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[silverspawn]

Start of Pondering about Zendo Questions

I thought I had to start by collecting a list of all previous rules, but infangthief already did this, so I'm only completing it.

Btw one feature that would be extremely cool for the forum are collapsible spoilers.

The question contains a doubled character.
The question contains a comma.
The question contains a word that starts with "m".
The question contains a capital vowel.
The words in the question are arranged alphabetically.
The question contains all of the letters in "a rule".
The question has a prime number of characters.
Both first and last letters of the question are both consonants or both vowels.
The previous question shares any words with current question. (later ruled an invalid rule)
The average word length of the question is greater than 4 characters.
The third letter of the question is a vowel.
The last word of the question has at least one letter from each QWERTY keyboard row.
The question contains a capitalized T,H,E,O,R or Y.
The question has a one-syllable word, a two-syllable word, and a three-syllable word.
The question contains the letters in 'meme,' i.e., at least two m's and two e's.
The only 't's in the question are not at the start of words.
The question contains 4 or more characters that are not lowercase letters or spaces.
The question contains a letter in the range N-Z.
The question has two letters that are next to each other in the alphabet next to each other in the right order.
The questions does not contain any of the letters j,q,x or z.
The question has at least as many words with five or more letters than words with 4 or fewer letters.
The question contains a word with the same number of letters as the number of words in the question.
The question contains a 'y' or does not contain an 'n'.
The question contains an n-th word which has exactly n letters.
The question contains an anagram of a Dominion card.
The first letter of the alphabet occurring in the question occurs only once.
The question has at least 3 words all of the same length.
The first and last word of the question share any letters.
The third word of the question has an even number of letters.
The last word of the question contains a letter that hasn't occurred before.
Every word of the question has an adjacent word which has a letter in common with it.
The number of letters in the question is congruent to 1 mod 3.
The question contains both an r and an s.
The number of words with an even number of characters is even.
Between the first and last lowercase letters there is nothing but lowercase letters and spaces.
The question contains the name of a Dominion card-shaped thing.
There are two consecutive words with the same number of characters.
The median number of letters per word is an integer.
Either the number of words or the number of letters is a square number.
More than half of the characters in the question form a single word.
There is an 'N' in the first three words of the question.
The question does not contain two words in alphabetical order.
The question contains two consecutive letters which are consecutive in the alphabet, in order.
The question contains the string "Elliptic Curve Cryptography".
The question contains at least one word which is made up of symbols of chemical elements.
The letter e appears as or more frequently than any other letter
The question must not contain a series of three letters in the same direction.
The word must contain at least one of the letter determined by the length of the word. (1=a, 2=b... 26=z, 27=a, etc.)
The number of vowels (aeiou) needs to be the same as the number of consonants.
The question must contain all letters of at least one spelled-out number
The question must contain a topological subspace that is homeomorphic to the circle
The question must contain a two-letter abbreviation for an element.
The sum of the ASCII values of all characters is even.
The question contains a word which contains a letter whose position in the alphabet equals the word length
The question must contain two words whose length is at least 5 apart

[silverspawn]

The Elliptic Curve Cryptography one is just so funny

[silverspawn]

I'm still cringing at how much signaling was motivating my posts in that thread and that was only a year ago. I thought I had already gotten past this at that point.

[jotheonah]

Also in stronghold, the AI of units attacking your base is "search for way to the keep; if it exists go there; if not attack walls; check every couple of seconds to re-decide". This is exploitable by building a single very long winded way as the only path to your keep. Opponent will go through no matter what, which takes far more time than to kill walls. (Stops working once they have catapults which changes the AI.) But don't make it too long or the game crashes at the point where the AI searches for the way in. Also this exploit is unnecessary if you follow the guide above,

This is hilarious.

[MiX]

Guess: a sentence satisfies the rule iff one word in it has at least 5 more letters than another word

Be honest, to what extent was that solved by the latest set of questions?

That was probably 90% of it. Or more.

To make the implicit explicit, I was a little annoyed by this, not because you used that to guess correctly but because I think I expected an acknowledgement that it was because of my post. But idk if this is at all reasonable, also definitely possible that I've done something analogous before without even realizing it and the other person was either lucky/mindful enough not to be annoyed or too shy/polite to say it.

I also made some mistake somewhere because I thought some of the judgments implied that not all letters are equal, which ended up being the case. A first lesson would be to write down hypotheses, which already generalizes to other domains!

I did mean to acknowledge that you helped me: that's what this part of this post was for:

O sphinx, thank you.

This wasn't explicit on purpose (as I think saying "thanks for solving this for me, unfortunately I was here earlier to guess" is not exactly polite), but I said this so you'd know I drew heavy inspiration from your sphinx questions.

[silverspawn]

The sad thing is that I actually picked that up and my ego wasn't satisfied (but I don't endorse that reaction)

[silverspawn]

This is a super cool puzzle that just happened naturally in my game. Also difficult-ish. White to move.

Hint: I played Ne6 to win the Queen, which is a terrible blunder that throws the game on the spot because the opponent can just take the queen and your attack is over. Opponent resigned because they didn't see it. But the position is Mate in 2.

[silverspawn]

I remember at least one person make the point that today's movies aren't as good as they used to, and no-one will care about things like The Queen's Gambit in a generation.

But, like, I don't see why that would be true. I especially don't see how the Queen's Gambit is any worse than classical movies. Maybe just because there are more movies, it'll be harder to be remembered, but I have no problem imagining people looking fondly on that show in 20 years, provided the world still exists at that point. It's inoffensive, timeless, and really good.

[Awaclus]

I remember at least one person make the point that today's movies aren't as good as they used to, and no-one will care about things like The Queen's Gambit in a generation.

But, like, I don't see why that would be true. I especially don't see how the Queen's Gambit is any worse than classical movies. Maybe just because there are more movies, it'll be harder to be remembered, but I have no problem imagining people looking fondly on that show in 20 years, provided the world still exists at that point. It's inoffensive, timeless, and really good.

It's mostly true because the person who's saying it isn't a teenager anymore and doesn't have the time or the mental resources to get enthusiastic about any new works of fiction anymore. Thus, all of the works of fiction they are enthusiastic about are old at this point. I mean, a really high percentage of my favorite works have either just recently had their 10th anniversary or are about to have it within a couple of years, and that absolutely isn't a coincidence, even though I am also excited about a lot of newer stuff as well and probably substantially more interested in fiction and open to novel experiences than the average person in general.

[silverspawn]

I remember at least one person make the point that today's movies aren't as good as they used to, and no-one will care about things like The Queen's Gambit in a generation.

But, like, I don't see why that would be true. I especially don't see how the Queen's Gambit is any worse than classical movies. Maybe just because there are more movies, it'll be harder to be remembered, but I have no problem imagining people looking fondly on that show in 20 years, provided the world still exists at that point. It's inoffensive, timeless, and really good.

It's mostly true because the person who's saying it isn't a teenager anymore and doesn't have the time or the mental resources to get enthusiastic about any new works of fiction anymore. Thus, all of the works of fiction they are enthusiastic about are old at this point. I mean, a really high percentage of my favorite works have either just recently had their 10th anniversary or are about to have it within a couple of years, and that absolutely isn't a coincidence, even though I am also excited about a lot of newer stuff as well and probably substantially more interested in fiction and open to novel experiences than the average person in general.

The one person who I remember said this was Scott Sumner, who is at least 60.

But this confirms my point; it's not a statement about the movie landscape, it's a statement about himself.

[silverspawn]

Creating this as a html page will be part of the next exam. I bet not a single student will realize it's a pangram.

[silverspawn]

On the top left corner right when the 1st episode started it listed "animal harm" as casually as they list profanity. I am still as angry about today as I was when I first saw that. My motto has always been that people do not have to watch things if they do not like them, but do not take away my right to watch if I want. For me, this is one of those topics where I ABSOLUTELY draw the line. I will never support any channel, show, people, etc who do this. So I cancelled Netflix since they are showing this.
2 out of 31 found this helpful. Was this review helpful?

[silverspawn]

Weird and waste of time. Do not watch!!! Time iz money.
8 out of 23 found this helpful. Was this review helpful?

[faust]

Arguably though, the second review is more helpful than the first, as the first comes from a person who clearly did not watch the show, and contains no information that would not already be available to a potential viewer.

[silverspawn]

Agreed.

Also the second review is outright great for the comedic factor. Much better humor/time ratio than watching comedy specials. For me, anyway.

[silverspawn]

So Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote this 1600 page long series-of-essays-which-was-then-collected-into-the-book-"Rationality: From AI to Zombies"-but-is-colloquially-most-commonly-referred-to-as-"The Sequences". (Also the first link in my signature.) As far as I recall, they consist of something like

- Discussion of commonly known biases from the literature (Conjunction Fallacy, Scope Insensitivity, Availability Heuristic, Confirmation Bias, etc etc etc etc etc.)
- Text book introductions to relevant fields (basic probability theory, very basic statistics, Meta Logic, construction of natural numbers, , some causal modeling, some physics including Thermodynamics, probably a bunch of other fields that I can't name right now)
- A bunch of philosophy about what truth is and related matters
- Game Theory and Decision Theory that includes the novel contributions from EY and Miri
- Some stuff specific to AI
- Some non-empirical essays about the world, like stuff about signaling, playing roles, being happier, and probably lots of others that I don't remember. (The part about signaling had an extremely large impact on me specifically, probably more than everything else combined.)
- A bunch of stuff about ethics
- A few posts about consciousness
- The sequence on Quantum Physics
- Some stuff about cryonics

I've read almost all of that several years back and found it extremely valuable. Recently, it's been mentioned in discussions that beneath all of the surface-level content, the Sequences try to convey the sense that "humans are algorithms", which is meant as contrary to "humans are immortal souls" or "humans are atoms" or anything else that you might ultimately identify as.

I think this is wrong. Humans aren't algorithms because algorithms aren't conscious. Algorithms aren't conscious because they're not a thing, fundamentally speaking. Algorithms are an abstraction to describe how heaps of atoms move over time. They're an incredibly useful and powerful abstraction, but still an abstraction. They're not part of the fundamental stuff of the universe. You cannot be an algorithm any more than you can be the process of mating.

I think the fundamental stuff of the universe is matter. Matter is inherently conscious (this view is called panpsychism). If you combine a lot of matter, you can build more complex structures (like houses or humans) and more complex consciousnesses (like animals or humans). Very simple. Thus, humans are atoms.

As far as I remember, believing that humans are atoms is compatible doesn't pose a lot of conflict with The Sequences. I wasn't a fan of the part on ethics, but even that doesn't seem all that related. But it's difficult to know for sure because I didn't have those views when I read them.

Hence I now decided to read it all again, which is probably a worthwhile project anyway. So far, I'm a couple of posts in, and it's all about common biases, which is not only compatible with believing humans are atoms but also probably totally uncontroversial (and all backed by studies anyway (though who knows if they replicate (not sure if anyone ever went back and fixed this after the replication crises began)))

[silverspawn]

EY's views on ethics as I remember them are that human values are complex, and satisfying them requires aiming at something like a tiny region in a 100000-dimensional space, which is extremely difficult. (E.g., say the sky became purple tomorrow; humans would find this very disturbing even if they knew it wasn't dangerous because the color of the sky is among the 100000 things they value.) And while it seems reasonable to try to maximize those, and the only non-stupid way to do this is to have something that looks sort of like utilitarianism, there is no way to make statements with truth values about this. There's only people and what they try to do, and if we want a future we like, well we have to try to satisfy our super complicated values. He never uses the phrase moral relativism afair, but it is moral relativism.

Conversely, I think well-being is fundamental, objective, and quantifiable, i.e. exactly like literally everything else.

[silverspawn]

Going back to lighter matters, one of the most egregious fallacies is the planning fallacy:

More generally, this phenomenon is known as the “planning fallacy.” The planning fallacy is that people think they can plan, ha ha.

A clue to the underlying problem with the planning algorithm was uncovered by Newby-Clark et al., who found that

    Asking subjects for their predictions based on realistic “best guess” scenarios; and
    Asking subjects for their hoped-for “best case” scenarios . . .

. . . produced indistinguishable results.5

When people are asked for a “realistic” scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes—the same vision as their “best case.”

Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the “worst case.”

The reason why this seems particularly egregious is that everyone commits it, and people who know about it also commit it all the time. And it seems like people who know about it and know that people who know about it commit it all the time *still* commit it all the time. It seems just so so difficult to be properly pessimistic about this.

In one cited study, people were asked to assign dates by which they complete a personal project with 50, 75%, and 99% probability. About 45% completed their project by the 99% date. Pretty sure the correct answer for the 99% date is almost always 'impossible' because there's a larger than 1% chance you never complete whatever you're working on right now, so no date is late enough.

The general advice is "throw away your internal model of how fast you think are. Look at whatever project you've done previously. This one will probably work about as well". Ie just reference class forecasting, which is also what really good forecasters recommend. Just look at similar cases.

[silverspawn]

Just realized an obvious connection between this and something I've complained about a few pages ago, which is that so often IRL people announce they will do things and they don't do it... imE something like half the time. This is just stuff like "I'll call you back after I finish talking to this customer." (He called me back one day later at least.) Insofar as I am more reliable than that, maybe its because I understand how incredibly hard it is to plan anything and thus devote more effort to it.

[silverspawn]

Another example would be the principal who, faced with two children who were caught fighting on the playground, sternly says: “It doesn’t matter who started the fight, it only matters who ends it.” Of course it matters who started the fight. The principal may not have access to good information about this critical fact, but if so, the principal should say so, not dismiss the importance of who threw the first punch. Let a parent try punching the principal, and we’ll see how far “It doesn’t matter who started it” gets in front of a judge.

Amen

[silverspawn]

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

This is the problem with what my sister is doing (explaining global events with her 'the world is ruled by an intellectual elite' model).

[silverspawn]

Less understood but very important concept: Expecting Short Inferential Distances

The post argues that, in the ancestral environment, it was enough to explain concepts at inferential distance 1, which is to say, in terms of other concepts. It was enough because everyone was basically familiar with the same set of concepts, so whenever you discover something new "there is food here!", you only have that one thing to share.

But today, inferential distances can be much larger. This means you have to explain concept X in terms of concepts Y, and Z (distance 1), and then explain concepts Y and Z in terms of concepts a,b,c, (distance 2) and so on until you arrive at something the audience can understand. Alas, many people go back only one step, and that's how we get tutorials like this (first hit when I googled "What is Git"

By far, the most widely used modern version control system in the world today is Git. Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous creator of the Linux operating system kernel. A staggering number of software projects rely on Git for version control, including commercial projects as well as open source. Developers who have worked with Git are well represented in the pool of available software development talent and it works well on a wide range of operating systems and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments).

Having a distributed architecture, Git is an example of a DVCS (hence Distributed Version Control System). Rather than have only one single place for the full version history of the software as is common in once-popular version control systems like CVS or Subversion (also known as SVN), in Git, every developer's working copy of the code is also a repository that can contain the full history of all changes.

In addition to being distributed, Git has been designed with performance, security and flexibility in mind.

This used to make me very angry. I've talked about that before. It still makes me a little angry.

Then of course there's a the separate problem that it's unclear how many steps you should do. You can't always go all the way back. (I'm not doing that in this thread either, but I'm not writing a tutorial.) But this doesn't excuse only doing one step in most cases.

It gets maximally egregious if people explain something to you at distance 1 and then think you're stupid if you don't understand it.

[silverspawn]

And that was the entirety of book 1. Exactly 49 posts.

With the final post, we finally got somewhere on the "humans are algorithms" thing. There is also this off-handed diss of panpsychism in there:

Mark sighs sadly. “Never mind . . . it’s obvious you don’t know. Maybe all pebbles are magical to start with, even before they enter the bucket. We could call that position panpebblism.”

Aside from this and one short fictional story about politics, the other 47 posts have been very direct, explicit, and saying true things. Why start talking in metaphors when you want to make a point about consciousness?

But anyway, this is not 'the entire sequence is secretly about humans being algorithms', it's 'the entire sequences is about biases and probability and stuff like that which I take no issues with, and then there is one single post sort of about humans being algorithms except it's all metaphorical'.

I think EY and related people think that understanding the concepts of the first 48 posts makes you recognize that panpsychism isn't true, and that only leaves 'humans are algorithms'. But what it really shows is that he doesn't understand the reasons for believing in panpsychism. Well, that or I don't understand something.

[silverspawn]

Something clicked. I think I finally get it.

EY doesn't think the hard problem is real. He thinks consciousness is to us as life is to people from a few hundred years ago. People used to look at organisms, and the way they moved seemed like magic. Impossible to make sense of conventionally. Thus, they hypothesized that there had to be a special life essence. They called this Élan Vital, and they thought this was the stuff that allowed us to breathe and move around. When a human dies, their Élan Vital disappears and they lose this ability.

Alas, this was wrong. There is no Élan vital. As we did more science, we discovered that everything that organisms do can be explained with regular physics.

Simlarly, in the parable at the end of book I, there is a Shepard who has to lead all sheep in and out of a certain area every day. His problem is that he doesn't know whether all of the sheep have returned, so he either has to spend an hour every day looking for any missing ones, or risk that some of them are still out there, in which case they'll die to wolves. Eventually, he comes up with a counting system via pebbles in a bucket. Whenever a sheep leaves the area, he throws a pebble into the bucket. Whenever a sheep enters, he takes out a pebble. When the bucket is empty, all sheep are inside the area.

Then comes someone from the government to whom the system seems like magic. He hypothesizes that the bucket is magic, that these pebbles are magic, that you get magic by throwing a certain number of pebbles into the bucket, etc etc. Or that every ordinary pebble has a bit of magic. And all of this is a metaphor for consciousness, hence we get this:

Mark sighs sadly. “Never mind . . . it’s obvious you don’t know. Maybe all pebbles are magical to start with, even before they enter the bucket. We could call that position panpebblism.”

But alas!  everyone is confused because there is no magic at al happening. There is, in fact, nothing mysterious about the bucket system. It only appears to be magic from the outside because the person from the government doesn't understand addition. Just like consciousness only appears  unique from the outside because we don't understand               .

"But consciousness is different!" -- is only what we say because don't understand it. To people from the past, life seemed different! To earlier people, the sun seemed different! It's only confusion! Consciousness is nothing special at all! The feeling of uniqueness is only an artifact of our own confusion!

[silverspawn]

As far as I know, there are only five coherent theories about consciousness on offer:

Strong illusionism: consciousness doesn't exist

Divinity: humans and perhaps animals have immortal souls, and they produce consciousness

Strong emergence: atoms are not conscious, but when heaps of atoms move in particular ways, consciousness appears. (This is arguably the mainstream view)

[don't know the name]: only consciousness exists, matter is an illusion

panpsychism: all atoms are a tiny bit conscious, and when they are combined, you can build complex consciousnesses

The first four of these seem extremely implausible, and I never understood how EY could disagree with this. But (I think) he doesn't. By saying 'consciousness is no more special than life' he gets by without having a theory of consciousness altogether. He can ridicule panpsychism without endorsing any any alternative. He's just dodging the problem. That way, he gets to write long posts ridiculing the concept of strong emergence while also having beliefs about consciousness that are effectively isomorphic to strong emergence.

And an entire research field was confused about morality every since. The End.