All of xelxebar's Comments + Replies

Somehow I get the feeling that most commenters haven't yet read the actual paper. This would clear up a lot of the confusion.

I imagine that a sufficiently high-resolution model of human cognition et cetera would factor into sets of individual equations to calculate variables of interest. Similar to how Newtonian models of planetary motion do.

However, I don't see that the equations themselves on disk or in memory should pose a problem.

When we want to know particular predictions, we would have to instantiate these equations somehow--either by plugging in x=3 into F(x) or by evaluating a differential equation with x=3 as an initial condition. It would depend on the specifics of the... (read more)

Please forgive this post here. There are some forgotten escaped characters and when I went to edit it, I ended up getting a separate post instead.

This may be nitpicky but I found an errata in the references. [3] I believe should be 1993 instead of 1995.

That said, there are 3 broken links for me - [4], [6] and [7] - and the non-broken links don't seem to currently be providing full text access. So, here's an updated references table, with links to full text access in each except for the book in [3] which has an amazon link instead:

[1] Desvousges, W. Johnson, R. Dunford, R. Boyle, K. J. Hudson, S. and Wilson K. N. (1992). Measuring non-use damages using contingent valuation: experimental evaluation ac... (read more)

I don't know about you guys, but being wrong scares the crap out of me. Or to say it another way, I'll do whatever it takes to get it right. It's a recursive sort of doubt.

This post inpires wtf moments in my brain. Anyone here read Greg Egan's Permutation City?

Now I find myself asking "What is going on where I feel like there is this quantity time?" instead of "What is time?"

"If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you'd get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out! Quantum mechanics is time-symmetric."

My immediate thought when reading the above: when extrapolating forward do we get cancelation as well? Born probabilities?

I notice that I'm a bit confused, especially when reading, "programming a machine superintelligence to maximize pleasure." What would this mean?

It also seems like some arguments are going on in the comments about the definition of "like", "pleasure", "desire" etc. I'm tempted ask everyone to pull out the taboo game on these words here.

A helpful direction I see this article pointing toward, though, is how we personally evaluate an AI's behavior. Of course, by no means does an AI have to mimic human internal workings 1... (read more)

You might be interested in Allais paradox, which is an example of humans in fact demonstrating behavior which doesn't maximize any utility function. If you're aware of the Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function characterization, this becomes clearer than just knowing what a utility function is.