Epistemic status: I consider the following future quite plausible in the next few years (~35% chance that something vaguely like this occurs), perhaps as soon as a year from now.Imagine an open-source LLM agent good enough to cover its own compute costs and turn a modest profit on average when allowed to run with full internet and tool access and told to make as much money as possible. I estimate this to be slightly better than the best publicly available closed-source...

Introduction

So. I previously demonstrated an anthropic impossibility theorem, showing that in Duplicates Sleeping Beauty, there was no possible probability theory that obeyed both the martingale condition and "simple Bayes" in non-anthropic situations.This post will clarify and simplify the result, replacing the martingale with the law of total probability. Let's start by fully defining both Simple Bayes and what a non-anthropic situation is.Duplicates Sleeping Beauty. She is put...

An uncentered world is an objective state-trajectory of the material universe; I ignore quantum complications. If you know the uncentered world, it does not follow that you can predict your proximate observations, since you do not know which part of the uncentered world is here and now. A centered world is an uncentered world combined with a "here and now" tag for "where am I / what time is it".

A few days ago I took the kids to