wizzwizz4

Karma: 162

wizzwizz4 22 May 2024 11:17 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: kremlin’s comment on: How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
I think the bigger problem with the argument is: if Jesus rose from the dead for the same reasons that a randomly-selected human would, then Jesus is just an arbitrary human who got lucky, and mainstream Christianity is false. So if you’re invoking that to try to estimate whether Christianity is true or not, you’re clearly asking the wrong question.

wizzwizz4 6 Jul 2021 13:42 UTC
4 points
in reply to: maximkazhenkov’s comment on: Are coincidences clues about missed disasters? It depends on your answer to the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
I don’t quite get the argument here; doesn’t anthropic shadow imply we have nothing to worry about (except for maybe hyperexistential risks) since we’re guaranteed to be living in a timeline where humanity survives in the end?
But it doesn’t say we’re guaranteed not to be living in a timeline where humanity doesn’t survive.
If I had a universe copying machine and a doomsday machine, pressed the “universe copy” button 1000 times (for 2¹⁰⁰⁰ universes), then smashed relativistic meteors into Earth in all but one of them… would you call that an ethical issue? I certainly would, even though the inhabitants of the original universe are guaranteed to be living in a timeline where they don’t die horribly from a volcanic apocalypse.

wizzwizz4 18 Jun 2021 12:37 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: Self-Keeping Secrets
I can’t remember pain, in much the same way. Perhaps extreme depression “counts as” mental pain enough to trigger this effect?

wizzwizz4 10 Jun 2021 19:39 UTC
1 point
in reply to: VijayKrishnan’s comment on: Taking the awkwardness out of a Prenup—A Game Theoretic solution
Write “half”, or (if you’re feeling pedantic), “~half”.

wizzwizz4 27 Jul 2020 13:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: The Copernican Revolution from the Inside
Bayesian inference only functions within known solution-space. Spotting things outside of known solution space, while rare, is essential for the progression of science – and can’t be modelled simply as Bayesian inference.

wizzwizz4 22 Jul 2020 12:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eneasz’s comment on: Mundane Magic
Did anyone point out that the 3DS has a camera title?

wizzwizz4 22 Jul 2020 11:43 UTC
1 point
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Mundane Magic
Communication transfers ideas from one person to another. If technically correct communication transfers false ideas, it is deception. Accurate communication transfers correct ideas with high fidelity, which isn’t necessarily equivalent to technically correct communication.

wizzwizz4 18 Jul 2020 15:24 UTC
4 points
on: Can an agent use interactive proofs to check the alignment of succesors?
I can confirm that that’s an expression in English.

wizzwizz4 12 Jul 2020 12:33 UTC
3 points
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Magic Brain Juice
but it’s hard to hear the story and imagine that that grandpa is an old timey european, talking about good wolves.
That is what I thought. Not “old timey” per se, but modern grandparent age. The story feels five to ten years old, to me.

wizzwizz4 10 Jul 2020 15:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Luke Allen’s comment on: Covid 7/9: Lies, Damn Lies and Death Rates
or so as not to confuse the public with changed numbers
If you’re withholding knowledge to avoid confusing people, chances are that your withholding is the primary source of confusion. Just say “new estimates” or “revised estimates” – job done.

wizzwizz4 9 Jul 2020 15:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: wizzwizz4’s comment on: Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
What could survive is a propensity to become the sort of person to sacrifice yourself to protect your family. given that no other family member has done so. Or, a propensity to sacrifice yourself that would normally kick in after you’ve had kids. But actually sacrificing yourself before you pass on your genes is a textbook example of “selected against”.

wizzwizz4 7 Jul 2020 17:49 UTC
5 points
in reply to: a gently pricked vein’s comment on: (answered: yes) Has anyone written up a consideration of Downs’s “Paradox of Voting” from the perspective of MIRI-ish decision theories (UDT, FDT, or even just EDT)?
I think it’s just reachability. Arbital is Far Away, and it’s plausible that not everyone even knows it exists.

wizzwizz4 4 Jul 2020 19:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ActionItem’s comment on: Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Certain That 53 Is Prime
A second, detailed reading might make it seem like this comment’s has an error. However, the reasoning is sound; “you said the coin was heads” doesn’t distinguish very well between “the coin was heads” and “the coin was tails but you lied about the bet”, so doesn’t provide much evidence.
Likewise, the dismissing of hearsay appears to be an error, but remember that humans have finite computational power. If you take into account (at least) the hypothesis that somebody’s trying to deceive you about reality, you effectively end up dismissing the evidence anyway – but then you need to keep track of an extra hypothesis for the rest of your life to avoid scatterings of hearsay consistently nudging up your probability estimate when that’s not really founded. (This is assuming that it’s cheap to manufacture hearsay; expensive-to-manufacture hearsay shouldn’t be dismissed so lightly.)

wizzwizz4 4 Jul 2020 12:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: lmm’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
I had to think about this for quite a while before I could refute it. Well done.

wizzwizz4 4 Jul 2020 12:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: eirenicon’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
So, the universe is bleen?

wizzwizz4 3 Jul 2020 21:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: The Super Happy People (3/8)
If you happen to have evolved a cognitive architecture that permits storing information about the state of the world in the same format as information about how to build new members of the species, transferring that information would grant an evolutionary advantage over not. The only “just so” assumption is in such a cognitive architecture having developed, but they’re allowed that assumption given that the Super Happies already exist.

wizzwizz4 3 Jul 2020 13:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Evenflair’s comment on: Harry Potter and methods of rationality ending.
Yes, it was something Yudkowsky added. But the text doesn’t imply ghosts aren’t “really people”; it just states that they’re read-only human simulations of unknown fidelity, and the characters are chauvinistic about that.

wizzwizz4 2 Jul 2020 18:41 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Evenflair’s comment on: Harry Potter and methods of rationality ending.
Implying that ghosts aren’t really people
Or were just exempted from protection from the Interdict of Merlin, like books.

wizzwizz4 2 Jul 2020 17:59 UTC
1 point
on: How to decide to get a nosejob or not?
You should also take into account what this signals to people who know you’ve had a nose job (e.g. vanity).

wizzwizz4 24 Jun 2020 13:22 UTC
8 points
in reply to: siclabomines’s comment on: [META] Building a whisper network.
They look like it, but its some sort of emergent behaviour,
I agree with this assessment. It almost feels like a hive mind; I’ve dipped into the peripherals of online mobs before, and have felt “hey, this action is a good idea” thoughts enter my head unbidden. I’d probably participate in such things often, if I didn’t have a set of heuristics that (coincidentally) cancels out most of this effect, and a desire not to associate with the sorts of people who form mobs.
If the barrier-to-entry is increased to “requires two minutes of unrewarded drudgery, where it’s not intuitively obvious what needs to be done” in such a way that a short, well-worded “mob instruction” message can’t bypass the effect, it’s unlikely a mob will form around such actions.
Incidentally, I wonder whether programming for the mob is a field of social psychology.