I agree with Claude here. My issue wasn't about using statistical or algorithmic modeling for social modeling. My issue was about data. What data would you compress to answer questions like "how many weeks after conception should abortion remain legal?" Or "what is the optimal immigration policy?" Even if clean data existed and Kolmogorov complexity was computable, the output is still just a few bits. Your choice of the language dependent constant could give you whatever answer you wanted.
BTW I agree that most decompression algorithms like LZ77 are not Turing complete. But not all. ZPAQ uses a Turing complete postprocessor after context modeling. I used it to compress a million digits of pi to a few hundred bytes. But it was up to me to write the model. Normally the compressor only chooses from a small menu of postprocessors. Also I am very impressed that Anthropic was able to create the artificial scientist like in Ben's AGI timeline from 20 years ago. The level of sophistication is a huge jump from just a couple of years ago. We should be worried. I just saw a study showing fertility collapse coinciding with the introduction of the iPhone around 2009. This is going to accelerate with the introduction of artificial people. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 8:38 PM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 11, 2026 at 9:02 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> One of the many statistical models listed was MDL, minimum description >> length. Proving that no shorter description exists is not computable. The >> long list of other models are computable approximations of MDL. Some work >> better than others, depending on the data. >> > > Real world measurements can, of course, be compressed by statistical > methods but interventions that don't require programming languages > presenting a fiction of Turing completeness only work for situations that > aren't dynamic. > > The Supersonic Tsunami of AGI will put a lot more babies at risk than the > next Baby Hitler or the next Baby Rissannen if those with the data and > computation keep excusing themselves with arguments like the one you just > made. > > See where this conversation with Anthropic ended up: > > https://claude.ai/share/8ad79e30-9cc6-4d0a-9082-bf800bb2045e > > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T5b182c3fd14f61e9-M1fb9e96333bd749ec580350b> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T5b182c3fd14f61e9-M92e2336d97014081847381f9 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
