LessWrong 2.0 Reader

FWIW, I spent a few months researching and thinking specifically about the brain FLOP/s question, and carefully compared my conclusions to Joe Carlsmith's. With a different set of sources, and different reasoning paths, I also came to an estimate approximately centered on 1e15 FLOP/s . If I were to try to be more specific than nearest OOM, I'd move that slightly upward, but still below 5e15 FLOP/s. This is just one more reasonably-well-researched opinion though. I'd be fascinated by having a conversation about why 1e14 FLOP/s might be a better estimate.

A further consideration is that this an estimate for the compute that occurs over the course of seconds. Which, for simplicity's sake, can focus on action potentials. For longer term brain processes, you need to take into account fractional shares of relatively-slow-but-high-complexity processes like protein signalling cascades and persistent changes in gene expression and protein structures in the cytoplasm and membrane receptor populations. I mention this not because it changes the FLOP/s estimate much (since these processes are relatively slow), but because keeping these in mind should shape one's intuition about the complexity of the computation and learning processes that are occuring. I feel like some set of people greatly underestimate this complexity, while a different set overestimates it. Relevant further thoughts from me on this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uPi2YppTEnzKG3nXD/nathan-helm-burger-s-shortform?commentId=qCSJ2nPsNXC2PFvBW [LW(p) · GW(p)]

When I was a kid and 9/11 happened, some people online were talking about the effect on the stock market. My mom told me that the stock exchange was down the street from the WTC and not damaged, so I thought the people on the Internet were all wrong.

Right, and per the second part of my comment - insofar as consciousness is a real phenomenon, there's an empirical question of if whatever frame invariant definition of computation you're using is the correct one.

an observation: for the keltham who doesn't distinguish between effects of intentional action and intentional inaction, they have implicitly stated they would prefer to proactively cause a child's death if it gained them expensive clothes. i expect that if the article were explicitly about this, there would be much less agreement with it - or if not, the article would be mostly focused on the possible decision theoretic^[1] reason for such an entity to {not kill / save} the child.

(it is still true that such a keltham would be 'coherent', to be clear, if that is what its preference is. so this is more an observation about the community)

1. ^{^}

   Well, said Keltham, in that case, he was going right back to taking another fifteen seconds to strip off his super-expensive clothes, if the child didn't look like it was literally right about to drown.  And if society didn't like that, it was society's job to solve that thing with the master criminals.  Though he'd maybe modify that if they were in a possible-true-death situation, because a true life is worth a huge number of labor-hours, and that part did feel like some bit of decision theory would say that everyone would be wealthier if everyone would sacrifice small amounts of wealth to save huge amounts of somebody else's wealth, if that happened unpredictably to people, and if society was also that incompetent at setting up proper reimbursements.  Though if it was like that in real life instead of the Least Convenient Possible World, it would mean that Civilization was terrible at coordination and it was time to overthrow Governance and start over.

I've been trying to make this comment a bunch of times, no quotation from the post in case that's the issue:

No, a thirder would not treat those possibilities as equiprobable. A thirder would instead treat the coin toss outcome probabilities as a prior, and weight the possibilities accordingly. Thus H1 would be weighted twice as much as any of the individual TH or TT possibilities.

This actually sounds about right. What's paradoxical here?

Not that it's necessarily inconsistent, but in my view it does seem to be pointing out an important problem with the assumptions (hence indeed a paradox if you accept those false assumptions):

(ignore this part, it is just a rehash of the path dependence paradigm. It is here to show that I am not complaining about the math, but about its relation to reality):

Imagine you are going to be split (once). It is factually the case that there are going to be two people with memories, etc. consistent with having been you. Without any important differences to distinguish them, and if you insist on coming up with some probability number for "waking up" as one particular one of them obviously it has to be ½.

And then, if one of those copies subsequently splits, if you insist on assigning a probability number for those further copies, then from the perspective of that parent copy, the further copies also have to be ½ each.

And then if you take these probability numbers seriously and insist on them all being consistent then obviously from the perspective of the original the probability numbers for the final numbers have to be ½ and ¼ and ¼. As you say "this actually sounds about right".

What's paradoxical here is that in the scenario provided we have the following facts:

1. you have 3 identical copies all formed from the original
2. all 3 copies have an equal footing going forward

and yet, the path-based identity paradigm is trying to assign different weights to these copies, based on some technical details of what happened to create them. The intuition that this is absurd is pointing at the fact that these technical details aren't what most people probably would care about, except if they insist on treating these probability numbers as real things and trying to make them follow consistent rules. 

Ultimately "these three copies will each experience being a continuation of me" is an actual fact about the world, but statements like "'I' will experience being copy A (as opposed to B or C)" are not pointing to an actual fact about the world. Thus assigning a probability number to such a statement is a mental convenience that should not be taken seriously. The moment such numbers stop being convenient, like assigning different weights to copies you are actually indifferent between, they should be discarded. (and optionally you could make up new numbers that match what you actually care about instrumentally. Or just not think of it in those terms).

This post would be a LOT better with about half-a-dozen representative real examples you've run into.

I'd enjoy some acknowledgement that there IS an interplay between cognitive beliefs (based on intelligent modeling of the universe and other people) and intuitive experienced emotions.  "not a monocausal result of how smart or stupid they are" does not imply total lack of correlation or impact.  Nor does it imply that cognitive ability to choose a framing or model is not effective in changing one's aliefs and preferences.

I'm fully onboard with countering the bullying and soldier-mindset debate techniques that smart people use against less-smart (or equally-smart but differently-educated) people.  I don't buy that everyone is entitled to express and follow any preferences, including anti-social or harmful-to-others beliefs.  Some things are just wrong in modern social contexts.

I recently came across unsupervised machine translation here. It's not directly applicable, but it opens the possibility that, given enough information about "something", you can pin down what it's encoding in your own language.

So let's say now that we have a computer that simulates a human brain in a manner that we understand. Perhaps there really could be a sense in which it simulates a human brain that is independent of our interpretation of it. I'm having some trouble formulating this precisely.

Great question, thanks!

I think you're correct in pointing towards the existence of basically-all-downside genetic conditions, but I still think these are in the minority. Moreover, even most of those don't create a big issue on the object level— compared to how people might feel about the issue as a result.

This argument doesn't extend to conditions like Huntington's, but if a person is missing a pinky finger, most of the issues the person is going to face are related to social factors and their own emotions, not the physical aspect.

I also just say this from experience helping others.