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Deranged rationalists sweating over agents in different universes tweaking the Solomonoff prior (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tr7tAyt5zZpdTwTQK/the-solomonoff-prior-is-malign)
32

brb taking the set of all Turing machines which output strings when run with no input and weighting them proportional to 2−K, where K is the description length of the Turing machine, shouldn’t take long

They do know the Busy Beaver Machine is by definition uncomputable …
They do?
I just meant it’s ridiculous to talk about someone interfering with the set of all Turing machines that halt on an empty string
Oh yeah it definitely is. I just wouldn't bank on lesswrongers knowing anything about anything that is not mentioned in the first paragraph of the wikipedia page.
I don’t think they do > We can also choose whatever large number is easiest to specify (the busy beaver numbers come to mind).
Clearly I gave as much effort reading the post as they did the BB wiki. The other Scott must be fuming right now.

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The ... problem is that you cant tell when they have ... halted.
The problem is that they go on and on and you can’t tell if they’ll ever halt.
Sorry this was just a joking reference to the [halting problem.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem)
Yeah I just mean it's even more appropriate because with the halting problem the program in question (for which the problem is not trivial) runs on and on and you don't know if it will ever halt. You would know if it halted, you could with a few tricks detect if it enters an endless loop, but that doesn't solve the problem because some programs just go on and on without either condition happening (and then may halt after unimaginably, I mean, incomputably many steps). edit: which honestly sounds like reading a rationalist essay.

The word “seems” is doing an awful lot of work in that post. Take a shot for every “seems likely”, “seems possible”, “seems reasonable” etc and you might be drunk enough by the end to agree with it.*

*Do not do this, there are 12 “seems”

It’s ~~turtles~~ assumptions all the way down

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Yeah, but it's high grade ore if you're a jobbing SF writer! (Source: personal experience.)
what the fuck famed sci-fi author charles stross is a sneerclubber???? nooooooooooooooo he's a ddeply evil person participating in a ddeply ebil proejct now! muh *singularity sky* *cries in rationalist*
Remember, fiction is all about entertaining people with lies written for money! Fiction doesn't give you any kind of definite insight into what the author believes. Although it often gives you insight into what they disbelieve/dislike -- that's much harder to hide -- and what they don't know.
!! We are honored to receive the eminent delegate from The Scottish Socialist Science Fiction Vanguard Party (SSSFVP).
imagine my shock when, knowing nothing about his personal beliefs (aside from what can be gleaned from his books, anyway), I heard him as a guest on trashfuture
oh shit i need to check out that episode
careful now, they're still not over Greg Egan look out for his sequel, in which the Snide Club overcomes Overpowering Falsehood Dot Com
ree zendegi bad
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. This is what happens when you teach someone who knows a bit of python bits and pieces of complexity theory (Kolomogorov complexity/Solomonoff induction) and tell them they’re a genius

You can’t just say “oh but the difference in size of specification is a constant factor, we’ll ignore it” when you’re discounting results exponentially relative to the size of specification. Even if we accept all the other handwaving, like claiming the Game of Life will actually simulate intelligent life when not explicitly set up to run as something similar, the total probability of such outcomes would be completely dominated by simpler outcomes without those necessary preconditions.

It take me literally days of supercomputing time to simulate one defect in a crystal atom, and it’s still not very accurate! But no, we’re gonna get so good at simulating the entire universe from scratch that aliens from other dimensions will hijack us from it. What the fuck is this?

But think what a thousand years of Moore's law will do!
In seriousness this is my favorite discussion of Moore's law [http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=2294](http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=2294)
In a thousand years, 10^160 people will be working tirelessly inside simulations to make Moore's law happen (Robin Hanson intensifies).

*Wolfram’s deep blue nuts explode—POP!—in a puff of malign confluent cellular automata*  

 

SubstitutionSystem[{“A” -> “AHA”}, “HA”, ∞]

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It’s Roko’s again. Different mechanism, same creation of demons, gods and angels.

This honestly reminds me of those books that were written in Europe by religious nutcases about the specifics of how hell, heaven and purgatory are configured.

Very different context but they just kind of feel similar you know?

Dante does not deserve this kind of smear
Mmmm. I dunno. Dante kinda beat Yud to it in denouncing his enemies through oddly specific rants inside his fanfic.
I mean like, support his agenda or not - it’s just insulting to compare his writing to these hacks.
I mean, true. At least Dante new how to read through and edit his work.
ISWYDT

I’m concerned aliens are simulating universes to change the mean size of the head of a pin in order to affect how many angels (on average) can dance on its head. In this 20,000 word essay I hope to convince you that…

Wait till the ergodicity revolution expands from economics and puts shows these ideas for the inanity that they are.

One reason to care about the Solomonoff prior is that we can use it to do a form of idealized induction.

Oof.

Has Bayesianism fallen out of fashion?

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Link please
I'm presuming this is [charles stross](https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1319299968637800451), who browses sneerclub and commented up there in this thread.