All of matolcsid's Comments + Replies

I think Vanessa would argue that "Bayesianism" is not really an option. The non-realizability problem in Bayesianism is not just some weird special case, but the normal state of things: Bayesianism assumes that we have hypotheses fully describing the world, which we very definitely don't have in real life. IB tries to be less demanding, and the laws in the agent's hypothesis class don't necessarily need to be that detailed. I am relatively skeptical of this, and I believe that for an IB agent to work well, the laws in its hypothesis class probably also nee... (read more)

1. No idea. I don't think it's computationally very tractable. If I understand correctly, l Vanessa hopes there will be computationally feasible approximations, but there wasn't much research into computational complexity yet, because there are more basic unsolved questions.
2. I'm pretty sure that no. An IB agent (with enough compute) plans for the long run and doesn't go into a chain of deals that leaves it worse of than not doing anything. In general, IB solves the "not exactly Bayesian expected utility maximizer but still can't be Dutch booked problem" by pot

Personally I like Unsong's God, and I think His approach is better than tiling the Universe with copies of the same optimal entity (or copies of an optimal neighborhood where each being can encounter enough diversity to satisfy them in their own neighborhood). 

The Unsong approach might still lead to uncomfortable outcomes with some people tortured to make other people have different positive experiences than the ones already tried (hence the solution to the Problem of evil in Unsong), but I think that with giving big enough negative utilities to suffe... (read more)

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. By looking around, it very soon learns that some things are not maximally horrible, like the chair in the room is not broken (so presumably there is some kind of law constraining Murphy to keep the chair intact at least for now). Why would the agent break the chair then, why would that be better than what would happen otherwise?

Okay, maybe I was somewhat unfair in saying there are no results. Sill, I think it's good to distinguish "internal results" and "external results". Take the example of complex analysis: we have many beautiful results about complex holomorphic functions, like Cauchy's integral formula. I call these internal results. But what made complex analysis so widely studied is that it could be used to produce some external results, like calculating the integral under the bell curve or proving the prime number theorem. These are questions that interested people even b... (read more)

I still think that the hot stove example is a real problem, although maybe unavoidable. My example starts with "I learned that the hot stove always burns my hand." This is not the exploration part anymore, the agent already observed the stove burning its hand many times. Normally, this would be enough to never touch the hot stove again, but if some unexplained nice things happen in the outside world, there is suddenly no guarantee that the IB agent doesn't start touching the stove again. Maybe this is unavoidable, but I maintain it's a weird behavior patte... (read more)