TruePath

Karma: 170

TruePath Jan 17, 2019, 5:27 PM
1 point
in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: And My Axiom! Insights from ‘Computability and Logic’
Yah, enumerable means something different than computably enumerable.

TruePath Jan 15, 2019, 2:20 AM
−1 points
on: Anthropics: Full Non-indexical Conditioning (FNC) is inconsistent
This is just the standard sleeping beauty paradox and I’d suggest that the issue isn’t unique to FNC.

However, you are a bit quick in concluding it is time inconsistent as it’s not altogether clear that one is truly referring to the same event before and after you have the observation. The hint here is that in the standard sleeping beauty paradox the supposed update involves only information you already were certain you would get.

Id argue that what’s actually going on is that you are evaluating slightly different questions in the two cases

TruePath Dec 11, 2018, 10:01 AM
9 points
on: Who’s welcome to our LessWrong meetups?
Don’t. At least outside of Silicon Valley where oversubscription may actually be a problem. It’s a good intention but it inevitably will make people worry they aren’t welcome or aren’t the right sort of people . Instead, describe what one does or what one talks about in a way that will appeal to the kind of people who would enjoy coming

TruePath Nov 20, 2018, 1:48 PM
7 points
on: [Insert clever intro here]
Given that you just wrote a whole post to say hi and share your background with everyone I’m pretty confident you’ll fit right in and won’t have any problems being too shy. Writing a post like this rather than just commenting is such a less wrong kind of thing to do so I think you’ll be right at home.

TruePath Nov 16, 2018, 4:50 AM
3 points
in reply to: Valerio’s comment on: The “semiosis reply” to the Chinese Room Argument
Searle can be any X?? WTF? That’s a bit confusingly written.

The intuition Searle is pumping is that since he, as a component of the total system doesn’t understand Chinese it seems counterintuitive to conclude that the whole system understands Chinese. When Searle says he is the system he is pointing to the fact that he is doing all the actual interpretation of instructions and is seems weird to think that the whole system has some extra experiences that let it understand Chinese even though he does not. When Searle uses the word understand he does not mean demonstrate the appropriate input output behavior he is presuming it has that behavior and asking about the system’s experiences.

Searle’s view from his philosophy of language is that our understanding and mening is grounded in our experiences and what makes a person count as understanding (as opposed to merely dumbly parroting) Chinese is that they have certain kinds of experiences while manipulating the words. When Searle asserts the room doesn’t understand Chinese he is asserting that it doesn’t have the requisite experiences (because it’s not having any experiences) that someone would need to have to count as understanding Chinese.

Look, I’ve listened to Searle explain this himself multiple times during the 2 years of graduate seminars on philosophy of mind I took with him and have discussed this very argument with him at some length. I’m sorry but you are interpreting him incorrectly.

I know I’m not making the confusion you suggest because I’ve personally talked with him at some length about his argument.

TruePath Nov 16, 2018, 4:35 AM
23 points
1
on: Sam Harris and the Is–Ought Gap
I essentially agree with you that science can’t bridge the is-ought gap (see caveats) but it’s a good deal more complicated than the arguments you give here allow for (they are a good intro but I felt it’s worth pointing out the complexities).
1. When someone claims to have bridged the is-ought gap they aren’t usually claiming to have analytically identified (i.e. identified as a matter of definition) ought with some is statements. That’ s a crazily high bar and modern philosophers (and Sam Harris was trained as a philosopher) tend to feel true analytic identities are rare but are not the only kind of necessary truths. For instance, the fact that “water is H20” is widely regarded as a necessary truth that isn’t analytic (do a search if you want an explanation) and there are any number of other philosophical arguments that are seen as establishing necessary truths which don’t amount to the definitional relationship you demand.
I think the standard Harris is using is much weaker even than that.
1. You insist that to be an ought it must be motivating for the subject. This is a matter of some debate. Some moral realists would endorse this while others would insist that it need only motivate certain kinds of agents who aren’t too screwed up in some way. But, I tend to agree with your conclusion just suggest it be qualified by saying we presuming the standard sense of moral realism here.
2. One has to be really careful with what you mean by ‘science’ here. One way people have snuck around the is-ought gap before is using terms like cruel which are kinda ‘is’ facts that back in an ought (to be cruel requires that you immorally inflict suffering etc..).
3. It’s not that Harris is purely embedded in some kind of dialectical tradition. He was trained as an analytic philosopher and they invented the is-ought gap and are no strangers to the former mode of argumentation. IT’s more that Carrol is a physicist and doesn’t know the terminology that would let him pin Harris down in terms he would understand and keep him from squirming off the point.
However, I’m pretty sure (based on my interaction with Harris emailing him over what sounded like a similarly wrongheaded view in the philosophy of mind) that Harris would admit that he hasn’t bridged Hume’s is-ought gap as philosophers understand it but instead explain that he means to address the general public’s sense that science has no moral insight to offer.

In that sense I think he is right. Most people don’t realize how much science can inform our moral discussions...he’s just being hyperbolic to sell it.

TruePath Nov 13, 2018, 1:15 AM
−4 points
in reply to: Andaro’s comment on: Wireheading as a Possible Contributor to Civilizational Decline
I agree with your general thrust except your statement that “you longtermists can simply forgo your own pleasure wireheading and instead work very hard on the whole growth and reproduction agenda” if we are able to wirehead in an effective manner it might be morally obligatory to force them into wireheading to maximize utility.

TruePath Nov 13, 2018, 1:13 AM
1 point
on: Wireheading as a Possible Contributor to Civilizational Decline
Also, your concern about some kind of disaster caused by wireheading addiction and resulting deaths and damage is pretty absurd.

Yes, people are more likely to do drugs when they are more available but even if the government can’t limit the devices that enable wireheading from legal purchase it will still require a greater effort to put together your wireheading setup than it currently does to drive to the right part of the nearest city (discoverable via google) and purchasing some heroin. Even if it did become very easy to access it’s still not true that most people who have been given the option to shoot up heroin do so and the biggest factor which deters them is the perceived danger or harm. If wireheading is more addictive/harmful it will discourage use.

Moreover, for wireheading to pose a greater danger than just going to buy heroin it would have to give greater control over brain stimulation (i.e. create more pleasure etc..) and the greater our control over the brain stimulation the greater the chance we can do so in a way that doesn’t create damage.

Indeed, any non-chemical means of brain stimulation is almost certain to be crazily safe because once monitoring equipment detects a problem you can simply shut off the intervention without the concern of long-halflife drugs remaining in the system continuing the effect.

TruePath Nov 13, 2018, 1:12 AM
1 point
on: Wireheading as a Possible Contributor to Civilizational Decline
You make a lot of claims here that seem unsupported and based on nothing but vague analogy with existing primitive means of altering our brain chemisty. For instance a key claim that pretty most of your consequences seem to depend on is this: “It is great to be in a good working mood, where you are in the flow and every task is easy, but if one feels “too good”, one will be able only to perform “trainspotting”, that is mindless staring at objects.

Why should this be true at all? The reason heroin abusers aren’t very productive (and, imo, heroin isn’t the most pleasurable existing drug) is because of the effects opiates have as depressants making them nod off etc.. The more control we achieve over brain stimulation the less likely wireheading will have the kind of side-effects which limit functioning. Now one might have a more subtle argument that suggests the ability of even a directly stimulated brain to feel pleasure will be limited and thus if we directly stimulate too much pleasure we will no longer have the appropriate rewards to incentivize work but it seems equally plausible that we will be able to seperate pleasure and motivation/effort and actually enhance our inclination to work while instilling great pleasure.

TruePath Nov 10, 2018, 10:50 AM
3 points
on: Is Copenhagen or Many Worlds true? An experiment. What? Yes.
Skimming the paper I’m not at all impressed. In particular, they make frequent and incautious use of all sorts of approximations that are only valid up to a point under certain assumptions but make no attempt to bound the errors introduced or justify the assumptions.

This is particularly dangerous to do in the context of trying to demonstrate a failure of the 2nd law of thermodynamics as the very thought experiment that might be useful will generally break those heuristics and approximations. Worse, the 2nd law is only a statistical regularity not a true exceptionless regularity so what one actually needs to show.

Even worse this piece seems to be trying to use a suspicious mixture of quantum and classical notions, e.g., using classical notions to define a closed system then analyzing it as a quantum system

TruePath Oct 26, 2018, 11:42 PM
2 points
on: In favor of tabooing the word “values” and using only “priorities” instead
Not everyone believes that everything is commesurable and people often wish to be able to talk about these issues without implicitly presuming that fact.

Moreover, values suggests something that is desirable because it is a moral good. A priority can be something I just happen to selfishly want. For instance, I might hold diminishing suffering as a value yet my highest current priority might be torturing someone to death because they killed a loved one of mine (having that priority is a moral failing on my part but doesn’t make it impossible).

TruePath Oct 15, 2018, 11:36 AM
2 points
on: Nyoom
Two thoughts.

First, as a relatively in shape person who walks a ton (no car living in the midwest) I can attest that I often wish I had a golf cart/scooter solution. They don’t need to be a replacement for walking (though good that they can be) they might also appeal to those of us who like to walk a lot but need a replacement for a car when it gets really hot or we need to carry groceries (motorcycle style scooters require licenses and can’t always be driven on campuses or parks). It would be great if these became less socially disapproved of for the non-disabled.

Second, aren’t there stable, fast scooters with decent torque and larger battery packs? Why do you think the crappy scooter will become super popular? Is it that much cheaper? Or are you just saying even a crappy scooter provides these advantages.

Decision Theory Anti-realism

TruePathOct 10, 2018, 12:08 AM

10 points

10 comments6 min readLW link

TruePath Sep 19, 2018, 11:56 AM
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Formal vs. Effective Pre-Commitment
Except if you actually go try and do the work people’s pre-theoretic understanding of rationality doesn’t correspond to a single precise concept.
Once you step into Newcomb type problems it’s no longer clear how decision theory is supposed to correspond to the world. You might be tempted to say that decision theory tells you the best way to act...but it no longer does that since it’s not that the two-boxer should have picked one box. The two-boxer was incapable of so picking and what EDT is telling you is something more like: you should have been the sort of being who would have been a one boxer not that *you* should have been a one boxer.
Different people will disagree over whether their pre-theoretic notion of rationality is one in which it is correct to say that it is rational to be a one/two boxer. Classic example of working with a imprecisely defined concept.

TruePath Sep 19, 2018, 3:04 AM
5 points
on: Realism about rationality
First, let me say I 100% agree with the idea that there is a problem in the rationality community of viewing rationality as something like momentum or gold (I named my blog rejectingrationality after this phenomena and tried to deal with it in my first post).
However, I’m not totally sure everything you say falls under that concept. In particular, I’d say that rationality realism is something like the belief that there is a fact of the matter about how best to form beliefs or take actions in response to a particular set of experiences and that many facts about this (going far beyond don’t be dutch booked). With the frequent additional belief that what is rational to do in response to various kind of experiences can be inferred by a priori considerations, e.g., think about all the ways that rule X might lead you wrong in certain possible situations so X can’t be rational.
When I’ve raised this issue in the past the response I’ve gotten from both Yudkowsky and Hanson is: “But of course we can try to be less wrong,” i.e., have less false beliefs. And of course that is true but that’s a very different notion than the notion of rationality used by rationality realists and misses the way that much of the rationality’s community’s talk about rationality isn’t about literally being less wrong but about classify rules for reaching beliefs into rational and irrational even when they don’t disagree in the actual world.
In particular, if all I’m doing is analyzing how to be less wrong I can’t criticize people who dogmatically believe things that happen to be true. After all, if god does exist, than dogmatically believing he does makes the people who do less wrong. Similarly the various critiques of human psychological dispositions as leading us to make wrong choices in some kinds of cases isn’t sufficient if those cases are rare and cases where it yields better results are common. However, those who are rationality realists suggest that there is some fact of the matter which makes these belief forming strategies irrational and thus appropriate to eschew and criticize. But, ultimately, aside from merely avoiding getting dutch booked, no rule for belief forming can assure it is less wrong than another in all possible worlds.

TruePath Sep 19, 2018, 2:30 AM
1 point
in reply to: Valerio’s comment on: The “semiosis reply” to the Chinese Room Argument
If you want to argue against that piece of reasoning give it a different name because it’s not the Chinese room argument. I took multiple graduate classes with professor Searle and, while there are a number of details Said definitely gets the overall outline correct and the argument you advanced is not his Chinese room argument.
That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about your argument just don’t insist it is Searle’s Chinese room argument.

TruePath 19 Sep 2018 2:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Formal vs. Effective Pre-Commitment
To the extent they define a particular idealization it’s one which isn’t interesting/compelling. What one would want to have to say there was a well defined question here is a single definition of what a rational agent is that everyone agreed on which one could then show favored such and such decision theory.
To put the point differently you and I can agree on absolutely every fact about the world and mathematics and yet disagree about which is the best decision theory because we simply mean slightly different things by rational agent. Moreover, there is no clear practical difference which presses us to use one definition or another like the practical usefulness of the aspects of the definition of rational agreement which yield the outcomes that all the theories agree on.

TruePath 19 Sep 2018 2:14 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Formal vs. Effective Pre-Commitment
Obviously you can and if you define that NEW idealization an X-agent (or more likely redefine the word rationality in that situation) and then there may be a fact of the matter about how an X-agent will behave in such situations. What we can’t do is assume that there is a fact of the matter about what a rational agent will do that outstrips the definition.
As such it doesn’t make sense to say CDT is right or TDT or whatever before introducing a specific idealization relative to which we can prove they give the correct answer. But that idealization has to come first and has to convince the reader that it is a good idealization.
But the rhetoric around these decision theories misleadingly tries to convince us that there is some kind of pre-existing notion of rational agent and they have discovered that XDT gives the correct answer for that notion. That’s what makes people view these claims as interesting. If the claim was nothing more than ’here is one way you can make decisions corresponding to the following assumptions” it would be much more obscure and less interesting.

TruePath 19 Sep 2018 2:07 UTC
−1 points
on: Four kinds of problems
Your criticism of the philosophy/philosophers is misguided on a number of accounts.
1. You’re basing those criticisms on the presentation in a video designed to present philosophy to the masses. That’s like reading some phys.org arg article claiming that electrons can be in two locations at once and using that to critisize the theory of Quantum Mechanics.
2. The problem philosophers are interested in addressing may not be the one you are thinking of. Philosophers would never suggest that the assumption of logical omniscience prevents one from using Bayesianism as a practical guide towards reasoning or that it’s not often a good idealization to treat degrees of belief as probabilities. However, I believe the question that this discussion is in relation to is in giving a theory that explains the fundamental nature of probability claims and here the fact that we really aren’t logically omniscient prevents us from identifying probabilities with something like rational degrees of belief (though that proposal has other problems too).
3. It’s not like philosophers haven’t put in plenty of effort looking for probability like systems that don’t presume logical omniscience. They have developed any number of them but none seem particularly useful and I’m not convinced that the paper you link about this will be much different (not that they are wrong just not that useful).

TruePath 27 Aug 2018 21:53 UTC
4 points
on: Formal vs. Effective Pre-Commitment
In particular, I’d argue that the paradoxical aspects of Newcomb’s problem result from exactly this kind of confusion between the usual agent idealization and the fact that actual actors (human beings) are physical beings subject to the laws of physics. The apparent paradoxical aspects results because we are used to idealizing individual behavior in terms of agents where that formalism requires we specify the situation in terms of a tree of possibilities with each path corresponding to an outcome and with the payoff computed by looking at the path specified by all agent’s choices (e.g. there is a node where the demon player chooses what money to put in the boxes and then there is a node where the human player, without knowledge of demon player’s choices, decides to take both boxes or neither). The agent formalization (where 1 or 2 boxing is modeled as a subsequent choice) simply doesn’t allow the content of the boxes to depend on whether or not the human agent chooses 1 or 2 boxes.
Of course, since actual people aren’t ideal agents one can argue that something like the newcomb demon is physically possible but that’s just a way of specifying that we are in a situation where the agent idealization breaks down.
This means there is simply no fact of the matter about how a rational agent (or whatever) should behave in newcomb type situations because the (usual) rational agent idealization is incompatible with the newcomb situation (ok, more technically you can model it that way but the choice of how to model it just unsatisfactorily builds in the answer by specifying how the payoff depends on 1 vs two boxing).
To sum up what the answer to the newcomb problem is depends heavily on how you preciscify the question. Are you asking whether humans who are disposed to decide in way A end up better of than humans disposed to behave in way B? In that case it’s easy. But things like CDT, TDT etc.. don’t claim to be producing facts of that kind but rather saying something about ideal rational agents of some kind which then just boringly depends on a ambiguities in what we mean by that.ideal rational agents.

TruePath

De­ci­sion The­ory Anti-realism

Decision Theory Anti-realism