Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

People tend to ignore that for a logical trail to work every stated and unstated assumption needs to be 100% true or it's pointless. Roko's Basilisk is great example where even the slightest weakness in any part of the argument makes the whole idea pointless. (And there are a lot of unstated assumptions.)

EX: What's the maximum computational power of the universe?

View on HN

Eliezer agrees with you! Roko's Basilisk in particular is wrong. As a matter of policy though, you do not just publicly publish information hazards that might be real; that was why it was a big deal.

You don't what? What policy? Information hazards? What?!

I feel like I just stumbled into a Scientology auditing session or something reading your comment.

It's a concept coined by Nick Bostrom. Basically, some information can be harmful. As a simple, non-controvertial information hazard, imagine you learned an identity of a covert assasin of a foreign government, and you start telling about it to people around you. Don't be surprised if not only you drop dead, but the people you interact with as well.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Information_hazard

You should familiarize yourself with that feeling so you can recognize it later; it's the feeling of falling into an inferential gap. (The thing might be worthless, true, like Scientology. I usually find that resolving confusion is worth my time, though.)

"Information hazard" is just a term for "things you or others learn and then are worse off because of". Examples of information hazards:

- Instructions on how to make a gigaton bomb with processes and materials anyone can acquire and assemble privately.

- A reachable-by-a-country mechanism for blowing up the sun.

- An image designed to temporarily or permanently mess with your vision. Sharing [1] on reddit as a "cool optical illusion" would be mean.

- Probably whatever a computer spits out if you give it a scan of your brain and set it on the task of finding a paragraph/image/movie/whatever that maximizes dopamine production.

- Some people would consider a devastating argument against free will to be an information hazard, predicting that people would then do whatever they wanted because they "couldn't be blamed".

- If you're a hardcore atheist: religions. If you're a hardcore theist who thinks the devil is out to trick you: convincing arguments against belief.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect

> you do not just publicly publish information hazards that might be real

But... for "might be real" to be valid at all, you have to buy into the Roko's basilisk concept in the first place.

If you don't, there's nothing to get upset about.

That's like saying you shouldn't be mad at someone who attempted to murder you because they failed. There's a reason we have a crime called "attempted murder". You may find the wikipedia article on "Inchoate offense" interesting, specifically the section on Impossibility[1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoate_offense#Impossibility

I meant "might be real" according to generic-you in that statement. Someone being wrong doesn't make information hazards in general disappear.

If I learned that a co-worker believed that nuts were invariably fatal to me and gone on to hide some in my food, the nuts would do me no harm but I would still take the whole incident seriously.

The visible universe? Some back-of-the-napkin estimates are that no more than 2^500 bits will be flipped in the region of space we can see, but there's a crucial assumption about minimum temperature you need to make to make that that estimate finite.

On the other hand, there's some pretty compelling reasoning that the entire universe is actually infinite in extent, so ... infinite computational power?

What an absurd thing to consider. There is no possibility of building a computer the size of the universe. This website is full of crazy people talking about crazy things!

Because? How do you know? Show us the reasoning.

Also, there is this concept of "thought experiments". Building a universe-sized computer may sound as likely as sitting on the light wave and looking around, and yet the second one brought us Relativity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com