SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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Friends Don’t Let Friends Learn Probability from Yudkowsky | Science After Sunclipse (www.sunclipse.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For convenience, I gathered a few comments of mine into a blog post.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Deeply complicating matters, 0 and 1 can be excluded from theories of probability, and there is a good informal reason to do it, known as Cromwell's rule. The issue is that there no longer are units in such a system; 0 is the disjunctive unit and 1 is the conjunctive unit. This is part of a bigger theme in maths where units are increasingly seen as optional, but Yud is completely unaware of this bigger theme.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Personally, I've always found Cromwell's rule a deeply boring proposal for screwing with the axioms. Try doing the Dutch-book argument with surreal numbers, then I'll pay attention. :-P

(I would expect that many subjectivist Bayesians would take Cromwell's rule as an addition to the basic rules that are themselves justified by Dutch book or some such means. Not assigning sharp-edged probabilities out of general prudence is a thing an individual gambler can choose to do, if that's the way their tendencies lie, while not being part of the mathematical definition of the subject itself. But, well, 46,656 varieties and all that. Moreover, it is hard to do physics having chopped off the endpoints of the interval without chopping other structures as well. For example, if you don't even allow 0 and 1 to be available as idealizations, you might end up peeling the skin off quantum state space. Some could cope with this, but not Yud, since he demands that all of reality be a single pure quantum state. Insofar as any sense can be made out of Yud's rambles, he is wanting something stronger than Cromwell's rule, anyway, since he wants to forbid probability 1 even for logical implications, which Lindley allowed.)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I just read the post about 0 and 1 being invalid probabilities. Here’s my best attempt at interpreting it as a joke: This is clearly yud’s attempt at creating a mathematical trollpost using only words.

But yeah as someone with a (honestly atrophied) degree in mathematics I am struggling to figure out the post. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not performing mathematics; at best it is sophistry. Honestly it makes me sad that he wrote it at all and that people read it and agreed with it.

Reading it is like going to a restaurant, seeing “bowl of plain rice” on the menu, ordering it, and getting served an old boot full of glitter and sawdust. Seeing the comment section and seeing people that think yud is smart or correct about anything is reading the yelp reviews later for the restaurant and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant, and that it was really good and that now when they go to other restaurants with rice it’s never the real thing and they shouldn’t be trusted.

For actually interesting contrarian maths, go watch some Norman Wildberger videos or something.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant

And this is the fundamental, absolute, no-further-down essential appeal of rationalism. Fans have never encountered ideas before, or not in any way that they’ve been able to digest them (“what the author really meant: the curtains are fucking blue”). And it bubbles up throughout, in every environ of the culture. If you are ever as stupid and masochistic as I am and find yourself on TheMotte.org, it’s the key to everything they say: they literally have never encountered facts from beyond their own rabid whirlpool of hatred, and everything that they learned in the whirlpool was laced with contrarian ressentiment towards an enemy they literally haven’t seen.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

oh dear god, a literal refinery for raw rat ore

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Reading the article is like seeing a guy at a party pick up a guitar, announce he’s going to play wonderwall, but for whatever reason he starts holding the guitar like a trumpet, blowing on the headstock and everything. There’s no indication that this is a joke. A crowd forms and they love it, tunelessly and arrhythmically chanting “wonder wall! Wonder wall!” Over and over. It’s not even part of the song. You see him later making out in a puddle, people still chanting “wonder wall!” at the puddle. Your only recourse is to set the couch on fire and leave.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you really want to cite someone he admires, you could note that Eliezer Yudkowsky uses 1 as a probability when trying (and failing) to explain quantum mechanics, because he writes probability amplitudes of absolute value 1.

I’m glad I’ve never pissed off a career physicist, cause this is concise, targeted destruction

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

If you want more of this, I wrote a full critique of his mangled intro to quantum physics, where he forgets the whole "conservation of energy" thing.