It is because a mirror has no commitment to any image that it can clearly and accurately reflect any image before it. The mind of a warrior is like a mirror in that it has no commitment to any outcome and is free to let form and purpose result on the spot, according to the situation.
—Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
You may find it felicitous to link directly to the tweet.
This reminds me of how I felt when I learned that a third of the passengers of the Hindenburg survived. Went something like this, if I recall:
Apparently if you drop people out of the sky in a ball of fire, that’s not enough to kill all of them, or even 90% of them.
I have become 30% confident that my comments here are a net harm, which is too much to bear and so I am discontinuing my comments here unless someone cares to convince me otherwise.
Edit: Good-bye.
Which is not the same thing as expecting a project to take much less time than it actually will.
Edit: I reveal my ignorance. Mea culpa.
Parts of this I think are brilliant, other parts I think are absolute nonsense. Not sure how I want to vote on this.
there is no way for an AI employing computational epistemology to bootstrap to a deeper ontology.
This strikes me as probably true but unproven.
My own investigations suggest that the tradition of thought which made the most progress in this direction was the philosophical school known as transcendental phenomenology.
You are anthropomorphizing the universe.
That isn’t the planning fallacy.
This is a better explanation than I could have given for my intuition that physicalism (i.e. “the universe is made out of physics”) is a category error.
Whether or not a non-self-modifying planning Oracle is the best solution in the end, it’s not such an obvious privileged-point-in-solution-space that someone should be alarmed at SIAI not discussing it. This is empirically verifiable in the sense that ‘tool AI’ wasn’t the obvious solution to e.g. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, I. J. Good, Peter Norvig, Vernor Vinge, or for that matter Isaac Asimov.
Nonsense. The problem has posed has always been around, and the solution is just to avoid repeating the same state twice, because that results in a draw.
I like this. I was going to say something like,
“Suppose , what does that say about your solutions designed for real life?” and screw you I hate when people do this and think it is clever. Utility monster is another example of this sort of nonsense.
but you said the same thing, and less rudely, so upvoted.
Perhaps it was imprudent, but I assumed that someone trying to promote rationality would herself be rational enough to overcome this parochialism bias.
“Any and all cost” would subsume low probabilities if it were true (which, of course, it is not).
The poll results are intriguing. 35% would want cybernetic immortality at any and all cost! And yet I don’t see 35% of people who can afford it signed up for cryonics.
What?
A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure. Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much. Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterprise of living fully and comfortably within the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure. I will not agree that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty success. I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.
-Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
The notion that “If you fail at this you will fail at this forever” is very dangerous to depressed people,
A dangerous truth is still true. Let’s not recommend people try at things if a failure will cause a failure cascade!
TDT doesn’t say anything useful [...] about entities that change over time
The notion of “change over time” is deeply irrelevant to TDT, hence its name.
I personally found the research in Influence rather lacking and thought Cialdini speculated too much. But chapter 3 of the book is dead on.
Do people think superrationality, TDT, and UDT are supposed to be useable by humans?
I had always assumed that these things were created as sort of abstract ideals, things you could program an AI to use (I find it no coincidence that all three of these concepts come from AI researchers/theorists to some degree) or something you could compare humans to, but not something that humans can actually use in real life.
But having read the original superrationality essays, I realize that Hofstadter makes no mention of using this in an AI framework and instead thinks about humans using it. And in HPMoR, Eliezer has two eleven-year old humans using a bare-bones version of TDT to cooperate (I forget the chapter this occurs in), and in the TDT paper, Eliezer still makes no mention of AIs but instead talks about “causal decision theorists” and “evidential decision theorists” as though they were just people walking around with opinions about decision theory, not the platonic formalized abstraction of decision theories. (I don’t think he uses the phrase “timeless decision theorists”.)
I think part of the rejection people have to these decision theories might be from how impossible they are to actually implement in humans. To get superrationality to work in humans, you’d probably have to broadcast it directly into the minds of everyone on the planet, and even then it’s uncertain how many defectors would remain. You almost certainly could not possibly get TDT or UDT to work in humans because the majority of them cannot even understand them. I certainly had trouble, and I am not exactly one of the dumbest members of the species, and frankly I’m not even sure I understand them now.
The original question remains. It is not rhetorical. Do people think TDT/UDT/superrationality are supposed to be useable by humans?
(I am aware of this; it is no surprise that a very smart and motivated person can use TDT to cooperate with himself, but I doubt they can really be used in practice to get people to cooperate with other people, especially those not of the same tribe.)
An expert on political ruthlessness, not an expert at political ruthlessness!
I suggest a new rule: the source of the quote should be at least three months old. It’s too easy to get excited about the latest blog post that made the rounds on Facebook.