4 ms·

At 100% maybe, but at 90% it's possible that some algorithm that took, say, IQ, net income, and Meyers-Briggs type into account could hit 90%.

skybrian 5y ago
The original poster showed you can break it by flipping a coin.
jerf 5y ago
That's another way in which embedding it back into reality takes the force out of it... an algorithm that merely does a good job isn't a paradox, nobody has a problem believing that such a thing could exist. The average human might swear up and down the algorithm couldn't predict them, but certainly it won't have a hard time predicting everyone else pretty well. (A variant on "when I misbehave, it's for various good reasons, but when others misbehave it's because they're jerks.") The paradox arises around the 100.00000000...% accurate algorithm.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  > The paradox arises around the 100.00000000...% accurate algorithm. Is it? As I said, my decision up-front is to flip a perfectly fair coin (or substitute in your favorite CSPRNG or TRNG). So your machine could have whatever claimed accuracy percentage, but I can't see how there's anything to predict beyond 50% and any machine that does so would have to be magical (i.e. outside the rules of science/mathematics). I used that as a stand-in for my intuitive thought that such a machine's accuracy is time-dependent - the further out from the original scan you are, the more "random coin flips" your brain has experienced & thus you degrade very quickly to somewhere around 50% accuracy. You could try to mitigate that by having a super accurate model of how your brain works & trying to measure all the inputs it has encountered since, but ultimately the machine has to degrade to 50% at some point in time unless "magic". I guess you could do worse than 50%, but given this is a binary choice, any such result I think would mean you could just take the complementary result so the lower bound should always be 50%? Not sure about that last point.

skybrian 5y ago

The original poster showed you can break it by flipping a coin.

jerf 5y ago

That's another way in which embedding it back into reality takes the force out of it... an algorithm that merely does a good job isn't a paradox, nobody has a problem believing that such a thing could exist. The average human might swear up and down the algorithm couldn't predict them, but certainly it won't have a hard time predicting everyone else pretty well. (A variant on "when I misbehave, it's for various good reasons, but when others misbehave it's because they're jerks.") The paradox arises around the 100.00000000...% accurate algorithm.

vlovich123 5y ago
> The paradox arises around the 100.00000000...% accurate algorithm. Is it? As I said, my decision up-front is to flip a perfectly fair coin (or substitute in your favorite CSPRNG or TRNG). So your machine could have whatever claimed accuracy percentage, but I can't see how there's anything to predict beyond 50% and any machine that does so would have to be magical (i.e. outside the rules of science/mathematics). I used that as a stand-in for my intuitive thought that such a machine's accuracy is time-dependent - the further out from the original scan you are, the more "random coin flips" your brain has experienced & thus you degrade very quickly to somewhere around 50% accuracy. You could try to mitigate that by having a super accurate model of how your brain works & trying to measure all the inputs it has encountered since, but ultimately the machine has to degrade to 50% at some point in time unless "magic". I guess you could do worse than 50%, but given this is a binary choice, any such result I think would mean you could just take the complementary result so the lower bound should always be 50%? Not sure about that last point.