LessWrong 2.0 Reader

For me, a candidates claim of what they will do is sufficient when they have unilateral control over doing it.  For instance, I believe a claim to sign or veto a specific type of bill.  I don't tend to believe that they will make the economy good, avoid recession, close all the tax loopholes, etc.  
Do you:
a) believe candidates when they claim they will be successful at things not entirely in their control
b) believe Trump but not others (like Kamala) when they claim they'll do things not entirely in their control
c) think that a Russia-Ukraine peace negotiation would be entirely in Trump's control
d) see some actions that are entire in Trump's control that you are confident would cause peace
e) other

To me your post feels like you are arguing against some pop science understanding of evolution instead of looking at what those biologists who use "evo math" actually belief in 2024.

I'm glad that someone engages with non-Lewisian halfism but this is clearly wrong on a very basic level. To understand why, let's consider a simpler problem:

Two coins are tossed. Then you are told state of one of the coins, but you don't know whether it's the first coin or the second. Then you are told whether it was the first coin or the second. What should be your credence that the state of both coins are the same 1. before you were told the state of one of the coins? 2. after you were told the state of one of the coins? 3. after you were told which coin was it? 

You are creating a related but different and also complicated problem: the Two Child Problem, which is notoriously ambiguous. "Then you are told the state of one of the coins" can have many meanings.

If I ask the experimenter "choose one of the coins randomly and tell me what it is" then I am not able to update my probability. It will still be 1/2 that the coins are the same.

If I ask the experimenter "is there at least one heads?" then I will be able to update. If they say yes I can update to 1/3, if they say no I can update to 1.

Frankly, it seems as if Conitzer forgot that credence can change for reasons not related to memory loss. That one can simply receive new evidence and change their credence based on that.

Conitzer's problem can be simplified further by letting Beauty flip a coin herself on Monday and Tuesday.

She wakes up Monday and flips a coin. She wakes up Tuesday and flips a coin. That's it.

After flipping a coin, what should her credence be that the coin flips are the same? 

Do you disagree now that the answer is 1/2?

I think it is clearly 1/2 precisely because there is no new evidence. The violation of the Reflection Principle is secondary. More importantly, something has gone wrong if we think she can flip a coin and update the probability of the coins being the same. 

She didn't know the sequence in advance, like, for example, she knew that she is to be awakened on Monday. She made a guess and managed to guess right. The difference is that on a repetition of the probability experiment, she is awakened on Monday in every iteration of it, but the sequence of the tosses is the same as she precommited to only in a smal fraction of all iterations of the experiment.

I agree, but she doesn't get to observe the sequence of tosses in the experiment. She isn't even able to observe that a sequence of tosses happens "at least once" in the experiment. That's what Conitzer shows in his problem.

She can't update her probability based on observing a rare event C (as you have defined it), because she can't observe C in the first place.

A version without amnesia is not exactly the same situation, but something similar can happen. Suppose the experimenter will flip a coin, on heads they will flip a new sequence of 1000, on tails they will flip 2 new sequences of 1000. I ask the experimenter "randomly choose one of the sequences and tell me the result", and they tell me the result was 1000 heads in a row. A sequence of 1000 heads in a row is more likely to have occurred at least once if they flipped 2 sequences. But this does not allow me to update my probability of the number of sequences, because I have not learned "there is at least one sequence of 1000 heads."

Is this assuming AI will never reach the data efficiency and energy efficiency of human brains? Currently, the best AI we have comes at enormous computing/energy costs, but we know by example that this isn't a physical requirement.

IMO, a plausible story of fast takeoff could involve the frontier of the current paradigm (e.g. GPT-5 + CoT training + extended inference) being used at great cost to help discover a newer paradigm that is several orders of magnitude more efficient, enabling much faster recursive self-improvement cycles.

CoT and inference scaling imply current methods can keep things improving without novel techniques. No one knows what new methods may be discovered and what capabilities they may unlock.

I was unimpressed by his statistics regardless, and his response to criticisms (where he won't even say what those were) left me even less impressed, so I don't think one needs to look at his political terminology to criticize Bill James.

Over time I have seen many people assert that “Aligned Superintelligence” may not even be possible in principle. I think that is incorrect and I will give a proof - without explicit construction - that it is possible.

The meta problem here is that you gave a "proof" (in quotes because I haven't verified it myself as correct) using your own definitions of "aligned" and "superintelligence", but if people asserting that it's not possible in principle have different definitions in mind, then you haven't actually shown them to be incorrect.

This is something that in my opinion would deserve a longer focused debate

I'm not sure I have much more to say (I could explain the ways those things are somewhat inevitable, but I don't believe it's really necessary, just like, look at humans.), since I don't really know what to do about this, other than what I'm already doing, which is building social environments where people will no longer find it necessary to overconnect/being intentional about how we structure the network is possible, and I would guess that once it is real and I can show it to people, there will be no disagreements.

But in the meantime, we do not have such social environments, so I can't really tell anyone to stop going to bars and connecting at random. You must love, and that is the love that there is to be had today.

Because he says so.

Why do you believe that Trump will negotiate a peace?

I’m not allowed to vote in the election but I hope Trump wins because I think he will negotiate a peace in Ukraine. If Harris wins I think the war will drag on for another couple of years at worst.

I have no problem getting pushback.