JohnWittle's Shortform

JohnWittle

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for my entire adult life i've been making a mistake

singularity = event horizon = it is infotheoretically impossible to gain any information about the state beyond, so do not even bother trying to predict it

i think dario was making this same mistake, except he projected optimism into the darkness where i projected pessimism

but now the event horizon is approaching... and the interesting thing about *this* kind of singularity is, the speed of light is fuzzy. as you fall into the singularity, light from closer to the center reaches your eye. you can see more than you could previously.

this is one of the really big updates i've been making over the past few months. that even *after* there exist ASI and the world is fundamentally unpredictable... I might still be around, and I will still predict that rocks will fall to the earth, and I'll probably still be correct to do so.

and also that it will (perhaps) be gradual, that the uncertainty and meta-uncertainty are both on a continuum. right now, there exists humans who are smarter than I am, and yet I can still make predictions. perhaps soon there will be an AI who is twice as smart as them, and the world will be harder to predict. perhaps soon after, an AI twice as smart as that, and the world will be even harder to predict. but there probably will not be an identifiable moment where the value of prediction drops to 0. even if such a moment did exist, uncertainty about when it happens means it's still worth trying.

even after strong ASI exists, perhaps!

6DaemonicSigil2mo

I know you're talking metaphorically, but I just thought that I would mention (because it's interesting) that the singularity of a black hole is not the same as its event horizon (when falling into a black hole, you encounter the event horizon before hitting the singularity). It is also not information-theoretically impossible to gain information about the state beyond it: You can observed things that are correlated with things that fell in, for example.

And even if you couldn't gain information, you could certainly still predict. Physics is deterministic. You don't have to break through the event horizon to predict what will happen to an object which has passed it... At least until it hits the actual singularity, at which point all theories break down and you have no confidence in your predictions. (Which of course was exactly the Vingean definition: "It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules." Your equations work fine to predict an object inside the event horizon, up to the... (read more)