LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Seems okay. Maybe a bit too long; especially the Pascal triangle is too large.

With alcohol, you can see what other people say and do when their self-control is impaired. It's like a mild form of mind-reading.

Rewriting the sequences to make them shorter would be very useful IMHO. But I prefer reading normal text to bullet points, especially if it would be a long text (such as rewriting the entire sequences).

New York City

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Thanks for this post! Very clear and great reference.

- You appear to use the term 'scope' in a particular technical sense. Could you give a one-line definition?
- Do you know if this agenda has been picked up since you made this post?

I think there's one fundamental problem here IMO, which is that not everything is fungible, and thus not everything manages to actually comfortably exist on the same axis of values. Fingers are not fungible. At the current state of technology, once severed, they're gone. In some sense, you could say, that's a limited loss. But for you, as a human being, it may as well be infinite. You just lost something you'll never ever have back. All the trillions and quadrillion dollars in the world wouldn't be enough to buy it back if you regretted your choice. And thus, while in some sense its value must be limited (it's just the fingers of one single human being after all, no? How many of those get lost every day simply because it would have been a bit more expensive to equip the workshop with a circular saw that has a proper safety stop?), in some other sense the value of your fingers to you is infinite, completely beyond money.

Bit of an aside - but I think this is part of what causes such a visceral reaction in some people to the idea of sex reassignment surgery, which then feeds into transphobic rationalizations and ideologies. The concept of genuinely wanting to get rid of a part of your body that you can't possibly get back feels so fundamentally wrong on some level to many people, it pretty much alone for them seals the deal that you must either be insane or having been manipulated by some kind of evil outside force.

(This comment is written in the ChatGPT style because I've spent so much time talking to language models.)

Calculating the probabilities

The calculation of the probabilities consists of the following steps:

1. The epistemic split

   Either we guessed the correct digit of $\pi$ ($10\%$) (branch $1$), or we didn't ($90\%$) (branch $2$).

2. The computational split

   On branch $1$, all of your measure survives (branch $1-1$) and none dies (branch $1-2$), on branch $2$, $\frac{1}{128}$ survives (branch $2-1$) and $\frac{127}{128}$ dies (branch $2-2$).

3. Putting it all together

   Conditional on us subjectively surviving (which QI guarantees), the probability we guessed the digit of $\pi$ correctly is

   $P=\frac{10\%\times 100\%}{10\%\times 100\%+90\%\times \frac{1}{128}\times 100\%}\approx 93.4\%$

   The probability of us having guessed the digit of $\pi$ prior to us surviving is, of course, just $10\%$.

Verifying them empirically

For the probabilities to be meaningful, they need to be verifiable empirically in some way.

Let's first verify that prior to us surviving, the probability of us guessing the digit correctly is $10\%$. We'll run $n$ experiments by guessing a digit each time and instantly verifying it. We'll learn that we're successful in, indeed, just $10\%$ of the time.

Let's now verify that conditional on us surviving, we'll have $\approx 93.4\%$ probability of guessing correctly. We perform the experiment $n$ times again, and this time, every time we survive, other people will check if the guess was correct. They will observe that we guess correctly, indeed, $\approx 93.4\%$ of the time.

Conclusion

We arrived at the conclusion that the probability jumps at the moment of our awakening. That might sound incredibly counterintuitive, but since it's verifiable empirically, we have no choice but to accept it.

FYI if you want to use o1-like reasoning, you need to check off "Deep Think".

It's also not really a movie as much as a live recording of a stage play. But agree it's fantastic (honestly, I'd be comfortable calling it Aladdin rational fanfiction).

Also a little silly detail I love about it in hindsight:

Must be noted that all that subtext is entirely the product of the movie adaptation. The short story absolutely leaves no room for doubt, and in fact concludes on a punchline that rests on that.