the same neurons, we just model them differently?

We talk about edge detectors mostly because they’re simple and “stand-alone” enough that we located and modeled them in the brain. There are many more complex and less isolated parts of the brain we haven’t isolated and modeled well yet; should that make us more or less concerned that they (or parts of them) have relevant experiences?

Finally, if very high-level parts of my brain (“I”) have a good experience, while a theory leads us to think that lots of edge-detectors inside my brain are having a bad experiences (“I can’t decide if that’s an edge or not, help!”), how might a moral theory look that would resolve or trade-off these against each other?

DanArmak Oct 15, 2021, 6:53 AM
2 points
on: Do you think you are a Boltzmann brain? If not, why not?
This is a question similar to “am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”. Both statements are incompatible with any other empirical or logical belief, or with making any predictions about future experiences. Therefore, the questions and belief-propositions are in some sense meaningless. (I’m curious whether this is a theorem in some formalized belief structure.)

For example, there’s an argument about B-brains that goes: simple fluctuations are vastly more likely than complex ones; therefore almost all B-brains that fluctuate into existence will exist for only a brief moment and will then chaotically dissolve in a kind of time-reverse of their fluctuating into existence.

Should a B-brain expect a chaotic dissolution in its near future? No, because its very concepts of physics and thermodynamics that cause it to make such predictions are themselves the results of random fluctuations. It remembers reading arguments and seeing evidence for Boltzmann’s theorem of enthropy, but those memories are false, the result of random fluctuations.

So a B-brain shouldn’t expect anything at all (conditioning on its own subjective probability of being a B-brain). That means a belief in being a B-brain isn’t something that can be tied to other beliefs and questioned.

DanArmak Oct 14, 2021, 3:38 PM
13 points
on: Covid 10/14: Less Long Cvoid
Title typo: cvoid.

DanArmak Oct 12, 2021, 12:54 PM
2 points
on: Book Review: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite

Let’s take the US government as a metaphor. Instead of saying it’s composed of the legislative, executive, and judicial modules, Kurzban would describe it as being made up of modules such as a White House press secretary

Both are useful models of different levels of the US government. Is the claim here that there is no useful model of the brain as a few big powerful modules that aggregate sub-modules? Or is it merely that others posit merely a few large modules, whereas Kurzban thinks we must model both small and large agents at once?

We don’t ask “what is it like to be an edge detector?”, because there was no evolutionary pressure to enable us to answer that question. It could be most human experience is as mysterious to our conscious minds as bat experiences.

If “human experience” includes the experience of an edge detector, I have to ask for a definition of “human experience”. Is he saying an edge detector is conscious or sentient? What does it mean to talk of the experience of such a relatively small and simple part of the brain? Why should we care what its experience is like, however we define it?

DanArmak Oct 12, 2021, 12:44 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Book Review: Open Borders

Finding the percentage of “immigrants” is misleading, since it’s immigrants from Mexico and Central America who are politically controversial, not generic “immigrants” averaged over all sources.

I’m no expert on American immigration issues, but I presume this is because most immigrants come in through the (huge) south land border, and are much harder for the government to control than those coming in by air or sea.

However, I expect immigrants from any other country outside the Americas would be just as politically controversial if large numbers of them started arriving, and an open borders policy with Europe or Asia or Africa would be just as unacceptable to most Americans.

Are Americans much more accepting of immigrants from outside Central and South America?

DanArmak Oct 10, 2021, 3:12 PM
4 points
on: Book Review: Open Borders

immigrants are barely different from natives in their political views, and they adopt a lot of the cultural values of their destination country.

The US is famous for being culturally and politically polarized. What does it even mean for immigrants to be “barely different from natives” politically? Do they have the same (polarized) spread of positions? Do they all fit into one of the existing political camps without creating a new one? Do they all fit into the in-group camp for Caplan’s target audience?

And again:

[Caplan] finds that immigrants are a tiny bit more left-wing than the general population but that their kids and grandkids regress to the political mainstream.

If the US electorate is polarized left-right, does being a bit more left-wing mean a slightly higher percentage of immigrants than of natives are left-wing, but immigrants are still as polarized as the natives?

DanArmak Oct 6, 2021, 4:26 PM
2 points
in reply to: George3d6’s comment on: Contra Paul Christiano on Sex

bad configurations can be selected against inside the germinal cells themselves or when the new organism is just a clump of a few thousand cells

Many genes and downstream effects are only expressed (and can be selected on) after birthing/hatching, or only in adult organisms. This can include whole organs, e.g. mammal fetuses don’t use their lungs in the womb. A fetus could be deaf, blind, weak, slow, stupid—none of this would stop it from being carried to term. An individual could be terrible at hunting, socializing, mating, raising grandchildren—none of that would stop it from being born and raised to adulthood.

There’s no biological way to really test the effect of a gene ahead of time. So it’s very valuable to get genes that have already been selected for beneficial effects outside of early development.

That’s in addition to p.b.’s point about losing information.

DanArmak Oct 1, 2021, 5:54 PM
13 points
on: Contra Paul Christiano on Sex
When you get an allele from sex, there are two sources of variance. One is genes your (adult) partner has that are different from yours. The other is additional de novo mutations in your partner’s gametes.

The former has already undergone strong selection, because it was part of one (and usually many) generations’ worth of successfully reproducing organisms. This is much better than getting variance from random mutations, which are more often bad than good, and can be outright fatal.

Selecting through many generations of gametes, like (human) sperm do, isn’t good enough; it doesn’t filter out bad mutations in genes that aren’t expressed in sperm cells.

Lateral gene transfer might be as good as sex, but I don’t see how higher mutation rates can compete. I believe that empirically, mutations that weaken one of the anti-mutation DNA preservation mechanisms in gametes are usually deleterious and are not selected.

DanArmak Sep 28, 2021, 5:52 PM
4 points
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: This Can’t Go On

I propose using computational resources as the “reference” good.

I don’t understand the implications of this, can you please explain / refer me somewhere? How is the GDP measurement resulting from this choice going to be different from another choice like control of matter/energy? Why do we even need to make a choice, beyond the necessary assumption that there will still be a monetary economy (and therefore a measurable GDP)?

In the hypothetical future society you propose, most value comes from non-material goods.

That seems very likely, but it’s not a necessary part of my argument. Most value could keep coming from material goods, if we keep inventing new kinds of goods (i.e. new arrangements of matter) that we value higher than past goods.

However, these non-material goods are produced by some computational process,. Therefore, buying computational resources should always be marginally profitable. On the other hand, the total amount of computational resources is bounded by physics. This seems like it should imply a bound on GDP.

There’s a physical bound on how much computation can be done in the remaining lifetime of the universe (in our future lightcone). But that computation will necessarily take place over a very very long span of time.

For as long as we can keep computing, the set of computation outputs (inventions, art, simulated-person-lifetimes, etc) each year can keep being some n% more valuable than the previous year. The computation “just” needs to keep coming up with better things every year instead of e.g. repeating the same simulation over and over again. And this doesn’t seem impossible to me.

DanArmak Sep 23, 2021, 6:22 PM
4 points
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: This Can’t Go On

I think that most people would prefer facing a 10e-6 probability of death to paying 1000 USD.

The sum of 1000 USD comes from the average wealth of people today. Using (any) constant here encodes the assumption that GDP per capita (wealth times population) won’t keep growing.

If we instead suppose a purely relative limit, e.g. that a person is willing to pay a 1e-6 part of their personal wealth to avoid a 1e6 chance of death, then we don’t get a bound on total wealth.

DanArmak Sep 23, 2021, 11:21 AM
4 points
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: This Can’t Go On

you imagine that the rate at which new “things” are produced hits diminishing returns

The rate at which new atoms (or matter/energy/space more broadly) are added will hit diminishing returns, at the very least due to speed of light.

The rate at which new things are produced won’t necessarily hit diminishing returns because we can keep cannibalizing old things to make better new things. Often, re-configurations of existing atoms produce value without consuming new resources except for the (much smaller) amount of resources used to rearrange them. If I invent email which replaces post mail I produce value while reducing atoms used.

this value growth has to hit a ceiling pretty soon anyway, because things can only be that much valuable

Eventually yes, but I don’t think they have to do hit a ceiling soon, e.g. in a timeframe relevant to the OP. Maybe it’s probable they will, but I don’t know how to quantify it. The purely physical ceiling on ascribable value is enormously high (other comment on this and also this).

Like you, I don’t know what to make of intuition pumps like your proposed Pascal’s Ceiling of Value. Once you accept that actual physics don’t practically limit value, what’s left of the OP is a similar-looking argument from incredulity: can value really grow exponentially almost-forever just by inventing new things to do with existing atoms? I don’t know that it will keep growing, but I don’t see a strong reason to think it can’t, either.

DanArmak Sep 23, 2021, 10:29 AM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Weird models of country development?
I agree, and want to place a slightly different emphasis. A “better” education system is a two-place function; what’s better for a poor country is different from what’s better for a rich Western one. And education in Western countries looked different back when they were industrializing and still poor by modern standards.

(Not that the West a century ago is necessarily a good template to copy. The point is that the education systems rich countries have today weren’t necessarily a part of what made them rich in the first place.)

A lot (some think most) of Western education is also a credentialing and signalling system. It can also promote social integration (shared culture), and serves as daycare for lower grades.These things don’t directly help a poor country get richer.

Signalling is a zero sum game competing over the top jobs in a poor economy. Sequestering teenagers reduces available workforce for a net economic loss. Community daycare is economically valuable, but requiring qualified teachers is expensive and can make it a net loss.

So poor countries can copy Western education systems faithfully and still not benefit. What they are cargo culting is not (just) the elements of how to do “education”, but the function of the education system in broader society. Faithfully reproducing modern Western education doesn’t necessarily make your country rich: that’s cargo culting.

DanArmak Sep 21, 2021, 3:49 PM
2 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: This Can’t Go On
Great point, thanks!

DanArmak Sep 20, 2021, 9:49 PM
2 points
in reply to: awenonian’s comment on: This Can’t Go On
Please see my other reply here. Yes, value is finite, but the number of possible states of the universe is enormously large, and we won’t explore it in 8000 years. The order of magnitude is much bigger.

(Incidentally, our galaxy is ~ 100,000 light years across; so even expanding to cover it would take much longer than 8000 years, and that would be creating value the old-fashioned way by adding atoms, but it wouldn’t support continued exponential growth. So “8000 years” and calculations based off the size of the galaxy shouldn’t be mixed together. But the order-of-magnitude argument should work about as well for the matter within 8000 light-years of Earth.)

DanArmak Sep 20, 2021, 5:12 PM
4 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: This Can’t Go On

in their expected lifespan

Or even in the expected lifetime of the universe.

perhaps we don’t need to explore all combinations of atoms to be sure that we’ve achieved the limit of value.

That’s a good point, but how would we know? We would need to prove that a given configuration is of maximal (and tile-able) utility without evaluating the (exponentially bigger) number of configurations of bigger size. And we don’t (and possibly can’t, or shouldn’t) have an exact (mathematical) definition of a Pan-Human Utility Function.

However, a proof isn’t needed to make this happen (for better and for worse). If a local configuration is created which is sufficiently more (universally!) valuable than any other known local configuration, neighbors will start copying it and it will tile the galaxy, possibly ending progress if it’s a stable configuration—even if this configuration is far from the best one possible locally (let alone globally).

In practice, “a wonderful thing was invented, everyone copied it of their own free will, and stayed like that forever because human minds couldn’t conceive of a better world, leaving almost all possible future value on the table” doesn’t worry me nearly as much as other end-of-progress scenarios. The ones where everyone dies seem much more likely.

DanArmak 20 Sep 2021 14:01 UTC
9 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: This Can’t Go On
In the limit you are correct: if a utility function assigns a value to every possible arrangement of atoms, then there is some maximum value, and you can’t keep increasing value forever without adding atoms because you will hit the maximum at some point. An economy can be said to be “maximally efficient” when value can’t be added by rearranging its existing atoms, and we must add atoms to produce more value.

However, physics provides very weak upper bounds on the possible value (to humans) of a physical system of given size, because the number of possible physical arrangements of a finite-sized system is enormous. The Bekenstein bound is approximately 2.6e43 * M * R (mass times radius) bits per kg * m. Someone who understands QM should correct me here, but just as an order-of-magnitude-of-order-of-magnitude estimation, our galaxy masses around 1e44 Kg with a radius of 1e18 meters, so its arrangement in a black hole can contain up to 2.6e105 bits of information.

Those are bits; the number of states is 2^(2.6e105). That is much, much bigger than the OP’s 3e70; we can grow the per-atom value of the overall system state by a factor much bigger than 3e70.

Of course this isn’t a tight argument and there are lots of other things to consider. For example, to get the galaxy into some valuable configuration, we’d need to “use up” part of the same galaxy in the process of changing the configuration of the rest. But from a purely physical perspective, the upper bound on value per atom is enormously high.

ETA: replaced mind-boggling numbers with even bigger mind-boggling numbers after a more careful reading of Wikipedia.
What links here?
- DanArmak's comment on This Can’t Go On by HoldenKarnofsky (23 Sep 2021 11:21 UTC; 4 points)
- DanArmak's comment on This Can’t Go On by HoldenKarnofsky (20 Sep 2021 21:49 UTC; 2 points)

DanArmak 20 Sep 2021 13:23 UTC
2 points
in reply to: CynthesisToday’s comment on: This Can’t Go On
The OP’s argument is general: it says essentially that (economic) value is bounded linearly by the number of atoms backing the economy. Regardless of how the atoms are translated to value. This is an impossibility argument. My rebuttal was also general, saying that value is not so bounded.

Any particular way of extracting value, like electronics, usually has much lower bounds in practice than ‘linear in the amount of atoms used’ (even ignoring different atomic elements). So yes, today’s technology that depends on ‘rare’ earths is bounded by the accessible amount of those elements.

But this technology is only a few decades old. The economy has been growing at some % a year for much longer than that, across many industries and technological innovations that have had very different material constraints from each other. And so, while contemporary rare-earth-dependent techniques won’t keep working forever, the overall trend of economic growth could continue far beyond any one technology’s lifespan, and for much longer than the OP projects.

Technology and other secular change doesn’t always increase value; often it is harmful. My argument is that economy can keep growing for a long time, not that it necessarily will, or that all (or even most) changes over time are for the best. And GDP is not a good measure of human wellbeing to begin with; we’re measuring dollars, not happiness, and when I talk about “utility” I mean the kind estimated via revealed preferences.