How many of these blogposts would you write if you had unlimited resources other than time (a full-time editor, research team, even maybe focus groups)?
Failures of The Aumann Agreement Theorem
One thing I find is that people focus too much on failures of AAT, rather than the much more common case of successes. I think almost every conversation you have relies on AAT.
For instance, I'm the one who cooks dinner in my home, and my girlfriend regularly asks me what options there are for dinner, and believes me when I tell her what the options are.
That she asks me what the options are shows that she, in a probabilistic sense, disagrees with me; I put high probability on a specific set of options that I know we have the ingredients for, while she puts low probability on those options due to not knowing we have the ingredients. She then updates her belief based on my response because she trusts me to be rational (I'm the one who ordered the ingredients/who observed the invoice, and my rationality thus makes me able to know what the food options are) and honest (I wouldn't e.g. randomly say that the options are spaghetti carbonara, vegan sandwiches or lobster when actually I believe options are burgers, poke, or risotto).
This seems to me to be the basis of lots of conversations; you talk about stuff that you think the other person has experience with, and you trust them to be honest/rational and therefore you update your beliefs to match what they say.
I sometimes get the impression that the rationalist community doesn't realize that Aumann's Agreement Theorem works just fine most of the time.
Love the idea. How efficient! :)
About mental breaks, I guess this might helps creativity for the same reason meditation and naps help partial consolidation of memory traces (see below for a recent thesis showing these effects).
Specifically, I would speculate that consolidation means reorganizing memories, and that reorganizing memories helps making sense of this information.
I might steal the exorcism metaphor for the post I probably will write about the complexity prior.
Related to
infraBook Club I: Corrigibility is bad ashkually
One of my old blog posts I never wrote (I did not even list it in a "posts I will never write" document) is one about how corrigibility are anti correlated with goal security.
Something like: If you build an AI that don't resist someone trying to change its goals, it will also not try to stop bad actors from changing its goal. (I don't think this particular worry applies to Paul's version of corrigibility, but this blog post idea was from before I learned about his definition.)
I argue that all organisms suffer from rot. There is thermodynamic lower bound on rot. The larger & more complex the organism is the more rot. I argue that biological life solves this fundamental problem by a bounded-error lifecycle strategy.
The germline doesn't rot, though. Human egg and sperm-producing cells must maintain (epi-)genomic integrity indefinitely.
This post has been written for the first Refine blog post day, at the end of the week of readings, dicussions, and exercises about epistomology for doing good conceptual research.
(/with courtesy to Adam Shimi who suggested the title and idea. )
Predicative mathematics is a foundations of mathematics that rejects 'impredicative' definitions. Roughly speaking, you can think of predicative mathematics as rejecting the powerset axiom.