[breuleux]

Regarding "Alien Message", I don't find that story particularly convincing. I think it's muddled and contrived.

The basic issue is that we have to deduce stuff about the world we live in, using resources from the world we live in. In the story, the data bandwidth is contrived to be insanely smaller than the compute bandwidth, but that's not realistic. In reality, we are surrounded by chaotic physical systems that operate on raw hardware. They are, in fact, quite fast, and probably impossible to simulate efficiently. For instance, we can obviously never build a computer that can simulate the behavior of its own circuitry, using said circuitry, faster than it operates. But I think there's a lot of physical systems that are just like that.

Being data-limited means that we get data slower than we can analyze and process it. It is certainly possible to improve our ability to analyze data, but I don't think we can assume that the best physically realizable intelligence would overcome data limitation, nor that it would be cost-effective in the first place, compared to simply gathering more data and experimenting more.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Regarding "Alien Message", I don't find that story particularly convincing. I think it's muddled and contrived.

Well, yes. it's from Eliezer Yudkowsky. The kind of people who who generally find him persuasive, will do so. Those who don't find him convincing or even find him somewhat of a crank, like the other self-proclaimed "rationalists", will do do. "muddled" is correct, he lacks rigour in everything, but certainly brings the word count.

[kragen]

You're the guy who in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517647 I demonstrated was a physics crank: unskilled and unaware of it, dismissing the Alcubierre metric as "fantasy, nigh nonsensical and self-contradictory", unlike actual physicists. And, when I presented the evidence that that's not what actual physicists say about it, you responded by heaping personal abuse on me. Perhaps you posted this comment later as an additional form of ego defense, since it implicitly calls me a crank, by implying that I'm a "rationalist"?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Those are odd claims, but they don't interest me. You have not and are not demonstrating anything outside of your own fixations. Project much?

[kragen]

You seem to be agreeing with the story's thesis, rather than disagreeing. The story claims that we get an enormous amount of data from which we could compute much more than we do. You, too, are claiming that we get an enormous amount of data from which we could compute much more than we do. If that's true, then we aren't limited by our data, which is what I meant by "data-limited"—although you seem to mean the opposite, "we get data slower than we can analyze and process it", in which we are limited not by the data but by the processing. This tends to rebut the claim above, "If you had AGI tomorrow and asked it to cure cancer, it would just ask for more experimental data and resources."

It may very well be true that you could cure cancer even faster or more cheaply with more experimental data, but that's irrelevant to the claim that more experimental data is necessary.

It may also be the case that there's no "shortcut" to simulating a human body well enough to test drugs against a simulated tumor faster than real time—that is, that you need to have enough memory to track every simulated atom. (The success of AlphaFold suggests that this is not the case, as does the ability of humans to survive things like electric shocks, but let's be conservative.) But a human body only contains on the order of 10²⁴ atoms, so you can just build a computer with 10²⁸ words of memory, and processing power to match. It might be millions of times larger than a human body, but that's okay; there's plenty of mass out there to turn into computronium. It doesn't make it physically unrealizable.

Relatedly, you may be interested in seeing Mr. Rogers confronting the paperclip maximizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-zJ1spML5c