All of dranorter's Comments + Replies

It doesn't seem quite right to say that the sensor readings are identical when the thief has full knowledge of the diamond. The sensor readings after tampering can be identical. But some sensor readings have caused the predictor to believe that the sensors would be tampered with by the thief. The problem is just that the predictor knows what signs to look for, and humans do not.

It's worth noting that in the case of logical induction, there's a more fleshed-out story where the LI eventually has self-trust and can also come to believe probabilities produced by other LI processes. And, logical induction can come to trust outputs of other processes too. For LI, a "virtuous process" is basically one that satisfies the LI criterion, though of course it wouldn't switch to the new set of beliefs unless they were known products of a longer amount of thought, or had proven themselves superior in some other way.

3Abram Demski
I don't think this is true. Two different logical inductors need not trust each other in general, even if one has had vastly longer to think, and so has developed "better" beliefs. They do have reason to trust each other eventually on empirical matters, IE, matters for which they get sufficient feedback. (I'm unfortunately relying an an unpublished theorem to assert that.) However, for undecidable sentences, I think there is no reason why one logical inductor should consider another to have "virtuous reasoning", even if the other has thought for much longer. What we can say is that a logical inductor eventually sees itself as reasoning virtuously. And, furthermore, that "itself" means as mathematically defined -- it does not similarly trust "whatever the computer I'm running on happens to believe tomorrow", since the computational process could be corrupted by e.g. a cosmic ray. But for both a human and for a logical inductor, the epistemic process involves an interaction with the environment. Humans engage in discussion, read literature, observe nature. Logical inductors get information from the deductive process, which it trusts to be a source of truth. What distinguishes corrupt environmental influences from non-corrupt ones?

The definition may not be principled, but there's something that feels a little bit right about it in context. There are various ways to "stay in the logical past" which seem similar in spirit to migueltorrescosta's remark, like calculating your opponent's exact behavior but refusing to look at certain aspects of it. The proposal, it seems, is to iterate already-iterated games by passing more limited information of some sort between the possibly-infinite sessions. (Both your and the opponent's memory gets limited.) But if we admit that Miguel's "iterated p

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2Abram Demski
I have been thinking a bit about evolutionarily stable equilibria, now. Two things seem interesting (perhaps only as analogies, not literal applications of the evolutionarily stable equilibria concept): * The motivation for evolutionary equilibria involves dumb selection, rather than rational reasoning. This cuts the tricky knots of recursion. It also makes the myopic learning, which only pays attention to how well things perform in of round, seem more reasonable. Perhaps there's something to be said about rational learning algorithms needing to cut the knots of recursion somehow, such that the evolutionary equilibrium concept holds a lesson for more reflective agents. * The idea of evolutionary stability is interesting because it mixes the game and the metagame together a little bit: the players should do what is good for them, but the resulting solution should also be self-enforcing, which means consideration is given to how the solution shapes the future dynamics of learning. This seems like a necessary feature of a solution.

I think it's worth mentioning that part of the original appeal of the term (which made us initially wary) was the way it matches intuitively with the experience of signaling behavior. Here's the original motivating example. Imagine that you are in the Parfit's Hitchhiker scenario and Paul Ekman has already noticed that you're lying. What do you do? You try to get a second chance. But it won't be enough to simply re-state that you'll pay him. Even if he doesn't detect the lie this time around, you're the same person who had to lie only a moment ago. What ch

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What does it look like to rotate and then renormalize?

There seem to be two answers. The first answer is that the highest probability event is the one farthest to the right. This event must be the entire . All we do to renormalize is scale until this event is probability 1.

If we rotate until some probabilities are negative, and then renormalize in this way, the negative probabilities stay negative, but rescale.

The second way to renormalize is to choose a separating line, and use its normal vector as probability. This keeps probability positive. Then we fin... (read more)