Tom_McCabe
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"Among all these comments, I see no appreciation of the fact that the version of many worlds we have just been given CANNOT MAKE PREDICTIONS, whereas "collapse theories" DO."
So far as I know, MWI and collapse both make the exact same predictions, although Eliezer has demonstrated that MWI is much cleaner in theoretical terms. If there's any feasible experiment which can distinguish between the two, I'm sure quantum physicists would already have tried it.
To quote E.T. Jaynes:
"This example shows also that the major premise, “If A then B” expresses B only as a logical consequence of A; and not necessarily a causal physical consequence, which could be effective only at a later time. The rain at 10 AM is not the physical cause of the clouds at 9:45 AM. Nevertheless, the proper logical connection is not in the uncertain causal direction (clouds =⇒ rain), but rather (rain =⇒ clouds) which is certain, although noncausal. We emphasize at the outset that we are concerned here with logical connections, because ...
"The same people who would never blindly accept a Bush Admin figure will blindly accept an anti-Bush figure."
Notice how you assume, without bothering to Google it, that the million-casualties figure was "anti-Bush". If it came from Clinton for President, or MoveOn, or the Democratic Party, you would have a case. In reality, the survey was conducted by Opinion Research Business, an independent polling agency which is not even US-based (their HQ is in London). The same group has published pro-Bush results in the past (eg, see http://www.t...
"The big puzzle here is the inverse square of the mutation rate. The example of improvement in a starting population with a randomized genome of maximum variance, which can't be used to send a strongly informative message, doesn't explain the maintenance of nearly all information in a genome."
(hacks program for asexual reproduction)
I've found that, assuming asexual reproduction, the genome's useful information really does scale nice and linearly with the mutation rate. The amount of maintainable information decreases significantly (by a factor the three or so, in the original test data).
"Wei Dai, being able to send 10 bits each with a 60% probability of being correct, is not the same as being able to transmit 6 bits of mathematical information. It would be if you knew which 6 bits would be correct, but you don't."
"Given sexuality and chromosome assortment but no recombination, a species with 100 chromosomes can evolve much faster than an asexual bacterial population!"
No, it can't. Suppose that you want to maintain the genome against a mutation pressure of one hundred bits per generation (one base flip/chromosome, to ma...
"This increases the potential number of semi-meaningful bases (bases such that some mutations have no effect but other mutations have detrimental effect) but cancels out the ability to store any increased information in such bases."
If 27% of all mutations have absolutely no effect, the "one mutation = one death" rule is broken, and so more information can be stored because the effective mutation rate is lower (this also means, of course, that the rate of beneficial mutations is lower). So it may be a 40 MB bound instead of a 25 MB bound...
"The notion of sacred values seems to lead to irrationality in a lot of cases, some of it gross irrationality like scope neglect over human lives and "Can't Say No" spending."
Could you post a scenario where most people would choose the option which unambiguously causes greater harm, without getting into these kinds of debates about what "harm" means? Eg., where option A ends with shooting one person, and option B ends with shooting ten people, but option B sounds better initially? We have a hard enough time getting rid of irrationality, even in cases where we know what is rational.
"An option that dominates in finite cases will always provably be part of the maximal option in finite problems; but in infinite problems, where there is no maximal option, the dominance of the option for the infinite case does not follow from its dominance in all finite cases."
From Peter's proof, it seems like you should be able to prove that an arbitrarily large (but finite) utility function will be dominated by events with arbitrarily large (but finite) improbabilities.
"Robin Hanson was correct, I do think that TORTURE is the obvious opti...
"For those who would pick SPECKS, would you pay a single penny to avoid the dust specks?"
Yes. Note that, for the obvious next question, I cannot think of an amount of money large enough such that I would rather keep it than use it to save a person from torture. Assuming that this is post-Singularity money which I cannot spend on other life-saving or torture-stopping efforts.
"You probably wouldn't blind everyone on earth to save that one person from being tortured, and yet, there are (3^^^3)/(10^17) >> 7*10^9 people being blinded for ea...
"Wow. People sure are coming up with interesting ways of avoiding the question."
My response was a real request for information- if this is a pure utility test, I would select the dust specks. If this were done to a complex, functioning society, adding dust specks into everyone's eyes would disrupt a great deal of important stuff- someone would almost certainly get killed in an accident due to the distraction, even on a planet with only 10^15 people and not 3^^^^3.
"Congratulations, you made my brain asplode."
Read http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=22 if you haven't already. Your utility function should not be assigning things arbitrarily large additive utilities, or else you get precisely this problem (if pigs qualify as minds, use rocks), and your function will sum to infinity. If you "kill" by destroying the exact same information content over and over, it doesn't seem to be as bad, or even bad at all. If I made a million identical copies of you, froze them into complete stasis, and then shot 999,...
"So how would you recognize a natural ethical process if you saw one?"
Suppose that you observe process A- maybe you look at it, or poke around a bit inside it, but you don't make a precise model. If you extrapolate A forward in time, you will get a probability distribution over possible states (including the states of all the other stuff that A touches). If A consistently winds up in very small regions of this distribution, compared to what your model is, and there's no way to fix your model without making it extremely complex, you can say A is a...
"(BTW, one of the reasons I don't vote is that I am confident that I cannot, under any circumstances, EVER, have sufficient and reliable information about the candidates to allow me to make a good decision. So, I believe all voting decisions people actually make are irrational.)"
See http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/.
"Can anyone arrange to get money to this man or his family? I'm tempted to donate, to honor his deed."
"I see man as made in the image of God."
This does make some sense. If man is made in the image of God, and we know God is a mass murderer, then we can predict that some men will also be mass murderers. And lo, we have plenty of examples- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
"Sure God is not going to change natural law just because we are putting him to the test."
If God does exist, as soon as we finish saving the world and whatnot, he should be immediately arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity, due to his failure to interven...
"I would argue that they are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life."
A fully human life, in the natural sense of the term, has an average span of sixteen years. That's the environment we were designed to live in- nasty, brutal, and full of misery. By the standards of a typical human tribe, the Holocaust would have been notable for killing such a remarkably small percentage of the population. Why on Earth would we want to follow that example?
"It looks like this website has rejected the theistic understanding of faith and hope.&q...
""Fixed by evidence" != "simple"."
This is certainly true in the general case, but all physics theories which I've studied in detail really are simple, in the bits of entropy sense.
"Please recall that my original contention was that Einstein must have had enough observational evidence to fix the information inherent in General Relativity as a solution. If you describe ways that the information in General Relativity can be fixed by evidence, you are not contradicting this."
True; why do you have to contradict the main point of a post to comment on it? My point was that the space of possibilities was not vast; it was quite small, given the common-sense rules of gravity and math which were known at the time. Developing GR took ...
"If only you had been around to solve the problem instead of Maxwell and Einstein, how much work could have been saved!"
Obvious != simple != easy to learn. You of all people should understand this. You seemed to understand it seven years ago, back during the days of your wild and reckless youth. To quote SitS:
"Let's take a concrete example, the story Flowers for Algernon (later the movie Charly), by Daniel Keyes. (I'm afraid I'll have to tell you how the story comes out, but it's a Character story, not an Idea story, so that shouldn't spoil...
"The Foresight Institute has the same problem: People want to donate time instead of money, but it's really, really hard to use volunteers. If you know a solution to this, by all means share."
There's always Amazon's Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome). It's an inefficient use of people's time, but it's better than just telling people to go away. If people are reluctant to donate money, you can ask for donations of books- books are actually a fairly liquid asset (http://www.cash4books.net/).