Svyatoslav Usachev

Karma: 64

Svyatoslav Usachev Dec 5, 2021, 4:08 PM
1 point
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Privacy and Manipulation
Your friend’s case seems to be very clear cut, and the root issue is not some vague manipulation or secrecy, but the actual abuse that, I assume, continued through their interaction.

Svyatoslav Usachev Dec 5, 2021, 4:04 PM
2 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Privacy and Manipulation
While Aella’s post is very vivid in describing the horror of abuse, I don’t necessarily see it in your post. You don’t seem to be in a vulnerable/dependent position with respect to Carla and Dave, they don’t humiliate you, don’t make you doubt your own experience, don’t seem to discard your feelings, and so on.
That’s why if you said to me “I reserve the right to do X, if I find that you are manipulating me”, I wouldn’t be sure what you mean. (Even on the objective, God’s eye, level, let’s forget the question of how we make sure that it has indeed happened for a second).

Svyatoslav Usachev Dec 5, 2021, 1:43 AM
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Privacy and Manipulation
I don’t get a clear idea of what you mean by “manipulation” from your post, and I would be uncomfortable using this word as self-evident. “Making someone do something without their informed consent” seems like a reasonable attempt at a definition to me.

Svyatoslav Usachev Dec 5, 2021, 1:30 AM
4 points
on: Privacy and Manipulation
So the main issue, it seems, is that respecting confidentiality of some shared information may actually require a lot of effort, if it comes into conflict with the drive to behave morally. And manipulation in such cases then is bestowing this burden on a person without their informed consent, right?

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 9, 2021, 8:15 AM
5 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Worth checking your stock trading skills
Well, think about it, one-in-five is an extremely high probability! We only need 5 people to try what the OP tried, for one of them to be this successful and to write this post, and we won’t hear about most of those who failed.

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 5, 2021, 11:26 AM
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause
Yes, similarity to Pascal’s wager and other religious thought is not a coincidence at all. Our existence is marked by the ultimately irreconcilable conflict: on the one hand, if you view people as ML systems, being alive is both the fundamental goal of our decision-making and the precondition for all of our world-modeling; on the other hand, we are faced with the fact that all people die.

Even if we recognize our mortality rationally, our whole subconscious is built/trained around the ever-existing subjectivity. That’s why we are so often intuiting that there must be some immaculate and indestructible subject inside of us, that will not perish and can transcend space and time, as if “choosing” where to be embodied. You can see this assumption driving many thought experiments: cloning, teleportation, simulation, Boltzmann brains, cryonics, imagining what it is “to be someone else”, and so on. All of them presuppose that there is something you can call you beside being you, beside the totality of your experience. Major religions call it the soul. We, rationalists, know better than to explicitly posit something so supernatural, and yet it is still hard to truly embrace the fact that if you strip away every circumstance of existence that makes you you, the perfectly abstract observer remaining is devoid of any individuality and is no more you than it is me.

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 4, 2021, 6:50 PM
2 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause
What if you grab nothing from the stage but do grab the audience?
I think, if you truly grab nothing from the stage, then the audience is impersonal. My “experiencer” is exactly the same as your “experiencer”, the only difference is that mine is experiencing “me”, i.e., my thoughts, memories, emotions, etc.
Does it not make sense if you have a memory disease like alzheimers or concussion and somebody points as a picture and says “that is you” and you have no recollection of that, would they be wrong about it? Does it really flip on whether you feel a sense of connection to your old self?
Somebody is not wrong to use it as a social construct, but what we are discussing here, I guess, is how important it would be to me. First, it would be important to me that everyone else sees me as the descendant of that person. Second, I would still be a continuation of that person, in the ways I may not be conscious of, e.g., some past traumas, learned behaviours and so on.
Or before the disease strikes would you be wrong to worry about that person-to-be as your own welfare? Does it mean that because there is total oblivion inbetween that it doesn’t happen to you?
Actually, if you think about it, we care about our future selves not necessarily because they will remember us, but because we really want to project our present selves into the future, and also because we are in the unique position to affect the lives of our future selves like no human can affect another. Both of these hold in your example.

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 4, 2021, 5:14 PM
2 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause
Even before I “experience anything” when the “tabula rasa” condition is in effect the word “I” refers. Even among empty shells that have no personality or that have identical personalities “I” picks out a unique instance.
I don’t think that’s how psychology works. The word “I” is a concept learned with language, not something essential on its own.
To make the view extreme if you spent your life in car one could claim that “you can’t leave the car” because human outside of car and an empty car is a world differently structured than human living in a car. Sure identifying with a radically transformed self might be difficult but most people think they are their future selfs (that is it is not somebody else that wakes up in their bed).
Well, it would make sense to say that it is you that left the car (or the all-encompassing simulation), as long as there is continuity of the sense of self, as long as you keep your memories and everything you’ve learned in your car-life. But if I’d left everything behind before I got into the simulation, I don’t think it makes sense to say I am still “me”.

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 4, 2021, 3:13 PM
6 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause
I think, I am not getting my point across very well. The crux here is this: what is “you” but the footprint of your experience? That would include your memories, intuitions, reactions, associations, and patterns of thinking. I argue there is nothing else. If you remove that, then how “me” entering the simulation is different from “you” entering the simulation? The truly original face is devoid of any self-ness.

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 4, 2021, 2:30 PM
4 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause
Let’s imagine that you’ve spent your whole life from birth inside an MMORPG. Who is then “you”, separate from the MMORPG world, who could leave it? All your dreams, hopes, desires, thoughts, intuitions, personality, and all of your sense of “self” is formed by your experience within the MMORPG. What does that leave to the “original” you? Just the structure of the neural network with which you’ve been born? That doesn’t sound like anything essential to me. Certainly it is not something I can even be consciously aware of, how could I call it “me”? OP says “the simulators extracted and stored all of your memories”, but it’s an error to think that “memories” is just some data on a flash drive, if you actually remove the subtlest footprint of all your experience, then what remains?
There is a great koan which asks to “remember your original face”. There are several ways to think about it, but it points to the seeming duality between the subject (“you”) and the object (“the world”), that you imagine being submerged in, being an illusion, because in the end the subject is formed by the same world and is inseparable from it.
PS if you would keep your “simulated experience” though, as in “The Matrix”, then the thought experiment becomes coherent, because the continuity of self is preserved, and we can really say that it is “you” that moved from one world to another, but in that case it is not clear whether I should be treating my “simulated past” differently from my “real past”—they both have just been formative experiences that made me into who I am now.

Svyatoslav Usachev Nov 4, 2021, 12:16 PM
2 points
on: The Opt-Out Clause
The whole idea of a simulation you could “leave” is incoherent. It supposes that there is some part of you, which is separate from the physical/simulated world, e.g., a soul. I think there is nothing to me but the world I am experiencing, so there is no one who could leave.

Svyatoslav Usachev Oct 2, 2021, 11:25 AM
5 points
in reply to: clone of saturn’s comment on: Petrov Day 2021: Mutually Assured Destruction?
A thousand times this! I haven’t seen anyone pointing out what’s wrong with this ritual more clearly. Exactly, we turn the celebration of individual courage into a celebration of unity/conformity, what an irony.

Svyatoslav Usachev Sep 30, 2021, 9:33 AM
1 point
on: Pathways: Google’s AGI
As a comparison, the human brain is estimated to have hundreds of trillions of synapses connecting its 100 billion neurons. In terms of numbers, Google’s algorithms may soon match the human brain.
It reminds me how people first compared the amount of memory the computers had, and then their performance, as measured in FLOPS, to those of the human brain. And my intuition tells me that it is similarly misleading.

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 12, 2021, 1:46 PM
5 points
in reply to: artifex0’s comment on: Going Out With Dignity
If we are talking about any sort of “optimality”, we can’t expect even individual humans to have these “optimal” values, much less so en masse. Of course it is futile to dream that our deus ex machina will impose those fantastic values on the world if 99% of us de facto disagree with them.

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 5, 2021, 1:54 PM
3 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Should VS Would and Newcomb’s Paradox
Both definitions have their issues.

“able to act on its desires unimpededly” has 2 problems. First, it is clearly describing the “agent’s” (also not a well-defined category, but let’s leave it at that) experience, e.g. desires, not something objective from an outside view. Second, “unimpededly” is also intrinsically vague. Is my desire to fly impeded? Is an addict’s desire to quit? (If the answer is “no” to both, what would even count as impediment?) But, I guess, it is fine if we agree that “compatibilist free will” is just a feature of subjective experience.

“ability to make undetermined choices” relies on the ambiguous concept of “choice”, but also would be surprisingly abundant in a truly probabilistic world. We’d have to attribute “libertarian free will” to a radioactive isotope that’s “choosing” when to decay, or to any otherwise deterministic system that relies on such isotope. I don’t think that agrees with intuition of those who find this concept meaningful.

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 5, 2021, 12:19 AM
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Should VS Would and Newcomb’s Paradox
You’d have to draw the line somewhere so it would have any meaning at all. What’s the point in the concept if anything can be interpreted as such. What do you mean when you say “free choice” or “choice”?

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 4, 2021, 8:55 PM
3 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Should VS Would and Newcomb’s Paradox
I don’t think it can be meaningfully defined. How could you define free choice so that a human would have it, but a complicated mechanical contraption of stones wouldn’t?

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 4, 2021, 7:43 PM
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Should VS Would and Newcomb’s Paradox
I don’t think computers have any more free will [free choice] than stones. Do you?

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 4, 2021, 7:35 PM
3 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Should VS Would and Newcomb’s Paradox
Not necessarily. Non-determinism (that future is not completely defined by the past) doesn’t have anything to do with choice. A stone doesn’t make choices even if future is intrinsically unpredictable. The question here is why would anyone think that humans are qualitatively different from stones.

Svyatoslav Usachev Jul 4, 2021, 7:35 PM
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Should VS Would and Newcomb’s Paradox
Not necessarily. Determinism doesn’t have anything to do with choice. The stone doesn’t make choices regardless of determinism. The question here is why would anyone think that humans are qualitatively different from stones.