LessWrong 2.0 Reader

exercise for readers: what patterns need to hold in the environment in order for "do what I mean" to make sense at all?

Notes to self (let me know if anyone wants to hear more, but hopefully no unexplored avenues can be found in my list of "obvious" if somewhat overlapping points):

• sparsity - partial observations narrow down unobserved dimensions
• ambiguity / edge of chaos - the environment is "interesting" to both agents (neither fully predictable nor fully random)
• repetition / approximation / learnability - induction works
• computational boundedness / embeddedness / diversity
• power balance / care / empathy / trading opportunity / similarity / scale

Hmm. The change here is from "illegal" to "legal but taxed". So it seems to me that people should only ever be exposed to this additional tax complexity of they "opt in" by doing something they previously couldn't?

This community contributes to the rationality of humanity, which is beneficial for the entire human race. 

I would like to contribute to this rationality through my research work, as international cooperation beyond race, gender, language, etc. for a better world. However,  Japanese language is very distant from English. 

I will publish a research paper for AAAI-25 workshop W18 Post-Singularity Symbiosis on March 3rd in Pennsylvania, USA, but vast majority of my research papers are written in Japanese.  So, I will introduce my Japanese research, with AI translating it into multiple languages.
 

There is a very good Rationally Speaking podcast episode about this - one solution that is proposed by economist Ami Glazer is to not restrict pricing, but then issue vouchers or cash to those who need it. Glazer brings up that this is how the food stamp system works at present

That episode goes into other topics around this issue, like hoarding, rationing, positive externalities (eg. face masks protect not just the wearer but those around them)

A bit of a tangent, but economist Alex Tabarrok has talked about buying coal mines in order to not mine coal

One of the challenges until recently (as outlined in that link) was:

There are also some crazy “use it or lose it” laws that say that you can’t buy the right to extract a natural resource and not use it. When the high-bidder for an oil and gas lease near Arches National Park turned out to be an environmentalist the BLM cancelled the contract!

It looks like he argues against the idea that friendly future AIs will simulate the past based on ethical grounds, and imagining unfriendly AI torturing past simulations is conspiracy theory. I comment the following:

There are a couple of situations where future advance civilization will want to have many past simulation:
1. Resurrection simulation by Friendly AI.  They simulate the whole history of the earth incorporating all known data to return to live all people ever lived. It can also simulate a lot of simulation to win "measure war" against unfriendly AI and even to cure suffering of people who lived in the past.  
2. Any Unfriendly AI will be interested to solve Fermi paradox, and thus will simulate many possible civilizations around a time of global catastrophic risks (the time we live). Interesting thing here is that we can be not ancestry simulation in that case. 
 

Thanks for the reference -- I'll check out the paper (though there are no pointer variables in this picture inherently).

I think there is a miscommunication in my messaging. Possibly through overcommitting to the "matrix" analogy, I may have given the impression that I'm doing something I'm not. In particular, the view here isn't a controversial one -- it has nothing to do with Everett or einselection or decoherence. Crucially, I am saying nothing at all about quantum branches.

I'm now realizing that when you say map or territory, you're probably talking about a different picture where quantum interpretation (decoherence and branches) is foregrounded. I'm doing nothing of the sort, and as far as I can tell never making any "interpretive" claims.

All the statements in the post are essentially mathematically rigorous claims which say what happens when you 

• start with the usual QM picture, and posit that
• your universe divides into at least two subsystems, one of which you're studying
• one of the subsystems your system is coupled to is a minimally informative infinite-dimensional environment (i.e., a bath).

Both of these are mathematically formalizable and aren't saying anything about how to interpret quantum branches etc. And the Lindbladian is simply a useful formalism for tracking the evolution of a system that has these properties (subdivisions and baths). Note that (maybe this is the confusion?) subsystem does not mean quantum branch, or decoherence result. "Subsystem" means that we're looking at these particles over here, but there are also those particles over there (i.e. in terms of math, your Hilbert space is a tensor product ${\text{Sytem}}_1\otimes {\text{System}}_2.$

Also, I want to be clear that we can and should run this whole story without ever using the term "probability distribution" in any of the quantum-thermodynamics concepts. The language to describe a quantum system as above (system coupled with a bath) is from the start a language that only involves density matrices, and never uses the term "X is a probability distribution of Y". Instead you can get classical probability distributions to map into this picture as a certain limit of these dynamics.

As to measurement, I think you're once again talking about interpretation. I agree that in general, this may be tricky. But what is once again true mathematically is that if you model your system as coupled to a bath then you can set up behaviors that behave exactly as you would expect from an experiment from the point of view of studying the system (without asking questions about decoherence).

To me Feynman seems to fall quite on the von Neumann side of the spectrum. 

Yes, they seem to represent two completely different types of extreme intelligence which is very interesting. I also agree that vN's ideas are more relevant for the community.

Yes. Grothendieck is undoubtedly less innovative and curious all across the board. 

But I should have mentioned they are not of the same generation. vN helps build the atom bomb while G grows up in a concentration camp.

vN went along a scientific golden age. I'd argue it was probably harder to have the same impact on Science in the 1960s.

 I also model G as having disdain for applying mathematical ideas to "impure" subjects. Maybe because of the Manhattan project itself as well as the escalation of the Cold War.

This would be consistent with a whole school of french mathematicians deifying pure math, N. Bourbaki in general, and being generally skeptical of the potential of pure math on the improvement of society, Roger Godement being the stereotype.

My point was that Grothendieck's mind is interesting to dissect for someone interested in a general theory of intelligence and AI alignment (and that the von Neumann metaphor becomes kinda tiring)