LazyDave

Karma: 125

LazyDave Mar 21, 2010, 6:20 PM
3 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
I guess it would seem to me that what gets “overwritten” is the (now invalid) knowledge of where Y is, and what it is overwritten with is the new, valid position of it. I’ll have to chew on it for a while.

By the way, sort of unrelated, but I’ve always wondered why gravity acting on things is not considered a loss of entropy. For example I can drop a bowling ball from multiple distances, but it will always end up 0 feet from the ground:

B4 → B0

B3 → B0

B2 → B0

etc.

The only thing I can think of is that, when the ball hits the ground the collision creates enough heat (i.e. entropy) to balance everything out. Is that correct?

LazyDave Mar 20, 2010, 10:41 PM
2 points
0
on: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
So after doing the Maxwell’s Demon thing, you say that mutual information decreases, the entropy of Y decreases, so we are left with the same amount of total entropy:

M1,Y1 → M1,Y1

M2,Y2 → M2,Y1

M3,Y3 → M3,Y1

M4,Y4 → M4,Y1

However, I don’t see why the mutual information would be lost; would the Demon know where he “put” the molecule, thus making the transition look more like:

M1,Y1 → M1,Y1

M2,Y2 → M1,Y1

M3,Y3 → M1,Y1

M4,Y4 → M1,Y1

This would of course shrink the phase space, violate the second law, etc. I just do not see how M would stay the same when Y changed (i.e. lose the mutual information).

LazyDave Jan 25, 2010, 3:38 PM
0 points
on: Open Thread: January 2010
Does anybody have any updates as to the claims made against Alcor, i.e. the Tuna Can incident? I’ve tried a bunch of searches, but haven’t been able to find anything conclusive as to the veracity of the claims.

LazyDave Jan 23, 2010, 11:37 PM
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Raising the Sanity Waterline
Thanks; the Bayesians vs. Barbarians post is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I’ll have to read some of the posts that it links to (as well as re-read the background posts you referred to; haven’t read them in a while), as the way it stands I still think the Barbarians would win.

LazyDave Jan 23, 2010, 11:20 PM
−3 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Raising the Sanity Waterline

I’m not sure what the content of “making your opponent behave (ir)rationally” is >supposed to be. It’s certainly not an uncontroversial tidbit of received wisdom that the >rational thing to do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is to defect, which is what you seem to >imply.

Exactly, if I was able to make him act irrationally, he would not defect, whereas I would. And if the definition of rationality is that it makes you win, then it can be perfectly rational to have others act irrationally (i.e. believe wrong things).

LazyDave Jan 23, 2010, 10:58 PM
0 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Raising the Sanity Waterline

We think that religions are false, and a shared priority of Less Wrong denizens is to >believe things that are true instead

You’ll get no argument from me that religions are false. You will get practically no argument from me that it makes sense to want to believe things that are true. What I question is, is it always rational to make others believe things that are true? If I leave my lights on when I leave the house so that would-be robbers think I am home when I am not, I am making a rational decision to make others believe something that is false.

If I am playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma with someone (just once, so no tit-for-tat or anything), and I have the choice of making my opponent either act rationally or irrationally, the rational thing for me to do is make him act irrationally.

LazyDave Jan 23, 2010, 10:30 PM
−1 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Raising the Sanity Waterline
I have wondered for many years what a good alternative would be, and have not been able to come up with one. Now that in itself doesn’t mean anything; just because I can’t think of one does not mean there isn’t one. But given the antipathy of most on this site to religion (as evidenced by my comment getting dinged 4 times for merely suggesting that religion, though irrational, may be socially beneficial), I would think there would be posts upon posts explaining better alternatives. I have not seen them.

It seems to me that many rationalists hate religion so much, that they are loathe to admit it has any benefits at all, even if those benefits have NOTHING to do with the original reason for the loathing. It reminds me of a few years ago when someone said something to the effect of “Hitler’s army had great uniforms” (I don’t remember the exact details). Of course, the person had to end up apologizing a million times over, lost her job, etc. even though she was in no way endorsing Hitler’s horrendous actions.

Again, I am not even saying that religion is necessarily worth keeping. But the unquestioned assumption that it would be desirable to get rid of it does not seem to get a lot of scrutiny around here.

LazyDave Jan 19, 2010, 12:45 AM
−6 points
on: Raising the Sanity Waterline
I would dispute the (implied) part of this post that suggests removing religion would necessarily be a good thing. Besides being a way to explain rainbows and earthquakes and whatnot, it is also a “solution” to the prisoner’s dilemma. For explanations of physical phenomena, religion is no longer needed. But the “morality” problem is still there. Make everyone rational, and they will do the rational thing, i.e. defect when faced with a prisoner’s dilemma (or tragedy of the commons, or whatever). Getting rid of religion may certainly have its benefits, but I would not be too sure it would be an overall good thing.

LazyDave Oct 26, 2009, 11:52 PM
4 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: October 2009
I suspect it is because the main post refers to quotes being “voted up/down separately,” i.e. it puts it in people’s minds that they are supposed to vote on the quotes. I do find it funny that I got 12 karma points for cutting/pasting a quote; C.S. Lewis deserves the karma points, not me (as evidenced by the fact that I have gotten a grand total of 1 point from my own original posts). If one wanted to game the karma system, posting pithy quotes is the way to go.

LazyDave Oct 24, 2009, 6:53 PM
37 points
on: Rationality Quotes: October 2009
I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

-C.S. Lewis
What links here?
- gwern's comment on Eutopia is Scary—for the author by Stuart_Armstrong (Dec 29, 2011, 2:11 AM; 3 points)
- SilasBarta's comment on Rationality quotes: August 2010 by Cyan (Aug 3, 2010, 4:20 AM; 2 points)

LazyDave Oct 21, 2009, 6:00 PM
11 points
on: Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization

Kasparov competed against Deep Blue to steer the chessboard into a region where he won—knights and bishops were only his pawns

Were you trying to mix the literal and metaphorical here? Because I think that just his pawns were his pawns :)

LazyDave Jun 7, 2008, 4:52 PM
0 points
on: Timeless Control
All the ideas expressed in this post, as well as the “timeless physics” one, seems amazingly obvious to me, and has for all of my adult life, and compared to a lot of OB posters, I am not that bright. Since I normally find many of Elizer’s posts extremely counterintuitive and/or hard to grasp, I’ve got to ask the question: am I missing something here? Is Elizer saying something so mind-boggling out of this world that I do not even realize he is saying it?

LazyDave Jun 6, 2008, 6:27 PM
4 points
on: Thou Art Physics
I know this is just re-iterating what Caledonian and Ben Jones said, but too have meaningful discussion on this subject you have to taboo “free will” and come up with a specific description of what you are trying to figure out. The most basic concept of free will is “being able to do what you desire to do,” and that is not affected one whit by determinism, or MWI, or God knowing what you are going to do in advance, etc. I know there are a lot of other more sophisticated-sounding discussions regarding this (“ah, but can you choose to desire something else”, etc) but I have yet to hear of a meaningful definition of “free will” that is affected at all by such things as MWI.

BTW, it drives me nuts when people say “well if we do not have free will, why punish criminals?” (or “we pretend free will exists so that we can punish criminals”, etc). We punish criminals so that fewer crimes happen. Whether you think those criminals have “free will” has nothing to do with the results we get by punishing them.

LazyDave Jun 3, 2008, 5:59 PM
1 point
on: Timeless Identity
I have been seriously considering cryonics; if the MWI is correct, I figure that even if there is a vanishingly small chance of it working, “I” will still wake up in one of the worlds where it does work. Then again, even if I do not sign up, there are plenty of worlds out there where I do. So signing up is less of an attempt to live forever as it is an attempt to line up my current existence with the memory of the person who is revived, if that makes any sense. To put it another way, if there is a world where I procrastinate signing up until right before I die, the person who is revived will have 99.9% of the same memories as someone who did not sign up at all, so if I don’t end up signing up I do not lose much.

FWIW, I sent an email to Alcor a while ago that was never responded to, which makes me wonder if they have their act together enough to preserve me for the long haul.

On a related note, is there much agreement on what is “possible” as far as MWI goes? For example, in a classical universe if I know the position/momentum of every particle, I can predict the outcome of a coin flip with 1.0 probability. If we throw quantum events in the mix, how much does this change? I figure the answer should be in the range of (1.0 - tiny number) and (0.5 + tiny number).

LazyDave May 30, 2008, 11:44 PM
0 points
on: Einstein’s Superpowers
If the reason for keeping it private is that he plans to do the trick with more people (and it doesn’t work if you know the method in advance) than it makes sense. But otherwise, I don’t see much of a difference between somebody thinking “there is no argument that would convince me to let him out” and “argument X would not convince me to let him out”. In fact, the latter is more plausible anyway.

In any event, I am the type of guy who always tries to find out how a magic trick is done and then is always disappointed when he finds out. So I’m probably better off not knowing :)

LazyDave May 30, 2008, 8:54 PM
1 point
on: Einstein’s Superpowers
I always thought that the justification for not revealing the transcripts in the AI box experiment was pretty weak. As it is, I can claim that whatever method Elizer used must have been effective for people more simple minded then me; ignorance of the specifics of the method does not make it harder to make that claim. In fact, it makes it easier, as I can imagine Eli just said “pretty please” or whatever. In any event, the important point of the AI box exercise is that someone reasonably competent could be convinced to let the AI out, even if I couldn’t be convinced.

One thing I would liked to have known is if the subjects had a different opinion about the problem once they let the AI out. One would assume they did, but since all they said was “I let Elizer out of the box” it is somewhat hard to tell.

LazyDave May 16, 2008, 9:50 PM
4 points
on: Science Isn’t Strict Enough
“ME”—I’ve noticed that people on this forum seem to label ANYTHING that has to do with conditional probability “Bayesian”. I’m not quite sure why this is; I have a hard enough time figuring out the real difference between a “frequentist” and a “Bayesian”, but reading some of these posts I get the feeling that “Bayesian” around here means “someone who knows basic logic”.

LazyDave 15 May 2008 17:49 UTC
0 points
on: When Science Can’t Help
While we are (sort of) on the topic of cryonics, who here is signed up for it? For those that are, what organization are you with, and are you going with the full-body plan, or just the brain? I’m considering Alcor’s neuropreservation process.

LazyDave 14 May 2008 19:57 UTC
1 point
on: Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
Caledonian—not sure if this is what was originally alluded to, but the Prisoner’s Dilemma / Tragedy of the Commons scenario is one where agents acting in their best interest get screwed. Of course, that is why we have governments in the first place (i.e. to get around those problems).

M—How do you figure Somalia is libertarian? Libertarianism requires a stable government (i.e. a monopoly on force) which Somalia definitely does not have.

H.A. - I don’t think the point was that Libertarians are more scientific than others, but that Libertarianism and Science are similar in the sense that they put more faith in processes than in people.

LazyDave 13 May 2008 14:46 UTC
6 points
on: The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?
Eli—As you said in an earlier post, it is not the testability part of MWI that poses a problem for most people with a scientific viewpoint, it is the fact that MWI came after Collapse. So the core part of the scientific method—testability/falsifiability—gives no more weight to Collapse than to MWI.

As to the “Bayesian vs. Science” question (which is really a “Metaphysics vs. Science” question), I’ll go with Science every time. The scientific method has trounced logical argument time and time again.

Even if there turns out to be cases where the “logical” answer to a problem is correct, who cares if it does not make any predictions? If it is not testable, than it also follows you can’t do anything useful with it, like cure cancer, or make better heroin.