.. (read more)[T]he orangutan effect: If you sit down with an orangutan and carefully explain to it one of your cherished ideas, you may leave behind a puzzled primate, but will yourself exit thinking more clearly.
A concrete theory of transhuman values. How much fun is there in the universe; will we ever run out of fun; are we having fun yet; could we be having more fun. Part of the complexity of value thesis. Also forms part of the fully general answer to religious theodicy... (read more)
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Christopher Alexander (1936-2022) was an architect who studied the way nature and traditionally built buildings (such as peasant huts, or cathedrals) are a particular kind of beautiful, and have (he argued) the ability to bring a person back into a sense of perspective (e.g., a person may be quite stressed out about some detail, and then go for a long walk in nature, and find themselves "coming back to themselves.") Alexander attempted to work out a theory of design (for buildings, but also for design work broadly) that would create houses and other built objects with this same sort of beauty and sense of perspective embedded in them. His work inspired the "design patterns" movement in computer science, and, indirectly, wikis.
Once upon a time, LessWrong was a place where you'd be told to Read The Sequences before you'd finished your second comment apologizing for wasting time with non-constructive praise in the first.
Although the culture of rationality has changed greatly since the olden days, and our teachings are dispersed in many offspring movements, some remember good old-fashioned rationality with the same nostalgia MIRI computer scientists long for the days when AI was a science.
Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that give priority to reducing suffering, especially intense suffering. Rather than treating happiness and suffering as fully symmetric, suffering-focused views hold that preventing severe suffering often matters more urgently than creating additional happiness.
Indexical uncertainty is irreducible subjective uncertainty induced by anthropically expecting to be in more than one possible future world.
Suppose you are an AI and shortly 2 instances of you will see "Hello green world" and 3 instances will see "Hello red world". If you are a conscious AI, then you should anticipate seeing a green world with 40% probability, and a red world with 60% probability, and this subjective uncertainty is irreducible because it reflects an objective state of affairs where different versions of you see different things. To obtain full knowledge of this state of affairs obtaining later is to be left with subjective uncertainty now about "what I will see happen next".
On the Many-Worlds Interpretation, quantum uncertainty is irreducible because it is indexical uncertainty; the amplitudes in configuration space diverge into blobs of different measure, and we find ourselves in all blobs, somehow with a weight proportional to the measure of amplitude inside our blob.
Once upon a time, LessWrong was a place where you'd be told to Read The Sequences before you'd finished your second comment apologizing for wasting time with non-constructive praise in the first.
Although the culture of rationality has changed greatly since the olden days, and our teachings are dispersed in many offspring movements, some remember good old-fashioned rationality with the same nostalgia MIRI computer scientists long for the days when AI was a science.
Since free will is about as easy as a philosophical problem in reductionism can get, while still appearing "impossible" to at least some philosophers, it might make a good training problem for aspiring reductionists. If you consider yourself one of those, consider just reading the free will problem page, and not reading the free will solution pagepages below until you've made a very serious effort of your own.
Since free will is about as easy as a philosophical problem in reductionism can get, while still appearing "impossible" to at least some philosophers, it makesmight make a good exercisetraining problem for aspiring reductionists, which they should try on their own - seereductionists. If you consider yourself one of those, consider just reading the main page on free will problem.
These posts should page, and not be readreading the free will solution page until havingyou've made a very serious effort onof your own.
Related Pages: Consciousness, Free Will, Philosophy, Reductionism, .
Coordinal: A Postmortem (Ronak Mehta, 2026-05-19)
Suppose your model of physics says that the universe will eventually dissolve into a sea of particles in thermal equilibrium, and these particles will then exist indefinitely.
Then an exponentially vast supermajority of all observer-moments in this universe take place inside brains that momentarily assemble themselves from the sea of entropy by random fluctuations, and probably dissolve a moment later. These are "Boltzmann brains".
The vast supermajority of Boltzmann brains have relatively disordered experiences; they momentarily see chaos before dissolving again.
So your own, far more ordered and orderly experience in this very moment weighs heavily against the hypothesis "I am a Boltzmann brain". Inder most systems of anthropic reasoning this weighs heavily against the possibility "a supervast majority of all moments of consciousness are vastly less orderly than my own".
This then argues against
Full article:
Indexical uncertainty is irreducible subjective uncertainty induced by anthropically expecting to be in more than one possible future world.
Suppose you are an AI and shortly 2 instances of you will see "Hello green world" and 3 instances will see "Hello red world". If you are a conscious AI, then you should anticipate seeing a green world with 40% probability, and a red world with 60% probability, and this subjective uncertainty is irreducible because it reflects an objective state of affairs where different versions of you see different things. To obtain full knowledge of this state of affairs obtaining later is to be left with subjective uncertainty now about "what I will see happen next".
On the Many-Worlds Interpretation, quantum uncertainty is irreducible because it is indexical uncertainty; the amplitudes in configuration space diverge into blobs of different measure, and we find ourselves in all blobs, somehow with a weight proportional to the measure of amplitude inside our blob.
This then argues against
Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that give priority to reducing suffering, especially intense suffering. Rather than treating happiness and suffering as fully symmetric, suffering-focused views hold that preventing severe suffering often matters more urgently than creating additional happiness.
Christopher Alexander (1936-2022) was an architect who studied the way nature and traditionally built buildings (such as peasant huts, or cathedrals) are a particular kind of beautiful, and have (he argued) the ability to bring a person back into a sense of perspective (e.g., a person may be quite stressed out about some detail, and then go for a long walk in nature, and find themselves "coming back to themselves.") Alexander attempted to work out a theory of design (for buildings, but also for design work broadly) that would create houses and other built objects with this same sort of beauty and sense of perspective embedded in them. His work inspired the "design patterns" movement in computer science, and, indirectly, wikis.
So your own, far more ordered and orderly experience in this very moment weighs heavily against the hypothesis "I am a Boltzmann brain". InderUnder most systems of anthropic reasoning this weighs heavily against the possibility "a supervast majority of all moments of consciousness are vastly less orderly than my own".
See also: Evolutionary Psychology, Goodhart's Law, Wireheading
A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment.
A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked, blotted out with a point in tastespace that wasn't in the training dataset - an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs.
I think the phrase "more than one possible future world" is misleading and should be changed. The paradigmatic cases of indexical uncertainty (including both given examples of the five-AI-clones case and of Everettian quantum mechanics) involve no certainty about which objective possible world is actual, and only involves self-locating uncertainty about my location within a possible world.
So it would be more accurate to say that it is irreducible subjective uncertainty over multiple centered possible worlds or multiple locations with a given possible world.