[A], just 'cause I anticipate the 'More and more' will turn people off [it sounds like it's trying to call the direction of the winds rather than just where things are at].

[ Thanks for doing this work, by the way. ]

No, what I'm talking about here has nothing to do with hidden-variable theories. And I still don't think you understand my position on the EPR argument.

I'm talking about a universe which is classical in the sense of having all parameters be simultaneously determinate without needing hidden variables, but not necessarily classical in the sense of space[/time] always being arbitrarily divisible.

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear: I didn't mean a classical universe in the sense of conforming to Newton's assumptions about the continuity / indefinite divisibility of space [and time]. I meant a classical universe in the sense of all quasi-tangible parameters simultaneously having a determinate value. I think we could still use the concept of logical independence, under such conditions.

"building blocks of logical independence"? There can still be logical independence in the classical universe, can't there?

Is this your claim - that quantum indeterminacy "comes from" logical independence? I'm not confused about quantum indeterminacy, but I am confused about in what sense you mean that. Do you mean that there exists a formulation of a principle of logical independence which would hold under all possible physics, which implies quantum indeterminacy? Would this principle still imply quantum indeterminacy in an all-classical universe?

Imagine all humans ever, ordered by date of their birth.

All humans of the timeline I actually find myself a part of, or all humans that could have occurred, or almost occurred, within that timeline? Unless you refuse to grant the sense of counterfactual reasoning in general, there's no reason within a reductionist frame to dismiss counterfactual [but physically plausible and very nearly actual] values of "all humans ever".

Even if you consider the value of "in which 10B interval will I be born?" to be some kind of particularly fixed absolute about my existence, behind the veil of Rawls, before I am born, I don't actually know it. I can imagine the prior I would have about "in which 10B interval will I be born?" behind the veil of Rawls, and notice whether my observed experience seems strange in the face of that prior.

The Doomsday argument is not about some alternative history which we can imagine, where the past was different. It's about our history and its projection to the future. Facts of the history are given and not up to debate.

Consider an experiment where a coin is put Tails. Not tossed - simply always put Tails.

We say that the size sample space of such an experiment consists of one outcome: Tails. Even though we can imagine a different experiment with alternative rules where the coin is tossed or always put Heads.

It seems like maybe you think I think the Doomsday Argument is about drawing inferences about the past, or something? The Doomsday Argument isn't [necessarily] about drawing inferences about what happened in the past. It's about using factors that aren't particularly in the past, present, or future, to constrain our expectations of what will happen in the future, and our model of reality outside time.

Like Kolmogorov said,

It is [...] meaningless to ask about the quantity of information conveyed by the sequence 0 1 1 0 about the sequence 1 1 0 0.

But if we take a perfectly specific table of random numbers of the sort commonly used in statistical practice, and for each of its digits we write the unit's digit of the units of its square according to the scheme

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

0 1 4 9 6 5 6 9 4 1

the new table will contain approximately

( log_2 10 - (8/10) ) * n

bits of information about the initial sequence (where n is the number of digits in the tables).†

I can see a single coin that was placed Tails, and I won't be able to infer anything beyond "that coin was placed Tails".

But if I see a hundred coins placed Tails, lined up in a row, I can validly start asking questions about "why?".

--

†Kolmogorov's illustration doesn't exactly map on to mine. I would note a couple things to clarify the exact analogy by which I'm using this illustration of Kolmogorov's to corroborate my point.

First, I think Kolmogorov would have agreed that, while it may be meaningless to talk about the quantity of information conveyed by the sequence 1 0 1 0 about the sequence 1 1 0 0 , it is not obviously meaningless to talk about the quantity of information conveyed by the sequence 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 about the sequence 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1, since both obviously have internal structure, and there's a simple decompression algorithm that you can use to get from the former to the latter. Something similar seems true of a sequence of 100 coins facing Tails-up, and the simple decompression algorithm "for each of 100 coins, flip each to face Tails-up" - that is, they can communicate information about each other. Contrast with the single coin facing Tails-up, which is more like the sequence 1 1 0 0 in the [potential] presence of the sequence 1 0 1 0, in that it seems uninterestingly random.

Secondly, I think Kolmogorov's information theory is a strict improvement on Shannon's but weak in points. One of these weak points is that Kolmogorov doesn't provide any really practical mechanism for narrowing down the space of counterfactual minimal decompression algorithms ["programs"] which generated an observed sequence, even though he [I think rightly] uses the principle that the simplest algorithm can be discovered, as the basis for his measure of information. I think if you can say how much information a sequence communicates about another sequence after knowing the [clear-winner shortest] decompression scheme, you should be able to determine the decompression scheme and the seed data just from seeing the output sequence and assuming minimal information. This is what anthropics arguments [in part] aim to do, and this is what I'm trying to get at with the "100 coins all facing Tails-up" thought experiment.

I am not confused about the nature of quantum indeterminacy.

This is [...] Feynman's argument

.

I don't know why it's true, but it is in fact true

Oh, I hadn't been reading carefully. I'd thought it was your argument. Well, unfortunately, I haven't solved exorcism yet, sorry. BEGONE, EVIL SPIRIT. YOU IMPEDE SCIENCE. Did that do anything?

What we lack here is not so much a "textbook of all of science that everyone needs to read and understand deeply before even being allowed to participate in the debate". Rather, we lack good, commonly held models of how to reason about what is theory, and good terms to (try to) coordinate around and use in debates and decisions.

Yudkowsky's sequences [/Rationality: AI to Zombies] provide both these things. People did not read Yudkowsky's sequences and internalize the load-bearing conclusions enough to prevent the current poor state of AI theory discourse, though they could have. If you want your posts to have a net odds-of-humanity's-survival-improving impact on the public discourse on top of Yudkowsky's, I would advise that you condense your points and make the applications to concrete corporate actors, social contexts, and Python tools as clear as possible.

[ typo: 'Merman' -> 'Mermin' ]

The Aisafety[.]info group has collated some very helpful maps of "who is doing what" in AI safety, including this recent spreadsheet account of technical alignment actors and their problem domains / approaches as of 2024 [they also have an AI policy map, on the off chance you would be interested in that].

I expect "who is working on inner alignment?" to be a highly contested category boundary, so I would encourage you not to take my word for it, and to look through the spreadsheet and probably the collation post yourself [the post contains possibly-clueful-for-your-purposes short descriptions of what each group is working on], and make your own call as to who does and doesn't [likely] meet your criteria.

But for my own part, it looks to me like the major actors currently working on inner alignment are the Alignment Research Center [ARC] and Orthogonal.

You probably can't beat reading old MIRI papers and the Arbital AI alignment page. It's "outdated", but it hasn't actually been definitively improved on.