AlexMennen's comments

What do you think "bottom 25%" and "top 25%" mean, exactly?

This seems overly harsh. Few people took COVID-19 seriously on Feb 4, so this standard makes almost everyone have no credibility, including people who don't admit to the error. All humans are unreliable.

> This implies second order logic.

No, it does not. The second incompleteness theorem is provable in first-order Peano Arithmetic.

> Of course I'm in no position to say a similar thing about Goedels incompleteness theorem, and I even referred to it's result in higher order logics, but I still doubt the relevance, as many seem to be ignorant of his former completeness theorem.

I have no idea what you're trying to say, but I assure you that people who do this kind of research are aware of the completeness theorem.

I think the idea is that the machines are supposed to learn what humans want from human behavior, and then help humans get what they want their own way, rather than imitating human behavior.

This reasoning uses the self-indication assumption, which I tentatively also agree with, but there are some pretty good criticisms of it. http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints/olum/sia.pdf

That's just a special case of a general feature of probabilistic arguments: a small but positive fraction of the times they are used, they will give wildly misleading predictions. If we assume that everyone uses the doomsday argument with a uniform improper prior on the total number of people who will ever live, then all of them will conclude with 95% probability that they are not one of the first 5% of people to ever live (that is, that no more than 20 times the past population will be created in the future), and 5% of them will be wrong, which is exactly how probabilities are supposed to work.

No. It would probably pick up on the correlation, but AIXI assumes that its only interactions with the universe are through its input and output channels, so it cannot recognize that a particular part of the universe is itself. It does not know how to formulate that hypothesis.

Yes, thank you.

2 micromorts does not mean 2 separate risks, each of which has a 1 in 1 million chance of killing you. It means a single risk that has a 1 in 500 thousand chance of killing you. Similarly, it would be absurd to define 1 mort as the combination of 1 million separate risks, each of which has a 1 in 1 million chance of killing you. Whether 1 mort is guaranteed death or 1 - 1/e chance of death (my previous mention of it being 1/e was mistaken) is a property of how we define the unit to work, not a property of how correlated 1 million separate risks happen to be. Definitions that give answers other than 1 - 1/e or 1 don't make any sense.

> mathematically 1/e would only be an approximation anyway

If we're going with the definition that treats micromorts as independent, then it would make sense to define a mort as exactly a 1 - 1/e chance of death, and a micromort as a 1 - e^(-10^(-6)) chance of death, rather than a 10^-6 chance of death, but the difference is smaller than the degree of risk that we can measure or care about, so the difference is inconsequential, and it would still make sense to describe a micromort as a 10^-6 chance of death.

So is 1 mort a guaranteed death or a [edit:] 1 - 1/e chance of death?

Moving is generally much easier for sellers, who are more likely to be large corporations, than for buyers, who are more likely to be individuals.

Good point, but the chances of a failed launch are fairly small, and the damage from accidentally detonating a large nuke on the Earth's surface, while bad, would be small compared to human extinction.

If we are sufficiently uncertain about the comet's path, we might accidentally deflect it towards us. Obviously, if this is just as likely as deflecting it away from us, it would not be worthwhile to try. But most likely we would be able to reduce the probability of a catastrophic impact even after taking into account the possibility of such an error.

If there is a significant chance that a comet will hit and destroy us, it makes sense to do everything we can to prevent it from doing so. Given the stakes, .1% chance should be more than enough for us to take it seriously. It does not seem plausible that we could harm ourselves much by nuking a comet that wasn't going to hit us anyway.

In your tax example, that reasoning would make sense, since the legislature would be unlikely to pass those on its own. My point was that, even if "prop 35 gets enacted" is better than "nothing like prop 35 gets enacted", that doesn't necessarily mean you should vote for prop 35, since if it failed, its backers would be likely to take it to the legislature, which would be likely to pass it with amendments that may address your concerns.

In retrospect, though, the chances of all that happening conditional on prop 35 failing might not be enough to justify my original comment, even though each step is individually likely, since it requires 3 things to go right (and people often overestimate the probabilities of highly conjunctive events).

> those that cared may have decided "on the balance, in this flawed democratic system where I have to vote on this as a single unit, I think the result is better despite this consequence"

They would be wrong. Anyone who has enough resources to get a proposition on the ballot has enough resources to get the legislature to pay attention to them. And something like prop 35 would pass in the legislature for the same reason it passed at the ballot box. But the legislature can make amendments.

> One last point, as much as people focus on key states deciding the election, the reality is that the states are on a spectrum based on the popular vote. If a Republican wins the popular vote by 8% or more they'll probably carry California, otherwise they won't. A Democrat will have to win by 5-8% to carry Texas. When the popular vote is close, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin are in play. Were it not close they wouldn't be.

It is always the states near the middle that matter. This is because if you are going to lose the election anyway, losing by a smaller electoral college margin doesn't help, and conversely, if you are going to win anyway, winning by a larger electoral college margin doesn't help. Candidates campaign to maximize the probability that they reach 270 electoral votes. That is why Obama and Romney are campaigning a more in Ohio than they are in Florida even though the polls are closer in Florida than they are in Ohio. Florida is a toss-up, but if Obama wins Florida, he probably also wins enough slightly bluer states like Ohio to win without Florida.

Also, California or Texas flipping would require an absolutely massive popular vote landslide. Probably at least a 15% margin.

States have an incentive to use a winner take all policy to maximize their influence in the outcome.