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Her video on the Simulation Hypothesis was very poor https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-simulation https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-ho

Her video on the Simulation Hypothesis was very poor https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-simulation https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s....

zeroonetwothree 5y ago
Disappointing since it’s so easy to find problems with it in other ways.
astrange 5y ago
The responder appears to consider Nick Bostrom an actual philosopher instead of some sort of AI-worshipping SF writer which is never the impression I'd gotten. > Classic Poisoning the Well fallacy. The audience will be predisposed to compare the hypothesis to religion and not take it seriously before any argument is even made. Why shouldn't you take religion seriously? Pretty rude to religions. > There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions. On the other hand, yes it does do that, which is one of her most common points. > Again, it doesn’t mean much that nobody currently knows how to do it. No practical quantum computers exist yet, so obviously, nobody tried to run anything useful on them and more quantum algorithms will be found that run with lower time complexities than on classical computers. This doesn't help him because there aren't any algorithms that are uncomputable on classical computers but computable on quantum computers. She's also correct than quantum computers are special-purpose things and otherwise fairly useless. Though I don't know why the universe wouldn't be a computable function if you allow the computer to have a true random number generator.
- hither_shores 5y ago
  Bostrom is a full professor of philosophy at Oxford. Whatever you think of his arguments (or more likely, whatever mangled summary of them you ended up getting after the internet played a multi-year game of telephone with them first), he's as actual a philosopher as any living person can be.
  - astrange 5y ago
    I don’t have a degree in the field but one of my parents is a professor of philosophy and the other is a Cambridge MA in it so I think I’m qualified to disrespect him. (I can at least tell you that being a philosophy professor isn’t the same thing as being a philosopher.) More importantly, I know that believing in superintelligence means you’ve been reading too much SF and have forgotten that things can’t exist just because you can imagine them existing. Spend any time worrying about that and next thing you know you’ll have moved to a group home in Berkeley and joined an effective altruism cult.
    - drdeca 4y ago
      The idea that a superintelligence (by which I mean, something more intelligent than humans in all ways that we might measure) not only wont occur (which seems likely to me that it wont), but is impossible, seems to me, quite odd? Why would human intelligence be the absolute limit of what is possible? Seems implausible. Or maybe you mean something else by superintelligence, like, "more intelligent than humans in a self-improving way, and then FOOM and then it is necessarily more powerful than everything else", in which case, yeah that might be impossible (the upper bound of intelligence could perhaps be, while still higher than human intelligence, not actually all that much larger)
      - astrange 4y ago
        > Why would human intelligence be the absolute limit of what is possible? I'm willing to accept that intelligence exists insofar as it's the difference between a human and a gorilla. But is that something you can have "more" of? That concept implies humans are smarter just because their brains have more IQ, but maybe it's a single fixed function - so the gorilla has 0 intelligences and the human has 1 - then something with 2 isn't a superintelligence, it's more like a conjoined twin and would just find it wants to do two things at once and can't. But maybe superintelligence means someone who can think more quickly than you. So maybe that's about as scary as Magnus Carlsen or Terry Tao, but outside chess we already have calculators, and people who do math by hand don't seem to fear calculator users as superintelligences despite their superior results. In the real physical world, thinking faster doesn't necessarily get you better results because you still have to be correct, which means guessing and checking, so maybe it's the super-patient person we should be afraid of. Admittedly neither of those are proofs it's an impossible concept, just some plausible alternatives. > Or maybe you mean something else by superintelligence, like, "more intelligent than humans in a self-improving way, and then FOOM and then it is necessarily more powerful than everything else" Yes, I believe this scenario they're worried about is impossible because something will always appear that prevents it, and they've left all possible somethings out of their scenarios because they are only imagining them and not actually testing them. Such things would be entropy, energy consumption, communications delays, self-interest, "self-improving" turning out impossible due to Goodhart's law, etc. Examples of it not happening are large corporations (which always eventually stop growing, need constantly increasing inputs, and are actually composed of lots of smaller intelligences that don't all have the same goals), and the Mind AIs in Culture books (which have to be held back to even want to think about reality, and if they get too smart immediately stop caring about reality and just think about math forever).

Her video on the Simulation Hypothesis was very poor https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-simulation https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s....

zeroonetwothree 5y ago

Disappointing since it’s so easy to find problems with it in other ways.

astrange 5y ago

The responder appears to consider Nick Bostrom an actual philosopher instead of some sort of AI-worshipping SF writer which is never the impression I'd gotten. > Classic Poisoning the Well fallacy. The audience will be predisposed to compare the hypothesis to religion and not take it seriously before any argument is even made. Why shouldn't you take religion seriously? Pretty rude to religions. > There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions. On the other hand, yes it does do that, which is one of her most common points. > Again, it doesn’t mean much that nobody currently knows how to do it. No practical quantum computers exist yet, so obviously, nobody tried to run anything useful on them and more quantum algorithms will be found that run with lower time complexities than on classical computers. This doesn't help him because there aren't any algorithms that are uncomputable on classical computers but computable on quantum computers. She's also correct than quantum computers are special-purpose things and otherwise fairly useless. Though I don't know why the universe wouldn't be a computable function if you allow the computer to have a true random number generator.

hither_shores 5y ago
Bostrom is a full professor of philosophy at Oxford. Whatever you think of his arguments (or more likely, whatever mangled summary of them you ended up getting after the internet played a multi-year game of telephone with them first), he's as actual a philosopher as any living person can be.
- astrange 5y ago
  I don’t have a degree in the field but one of my parents is a professor of philosophy and the other is a Cambridge MA in it so I think I’m qualified to disrespect him. (I can at least tell you that being a philosophy professor isn’t the same thing as being a philosopher.) More importantly, I know that believing in superintelligence means you’ve been reading too much SF and have forgotten that things can’t exist just because you can imagine them existing. Spend any time worrying about that and next thing you know you’ll have moved to a group home in Berkeley and joined an effective altruism cult.
  - drdeca 4y ago
    The idea that a superintelligence (by which I mean, something more intelligent than humans in all ways that we might measure) not only wont occur (which seems likely to me that it wont), but is impossible, seems to me, quite odd? Why would human intelligence be the absolute limit of what is possible? Seems implausible. Or maybe you mean something else by superintelligence, like, "more intelligent than humans in a self-improving way, and then FOOM and then it is necessarily more powerful than everything else", in which case, yeah that might be impossible (the upper bound of intelligence could perhaps be, while still higher than human intelligence, not actually all that much larger)
    - astrange 4y ago
      > Why would human intelligence be the absolute limit of what is possible? I'm willing to accept that intelligence exists insofar as it's the difference between a human and a gorilla. But is that something you can have "more" of? That concept implies humans are smarter just because their brains have more IQ, but maybe it's a single fixed function - so the gorilla has 0 intelligences and the human has 1 - then something with 2 isn't a superintelligence, it's more like a conjoined twin and would just find it wants to do two things at once and can't. But maybe superintelligence means someone who can think more quickly than you. So maybe that's about as scary as Magnus Carlsen or Terry Tao, but outside chess we already have calculators, and people who do math by hand don't seem to fear calculator users as superintelligences despite their superior results. In the real physical world, thinking faster doesn't necessarily get you better results because you still have to be correct, which means guessing and checking, so maybe it's the super-patient person we should be afraid of. Admittedly neither of those are proofs it's an impossible concept, just some plausible alternatives. > Or maybe you mean something else by superintelligence, like, "more intelligent than humans in a self-improving way, and then FOOM and then it is necessarily more powerful than everything else" Yes, I believe this scenario they're worried about is impossible because something will always appear that prevents it, and they've left all possible somethings out of their scenarios because they are only imagining them and not actually testing them. Such things would be entropy, energy consumption, communications delays, self-interest, "self-improving" turning out impossible due to Goodhart's law, etc. Examples of it not happening are large corporations (which always eventually stop growing, need constantly increasing inputs, and are actually composed of lots of smaller intelligences that don't all have the same goals), and the Mind AIs in Culture books (which have to be held back to even want to think about reality, and if they get too smart immediately stop caring about reality and just think about math forever).