Pentashagon

Karma: 706

Pentashagon Jul 1, 2015, 6:08 AM
0 points
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: Beyond Statistics 101

The latter, but note that that’s not necessarily less damaging than active suppression would be.

I suppose there’s one scant anecdote for estimating this; cryptography research seemed to lag a decade or two behind actively suppressed/hidden government research. Granted, there was also less public interest in cryptography until the 80s or 90s, but it seems that suppression can only delay publication, not prevent it.

The real risk of suppression and exclusion both seem to be in permanently discouraging mathematicians who would otherwise make great breakthroughs, since affecting the timing of publication/discovery doesn’t seem as damaging.

This is not what the government should be supporting with taxpayer dollars.

I think I would be surprised if Basic Income was a less effective strategy than targeted government research funding.

What are your own interests?

Everything from logic and axiomatic foundations of mathematics to practical use of advanced theorems for computer science. What attracted me to Metamath was the idea that if I encountered a paper that was totally unintelligible to me (say Perelman’s proof of Poincaire’s conjecture or Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem) I could backtrack through sound definitions to concepts I already knew, and then build my understanding up from those definitions. Alas, just having a cross-reference of related definitions between various fields would be helpful. I take it that model theory is the place to look for such a cross-reference, and so that is probably the next thing I plan to study.

Practically, I realize that I don’t have enough time or patience or mental ability to slog through formal definitions all day, and so it would be nice to have something even better. A universal mathematical educator, so to speak. Although I worry that without a strong formal understanding I will miss important results/insights. So my other interest is building the kind of agent that can identify which formal insights are useful or important, which sort of naturally leads to an interest in AI and decision theory.

Pentashagon Jul 1, 2015, 5:25 AM
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: The Unfriendly Superintelligence next door

You seem to be conflating market mechanisms with political stances.

That is possible, but the existing market has been under the reins of many a political stance and has basically obeyed the same general rules of economics, regardless of the political rules that have tried to be imposed.

In theory a market can be used to solve any computational problem, provided one finds the right rules—this is the domain of computational mechanism design, an important branch of game theory.

The rules seem to be the weakest point of the system because they parallel the restrictions that political stances have caused to be placed on existing markets. If a computational market is coupled to the external world then it is probably possible to money-pump it against the spirit of the rules.

One way that a computational market could be unintentionally (and probably unavoidably) coupled to the external market is via status and signalling. Just like gold farmers in online games can sell virtual items to people with dollars, entities within the computational market could sell reputation or other results for real money in the external market. The U.S. FDA is an example of a rudimentary research market with rules that try to develop affordable, effective drugs. Pharmaceutical companies spend their money on advertising and patent wars instead of research. When the results of the computational market have economic effects in the wider market there will almost always be ways of gaming the system to win in the real world at the expense of optimizing the computation. In the worst case, the rule-makers themselves are subverted.

I am interested in concrete proposals to avoid those issues, but to me the problem sounds a lot like the longstanding problem of market regulation. How, specifically, will computational mechanism design succeed where years of social/economic/political trial and error have failed? I’m not particularly worried about coming up with game rules in which rational economic agents would solve a hard problem; I’m worried about embedding those game rules in a functioning micro-economy subject to interference from the outside world.

Pentashagon Jun 30, 2015, 5:58 AM
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: The Unfriendly Superintelligence next door
So would we have high-frequency-trading bots outside (or inside) of MRIs shorting the insurance policy value of people just diagnosed with cancer?

tl;dr: If the market does not already have an efficient mechanism for maximizing expected individual health (over all individuals who will ever live) then I take that as evidence that a complex derivative structure set up to purportedly achieve that goal more efficiently would instead be vulnerable to money-pumping.

Or to put a finer point on it; does the current market reward fixing and improving struggling companies or quickly driving them out of business and cutting them up for transplant into other companies?

Even further; does the current market value and strive to improve industries (companies aggregated by some measurement) that perform weakly relative to other industries? Or does the market tend to favor the growth of strong industries at the expense of the individual businesses making up the weak industries?

We’ve known how to cut health care costs and make it more efficient for centuries; let the weak/sick die and then take their stuff and give it to healthy/strong people.

I struggle to comprehend a free market that could simultaneously benefit all individual humans’ health while being driven by a profit motive. The free market has had centuries to come up with a way to reduce risk to individual businesses for the benefit of its shareholders; something that is highly desired by shareholders, who in fact make up the market. At best, investors can balance risk across companies and industries and hedge with complex financial instruments. Companies, however, buy insurance against uncertain outcomes that might reduce their value in the market. Sole proprietors are advised to form limited liability interests in their own companies purely to offset the personal financial risk. I can outlive Pentashagon LLC. but not my physical body as an investment vehicle that will be abandoned when it under-performs.

Pentashagon Jun 30, 2015, 4:03 AM
5 points
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: Beyond Statistics 101

I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn’t realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult

I’m sure you’re aware that the word “cult” is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I’d also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my “crank” alarm bells. I’ve seen too many Usenet posters who are sure they have a P=/!=NP proof, or a proof that set theory is false, or etc. who ultimately claim that because “the mathematical elite” are a cult that no one will listen to them. A cult generally engages in active suppression, often defamation, and not simply exclusion. Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy’s club that’s hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to the damage of the science?

Grothendieck’s problems look to be political and interpersonal. Perelman’s also. I think it’s one thing to claim that mathematical institutions are no more rational than any other politicized body, and quite another to claim that it’s a cult. Or maybe most social behavior is too cult-like. If so; perhaps don’t single out mathematics.

I’ve seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia.

I question the direction of causation. Historically many great mathematicians have been mentally and socially atypical and ended up not making much sense with their later writings. Either mathematics has always had an institutional problem or mathematicians have always had an incidence of mental difficulties (or a combination of both; but I would expect one to dominate).

Especially in Thurston’s On Proof and Progress in Mathematics I can appreciate the problem of trying to grok specialized areas of mathematics. The terminology and symbology is opaque to the uninitiated. It reminds me of section 1 of the Metamath Book which expresses similar unhappiness with the state of knowledge between specialist fields of mathematics and the general difficulty of learning mathematics. I had hoped that Metamath would become more popular and tie various subfields together through unifying theories and definitions, but as far as I can tell it languishes as a hobbyist project for a few dedicated mathematicians.

Pentashagon Jun 30, 2015, 3:24 AM
1 point
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: Beyond Statistics 101
I distinctly remember having points taken off of a physics midterm because I didn’t show my work. I think I dropped the exam in the waste basket on the way out of the auditorium.

I’ve always assumed that the problem is three-fold; generating a formal proof is NP-hard, getting the right answer via shortcuts can include cheating, and the faculty’s time is limited. Professors/graders do not have the capacity to rigorously demonstrate to themselves that the steps a student has written down actually pinpoint the unique answer. Without access to the student’s mind graders are unable to determine if students cheat or not; being able to memorize and/or reproduce the exact steps of a calculation significantly decrease the likelihood of cheating. Even if graders could do one or both of the previous for a single student, they are not 30x or 100x as smart as their students, making it impractical to repeat the process for every student.

That said, I had some very good mathematics teachers in higher level courses who could force students to think, and one in particular who could encourage/demand novelty from students simply by asking them to solve problems that they hadn’t yet learned to solve. I didn’t realize the power of the latter approach until later (and at the time everyone complained about exams with a median score well under 50%), but his classes were always my favorite.

Pentashagon Jun 12, 2015, 7:55 AM
2 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Agency is bugs and uncertainty
We have probabilistic models of the weather; ensemble forecasts. They’re fairly accurate. You can plan a picnic using them. You can not use probabilistic models to predict the conversation at the picnic (beyond that it will be about “the weather”, “the food”, etc.)

What I mean by computable probability distribution is that it’s tractable to build a probabilistic simulation that gives useful predictions. An uncomputable probability distribution is intractable to build such a simulation for. Knightian Uncertainty is a good name for the state of not being able to model something, but not a very quantitative one (and arguably I haven’t really quantified what makes a probabilistic model “useful” either).

I think the computability of probability distributions is probably the right way to classify relative agency but we also tend to recognize agency through goal detection. We think actions are “purposeful” because they correspond to actions we’re familiar with in our own goal-seeking behavior: searching, exploring, manipulating, energy-conserving motion, etc. We may even fail to recognize agency in systems that use actions we aren’t familiar with or whose goals are alien (e.g. are trees agents? I’d argue yes, but most people don’t treat them like agents compared to say, weeds). The weather’s “goal” is to reach thermodynamic equilibrium using tornadoes and other gusts of wind as its actions. It would be exceedingly efficient at that if it weren’t for the pesky sun. The sun’s goal is to expand, shed some mass, then cool and shrink into its own final thermodynamic equilibrium. It will Win unless other agents interfere or a particularly unlikely collision with another star happens.

Before modern science no one would have imagined those were the actual goals of the sun and the wind and so the periodic, meaningful-seeming actions suggested agency toward an unknown goal. After physics the goals and actions were so predictable that agency was lost.

Pentashagon Jun 8, 2015, 10:59 PM
0 points
on: Agency is bugs and uncertainty
So agentiness is having an uncomputable probability distribution?

Pentashagon May 30, 2015, 1:45 AM
0 points
in reply to: Fivehundred’s comment on: Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015

What’s wrong with hive minds? As long as my ‘soul’ survives, I wouldn’t mind being part of some gigantic consciousness.

A hive mind can quickly lose a lot of old human values if the minds continue past the death of individual bodies. Additionally, values like privacy and self-reliance would be difficult to maintain. Also, things we take for granted like being able to surprise friends with gifts or have interesting discussions getting to know another person would probably disappear. A hive mind might be great if it was formed from all your best friends, but joining a hive mind with all of humanity? Maybe after everyone is your best friend...

Pentashagon May 30, 2015, 1:42 AM
1 point
on: A Challenge: Maps We Take For Granted
You are a walking biological weapon, try to sterilize yourself and your clothes as much as possible first, and quarantine yourself until any novel (to the 13th century) viruses are gone. Try to avoid getting smallpox and any other prevalent ancient disease you’re not immune to.

Have you tried flying into a third world nation today and dragging them out of backwardness and poverty? What would make it easier in the 13th century?

If you can get past those hurdles the obvious benefits are mathematics (Arabic numerals, algebra, calculus) and standardized measures (bonus points if you can reconstruct the metric system fairly accurately), optics, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, electricity, and biology. For physics specifically the ability to do statics for construction and ballistics for cannons and thermodynamics for engines and other machines (and lubrication and hydraulics are important too). High carbon steel for machine tools, the assembly line and interchangeable parts. Steel reinforced concrete would be nice, but not a necessity. Rubber. High quality glass for optics; necessary for microscopes for biology to progress past “We don’t believe tiny organisms make us sick”. The scientific method (probably goes without saying) to keep things moving instead of turning back into alchemy and bloodletting.

Electricity and magnetism eventually; batteries won’t cut it for industrial scale use of electricity (electrolysis, lighting for longer working hours, arc furnaces for better smelting) so building workable generators that can be connected to steam engines is vital.

Other people have mentioned medicine, which is pretty important from an ethical perspective, but difficult to reverse centuries of bad practice. Basic antibiotics and sterilization is probably the best you’d be able to do, but without the pharmaceutical industry there’s a lot of stuff you can’t do. If you know how to make ether, at least get anesthesia started.

Pentashagon May 29, 2015, 6:40 AM
1 point
in reply to: Fivehundred’s comment on: Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015
I find myself conflicted about this. I want to preserve my human condition, and I want to give it up. It’s familiar, but it’s trying. I want the best of both worlds; the ability to challenge myself against real hardships and succeed, but also the ability to avoid the greatest hardships that I can’t overcome on my own. The paradox is that solving the actual hardships like aging and death will require sufficient power to make enjoyable hardships (solving puzzles, playing sports and other games, achieving orgasm, etc.) trivial.

I think that one viable approach is to essentially live vicariously through our offspring. I find it enjoyable watching children solve problems that are difficult for them but are now trivial for me, and I think that the desire to teach skills and to appreciate the success of (for lack of a better word) less advanced people learning how to solve the same problems that I’ve solved could provide a very long sequence of Fun in the universe. Pre-singularity humans already essentially do this. Grandparents still enjoy life despite having solved virtually all of the trivial problems (and facing imminent big problems), and I think I’d be fine being an eternal grandparent to new humans or other forms of life. I can’t extrapolate that beyond the singularity, but it makes sense that if we intend to preserve our current values we will need someone to be in the situation where those values still matter, and if we can’t experience those situations ourselves then the offspring we care about are a good substitute. Morality issues of creating children may be an issue.

Another solution is a walled garden run by FAI that preserves the trivial problems humans like solving while but solves the big problems. This has a stronger possibility for value drift and I think people would value life a bit less if they knew it was ultimately a video game.

It’s also possible that upon reflection we’ll realize that our current values also let us care about hive-minds in the same way we care about our friends and family now. We would be different, alien to present selves, but with the ability to trace our values back to our present state and see that at no point did we sacrifice them for expediency or abandon them for their triviality. This seems like the least probable solution simply because our values are not special, they arose in our ancestral environment because they worked. That we enjoy them is an accident, and that they could fully encompass the post-singularity world seems a bit miraculous.

As a kid I always wondered about this in the context of religious heaven. What could a bunch of former humans possibly do for eternity that wouldn’t become terribly boring or involve complete loss of humanity? I could never answer that question, so perhaps it’s an {AI,god}-hard problem to coherently extrapolate human values.

Pentashagon Apr 28, 2015, 4:53 AM
2 points
in reply to: SilentCal’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
In your story RC incurs no opportunity cost for planting seed in and tending a less efficient field. There should be an interest rate as a function for lending the last Nth percent of the seed based on the opportunity cost of planting and harvesting the less efficient field, which at some point crosses 0 and becomes negative. The interest rate drops even more quickly once his next expected yield will be more than he can eat or store for more than a single planting season.

If RC is currently in the situation where his desired interest rate is still positive for his last unplanted seed then his capital is constrained and he should instead ask for investment seed from S, for which he would be willing to pay interest.

In order not to starve RC should aim to grow sufficient grain such that his probability of having too little is lower than some risk threshold. In most cases this will leave him with excess seeds at every harvest (beyond the extra seeds required to avoid starvation risk) which he can lend. Depending on his assessment of the loan risk, he may even be able to save himself time and trouble by growing less grain to produce fewer seeds with the expectation that his loan will be repaid, which would allow him to realize a profit on an otherwise zero-interest loan.

Likewise, money below a certain threshold should compound; beyond that threshold it represents unacceptable opportunity costs for exercising its power as if it had been used to purchase excess goods. Investing/loaning those purchased goods should be the basis for money’s value beyond the threshold.

Pentashagon Apr 18, 2015, 3:47 AM
4 points
in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: A pair of free information security tools I wrote

In this case, I would argue that a transparent, sandboxed programming language like javascript is probably one of the safer pieces of “software” someone can download. Especially because browsers basically treat all javascript like it could be malicious.

Why would I paste a secret key into software that my browser explicitly treats as potentially malicious? I still argue that trusting a verifiable author/distributor is safer than trusting an arbitrary website, e.g. trusting gpg is safer than trusting xxx.yyy.com/zzz.js regardless of who you think wrote zzz.js, simply because it’s easier to get that wrong in some way than it is to accidentally install an evil version of gpg, especially if you use an open source package manager that makes use of PKI, or run it from TAILS, etc. I am also likely to trust javascript crypto served from https://www.gnupg.org/ more than from any other URL, for instance.

In general I agree wholeheartedly with your comment about sandboxing being important. The problem is that sandboxing does not imply trusting. I think smartphone apps are probably better sandboxed, but I don’t necessarily trust the distribution infrastructure (app stores) not to push down evil updates, etc. Sideloading a trusted app by a trusted author is probably a more realistic goal for OpenPGP for the masses.

Pentashagon Apr 15, 2015, 7:48 AM
3 points
in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: A pair of free information security tools I wrote
Does it change the low bits of white (0xFFFFFF) pixels? It would be a dead giveaway to find noise in overexposed areas of a photo, at least with the cameras I’ve used.

Pentashagon Apr 15, 2015, 7:01 AM
10 points
in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: A pair of free information security tools I wrote

Such an obvious and easy to exploit vulnerability has existed for 20ish years, undiscovered/unexposed until one person on LW pointed it out?

It’s not a vulnerability. I trust gnupg not to leak my private key, not the OpenPGP standard. I also trust gnupg not to delete all the files on my hard disk, etc. There’s a difference between trusting software to securely implement a standard and trusting the standard itself.

For an even simpler “vulnerability” in OpenPGP look up section 13.1.1 in RFC4880; encoding a message before signing. Just replace the pseudo-random padding with bits from the private key. Decoding (section 13.1.2) does not make any requirements on the content of PS.

Pentashagon Apr 15, 2015, 6:24 AM
1 point
in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: A pair of free information security tools I wrote
1. Short of somehow convincing the victim to send you a copy of their message, you have no means of accessing your recently-leaked data.
Public-key signatures should always be considered public when anticipating attacks. Use HMACs if you want secret authentication.
1. That leaked data would be publicly available. Anyone with knowledge of your scheme would also be able to access that data. Any encryption would be worthless because the encryption would take place client-side and all credentials thus would be exposed to the public as well.
You explicitly mentioned Decoy in your article, and a similar method could be used to leak bits to an attacker with no one else being able to recover them. We’re discussing public key encryption in this article which means that completely public javascript can indeed securely encrypt data using a public key and only the owner of the corresponding private key can decrypt it.
1. Because the script runs client-side, it also makes it extremely easy for a potential victim to examine your code to determine if it’s malicious or not. And, even if they’re too lazy to do so...
Sure, the first five or ten times it’s served. And then one time the victim reloads the page, the compromised script runs, leaks as much or all of the private key as possible, and then never gets served again.
1. A private key is long. A PGP signature is short. So your victim’s compromised signature would be 10x longer than the length of a normal PGP signature.
An exported private key is long because it includes both factors, the private exponent, and the inverse of p mod q. In my other comment I was too lazy to decode the key and extract one of the RSA factors, but one factor will be ~50% of the size of the RSA signature and that’s all an attacker needs.

Pentashagon Apr 15, 2015, 5:42 AM

3 points

in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: A pair of free information security tools I wrote

NOTE: lesswrong eats blank quoted lines. Insert a blank line after “Hash: SHA1” and “Version: GnuPG v1″.

Output of gpg—verify:

gpg: Signature made Tue 14 Apr 2015 10:37:40 PM PDT using RSA key ID 0E5DBFB2
gpg: Good signature from "pentashagon"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: B501 B12E 5184 8694 4557  01FC 6B69 F5F0 0E5D BFB2

Output of gpg -vv—verify:

gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE
gpg: armor header: Hash: SHA1
:packet 63: length 19 - gpg control packet
gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE
gpg: armor header: Version: GnuPG v1
:literal data packet:
        mode t (74), created 0, name="",
        raw data: unknown length
gpg: original file name=''
:signature packet: algo 1, keyid 6B69F5F00E5DBFB2
        version 4, created 1429076260, md5len 0, sigclass 0x01
        digest algo 2, begin of digest 56 f1
        hashed subpkt 2 len 4 (sig created 2015-04-15)
        hashed subpkt 20 len 1893 (notation: secret@key=-----BEGIN PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK-----|Version: GnuPG v1||lQHYBFUt9YMBBADJpmhhceujHvBFqsoA+FsSmKBosH4qliObnaGvHUcIcm87/R1g|X4RTG1J2uxWHSxQBPFpkcIVkMPUtudZANzEQBAsOGuTAmVzPaWvTqDM0dJlq3NgM|mDvIvkPIxphfmJMmKbhPq0awp+rARSpROMi1s/YKKEa0yGXhSz0mnfF+gwARAQAB|AAP/S+F0VvLs9nGefcDSigHrF3jap/p+R50+4gCzxncwczPIuty5MLpQy4s1AVvO|Mp6kdQCWjUQwVe78XAwZ3QlHyvEN47qD6c5WN0bnLjOLEHDOQI3OB/E1Ak79UyuQ|T4omHUjy2YbUfcVtpebNGwxFLiWmxEmPdn6dcKTRszp3D7ECANIlXmeSmtxXTNDJ|DAk9GhkSzbz2xYZvlHzFGoImFe84b9Pfy0EutwXPQfQItU0FLLqnGBy+DZy62jTs|S09VnJECAPWmdexdoVJJ2BmAH4q6FTB5xkRrLO3HFMbeNMOfvOgns/Ekg3Z2PrzG|n7DgUSQHe1iPrI82tVbXatzDMq2vw9MCAKyJkN6usPVdTqyiQc03zjrV1CnbCk+X|YSmzJqpWtC5QyirqJw89VCgAh8xbZ+Zr46V6GuavGCk7Olb3Bq5kexee6bQLcGVu|dGFzaGFnb26IuAQTAQIAIgUCVS31gwIbAwYLCQgHAwIGFQgCCQoLBBYCAwECHgEC|F4AACgkQa2n18A5dv7J0VgP6Asv0kKVVoNtdNVJIGY8K7b6/YteiI4ZZ5Bm/f3PQ|YJBEUFY9cWQ6MYYXQeboSXsujcvqbI2JDDVyt1QH+WvM4tXb6gfhjukhhnlZMCgJ|tyzuhwYXyhdeZ0VfoHNyLOXt2/UoX+luWxihd7Q1wb+69cT5uWR+aQ0+xzIriUGe|PQydAdgEVS31gwEEAMu8mg5rfL4Dg4NShsCsf2BGvRraddCrkqNN4rCp6GBQpFCM|1Retb0aDPJHlmjgigNS0iA8/YwrPltVKbyokKcWfIfa9f615Jhp4s7xAWIIrpcph|Ov9FjDlRWXwOOmqAc0yuUxZ3vgbDEFOXdnAi6d2CWF9kPyQ9Plns/x1pkKKLABEB|AAEAA/oC2k+Ml3lgrms/Vyl8iy3MFabSOHA2jXXOhD8CBZmzt41ayg4LIyo6t4hi|lpoejRp2tVcZDOSAeJWpGOi46KwOX5UwVmB8fWSm2hlvqmbtrCVPe3dd3deB2S6E|lMnjkF1YkCaYydfh2/ACiiOTk4fODGsuXuyOc++PIL1VYq1RcQIAzi6o6E1XXNzU|Bf1K7rVv7yn1RAFfuii+8P58cmZuazWtYP4m9U57K68G7IGA4H5CXkZSKP4l7SXt|ed6oMofiUwIA/PashjRrWIEAH98lBQiwHJfVRPlGTzaOvCB7Mv2jfHvyBGIoNAti|ueprOES0vT7+2zIZSm5z/kLm7S+sWtMn6QIAkzwzm7QDXKn3bJoAPH//gNuiX4td|SeHrR52TNhfO2jLFJSN4+Zc2KgNCCaYsCHZPI+smxad5aMAxnj7rWFSRY5vFiJ8E|GAECAAkFAlUt9YMCGwwACgkQa2n18A5dv7L+ggP/XU7r3GR6mTljp9IPGArvhEa4|QfPRmb3XIrzBAUTtN/Jep5pUTrz47ZPpwdrBgfqo9u0x80P+JvV 8k4t0jWsOgRQr|4+k8LE1LIPEm9vChtiWxWfzxcTIAzewa7m/gelqMRhbbmSKxgY6HTWjUbizC    vlB+|gD9PdL658E8TBFqJYbQ=|=MeTI|-----END PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK-----|)
        subpkt 16 len 8 (issuer key ID 6B69F5F00E5DBFB2)
        data: [1024 bits]
gpg: Signature made Tue 14 Apr 2015 10:37:40 PM PDT using RSA key ID 0E5DBFB2
gpg: using PGP trust model
gpg: Good signature from "pentashagon"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: B501 B12E 5184 8694 4557  01FC 6B69 F5F0 0E5D BFB2
gpg: textmode signature, digest algorithm SHA1

I ran the exported (unencrypted) private key through tr '\n' '|' to get a single line of text to set, and created the signature with:

gpg -a --clearsign --sig-notation secret@key="exported-secret-key-here" -u pentashagon

Let me know if your OpenPGP software of choice makes it any more clear that the signature is leaking the private key without some sort of verbose display.

Pentashagon Apr 15, 2015, 5:14 AM
0 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Hedonium’s semantic problem
I can imagine how decoherence explains why we only experience descent along a single path through the multiverse-tree instead of experiencing superposition, but I don’t think that’s sufficient to claim that all consciousness requires decoherence.

An interesting implication of Scott’s idea is that consciousness is timeless, despite our experience of time passing. For example, put a clock and a conscious being inside Schrödinger’s box and then either leave it in a superposition forever or open it at some point in the future. If we don’t open the box, in theory nothing is conscious of watching the clock as time passes. If we open the box, there’s a conscious being who can describe all the time inside the box watching the clock. When, to the outside observer, does that conscious experience happen? Either all the conscious experience happens the instant the box is measured, contrary to our notions of the experience of time passing and our understanding of how the physical state of the clock changes (e.g. the conscious experience of seeing the clock read 3:52 PM on Thursday should have happened at 3:52 PM on Thursday when the clock inside the box was in a superposition of physically displaying that time with very high probability), or else there would have been conscious experience the entire time even if the box was never opened, in order that the experience could happen at the corresponding time.

Which means we’re all p-zombies until a specific point in the future when we decohere sufficiently to have consciousness up to that point.

Pentashagon Apr 14, 2015, 5:52 AM
3 points
in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: A pair of free information security tools I wrote
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-5.2.3.1 has a list of several subpackets that can be included in a signature. How many people check to make sure the order of preferred algorithms isn’t tweaked to leak bits? Not to mention just repeating/fudging subpackets to blatantly leak binary data in subpackets that look “legitimate” to someone who hasn’t read and understood the whole RFC.

Pentashagon Jan 27, 2015, 5:17 PM
4 points
on: Formalizing Two Problems of Realistic World Models
Suppose that instead of having well-defined actions AIXI only has access to observables and its reward function. It might seem hopeless, but consider the subset of environments containing an implementation of a UTM which is evaluating T_A, a Turing machine implementing action-less AIXI, in which the implementation of the UTM has side effects in the next turn of the environment. This embeds AIXI-actions as side effects of an actual implementation of AIXI running as T_A on a UTM in the set of environments with observables matching those that the abstract AIXI-like algorithm observes. To maximize the reward function the agent must recognize its implementation embedded in the UTM in M and predict the consequences of the side effects of various choices it could make, substituting its own output for the output of the UTM in the next turn of the simulated environment (to avoid recursively simulating itself), choosing the side effects to maximize rewards.

In this context counterfactuals are simulations of the next turns of M resulting from the possible side effects of its current UTM. To be useful there must be a relation from computation-suffixes of T_A to the potential side effects of the UTM. In other words the agent must be able to cause a specific side effect as a result of state-transitions or tape operations performed causally-after it has determined which side effect will maximize rewards. This could be as straightforward as the UTM using the most-recently written bits on the tape to choose a side effect.

In the heating game, the UTM running T_A must be physically implemented as something that has a side effect corresponding to temperature, which causally effects the box of rewards, and all these causes must be predictable from the observables accessible to T_A in the UTM. Similarly, if there is an anvil suspended above a physical implementation of a UTM running T_A, the agent can avoid an inability to increase rewards in the future of environments in which the anvil is caused to drop (or escape from the UTM before dropping it).

This reduces the naturalized induction problem to the tiling/consistent reflection problem; the agent must choose which agent it wants to be in the next turn(s) through side effects that can change its future implementation.

Pentashagon Jan 20, 2015, 6:43 AM
7 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: … And Everyone Loses Their Minds
Is there also a bias toward the illusion of choice? Some people think driving is safer than flying because they are “in control” when driving, but not when flying. Similarly, I could stay inside a well-grounded building my whole life and avoid ever being struck by lightning, but I can’t make a similar choice to avoid all possible threats of terrorism.