We’re moving it to cafe royal. It’s in the area.
Ronak
Karma: 263
Where it used to be. Look outside regal cinema. Close to a shop called sixth street yogurt.
This is next to a shop called sixth street yogurt.
So Gloria jeans coffee is closed. I’m standing outside with a sign if anyone’s around. Sorry for the mix-up.
Yeah, conversation most probably. Backup games and things in case too many of us are bad at social stuff.
Awesome. Look forward to meeting you.
Totally. Moving to fifteenth.
Meetup : Mumbai Meetup
I took the survey—extra credit and everything!
When I said ‘A and B are the same,’ I meant that it is not possible for one of A and B to have a different truth-value from the other. Two-boxing entails you are a two-boxer, but being a two-boxer also entails that you’ll two-box. But let me try and convince you based on your second question, treating the two as at least conceptually distinct.
Imagine a hypothetical time when people spoke about statistics in terms of causation rather than correlation (and suppose no one had done Pearl’s work). As you can imagine, the paradoxes would write themselves. At one point, someone would throw up his/her arms and tell everyone to stop talking about causation. And then the causalists would rebel, because causality is a sacred idea. The correlators would reply probably by constructing a situation where a third, unmeasured C caused both A and B.
Newcomb’s is that problem for decision theory. CDT is in a sense right when it says one-boxing doesn’t cause there to be a million dollars in the box, that what does cause the money to be there is being a one-boxer. But, it ignores the fact that the same thing that caused there to be the million dollars also causes you to one-box—so, there may not be a causal link there very definitely is a correlation.
‘C causing both A and B’ is an instance of the simplest and most intuitive way in which correlation can be not causation, and CDT fails. EDT is looking at correlations between decisions and consequences and using that to decide.Aside: You’re right, though, that the LW idea of a decision is somewhat different from the CDT idea. You define it as “a proposition that the agent can make true or false at will.” That definition has this really enormous black box called will—and if Omega has an arbitrarily high predictive accuracy, then it must be the case that that black box is a causal link going from Omega’s raw material for prediction (brain state) to decision. CDT, when it says that you ought to only look at causal arrows that begin at the decision, assumes that there can be no causal arrow that points to the decision (because the moment you admit that there can be a causal arrow that begins somewhere and ends at your decision, you have to admit that there can exist C that causes both your decision and a consequence without your decision actually causing the consequence).
In short, the new idea of what a decision is itself causes the requirement for a new decision theory.
[Saying same thing as everyone else, just different words. Might work better, might not.]
Suppose once Omega explains everything to you, you think ‘now either the million dollars are there or aren’t and my decision doesn’t affect shit.’ True, your decision now doesn’t affect it—but your ‘source code’ (neural wiring) contains the information ‘will in this situation think thoughts that support two-boxing and accept them.’ So, choosing to one-box is the same as being the type of agent who’ll one-box.
The distinction between agent type and decision is artificial. If your decision is to two-box, you are the agent-type who will two-box. There’s no two ways about it. (As others have pointed out, this has been formalised by Anna Salomon.)The only way you can get out of this is if you believe in free will as something that exists in some metaphysical sense. Then to you, Omega being this accurate is beyond the realm of possibility and therefore the question is unfair.
What’s the hairy green sphere? My search engine gives this page as first result.
It sounds unlikely to be a cause—with a different reward system different teaching will be deemed right.
Epistemic:
-> finding out that I can’t, even given an exponentially bigger universe to compute in, be predicted.
It would also potentially destroy my sense of identity. Even if I can be predicted, I can do anything I want: it’s just that what I’ll want is constrained. However, if the converse is true, any want I feel has nothing to do with me (and my intuitive sense of identity is similar to ‘something that generates the wants and thoughts that I have’) and I’m not sure I’ll feel particularly obliged to satisfy them.
(Warning: writing it out made it sound to me like post-hoc rationalisation. But far as I can make out, I believe it.)-> finding out that I’m being controlled by direct neurological tinkering or very thorough manipulation.
Manipulation to some degree is very common, and the line between influence and manipulation is not very clean, but there is definitely an amount of manipulation that will make me go, ‘no free will.’ Basically, if you can make it clear that my wants are being constrained by intentions.Psychological and physical: I find it hard to come up with anything that won’t look normal. If my wants are being constrained, it’ll just feel like stronger wants acting contrariwise. However, I can imagine something ineffable keeping me away from certain thoughts and wants… but that happens anyway too—Yudkowsky’s written shitloads about that feeling (also, in a very different context, me).
Physically, involuntary motions happen all the time, and often I can’t move quite the way I want to. Physical constraints, I dismiss them as.
Because the solution to the problem is worthless except to the extent that it establishes your position in an issue it’s constructed to illuminate.
*I don’t know what you understand and don’t.
*I can tell you that he’s talking about rich people’s concerns and how they’ve taken over litfic and how there’s a very narrow understanding of character building, but there’s lots more intricacy to it and that’s why I’d do better at explaining bits than the whole thing.
No. I wouldn’t mind that, but those two are hardly the only things novels can do; and I can’t provide an exhaustive list of what literature does and how it does it—if I could do such things I’d have written something worth reading by now.
I’m sorry, but I have no idea how to explain Mieville’s statements to you. Lit people are often vague, and often because they aren’t able to be clearer. Maybe if you had specific points of confusion I could help.
It might help to know that the litfic audience is a lot more like an academy than a fanbase, and that Mieville is a Marxist so he’s using language from there.
They’re hard to pin down, and different people I know have different explanations.
The one in my head is basically that they pay too much attention to theme and perspective; while in many cases litfic is directly about perspectives (themes), lots of people tend to be reductio ad absurdums of this, focusing on these things in rather simplistic ways that sometimes ignore how the world works or the basic potentially interesting things in the setting**. This is made worse because it’s less obvious to the unpractised eye by the very nature of what’s being tackled what the difference between Nabokov and McEwan is than is that between Arthur C Clarke and a generic bad SF writer; and by the fact that the average litfic writer has been through a professional course in writing and therefore sounds very polished.
Here’s China Mieville’s explanation, since you shouldn’t be limited by my account found in the Guardian (it’s not a coincidence that he chose Saturday too, it’s partly that it’s too good an example and partly that he put it in my head back when I read this piece):
”Literary fiction of that ilk – insular, socially and psychologically hermetic, neurotically backslapping and self-congratulatory about a certain milieu, disaggregated from any estrangement or rubbing of aesthetics against the grain – is in poor shape.” Miéville identifies Ian McEwan’s Saturday, set around the 2003 demonstration against the Iraq war, as a “paradigmatic moment in the social crisis of litfic”.
”In the early 2000s there was this incredible efflorescence of anger and excitement . . . It seemed to me that Saturday quite bolshily said, ’OK, you accuse us of a neurotic obsession with insularity and a certain milieu. I’m going to take the most extraordinary political event that has happened in Britain for however many years and I am going to doggedly interiorise it and depoliticise it with a certain type of limpid prose . . . It was a combative novel that met that sense of there being a crisis and de-crisised it through its absolute fidelity to a set of generic tropes.”*Another particularly appropriate example: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel involving, among other things, cannibals and an earth that can’t grow food that, at page 300, suddenly reveals that it’s about A Father’s Concerns About Setting His Child Free and nothing else*. I’m sympathetic to the theme, but not when it funges on everything else potentially interesting about the story.
Edit: I consider China Mieville more able to answer this question properly than Eliezer because he has read a lot of litfic and incorporates techniques from that side into his writing.
Also, I just realised that this whole thread must have been a bit frustrating to you because of my laziness. Sorry about that.
It’d take me a while to explain it fully, but basically that the worst trends in litfic writing are manifested in his work.
But they made those diary entries. And looked into the diary regularly to make sure they remembered.