LessWrong 2.0 Reader

...Taleuntum would have been allowed to submit this bot as a separate entry on the grounds that it does not coordinate with Taleuntum's CloneBot.

Huh. I didn't realize that was allowed.

If Zack_M_Davis' AbstractSpyTreeBot can survive in a world of clones until turn 90 when the clone treaty expires then there may be some hope for Chaos Army.

The bots can access the number of the turn?? I thought that each pairing is an isolated iterated game that doesn't know anything about the context.

An alternative to editing many genes individually is to synthesise the whole genome from scratch, which is plausibly cheaper and more accurate.

The universe is not actually infinite.

And even if it were, there could be other things out there that could stop an FAI.

And even if there are not, people could still choose to die with a certain probability over time that leads to a finite average.

And even if not it could turn out that we might want to value life years lived with a subjective weight that falls over time causing the average to be finite.  

It is infinite. Imagine that FAI will appear in our time, that it will have human immortality as its final goal and that it will also will be able to solve the problem of the end of the universe. All these combined has, say, 1 per cent probability. Thus we have 1 per cent chance of infinite life expectancy, of which median is also infinity.

Formally, we often model causation as the action of one thing implying another, and we might formalize this with mathematical notation like $A⟹B$ to mean some event or thing $A$ causes some other event or thing $B$ to happen.

I have a job that requires a degree. This implies that I have a degree. But my having this job did not cause me to have a degree (to clarify, perhaps the expectation of gaining such a job caused me to get the degree, but not the job itself). From ET Jaynes, after a similar example:

This example shows also that the major premise, ‘if A then B’ expresses B only as a logical consequence of A; and not necessarily a causal physical consequence, which could be effective only at a later time. The rain at 10 am is not the physical cause of the clouds at 9:45 am. Nevertheless, the proper logical connection is not in the uncertain causal direction (clouds ⇒ rain), but rather (rain ⇒ clouds), which is certain, although noncausal. We emphasize at the outset that we are concerned here with logical connections, because some discussions and applications of inference have fallen into serious error through failure to see the distinction between logical implication and physical causation. The distinction is analyzed in some depth by Simon and Rescher (1966), who note that all attempts to interpret implication as expressing physical causation founder on the lack of contraposition expressed by the second syllogism (1.2). That is, if we tried to interpret the major premise as ‘A is the physical cause of B’, then we would hardly be able to accept that ‘not-B is the physical cause of not-A’. In Chapter 3 we shall see that attempts to interpret plausible inferences in terms of physical causation fare no better.

Causation is not so easy to model. Judea Pearl is supposedly working on it, though I know nothing of it.

This means that there's no aspect of the territory that is causality. There's no A, there's no B, there's no ⟹, there's just "is".

Here's how I think of it: I have sensory data coming in (what I see and hear and so on), and every word I associate with that data is an abstraction that seems to match with a useful pattern within the data (e.g. "I'm looking at a table"). So I think we kind of agree with the "There's no A or B", though I would phrase it in a way in which people might think we disagree. I think it still makes sense to talk about A or B, it's just that statements like "A is true" becomes a lot more slippery (but not in a "Everybody has their own truth, man" way). And this is the case, as you say, even at the level of atoms, though our sensory data is intermediated with other high-tech tools (e.g. electron microscopes or whatever).

Where I think we disagree is "there's no ⟹". Maybe there isn't. But the universe apparently follows some rules, and I would consider these rules to be facts about the universe. The laws that physicists found may be implications of these rules, but they might be the rules themselves. For the sake of analogy, the "code" that the universe runs on might contain "matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed", and I think it's fair to consider this to be part of the universe (though whether we can establish that a rule is actually in the code is another matter). The rules might also contain something about causation.

Anyway, great post.

“I am inclined to think—” said I.

“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.

Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Valley of Fear"

All clones behave exactly the same until round 90. Even the seed for the random number generator is the same.

All I can imagine is that a tiny difference in score due to facing different bots snowballs into a significant different pie share due to the multiplicative effect that simon noted. There was a Silly 0 Bot. Any clone that was lucky enough to face it on round 1 gorged itself with score. Same thing with Silly 1 Bot and a few others. Since they disappeared fast, it's a one-time bump in score that cannot be averaged over time.

What are the names of your 2 vassal PasswordBots?

So it's been 11 years. Do you still remember pjeby's advice? Did it change your life?

Can you tell us who is Insub and the story of your alliance with them?