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Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain model of a rational agent: a proof-based agent which is triggered to act when it finds certain proofs in Peano arithmetic (PA). Back when MIRI had an agent foundations team, they found they could derive what these agents would do using...
In his original paper on what we now call the "many-worlds" interpretation, Everett motivated it with quantum cosmology, since there's nowhere outside the universe for a Copenhagen-style observer to stand. Eliezer Yudkowsky said something similar to motivate timeless decision theory: > I hold it a virtue of any decision theory...
The context is MIRI's twist on Axelrod's Prisoner's Dilemma tournament. Axelrod's competitors were programs, facing each other in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. MIRI's tournament is a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma, but the programs get to read their opponent's code. Or, rather, a description of the behavior of the code in Gödel-Löb...
The sunlight hitting even a small portion of the United States has enough energy to power the whole country—that simple calculation was the subject of the last post. All this shows on its own is that running the country on solar power is physically possible. With photovoltaics it may be...
2024 is the year it became clear that we're actually going to do battery energy storage. That it was time to stop soberly reminding anyone too excited about solar that storage is an unsolved problem. In fact I personally became very excited about solar, and briefly thought that this year's...
Have you heard this before? In clinical trials, medicines have to be compared to a placebo to separate the effect of the medicine from the psychological effect of taking the drug. The patient's belief in the power of the medicine has a strong effect on its own. In fact, for...
An unknown probability sounds like a type error. There are unknowns, such as the result of a coin flip. And there are probabilities that these unknowns take certain values, such as the probability that the flip comes up heads. As a formula, P(Result=Heads)=1/2 The unknown, the result of the flip,...