endoself

Karma: 1,979

endoself Nov 1, 2012, 8:14 PM
2 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Things philosophers have debated
Wow. I’ve actually used all but one of those arguments (the principle of sufficient reason one) as reductios against various things.

endoself Oct 30, 2012, 7:16 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Causal Reference
I meant ‘statement’ in the abstract sense of what is stated rather than things like when it is stated and who it is stated by. ‘Proposition’ has the meanings that I intend without any others, so it would better convey my meaning here.

Reduce it to whart? You’ve already “tabood” spatio-temporal.

The point of rationalist taboo is to eliminate all the different phrasings we can use to mention a concept without really understanding it and force us to consider how the phenomenon being discussed actually works. Your wording presumes certain intuition about what the physical world is and how it should work by virtue of being “physical”, intuitions that are not usually argued for or even noticed. When you say you can’t explain what an “event” or something “spatio-temporal” is without reference to words that really just restate the concept, that is giving a mysterious answer. Things work a certain way, and we can determine how.

endoself Oct 30, 2012, 6:55 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Causal Reference
Yes, I’m trying to get you to reduce the concept rather than take it as primitive. I know what an event is, by I think that the distinction between events and statements is fuzzy, and I think that events are best understood as a subcategory of statements.

endoself Oct 30, 2012, 6:50 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Causal Reference
What is an event? What properties do events have that statements do not?

endoself Oct 30, 2012, 6:43 PM
1 point
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Causal Reference
Taboo spatio-temporal. Why is it a good idea to give one category of statements the special name ‘events’ and to reason about them differently than you would reason about other events?

Also, what about Newcomb’s problem?

endoself Oct 30, 2012, 6:39 PM
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Causal Reference

What do you mean by “when the truth-value of the conjecture is unknown”? That neither C nor ¬C is in your bound agent’s store of known theorems?

I meant that the agent is in some state of uncertainty. I’m trying to contrast the case where we are more certain of either C or ¬C with that where we have a significant degree of uncertainty.

If I know C is false, the purported proofs are trivially independent because they’re fully determined incorrect?

Yeah, this is just the trivial case.

Why is S1 independent of S2 given C is true?

I was talking about the simple case where there are no other causal links between the two proofs, like common lemmas or empirical observations. Those do change the causal structure by adding extra nodes and arrows, but I was making the simplifying assumption that we don’t have those things.

endoself Oct 24, 2012, 8:42 PM
1 point
in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Omega lies
We can simplify this consideration away by stipulating that the simulated agent doesn’t actually get any money, so the consequences of each choice is the same for the simulated agent.

endoself Oct 23, 2012, 5:04 PM
3 points
in reply to: Bundle_Gerbe’s comment on: Causal Reference

Then mathematician’s uncertainty was such that they would have causal graphs with TSW causing FLT.

Well the direction of the arrow would be unspecified. After all, not FLT implies not TSW is equivalent to TSW implies FLT, so there’s a symmetry here. This often happens in causal modelling; many causal discovery algorithms can output that they know an arrow exists, but they are unable to determine its direction.

Also, conjectures are the causes of their proofs rather than vice versa. You can see this as your degrees of belief in the correctness of purported proofs are independent given that the conjecture is true (or false), but dependent when the truth-value of the conjecture is unknown.

Apart from this detail, I agree with your comment and I find it to be similar to the way I think about the causal structure of math.
What links here?
- Eugine_Nier's comment on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Oct 27, 2012, 8:56 PM; 2 points)
- Eugine_Nier's comment on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything by Will_Newsome (Jan 12, 2014, 10:28 PM; -1 points)

endoself Oct 21, 2012, 5:15 PM
4 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Causal Reference
I did read that before commenting, but I misinterpreted it, and now I still find myself unable to understand it. The way I read it, it seem to equivocate between knowing something as in representing it in your physical brain and knowing something as in representing it in the ‘shadow brain’. You know which one is intended where, but I can’t figure it out.

endoself Oct 21, 2012, 2:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Causal Reference

You have it the wrong way around. In epiphenomenalism, brain states cause qualia, qualia don’t cause brain states.

If qualia don’t cause brain states, what caused the brain state that caused your hands to type this sentence? In order for the actual material brain to represent beliefs about qualia, there has to be an arrow from the qualia to the brain.

endoself Oct 21, 2012, 2:12 PM
1 point
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Causal Reference
The problem with this is that something can both be caused and appear in a lot of causal interactions. For example, if I launch a giant mirror into space to block out the sun, all of the arrows from the sun to brightness everywhere have to be changed. In AI, this is often represented using plate notation, where a rectangle (the plate) is drawn around a group of variables that repeat and an arrow from outside the plate effects every instance of the variables in the plate.

endoself Oct 21, 2012, 1:58 PM
1 point
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Causal Reference
I agree with this. I didn’t mean to give the impression that the causal structure is the same as the proof structure.

endoself Oct 21, 2012, 2:20 AM
3 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Causal Reference
It is meaningful to talk about mathematical facts causing other mathematical facts. For example, if I knew the complete laws of physics but did not have enough computing power to determine all their consequences (which would be impossible anyways, as I’m living inside of them), my uncertainty about what is going to happen in the universe would be described by the exact same probability distribution as my uncertainty about the mathematical consequences of the laws of physics, and so both distributions would satisfy the causal Markov condition for the same causal graph* (modulo any uncertainty about whether the laws that I believe to be correct actually do describe the universe).

This works the same way with any other set of mathematical facts. I believe that if the abc conjecture is true, then Szpiro’s conjecture is also true and I believe that if the abc conjecture is false, then Shinichi Mochizuki’s proof of it is flawed. All of these facts can be put into one probability distribution which can then be factored over a Bayesian network. There is no need to separate the mathematical from the nonmathematical.

* Depending on how exactly you phrase the question, I would even say that these distributions are describing my uncertainty about the same thing, but that isn’t necessary here.

endoself Oct 21, 2012, 1:33 AM
3 points
in reply to: Bruno_Coelho’s comment on: Thinking soberly about the context and consequences of Friendly AI
I mean the ones that most prominent LWers endorse.

endoself Oct 20, 2012, 8:49 PM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
Oh, that’s good then. Thanks.

endoself Oct 20, 2012, 5:06 PM
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
The company’s website seems to indicate that it is actually potassium iodide (under nutritional facts). Are you aware of this? Do you know if it’s accurate?

endoself Oct 20, 2012, 4:32 AM
2 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen
Mathematical truths do behave like causes. Remember, Bayesian probabilities represent subjective uncertainty. Yes, my uncertainty about the Riemann hypothesis is correlated with my uncertainty about other mathematical facts is the same way that my uncertainty about some physical facts is correlated with my uncertainty about others, so I can represent them both as Bayesian networks (really, one big Bayesian network, as my uncertainty about math is also correlated with my uncertainty about the world).

endoself Oct 20, 2012, 1:44 AM
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: A probability question
This is correct in the special case where all the information that your experts are basing their conclusions off of is independent. Slightly modifying your example, if the prior is 1:2 and you have n experts giving odds of 1:1, they each have a likelihood ratio of 2:1, so you get 1:2 * (2:1)^n = 2^(n-1):1. However, if they’ve all updated based on looking at the results from the same experiment, you’re double-counting the evidence; intuitively, you actually want to assign an odds ratio of 1:1.

The right thing to do here is to calculate for each subset of the experts what information they share, but you probably don’t have that information and so you’d have to estimate it, which I’d have to think a lot about in order to do well. Hopefully, the assumption of independence is approximately true in your data and you can just go with the naive method.

endoself Oct 17, 2012, 9:49 PM
8 points
in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: Thinking soberly about the context and consequences of Friendly AI
That’s possible, but I find it more likely that we have a silent majority of people who are on the periphery of the community and are uncomfortable with a lot of the singularitarian memes. I think that a lot of internet communities with voting have a lot of people who vote but don’t comment or comment only occasionally, so you’d expect that voting would reflect more peripheral members more strongly than the discussion would.

endoself Oct 17, 2012, 9:41 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
I’m not sure what Eliezer believes here; the way he talks about causality is why I added the “as I understand it” to the grandparent.

I think that even if it is just in the map we should still call it causality. It’s a useful concept and it is similar to the concept of causality we had before we understood these insights. It’s expected that when you come to understand something better it won’t turn out behave exactly the way you thought it did.