LessWrong 2.0 Reader

But I hope the arguments I've laid out above make it clear what the right answer has to be: You should anticipate having both experiences.

Some quantum experiments allow us to mostly anticipate some outcomes and not others. Either quantum physics doesn’t work the way Eliezer thinks it works and the universe is very small to not contain many spontaneously appearing copies of your brain, or we should be pretty surprised to continually find ourselves in such an ordered universe, where we don’t start seeing white noise over and over again.

I agree that if there are two copies of the brain that perfectly simulate it, both exist; but it’s not clear to me what should I anticipate in terms of ending up somewhere. Future versions of me that have fewer copies would feel like they exist just as much as versions that have many copies/run on computers with thicker wires/more current would feel.

But finding myself in an orderly universe, where quantum random number generators produce expected frequencies of results, requires something more than the simple truth that if there’s an abstract computation being computed, well, it is computed, and if it is experiencing, it’s experiencing (independently of how many computers in which proportions using which physics simulating frameworks physically run it).

I’m pretty confused about what is needed to produce a satisfying answer, conditional on a large enough universe, and the only potential explanation I came up with after thinking for ~15 minutes (before reading this post) was pretty circular and not satisfying (I’m not sure of a valid-feeling way that would allow me to consider something in my brain entangled with how true this answer is, without already relying on it).

(“What’s up with all the Boltzmann brain versions of me? Do they start seeing white noise, starting from every single moment? Why am I experiencing this instead?”)

And in a large enough universe, deciding to run on silicon instead of proteins might be pretty bad, because maybe, if GPUs that run the brain are tiny enough, most future versions of you might end up in weird forms of quantum immortality instead of being simulated.

If I physically scale my brain size on some outputs of results of quantum dice throws but not others, do I start observing skewed frequencies of results?

Any updates on this? For example, I notice that the new music services like Suno & Udio seem to be betraying a bit of mode collapse, but they certainly do not degenerate into such within-song repetition like these were.

He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.

Edward St Aubyn

Those redditors have pretty weak arguments. The first comment is basically "the other academics all agree with the popular claim that Gilley is criticizing, so the popular claim must be true". The second guy basically states "Gilley correctly argues that Hoschild's evidence for a population decline is too weak. But if the evidence is bad, Gilley can't prove there was a genocide. Therefore Gilley is wrong".

FHI at Oxford
by Nick Bostrom (recently turned into song [LW · GW]):

the big creaky wheel
a thousand years to turn

thousand meetings, thousand emails, thousand rules
to keep things from changing
and heaven forbid
the setting of a precedent

yet in this magisterial inefficiency
there are spaces and hiding places
for fragile weeds to bloom
and maybe bear some singular fruit

like the FHI, a misfit prodigy
daytime a tweedy don
at dark a superhero
flying off into the night
cape a-fluttering
to intercept villains and stop catastrophes

and why not base it here?
our spandex costumes
blend in with the scholarly gowns
our unusual proclivities
are shielded from ridicule
where mortar boards are still in vogue

Update #1

Lots of info to share! Here's a bunch of awesome people confirmed as coming.

Two sessions I'm personally quite excited to go to are Sarah Constantin's "My First Fact Post" and Alicorn's "My First GlowFic" (I want to try to do both of these things!).

lol at the approval/agreement ratio here. It does seem like this is a post that surely gets something wrong.

Questions Thread

Thinking Thread

That said, while I do think it's important to ensure that the public is aware of both current and future risks, unilaterally pointing the media in the direction of potentially sensationalizable individual studies is probably not the best way to go about that. In retrospect my suggestion to consider that was itself ill-considered, and I retract it.