The_Duck

Karma: 421

The_Duck Jun 7, 2014, 8:46 PM
3 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Mathematics as a lossy compression algorithm gone wild
Fair enough. I can see the appeal of your view if you don’t think there’s a theory of everything. But given the success of fundamental physics so far, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t such a theory!

The_Duck Jun 7, 2014, 4:51 PM
18 points
0
on: Mathematics as a lossy compression algorithm gone wild

What would it mean then for a Universe to not “run on math”? In this approach it means that in such a universe no subsystem can contain a model, no matter how coarse, of a larger system. In other words, such a universe is completely unpredictable from the inside. Such a universe cannot contain agents, intelligence or even the simplest life forms.

I think when we say that the universe “runs on math,” part of what we mean is that we can use simple mathematical laws to predict (in principle) all aspects of the universe. We suspect that there is a lossless compression algorithm, i.e., a theory of everything. This is a much stronger statement than just claiming that the universe contains some predictable regularities, and is part of what makes the Platonic ideas you are arguing against seem appealing.

We could imagine a universe in which physics found lots of approximate patterns that held most of the time and then got stuck, with no hint of any underlying order and simplicity. In such a universe we would probably not be so impressed with the idea of the universe “running on math” and these Platonic ideas might be less appealing.

The_Duck May 11, 2014, 2:16 PM
0 points
in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: [LINK] No Boltzmann Brains in an Empty Expanding Universe

Quantum fluctuations are not dynamical processes inherent to a system, but instead reflect the statistical nature of measurement outcomes.

I’m no expert at all, but while that sounds agreeable on an intuitive level, I’ve read that the opposite is true—ie that QM processed are inherently fuzzy

I don’t quite understand why you think that this is the opposite of what you quoted. The point is that the “inherent fuzziness” is there, but it is not because of literal unobserved “fluctuations” of the system over time. Speaking of “fluctuations” as if they were actual processes happening in time is poetic language (and all physicists understand that it is poetic language. The process of trying to explain QM to lay audiences generates a huge number of attractive but incomplete oversimplifications like this one).

The_Duck May 3, 2014, 5:13 PM
10 points
in reply to: Froolow’s comment on: The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space
something like ‘simulationist’ preservation seems to me to be well within two orders of magnitude of the probability of cryonics—both rely on society finding your information and deciding to do something with it

I don’t know if I agree with your estimate of the relative probabilities, but I admit that I exaggerated slightly to make my point. I agree that this strategy at least worth thinking about, especially if you think it is at all plausible that we are in a simulation. Something along these lines is the only one of the listed strategies that I thought had any merit.

A priori it seems hugely unlikely that with all of our ingenuity we can only come up with two plausible strategies for living forever (religion and cryonics)

I agree, and I also think we should try to think up other strategies. Here are some that people have already come up with besides cryonics and religion:
- Figure out how to cure aging before you die.
- Figure out how to upload brains before you die.
- Create a powerful AI and delegate the problem to it (complementary to cryonics if the AI will only be created after you die).

The_Duck May 3, 2014, 1:55 AM
10 points
on: The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space
Personally, I don’t find any of the strategies you mention to be plausible enough to be worth thinking about for more than a few seconds. (Most of them seem obviously insufficient to preserve anything I would identify as “me.”) I’m worried this may produce the opposite of this post’s intended effect, because it may seem to provide evidence that strategies besides cryonics can be easily dismissed.

The_Duck Apr 22, 2014, 8:33 AM
2 points
in reply to: EHeller’s comment on: AI risk, new executive summary

“There are numbers you can’t remember if I tell them to you” is not at all the same claim that “there are ideas I can’t explain to you.”

But they might be related. Perhaps there are interesting and useful concepts that would take, say, 100,000 pages of English text to write down, such that each page cannot be understood without holding most of the rest of the text in working memory, and such that no useful, shorter, higher-level version of the concept exists.

Humans can only think about things that can be taken one small piece at a time, because our working memories are pretty small. It’s plausible to me that there are atomic ideas that are simply too big to fit in a human’s working memory, and which do need to be held in your head at one time in order to be understood.

The_Duck Apr 19, 2014, 6:53 AM
1 point
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Rationality Quotes April 2014

I can’t turn it into equations.

Did you try? Each sentence in the quote could easily be expressed in some formal system like predicate calculus or something.

Be comfortable with hypocrisy

The_DuckApr 8, 2014, 10:03 AM

67 points

80 comments2 min readLW link

The_Duck Apr 8, 2014, 5:47 AM
8 points
on: The Case For Free Will or Why LessWrong must commit to self determination

I see a future pattern emerging in the United States:

Few atheists among overwhelming Christians → shrinking Christianity, growing Atheism → atheism tribalness growing well connected and strong → Natural tribal impulse to not tolerate different voices → war between atheists and Christians.

The last arrow seems like quite a jump. In the US we try to restrain the impulse to intolerance with protections for free speech and such. Do you think these protections are likely to fail? Why are religious divisions going to cause a war when other divisions such as the political left vs. right haven’t? Why do you think a religious war is likely in the US when European countries with much higher rates of atheism haven’t experienced such wars and don’t seem likely to?

Don’t try to say this won’t happen, and that Rationalists will always allow other people to believe differently. Coherent Extrapolated Volition, Politics is the Mind Killer, and Eliezar’ success in creating the LW and rationalist movement say otherwise.

I’m confused; what do these three things you cite have to do with intolerance of religious views?

The_Duck Apr 2, 2014, 6:11 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn’t understand

I don’t think that line makes him a compatibilist, because I don’t think that’s the notion of free will under discussion.

What exactly is the notion of free will that is under discussion? Or equivalently, can you explain what a “true” compatibilist position might look like? You cited this paper as an example of a “traditionally compatibilist view,” but I’m afraid I didn’t get much from it. I found it too dense to extract any meaning in the time I was willing to spend reading it, and it seemed to make some assertions that, as I interpreted them, were straightforwardly false.

I’d find a simple explanation of a “traditional compatibilist” position very helpful.

The_Duck Apr 1, 2014, 6:30 AM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn’t understand
I think this is his conclusion:

...if we want to know which meaning to attach to a confusing sensation, we should ask why the sensation is there, and under what conditions it is present or absent.

Then I could say something like: “This sensation of freedom occurs when I believe that I can carry out, without interference, each of multiple actions, such that I do not yet know which of them I will take, but I am in the process of judging their consequences according to my emotions and morals.”

This is a condition that can fail in the presence of jail cells, or a decision so overwhelmingly forced that I never perceived any uncertainty about it.

There—now my sensation of freedom indicates something coherent; and most of the time, I will have no reason to doubt the sensation’s veracity. I have no problems about saying that I have “free will” appropriately defined; so long as I am out of jail, uncertain of my own future decision, and living in a lawful universe that gave me emotions and morals whose interaction determines my choices.

Certainly I do not “lack free will” if that means I am in jail, or never uncertain of my future decisions, or in a brain-state where my emotions and morals fail to determine my actions in the usual way.

Usually I don’t talk about “free will” at all, of course! That would be asking for trouble—no, begging for trouble—since the other person doesn’t know about my redefinition. The phrase means far too many things to far too many people, and you could make a good case for tossing it out the window.

But I generally prefer to reinterpret my sensations sensibly, as opposed to refuting a confused interpretation and then calling the sensation “false”.

This sounds pretty compatibilist to me. EY gives a definition of free will that is manifestly compatible with determinism. Elsewhere in that post he argues that different definitions of free will are nonsensical and are generated by misleading intuitions.

But as the quote demonstrates, and as discussed in a different post, EY is less interested in providing a definition for free will and then asserting that people do or do not possess free will, and more interested in explaining in detail where all the intuitions about free will come from, and therefore why people talk about free will. He suggests that if you can explain what caused you to ask the question “do we have free will?” in the first place, you may not need to even bother to answer the question.

The_Duck Mar 5, 2014, 1:24 AM
5 points
in reply to: DaFranker’s comment on: Open Thread: March 4 − 10

my confidence that the ultimately correct and most useful Next Great Discovery (e.g. any method to control gravity) will not come from a physics department is above 50%.

If you care to expand on this, I’m curious to hear your reasoning.

The_Duck Mar 1, 2014, 11:51 PM
12 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Rationality Quotes March 2014
What does this mean?

The_Duck Jul 8, 2013, 4:45 AM
4 points
on: Estimating the kolmogorov complexity of the known laws of physics?
Computer simulation of the strong interaction part of the Standard Model is a big research area: you may want to read about lattice QCD. I’ve written a simple lattice QCD simulation in a few hundred lines of code. If you Google a bit you can probably find some example code. The rest of the Standard Model has essentially the same structure and would only be a few more lines of code.

The_Duck Dec 11, 2012, 10:30 PM
3 points
in reply to: Jay_Schweikert’s comment on: By Which It May Be Judged

I don’t think this works, because “fairness” is not defined as “divide up food equally” (or even “divide up resources equally”). It is the algorithm that, among other things, leads to dividing up the pie equally in the circumstances described in the original post

Yes; I meant for the phrase “divide up food equally” to be shorthand for something more correct but less compact, like “a complicated algorithm whose rough outline includes parts like, ‘...When a group of people are dividing up resources, divide them according to the following weighted combination of need, ownership, equality, who discovered the resources first, …’”

The_Duck Dec 11, 2012, 7:01 AM
10 points
on: By Which It May Be Judged
I think your discussions of metaethics might be improved by rigorously avoiding words like “fair,” “right,” “better,” “moral,” “good,” etc. I like the idea that “fair” points to a logical algorithm whose properties we can discuss objectively, but when you insist on using the word “fair,” and no other word, as your pointer to this algorithm, people inevitably get confused. It seems like you are insisting that words have objective meanings, or that your morality is universally compelling, or something. You can and do explicitly deny these, but when you continue to rely exclusively on the word “fair” as if there is only one concept that that word can possibly point to, it’s not clear what your alternative is.

Whereas if you use different symbols as pointers to your algorithms, the message (as I understand it) becomes much clearer. Translate something like:

Fair is dividing up food equally. Now, is dividing up the pie equally objectively fair? Yes: someone who wants to divide up the pie differently is talking about something other than fairness. So the assertion “dividing the pie equally is fair” is objectively true.

into

Define XYZZY as the algorithm “divide up food equally.” Now, is dividing up the pie equally objectively XYZZY? Of course it is: that’s a direct logical consequence of how I just defined XYZZY. Someone who wants to divide the pie differently is using an algorithm that is not XYZZY. The assertion “dividing up the pie equally is XYZZY” is as objective as the assertion “S0+S0=SS0”—someone who rejects the latter is not doing Peano arithmetic. By the way, when I personally say the word “fair,” I mean “XYZZY.”

I suspect that wording things like this has less potential to trip people up: it’s much easier to reason logically about XYZZY than about fairness, even if both words are supposed to be pointers to the same concept.

The_Duck Dec 10, 2012, 7:18 AM
2 points
in reply to: Mestroyer’s comment on: Absent Transhumanism and Transformative Technologies, Which Utopia is Left?
Upvoted because of the frank and detailed reduction of pleasure, pain, and preferences in general.

The_Duck Dec 4, 2012, 12:57 AM
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Looking for a likely cause of a mental phenomenon
This seems very insightful to me. In physics, it’s definitely my experience that over time I gain fluency with more and more powerful concepts that let me derive new things in much faster and simpler ways. And I find myself consciously working ideas over in my mind with, I think, the explicit goal of advancing this process.

The funny thing about this is that before I gain these “superpowers,” I’ll read an explanation in a textbook, which is in terms of high-level ideas that I haven’t completely grasped yet, so the reading doesn’t help as much as it should. The book claims, “this follows immediately from Lorentz invariance,” and I don’t really see what’s going on. Then, later, after I’ve understood those ideas, I find myself explaining things to myself in much the same words as the textbook: “I see! It’s simple! It follows immediately from Lorentz invariance!”—but now this really is an explanation, and the words have a lot more meaning.

I’m reminded of the Interdict of Merlin in HMPOR.

The_Duck Nov 30, 2012, 2:14 AM
0 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Causal Universes

I’m not disputing that we should factor in the lost utility from the future-that-would-have-been.

The issue for me is not the lost utility of the averted future lives. I just assign high negative utility to death itself, whenever it happens to someone who doesn’t want to die, anywhere in the future history of the universe. [To be clear, by “future history of the universe” I mean everything that ever gets simulated by the simulator’s computer, if our universe is a simulation.]

That’s the negative utility I’m weighing against whatever utility we gain by time traveling. My moral calculus is balancing

[Future in which 1 billion die by nuclear war, plus 10^20 years (say) of human history afterwards] vs. [Future in which 6 billion die by being erased from disk, plus 10^20 years (say) of human history afterwards].

I could be persuaded to favor the second option only if the expected value of the 10^20 years of future human history are significantly better on the right side. But the expected value of that difference would have to outweigh 5 billion deaths.

But choosing not to go back in time also means, in effect, destroying one future, and creating another. Do you disagree?

Yes, I disagree. Have you dedicated your life to having as many children as possible? I haven’t, because I feel zero moral obligation toward children who don’t exist, and feel zero guilt about “destroying” their nonexistent future.

The_Duck Nov 30, 2012, 1:44 AM
3 points
in reply to: scav’s comment on: Causal Universes

I am having my doubts that time travel is even a coherent concept.

But Eliezer gave you a constructive example in the post!

The_Duck

Be com­fortable with hypocrisy

Be comfortable with hypocrisy