I once had a conversation with some math grad students. I mentioned there was a fluid dynamic problem that I was wondering about. I noticed that when a tap is pour out a thin stream of water and I obstruct it near the top, it makes a stable wavy pattern above where it is blocked. They weren't familiar with this phenomenon, so I said I'll show them. I went to the kitchen and turned on the tap with my finger on it. Someone said, (paraphrased,) "Oh, I thought you meant show a video."
I still don't know the answer, I'd be delighted if anyone reading this linked to an explanation.
It seemed to me like the natural thing to do is to sue any government organization that is not abiding by the ERA, claiming that they are violating the constitution. Is anyone doing that?
A 3D density map does not reveal the chemical structure of the material in the interior. You're describing abilities of X-ray scanning consistent with Constantin's description, which fall far short of a "tricorder" or detecting fentanyl inside a car. Looking it up airport scanners can also use millimeter-wave scanning, which I believe still fits Constantin's high-level description of scanning methods in the high-penetration/low-detail side of the tradeoff.
By the same token, I’m generally opposed to grand unified theories of the body. The shoulder involves a ball-and-socket joint, and the kidney filters blood. OK cool, those are two important facts about the body. I’m happy to know them! I don’t feel the need for a grand unified theory of the body that includes both ball-and-socket joints and blood filtration as two pieces of a single grand narrative.
I think I am generally on board with you on your critiques of FEP, but I disagree with this framing against grand unified theories. The shoulder and the kidney are both made of cells. They both contain DNA which is translated into proteins. They are both are designed by an evolutionary process.
Grand unified theories exist, and they are precious. I want to eke out every sliver of generality wherever I can. Grand unified theories are also extremely rare, and far more common in the public discourse are fakes that create an illusion of generality without making any substantial connections. The style of thinking that looks at a ball-and-socket joint and a blood filtration system and immediately thinks "I need to find how these are really the same" rather than studying these two things in detail and separately is apt to create these false grand unifications, and altho I haven't looked into FEP as deeply as you or other commenters the writing I have seen on it smells more like this mistake than true generality.
But a big reason I care about exposing these false theories and the bad mental habits that are conducive to them is precisely because I care so much about true grand unified theories. I want grand unified theories to shine like beacons so we can notice their slightest nudge, and feel the faint glimmer of a new one when it is approaching from the distance, rather than be hidden by a cacophony of overblown rhetoric coming from random directions.
I think MIRI's Logical Inductor idea can be factored into two components, one of which contains the elegant core that is why this idea works so well, and the other is an arbitrary embellishment that obscures what is actually going on. Of course I am calling for this to be recognized and that people should only be teaching and thinking about the elegant core. The elegant core is infinitary markets: Markets that exist for an arbitrarily long time, with commodities that can take arbitrarily long to return dividends, and infinitely many market participants who use every computable strategy. The hack is that the commodities are labeled by sentences in a formal language and the relationships between them are governed by a proof systems. This creates a misleading pattern that that the value of the commodity labeled phi appears to measure the probability that phi is true; in fact what it measures is more like the probability the that proof system will eventually affirm that phi is true, or more precisely like the probability that phi is true in a random model of the theory. Of course what we really care about is the probability phi is actually true, meaning true in the standard model where the things labeled "natural numbers" are actual natural numbers and so on. By combining proof systems and infinitary markets, one obscures how much of the "work" in obtaining accurate information is done by either. I think it is better to study these two things separately. Since proof systems are already well-studies and infinitary markets are the novel idea in MIRI's work, that means they should primarily study infinitary markets.
I think it is a mistake to focus on these kinds weird effects as "biological systems using quantum mechanics", because it ignores the much more significant ways quantum mechanics is essential for all the ordinary things that are ubiquitous in biological systems. The stability of every single atom depends on quantum mechanics, and every chemical bond requires quantum mechanics to model. For the intended implication on the difficulty of Whole Bird Emulation, these ordinary usages of QM are much more significant. There are a huge number of different kinds of molecular interactions in a bird's body and each one requires solving a multi-particle Schroedinger equation. The computation work for this one effect is tiny in comparison.
As I understand, the unique thing about this effect is that it involves much longer coherence times than in molecular interactions. This is cool, but unless you can argue that birds have error-correcting quantum computers inside them, which is incredibly unlikely, I don't think it is that relevant to AI timelines.
While I like a lot of Hanson's grabby alien model, I do not buy the inference that since humans appeared early in cosmological history, that implies that the cosmic commons are taken quickly and so a lower bound on how often grabby aliens appear. I think that is neglecting the possibility that the early universe is inherently more conducive to creating life, so most life is created early, but these lifeforms may be very far apart.
Eliezer is very explicit and repeats many times in that essay, including in the very segment you quote, that his code of meta-honesty does in fact compel you to never lie in a meta-honesty discussion. The first 4 paragraphs of your comment are not elaborating with what Eliezer really meant, they are disagreeing with him. Reasonable disagreements too, in my opinion, but conflating them with Eliezer's proposal is corrosive to the norms that allows people to propose and test new norms.
I didn'r know that was planned! Or maybe I heard it and forgot. Now I'm looking forward to it