dlthomas

Karma: 1,985

dlthomas 15 Jul 2014 18:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
I’ll accept that.

dlthomas 15 Jul 2014 15:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
I don’t see that that makes other formulations “not Occam’s razor”, it just makes them less useful attempts at formalizing Occam’s razor. If an alternative formalization was found to work better, it would not be MDL—would MDL cease to be “Occam’s razor”? Or would the new, better formalization “not be Occam’s razor”? Of the latter, by what metric, since the new one “works better”?

For the record, I certainly agree that “space complexity alone” is a poor metric. I just don’t see that it should clearly be excluded entirely. I’m generally happy to exclude it on the grounds of parsimony, but this whole subthread was “How could MWI not be the most reasonable choice...?”

dlthomas 15 Jul 2014 13:03 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
Is there anything in particular that leads you to claim Minimum Description Length is the only legitimate claimaint to the title “Occam’s razor”? It was introduced much later, and the wikipedia article claims it is “a forumlation of Occam’s razor”.

Certainly, William of Occam wasn’t dealing in terms of information compression.

dlthomas 14 Jul 2014 18:58 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
What particular gold-standard “Occam’s razor” are you adhering to, then? It seems to fit well with “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” and “pluralities must never be posited without necessity”.

Note that I’m not saying there is no gold-standard “Occam’s razor” to which we should be adhering (in terms of denotation of the term or more generally); I’m just unaware of an interpretaton that clearly lays out how “entities” or “assumptions” are counted, or how the complexity of a hypothesis is otherwise measured, which is clearly “the canonical Occam’s razor” as opposed to having some other name. If there is one, by all means please make me aware!

dlthomas 21 Jan 2014 18:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Document’s comment on: The AI in a box boxes you
But good reason to expect it not to torture people at greater than the maximum rate its hardware was capable of, so if you can bound that there exist some positive values of belief that cannot be inflated into something meaningful by upping copies.

dlthomas 31 Jul 2013 4:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: The Meditation on Curiosity
Yes, fixed.

dlthomas 17 Oct 2012 20:33 UTC
0 points
in reply to: chaosmosis’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
I am not saying, “You value her continued existence, therefore you should believe in it.” I am rather saying that your values may extend to things you do not (and will not, ever) know about, and therefore it may be necessary to make estimations about likelihoods of things that you do not (and will not, ever) know about. In this case, the epistemological work is being done by an assumption of regularity and a non-privileging of your particular position in the physical laws of the universe, which make it seem more likely that there is not anything special about crossing your light cone as opposed to just moving somewhere else where she will happen to have no communication with you in the future.

dlthomas 16 Oct 2012 23:39 UTC
3 points
in reply to: chaosmosis’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
Values aren’t things which have predictive power. I don’t necessarily have to be able to verify it to prefer one state of the universe over another.

dlthomas 9 Oct 2012 23:32 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
You’re assuming that display of loyalty can radically increase your influence. My model was that your initial influence is determined situationally, and your disposition can decrease it more easily than increase it.

That said, let’s run with your interpretation; Bot-swa-na! Bot-swa-na!

dlthomas 9 Oct 2012 22:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
Because states are still a powerful force for (or against) change in this world, you are limited in the number of them you can directly affect (determined largely by where you and relatives were born), and for political and psychological reasons that ability is diminished when you fail to display loyalty (of the appropriate sort, which varies by group) to those states.

Also, apple pie is delicious.

dlthomas 9 Oct 2012 22:05 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Tuna-Fish’s comment on: Rationality Quotes October 2012
Irrelevant. The quote is not “If goods do cross borders, armies won’t.”

dlthomas 21 Aug 2012 17:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders
But one or more drawing-inferences-from-states-of-other-modules module could certainly exist, without invoking any separate homunculus. Whether they do and, if so, whether they are organized in a way that is relevant here are empirical questions that I lack the data to address.

dlthomas 10 Jul 2012 9:00 UTC
4 points
on: What Is Signaling, Really?
What are the costs associated with flowers?

dlthomas 26 May 2012 17:45 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Strange7’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
Interesting.

dlthomas 25 May 2012 20:33 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Problematic Problems for TDT

Could you construct an agent which was itself disadvantaged relative to TDT?

“Take only the box with $1000.”

Which itself is inferior to “Take no box.”

dlthomas 24 May 2012 20:28 UTC
2 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Holden’s Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous
My point is that we currently have methods of preventing this that don’t require an AI, and which do pretty well. Why do we need the AI to do it? Or more specifically, why should we reject an AI that won’t, but may do other useful things?

dlthomas 24 May 2012 20:14 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Holden’s Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous

Because there’s no consensus, your version of CEV would not interfere, and the 80% would be free to kill the 20%.

There may be a distinction between “the AI will not prevent the 80% from killing the 20%” and “nothing will prevent the 80% from killing the 20%” that is getting lost in your phrasing. I am not convinced that the math doesn’t make them equivalent, in the long run—but I’m definitely not convinced otherwise.

dlthomas 23 May 2012 23:28 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Ezekiel’s comment on: Problematic Problems for TDT

If I’m right, we may have shown the impossibility of a “best’ decision theory, no matter how meta you get (in a close analogy to Godelian incompleteness). If I’m wrong, what have I missed?

I would say that any such problem doesn’t show that there is no best decision theory, it shows that that class of problem cannot be used in the ranking.

Edited to add: Unless, perhaps, one can show that an instantiation of the problem with particular choice of (in this case decision theory, but whatever is varied) is particularly likely to be encountered.

dlthomas 23 May 2012 20:25 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Problematic Problems for TDT
But doesn’t that make cliquebots, in general?

dlthomas 23 May 2012 1:01 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Strange7’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
On the one hand a real distinction which makes a huge difference in feasibility. On the other hand, either way we’re boned, so it makes not a lot of difference in the context of the original question (as I understand it). On balance, it’s a cute digression but still a digression, and so I’m torn.