this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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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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decision theory is when there's a box with money but if you take the box it doesn't have money
If your decision theory can't address ~~weird~~ totally plausible in the near future hypotheticals with omniscient God-AIs offering you money in boxes if you jump through enough cognitive hoops, what is it really good for?
Tbh whenever I try to read anything on decision theory (even written by people other than rationalists), I end up wondering how do they think a redundant autopilot (with majority vote) would ever work. In an airplane, that is.
Considering just the physical consequences of a decision doesn’t work (unless theres a fault, consequences don’t make it through the voting electronics, so the alternative decisions made for the alternative that there is no fault, never make it through).
Each one simulating the two or more other autopilots is scifi-brained idiocy. Requiring that autopilots are exact copies is stupid (what if we had two different teams write different implementations, I think Airbus actually sort if did that).
Nothing is going to be simulating anything, and to make matters even worse for philosophers amateur and academic alike, the whole reason for redundancy is that sometimes there is a glitch that makes them not compute the same values, so any attempt to be clever with “ha, we just treat copies as one thing” doesn’t cut it either.
Related to aviation systems, here's a writeup about a complicated incident, where a discrepancy between two "identical" components was a contributing factor: