In the last few years, algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics have given me a sort of half-baked intuition that we, as a civilization, have the concept of nothingness wrong. To me, nothingness means the lack of any specification, or description, or restriction, and therefore implies the plenitude of all possible forms of existence. A void, a vacuum, utter silence, a blank slate, is something that needs to be described, or specified. I can't put it any better than that currently, but somehow the question why the "universe" exists seems a bit like an un-question to me now; it's the result of the complete absence of restrictions to existence. This lack of restriction, or description, seems to me the most natural, intuitive, or simple state imaginable.
Nov 2, 2008
Oct 25, 2008
Sep 21, 2008
The Case of the Missing Volatilities: A Disillusioned Capitalist's Rantings
A while ago, someone approached me with a business inquiry. He told me he was working as an investment consultant for Austrian savers who, being both risk-averse and unhappy with low yields from savings accounts, were, in his words looking for something like a "leveraged savings account", a combination of high returns and near zero volatility. That request made me cringe, and I politely let him know that I wasn't interested in doing business with him.
I somewhat pity the people who are consulting him; for they may sooner or later get what they ask for, but not what they want. What they want is a risk-free return above the rate of risk-free return. What they'll get is a smooth curve on some piece of paper. Because it would have been easy to give them a strategy that returns, say, 14 percent p.a. with near-zero volatility. For a few years, that is, long enough to collect some handsome fees. But you don't have to be a Quant for that - even you could have done that. Here's how:
First, find some event that you judge to be reasonably unlikely, like, snowfall on Christmas eve in Wels, Austria (my hometown.) I'd say there's a one-in-ten chance to that.
Second, find someone who judges more or less likewise and is willing to bet (not necessarily fairly) on the occurrence of the event.
Third, put your money in a savings account, and every year, accept the bet to the full height of your savings.
You're basically insuring your partner against the occurrence of a moderately rare event with all your capital. In essence, you're running an insurance company with a single insuree.
As long as things go well, you'll earn something like a 14 percent return every year (odds + savings account). How likely is it that things go well ? Your chance of surviving for five years is almost two-thirds; you can expect to go down only after seven years. Meanwhile, you'll chalk up almost zero volatility.
This may be the right place to mention that, according to a study by Credit Suisse/Tremont, the average return from hedge funds between 1994 and 2005 was about 14 percent before fees. And an often cited number for the average hedge fund's lifetime is five years. Now of course not all hedge funds close shop with total, or even large, losses. And most funds have far from zero volatility. So, uhm, I'm not implying a blatantly simple analogy here.
But I want to sharpen your senses to the fact that it's quite easy to smooth out the volatility from a capital growth curve. For a while. So if someone shows you a nice, smooth fifteen-year curve of 14 percent returns, please don't be impressed. He may just be one of four similar idiots, or frauds, who started out in the beginning. And for god sake don't hand over your money, at least if you can't take a qualified look under the hood to see what produces the returns. Also be aware that in many cases your opponent may be fooled by his own elaborate squaring-of-the-circle constructions, and may have genuine good faith in his strategy, so the terms idiot or fraud are probably a too harsh in most cases. He may loose all your money even if he's a nice guy.
The practice of gambling for small returns against large losses is generally frowned upon, since the tolerability of losses generally decreases stronger than linearly. That means a tenfold bigger loss usually is more than tenfold as bad for you.
And this brings us to last weeks events. Once again, the Fed and the US government demonstrated their determination to smooth out growth curves (gdp, stock market,employment), at the price of a small chance that things turn out really bad in the end (e.g. Fed losing political independence.) This has been going on since at least 2000, and even if the chance are small, someone is sooner or later going to lose their bets. The Fed has just acted like a man who'd learned he wouldn't get a raise this year and decided to make up for that by quitting his health insurance plan.
When I was in my early twenties (ca 1998), I turned from a moderate leftist into a firebrand libertarian. The demise of the eastern bloc, Japan's stagnation and the New Economy seemed proof to me of the superiority of free markets. I'm still much of a libertarian today, but I do not any longer make the mistake of confusing libertarian theory with the actual policies of self-declared free market advocates. I recommend reading books on the soviet system printed in the soviet union. It does wonders at giving you anew perspective on things you may read here and now.
Aug 15, 2008
The most horrible weapon ever conceived.
Maybe it was the Foehn wind we had yesterday who did it (Foehn has an awful effect on people's mood, check the wikipedia entry); maybe the fact I hadn't slept well the night before contributed its share; but at some time in the afternoon I had an idea how to build what is, in a very general meaning of the term, the most horrible weapon in the Universe.
(Oh, and I had had to stand in line really, really long that morning !)
It's basically the same goal-function-hypothesizing AI described in one of my earlier posts, fed with a specification of your enimy's goal function.
Only with the sign reversed, such that the maximizer becomes a minimizer.
A paperclip maximizer might wipe you out; but the above system will do to you whatever is the most horrible thing that can happen, in your eyes, (not necessarily limited just) to you. Do you care about your life ? How about your dependent's life ? Their sanity ? Humanity ? Sentient life in the Universe ? Life in the Universe ? The Universe ?
Too bad.
A somewhat comforting thought is that the enemy's-goal-function-hypothesizer-and-minimizer is highly unlikely ever to be used, or even built, due to it's devastating side effects. (Your value function and your enemy's value function may be at least a tiny bit positively correlated.) A fictional Egg Foam (from EGFM, Enimy Goal Function Minimizer) may, however, come in quite handy as a plot device in hard Singularity-related SF. The Blight from Vinge's A Fire was merely expansionist; Egg Foam, on the other hand, is wicked...
Jul 31, 2008
The Colors of my Digits
For as long as I can remember, I perceive digits as having their own colors:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Zero is glassy-transparent, like acrylic, so actually it's more like digits having textures. When I see digits written down somewhere, they do not appear to be vividly colored, just subtly shaded. But when visualizing numbers, I find it hard not to perceive the individual digits being colored in the above way.
I doubt that this rudimentary form of synesthesia is beneficial to my ability to deal with numbers. Many of the colors are quite similiar to each other, so I tend to misremember phonenumbers, sums or dates in a specific way.
Jul 10, 2008
Disclaimer: Universe is NOT simple
"Why is the universe so simple ?" asks the mathematician, or more generally, why is simple mathematics (school mathematics) so successful at describing the universe ?
The universe, however, is generally not simple to begin with. Rather there are some aspects of the universe (which we happen to be interested in) that can be computed easily. Put one sheep next to one sheep and you get two sheep (in the short term); so "putting next to each other" is isomorphic to a simple "+" operator. But what about the eddies and whorls in a ravine ? Cloud patterns ? And I haven't even begun to ask *creative* questions here.
An arbitrary, low-Kolmogoroff-complexity aspect of the universe is very difficult to compute. We as a species, shaped by evolution, happen to be interested in many simple-to-compute aspects.
The question should rather be phrased: Why does the universe have any simple-to-compute aspects at all ?
Jun 8, 2008
The Great Goodbye, Everett style.
In a post-singularity future, people may, with the help of superintelligent AI, have almost arbitrary levels of control over their environment and their own mental and physical constitution. This near-omnipotence, however, will presumably not extend to other people's mind and body. (Argument from symmetry, though a game-theoretically stable society model where each participent has unrestricted control over everyone else seems at least remotely conceivable. We'll leave that aside for later speculations.)
I think it's plausible to assume that those post-singularity people can be modeled as agents trying to maximize (minimize) their respective goal functions on the universe. Given their, in principle, almost infinite capability to maximize those functions, the biggest factor holding back individual agents may turn out to be other, similarly powerful agents with incompatible goal functions. Since we're talking about an agent model that clearly separates preferences from beliefs, Aumann's results don't provide a safety hatch here. Clearly, the agents can compromise, and arguments from symmetry again prevail, but this may, in the face of the otherwise immense capabilities of the agents, result in huge discounts from the theoretically achievable level of goal-function fulfillment.
That is, the posthumans may get in each other's way, and there's now way to rationally resolve the situation without massively stomping on some (or all) people's goal functions.
How likely is it that people's preferences may intrinsically differ after the technological singularity ? If those people have evolved through self- (or mutual) modification from humans, or have otherwise inherited, possibly through deliberate design, human values and tastes, then I'd regard this to be very likely indeed. I may be pessimistic here, but my personal lifelong experience is that people have, in parts radically, different values attached to certain aspects of the world, themselves, and other people, and no amount of rational insight is ever going to make those values compatible. So I think the problem I'm discussing here is real and realistic.
Emigration may be a solution, and is a cherished human tradition that may extend into a post-singularity future. Of course, people's value function will often put strong emphasis on the presence of (certain) other people, so walking away will in many cases be worse than gritting your teeth and getting on with each other. But in some cases, getting out of each other's hair may be the optimal thing to do.
Now posthumans surely have some radical opportunities to venture out into unexplored territory, and the silentium universii may mean that there's a lot of place to settle down. Starw(h)isps traveling at a notch below light speed can carry virtualized passengers for billions of parsecs within a short subjective time. But even this may not be far enough, as those other annoying posthumans with incompatible value systems will presumably have access to the same means of expansion and may be determined to use them, if not now, than maybe later in the future. For their destinies to separate, the opposing parties will have to make their future light cones disjunct. Cosmic acceleration from dark energy may make this possible simply by traveling far enough fast enough, but has at least two disadvantages: It creates an asymmetry between those deciding to move away and those that "inherit the earth", and it may be impractical for posthumans to wait long enough for inflation to catch on - given post-singularity computing capacities, and a foreseeable tendency to virtualize your supporting hardware, even a nanosecond wait in objective time may be unbearable on a subjective scale.
As you may have guessed by now from the title of this post, there's probably another, much simpler way for posthumans to part ways. This method depends on the assumed validity of the so-called many-worlds interpretation of the superposition principle in of quantum mechanics. As a note of caution, however, I'd like to point out that the superposition principle relies on the linearity of quantum mechanics, which may turn out to be false, since general relativity is non-linear. (That is, a linear combination of two solutions describing world-states is not necessarily a valid solution itself.) The basic idea is for all parties to condition their further existence on the output of a quantum random number generator. By accepting to inhabit only mutually exclusive subsets of possible worlds, all participants can have symmetric access to a constrained resource (e.g., they can all "inherit the earth" in their Everett branch.) The superposition principle also assures that their fates are separated once and forever, without the danger of any one party deciding to overturn the deal at a later time point. Furthermore, this approach can be implemented on a very short timescale.
As I believe in the mutual incompatibility of many, if not most, human tastes, values, and likings, as well as in the stability of those tastes, values and likings under reflection, I believe posthumans will use one method or another to eventually part ways. (The fact that I spend some time thinking on such problems shows that I believe I would do so, doesn't it ?) Everett emigration seems to be a rather straightforward way to achieve that. We do not, however, currently understand quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the superposition principle well enough to literally bet our lives on it. (Otherwise, we could already choose to implement it using current technology, that is, a quantum random number generator and some hydrogen bombs ...)
Could this be an explanation of the Fermi paradox ? If technological civilizations reliably undergo technological singularities, and post-singularity societies tend to "atomize" themselves, universes may in fact on average be relatively quiet places. But I don't really hold this argument to be valid, as even isolated posthumans may be very noisy. Furthermore, I think the "Everett barrier" is in fact not that impermeable in the presence of a sufficiently powerful AI, so transhumans with compatible tastes might join each other, even if they originated in different Everett branches - but that's some stuff to discuss in a follow-up to this post.
