When Accepting Lack of Free Will Matters

Here is an excerpt from my earlier post on free will in a deterministic world (as generally noted, the same logic applies in a low-level stochastic world): We know that physics does not support the idea of metaphysical free will. By metaphysical free will I mean the magical ability of agents to change the world by …

Logical Counterfactuals are low-res

(Epistemic status: I have no idea why such an obvious observation is never even mentioned by the decision theorists. Or maybe it is, I have not seen it.) A logical counterfactual, as described by Nate Soares: In a setting with deterministic algorithmic agents, how (in general) should we evaluate the expected value of the hypothetical …

Decisions are not about changing the world, they are about learning what world you live in.

Epistemic status: Probably discussed to death in multiple places, but people still make this mistake all the time. I am not well versed in UDT, but it seems along the same lines. Or maybe I am reinventing some aspects of Game Theory. We know that physics does not support the idea of metaphysical free will. …

Probability is a model, frequency is an observation: Why both halfers and thirders are correct in the Sleeping Beauty problem.

This post was inspired by a yet another post talking about the Sleeping Beauty problem: Repeated (and improved) Sleeping Beauty problem. It is also related to Probability is in the Mind. It is very common in physics and other sciences that different observers disagree about the value of a certain quantity they both measure. For example, for …

The Fermi Paradox: What did Sandberg, Drexler and Ord Really Dissolve?

So this paper by the trio from the FHI, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord (SDO for short) has been talked about quite a bit, on LessWrong, on SSC and on Reddit. It is about how their Monte-Carlo calculations based on probability distributions rather than on the usual point estimates of the Drake equation …

Wirehead your Chickens

TL;DR: If you care about farm animal welfare, work on minimizing actual animal suffering, not a human proxy for animal suffering. Epistemic status: had a chat about this with a couple of local EA enthusiasts who attended the EA Global 2018 in San-Francisco, and apparently this was not high on the agenda. I have only done a cursory …

Order from Randomness: Ordering the Universe of Random Numbers

Previously I had suggested that the laws of physics were the observers' attempts to make sense of the universe without laws while looking for patterns, which then become their models of reality. Some people suggested that this idea matched their intuition, others were bringing up Tegmark's mathematical universe as something that inherently has laws in …

Extracting physical laws from randomness

From the last post: Can one start with a sequence of random numbers as a toy universe, i.e. no order and get somewhere that way, just by finding spurious patterns in the sequence? An observer is a part of the universe, how would a sub-sequence of numbers represent an observer? A "physical law" in this …

Physics has laws, the Universe might not

Inspired by http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/06/physicist-concludes-there-are-no-laws.html, which dissed this article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/there-are-no-laws-of-physics-theres-only-the-landscape-20180604. Epistemic status: very raw, likely discussed elsewhere, though in different terms, but feels like has a kernel of usefulness in it. What does it mean for the universe to be governed by physical laws? What does the term physical law mean? It means that someone knowing that law can …