All of metachirality's Comments + Replies

I don't think the specific part of decision theory where people argue over Newcomb's problem is large enough as a field to be subject to the EMH. I don't think the incentives are awfully huge either. I'd compare it to ordinal analysis, a field which does have PhDs but very few experts in general and not many strong incentives. One significant recent result (if the proof works then the ordinal notation in question would be most powerful proven well-founded) was done entirely by an amateur building off of work by other amateurs (see the section on Bashicu Matrix System): https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2023/07/23/miscellaneous-discoveries/

Yes. Well, almost. Schwarz brings up disposition-based decision theory, which appears similar though might not be identical to FDT, and every paper I've seen on it appears to defend it as an alternative to CDT. There are some looser predecessors to FDT as well, such as Hofstadter's superrationality, but that's too different imo.

Given Schwarz' lack of reference to any paper describing any decision theory even resembling FDT, I'd wager that FDT's obviousness is merely only in retrospect.

Whenever I ask questions like "Is this bullshit or not", I'm not expecting a simple binary yes/no answer and it's meant to be shorthand for a question which is similar but longer and harder to word and asking for a more complex, specified answer.

Right now, I'm mostly taking a look at the thing I looked, and when and if (big if) I get far enough, I'll try to get Russian acquaintances to help me look into it further.

Curious about other personal development paradigms/psychotechnologies. So far I've mostly been trying to follow the book the Mind Illuminated and dabbling in feedbackloop-first rationality and tuning cognitive strategies.

Is there anything about those cases that suggest it should generalize to every decision theorist, or that this is as good a proxy for how much FDT works as the beliefs of earth scientists are for whether the Earth is flat or not?

For instance, your samples consist of a philosopher not specialized in decision theory, one unaccountable PhD, and one single person who is both accountable and specializes in decision theory. Somehow, I feel as if there is a difference between generalizing from that and generalizing from every credentialed expert that one could po... (read more)

My claim is that there is not yet people who know what they are talking about, or more precisely, everyone knows roughly as much about what they are talking about as everyone else.

Again, I'd like to know who these decision theorists you talked to were, or at least what their arguments were.

The most important thing here is how you are evaluating the field of decision theory as a whole, how you are evaluating who counts as an expert or not, and what arguments they make, in enough detail that one can conclude that FDT doesn't work without having to rely on your word.

So it's crazy to believe things that aren't supported by published academic papers? I think if your standard for "crazy" is believing something that a couple people in a field too underdeveloped to be subject to the EMH disagree with and that there are merely no papers defending it, not any actively rejecting it, then probably you and roughly every person on this website ever count as "crazy".

Actually, I think an important thing here is that decision theory is too underdeveloped and small to be subject to the EMH, so you can't just go "if this crazy hypoth... (read more)

The thing I disagree with here most is the claim that FDT is crazy. I do not think it is, in fact, crazy to think it is a good idea to adopt a decision theory whose users generically end up winning in decision problems compared to other decision theories.

I also find it suspicious that that part predicates on the opinions of experts we know nothing about, who presumably learned about FDT primarily from you who thinks FDT is bad, and also sort of assumes that MacAskill is any more of an expert on decision theory than Soares. Do not take this as a personal at... (read more)

(Epistemic status: Plausible position that I don't actually believe in.) The correct answer to the leg-cutting dilemma is that you shouldn't cut it, because actually you will end up existing no matter what because Omega has to simulate you to predict your actions, and it's always possible that you're in the simulation. The fact that you always have to be simulated to be predicted makes up for every apparent decision theory paradox, such as not cutting your leg off even when doing so precludes your existence.

I actually initially wrote off psychonetics because of its woo sounding name. However upon skimming the thing which I linked, I noticed two things that made me suspect that psychonetics might be worth taking seriously:

First, the safety rules and in particular, discouraging religious or spiritual interpretation and encouraging you to stop doing it if you start feeling "an otherworldly presence" or feeling as though you have magical powers and seek out a psychiatrist. Second, the purported benefits are limited in scope. It does not claim to solve all of your... (read more)

Do you have a link to it or something?

I agree. Right now though, I'm mostly unsure how to act on my knowledge of psychonetics' existence (and the existence of cognitive tuning, for that matter). At least for psychonetics, the sensible first step is probably to just read something on it and maybe distill it in a book review or something. Not sure about cognitive tuning in general since it's not really a thing yet.

If you (or anyone else) are interested in diving into psychonetics or cognitive tuning with me then feel free to contact me, though I can't guarantee anything will come of it because of the turbulent chaos of life (or more realistically my laziness).

I find it funny that GPT-4 finds the need to account for the possibility that the densities of uranium or gold might have changed as of September 2021.

I think it is referring to Gendlin's focusing.

A lot of your arguments boil down to "This ignores ML and prosaic alignment" so I think it would be helpful if you explained why ML and prosaic alignment are important.

I think the prior for aliens having visited Earth should be lower, since it a priori it seems unlikely to me that aliens would interact with Earth but not to an extent which makes it clear to us that they have. My intuition is that its probably rare to get to other planets with sapient life before building a superintelligence (which would almost certainly be obvious to us if it did arrive) and even if you do manage to go to other planets with sapient life, I don't think aliens would not try to contract us if they're anything like humans.

I am pretty anxious about posting this since this is my first post on LessWrong and also about a pretty confusing topic but I'm probably not well calibrated on this front so oh. Also thanks to NicholasKross for taking a look at my drafts.

Formal alignment proposals avoid this problem by doing metaethics, mostly something like determining what a person would want if they were perfectly rational (so no cognitive biases or logical errors), otherwise basically omniscient, and had an unlimited amount of time to think about it. This is called reflective equilibrium. I think this approach would work for most people, even pretty terrible people. If you extrapolated a terrorist who commits acts of violence for some supposed greater good, for example, they'd realize that the reasoning they used to de... (read more)