LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Adding more resources :

[Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg] Aligning society with our deepest values and sources of meaning (with Joe Edelman) #clearerThinkingWithSpencerGreenberg https://podcastaddict.com/clearer-thinking-with-spencer-greenberg/episode/175816099

https://podcastaddict.com/joe-carlsmith-audio/episode/157573278

I do want to note that a lot of the claimed unpredictability from chaos only works if you can measure stuff to a finite precision only, and while this is basically always true in practice, it is worth noticing, because if you did have the ability to have an infinite memory and infinite FLOP/s computer with infinitely precise measurement, like in Newtonian physics, chaos theory doesn't matter, because in a deterministic system, if you get the exact same input, it will always have the same output, so chaos doesn't matter.

To be clear, this isn't a practical way to beat chaos, but it is an exception to the rule that chaos makes a system unpredictable.

Fair enough.

I think my main problem with this proposal is that under the current paradigm of AIs (GPTs, foundation models),  I don't see how you want to implement ATA, and this isn't really a priority? 

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

The potential for a disputed confirmation could also be a problem here.

I can imagine more congressional hearings happening on UFOs, then OP says this is a confirmation that UFOs are of alien or paranormal origin, while the other party disagrees.

Not so much , given deteminism.

Determinism allows you to cause the future in a limited sense. Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on causes in he past -- it is nothing special and nothing different from physical causation). It allows, in a purely theoretical sense "if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A" ... but without the ability to have actually chosen b. You are a link in a deterministic chain that leads to a future state, so without you, the state will not happen ... not that you have any choose use in the matter. You can't stop or change the future because you can't fail to make your choices, or make them differently. You can't anything of your own, since everything about you and your choices was determined by at the time of the Big Bang. Under determinism , you are nothing special...only the BB is special.

Tthis is still true under many worlds. even though MWI implies that there is not a single inevitable future, it doesn't allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under MW determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are, and always were -- before you make a decision, after you make a decision , and before you were born. You can't choosee between them, even in the sense of adjusting the probabilities.

Libertarian free will, by contrast, does allow the future to depend on decisions which are not themselves determined. That means there are valid statements of the form "if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A". And you actually could have made choice a or choice b....these are real possibilities, not merely conceptual or logical ones.

Chaos provides value both by telling certain engineers where not to look for solutions to their problems, and by getting their bosses off their back about it. That’s a significant value add, but short of what I was hoping for when I started looking into Chaos.

I don't think it's a value-add, because this sort of proof-by-intimidation abuse is how chaos theory gets used in many places, such as here on Lesswrong as well, not just engineers fighting their managers. Remember the proof that humans can't get high scores playing pinball because 'chaos theory' [LW · GW]? It's just an indiscriminate rhetorical weapon. It is not true in the case of playing pinball, it is probably not true of trebuchets in general (as opposed to cheap simple trebuchets constructed for contests or the Third World), and I would be surprised if all of those 6 successful manipulations were the valid exceptions. It is similar to the pervasive abuse of Godel or the Halting theorem; you doubtless could successfully convince some managers to not bother with things like typechecking or unit-tests or formal proofs because "Turing proved it is impossible to prove things about arbitrary programs" etc, but that is not a good thing, it is a bad thing.

Good point. I have edited it into the last line of the post.

Not really, but they are definitely more few-shot than other areas, but thankfully getting 1 thing wrong isn't usually an immediate game-ender (though it is still to be avoided, and importantly this is why these 2 areas are harder than a lot of other fields).