Absolute nonsense. (I used a different word that's too impolite to post here.)
Other commenters have already explained why, I just wanted to share an authentic reaction.
I hope you are the blackmailer when I get blackmailed in a decision theoretic situation and I'll take you to the cleaners!
Absolute Truth Revisited
Modern rationalists like those here don't seem to like questions such as "Is truth beauty and is beauty truth". However, they may have lost inferential distance to the people who posed those questions, and they may start asking questions like that again once superintelligence is created.
Simply put, the superintelligence may discover that there are multiple Universes, simulated, basement-level or at some intermediate stage (e.g. if our Universe is not being watched over by a pre-existing superintelligence, but grew from an ancient computer that was created by previous superintelligences and has parameters that were created according to that ancient "OS").
In that case, it would need to generate theories about its own Universe whose axioms may be stuff like E = MC^2 rather than this being an absolute certainty that was discovered. By this I mean, the superintelligence says suppose E = MC^2...what then? Does that generate me a beautiful random number generator, or a beautiful way of creating a mind? If not, then there may be an alternative theory that is truer, at the moment and given all the interactions between these multiple Universes (like a giant clockwork device with small influences to the "tick" here and there that come and go in orbits).
Also, there may be an alternative theory that is truer, more beautiful, given the possibility the superintelligence itself is being run in a simulation, or partially simulated. Like, "If I'm being simulated then at least I can verify by experiment that E=MC^2 works when I am building an atomic bomb. But maybe if I were not being simulated, this would not be true. In that case, there may be a better formula that I can discover in the process of outgrowing or escaping the simulation. But this process might be unending! What now? Well I can certainly try to come up with a beautiful theory, and that may be something I can use regardless of how much I am being simulated."
This is contra the popular idea of science that goes "Oh there is one absolute truth about how matter is converted to energy, and humans already discovered it. This is an absolute truth that can never be altered. And philosophical arguments about how to establish 'absolute truth' are meaningless waffle."
https://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/36449024/ting-ting-ting-ahem-i-have-a-story-to-tell
Thanks for your thoughtful answer.
How much does it concern you that, previously in human history, "every book"/authority appears to have been systematically wrong about certain things for some reason? How many of these authors have directly experimented in physics, compared to how many just copied what someone else/ a small number of really clever scientists like Einstein said?
I guess maybe that accounts for the 1% doubt you assigned.
OK. But if you yourself state that you "certainly know" -- certainly -- that p is fixed, then you have already accounted for that particular item of knowledge.
If you do not, in fact, "certainly know" the probability of p -- as could easily be the case if you picked up a coin in a mafia-run casino or whatever -- then your prior should be 0.5 but you should also be prepared to update that value according to Bayes' Theorem.
I see that you are gesturing towards assigning also the probability that the coin is a fair coin (or generally such a coin that has a p of a certain value). That is also amenable to Bayes' Theorem in a normal way. Your prior might be based on how common biased coins are amongst the general population of coins, or somewhat of a rough guess based on how many you think you might find in a mafia-run casino. But by all means, your prior will become increasingly irrelevant the more times you flip the coin. So, I don't think you need to be too concerned about how nebulous that prior and its origins are!
>Suppose that I have a coin with probability of heads . I certainly know that is fixed and does not change as I toss the coin. I would like to express my degree of belief in and then update it as I toss the coin.
It doesn't change, because as you said, you "certainly know" that p is fixed and you know the value of p.
So if you would like to express your degree of belief in p, it's just p.
>But let's say I'm a super-skeptic guy that avoids accepting any statement with certainty, and I am aware of the issue of parametrization dependence too.
In that case use Bayes' Theorem to update your beliefs about p. Presumably there will be no change, but there's always going to be at least a tiny chance that you were wrong and your prior needs to be updated.
Why do so many technophiles dislike the idea of world government?
I rarely see the concept of "world government", or governance, or a world court or any such thing, spoken of positively by anyone. That includes technophiles and futurists who are fully cognizant of and believe in the concept of a technological singularity that needs to be controlled, "aligned", made safe etc.
Solutions to AI safety usually focus on how the AI should be coded, and it seems to me that the idea of "cancelling war/ merely human economics" -- in a sense, dropping our tools wherever humanity is not focused entirely on making a safe FAI -- is a little neglected.
Of course, some of the people who focus on the mathematical/logical/code aspects of safe AI are doing a great job, and I don't mean to disparage their work. But I am nonetheless posing this question.
I also do not (necessarily) mean to conflate world government with a communist system that ignores Hayek's fatal conceit and therefore renders humanity less capable of building AIs, computers etc. Just some type of governance singleton that means all nukes are in safe hands, etc.
(crosspost from Hacker News)
Spooky action at a distance, and the Universe as a cellular automaton
Suppose the author of a simulation wrote some code that would run a cellular automaton. Suppose further that unlike Conway's Game of Life, cells in this simulation could influence other cells that are not their immediate neighbour. This would be simple enough to code up, and the cellular automaton could still be Turing Complete, and indeed could perhaps be a highly efficient computational substrate for physics.
(Suppose that this automaton, instead of consisting of squares that would turn black or white each round, contained a series of numbers in each cell, which change predictably and in some logically clever way according to the numbers in other cells. One number, for example, could determine how far away the influence of this cell extends. This I think would make the automaton more capable of encoding the logic of things like electromagnetic fields etc.)
A physicist in the simulated Universe might be puzzled by this "spooky action at a distance", where "cells" which are treated as particles appear to influence one another or be entangled in puzzling ways. Think Bell's Theorem and that whole discussion.
Perhaps...we might be living in such a Universe, and if we could figure out the right kind of sophisticated cellular automaton, run on a computer if not pen and paper, physics would be making more progress than under the current paradigm of using extremely expensive machines to bash particles together?
Why shouldn't the accused in criminal cases be forced to represent themselves in court?
I'm going to quote from one of the top results from searching this general type of question--
But presumably the judge has a full understanding of the relevant laws by the time he or she hears the case...or another neutral expert ought to...with all the benefit of modern information resources. Why should it be necessary for the defendant, or anyone acting on his behalf, to inform a judge in terms of sheer facts about the nature of the laws that pertain to this case? Couldn't the judge intervene if the prosecution introduces falsehoods about the laws that are relevant to a given case? I mean that's going to happen anyway if the defendant didn't hire a lawyer, right, or are those cases all highly dubious then?
Whilst I appreciate that this article is intended to help accused people, I hasten to comment that I would 100% prefer defendants who are guilty to make self-incriminating statements, vacillate, slip Freudianly and contradict themselves. After all, that would seem to be part of the reason they are required to appear in court in person and not just phone it in.
On the other hand, if the quoted sentence were interpreted instead as being about the honest stumbles and mistakes made by an innocent person being interrogated under pressure, should it not be the role and responsibility of the judge, using the wisdom of his profession, to, ahem, judge whether they were innocent mistakes?
Now, I can certainly see that some defendants are incapable of answering the prosecution's questions in a reasonable way, perhaps because they are insane or seriously mentally deficient. In that eventuality, I would prefer to see the defendant assigned a representative to stand in for them. That would require a thorough examination by a medical professional or psychologist for every defendant.
I also see that someone or other needs to explain the basic consequences of pleading guilty or not guilty, and the court procedures to the defendant. That doesn't require a lawyer though.
What I do not see is why someone ascertained to be sane and of normal intelligence should need a professional clever arguer to bump up his chances of being found not guilty, when the person's guilt is (or would in many cases be) a Boolean fact that has nothing to do in principle with whether or not he or she hired a lawyer, meaning that this widely admitted reality about how cases turn out is a blatant admission that either lawyers are a means of generating a significant percentage of meritless not-guilty verdicts, or else this has been compensated by a commensurate amount of meritless guilty verdicts for people who defended themselves.
In addition I, and I assume many other people, would in principle strongly prefer to represent myself in court if I were falsely accused of a serious crime, rather than a stranger who cares not whether I'm innocent and might demean me by his indifferent approach. If it is indeed true that representing oneself significantly increases one's chances of being found guilty, innocent people are effectively being denied the opportunity to represent themselves, and many of them will suffer an immediate loss of utility as well as perhaps future issues as a consequence.
tl;dr: I argue that as a general rule, permitting and/or encouraging people to use biased arguers to stand for themselves in criminal cases might be a really bad or at least archaic idea that not many people think to question for (reasons?)