MendelSchmiedekamp

Karma: 295

MendelSchmiedekamp 9 Apr 2010 20:42 UTC
2 points
on: Frequentist Magic vs. Bayesian Magic
What I keep coming to here is, doesn’t the entire point of this post come to the situations where the parameters in question, the bias of the coins, are not independent? And doesn’t this contradict?

estimate 100 independent unknown parameters

Which leads me to read the later half of this post as, we can (in principle, perhaps not computably) estimate 1 complex parameter with 100 data sets better than 100 independent unknown parameters from individual data sets. This shouldn’t be surprising. I certainly don’t find it as such.

The first half just points out that in the independent case of this particular example, Bayesian and Frequentist perform equivalently for relatively similar assumptions. But cousin_it made a general claim about the Frequentist approach, so this isn’t worth much weight on its own.

MendelSchmiedekamp 24 Mar 2010 20:15 UTC
19 points
on: Levels of communication
This post is a decent first approximation. But it is important to remember that even successful communication is almost always occurring on more than just one of these levels at once.

Personally I find it useful to think of communication as having spontaneous layers of information which may include things like asserting social context, acquiring knowledge, reinforcing beliefs, practicing skills, indicating and detecting levels of sexual interest, and even play. And by spontaneous layers, I mean that we each contribute to the scope of a conversation, and then those contributions become discerned as patterns (whether intended or not).

Then iterate this process a few times, with my attempting to perceive and affect your patterns and you attempting to perceive and affect mine. Add some habitual or built-in (it’s extremely hard to tell the difference) models in the mind to start from and it seems simple (to me) how something as complex and variable as human communication can arise.

MendelSchmiedekamp 19 Mar 2010 20:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread: March 2010, part 3
In retrospect, spelling words out loud, something I do tend to do with a moderate frequency, is something I’ve gotten much better at over the past ten years. I suspect that I’ve hijacked my typing skill to the task, as I tend to error correct my verbal spelling in exactly the same way. I devote little or no conscious thought or sense mode to the spelling process, except in terms of feedback.

As for my language skills, they are at least adequate. However, I have devoted special attention to improving them so I can’t say that I don’t share some bias away from being especially capable.

MendelSchmiedekamp 1 Mar 2010 14:31 UTC
0 points
on: Mental Crystallography

When you’re trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts—most especially concepts—it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience’s crystallography and your own.

This is something of an oversimplification. Categories are one possible first step, but eventually you will need more nuance than that. I suggest forming estimates based on the communication being serving also as a sequence of experiments. And being very strict about not ruling things out, especially if you have not managed to beat down your typical mind fallacy.

And that’s just for a simply dialogue. Communication in a public forum with other audiences and even other participants, well, that is even more complex.

MendelSchmiedekamp 17 Feb 2010 14:38 UTC
4 points
in reply to: LucasSloan’s comment on: Open Thread: February 2010, part 2
Arguably, as seminal as the sequences are treated, why are the “newbies” the only ones who should be (re)reading them?

MendelSchmiedekamp 13 Jan 2010 15:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Outline of a lower bound for consciousness

The number of assertions needed is now so large that it may be difficult for a human to acquire that much knowledge.

Especially given these are likely significantly lower bounds, and don’t account for the problems of running on spotty evolutionary hardware, I suspect that the discrepancy is even greater than it first appears.

What I find intriguing about this result is that essentially it is one of the few I’ve seen that has a limit description of consciousness: you have on one hand a rating of complexity of your “conscious” cognitive system and on the other you have world adherence based on the population of your assertions. Consciousness is maintained if, as you increase your complexity, you maintain the variety of the assertion population.

It is possible that the convergence rates for humans and prospective GAI will simply be different, however. Which makes a certain amount of sense. Ideal consciousness in this model is unachievable, and approaching it faster is more costly, so there are good evolutionary reasons for our brains to be as meagerly conscious as possibly—even to fake consciousness when the resources would not otherwise be missed.

MendelSchmiedekamp 12 Jan 2010 19:00 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MatthewB’s comment on: High Status and Stupidity: Why?
This should not be underestimated as an issue. Status as we use it here and at overcoming bias tends to be simplified into something not unlike a monetary model.

It is possible to try to treat things like status reductively, but in the current discussion it will hopefully suffice to characterize it with more nuance than “social wealth”.

MendelSchmiedekamp 22 Dec 2009 18:17 UTC
8 points
on: The Correct Contrarian Cluster
If you only expect to find one empirically correct cluster of contrarian beliefs, then you will most likely find only one, regardless of what exists.

Treating this is as a clustering problem we can extract common clusters of beliefs from the general contrarian collection and determine degrees of empirical correctness. Presupposing a particular structure will introduce biases on the discoveries you can make.

MendelSchmiedekamp 13 Dec 2009 6:37 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Psychohistorian’s comment on: The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom

there’s really no reason those numbers should too much higher than they are for a random inhabitant of the city

Actually simply being in the local social network of the victim should increase the probability of involvement by a significant amount. This would of course be based on population, murder rates, and so on. And likely would also depend on estimates of criminology models for the crime in question.

MendelSchmiedekamp 4 Dec 2009 17:23 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MendelSchmiedekamp’s comment on: 11 core rationalist skills
Proof of how dangerous this sort of list can be.

I entirely forget about:
- act effectively
After all, how can you advance even pure epistemic rationality without constructing your own experiments on the world?

MendelSchmiedekamp 4 Dec 2009 16:35 UTC
1 point
on: 11 core rationalist skills
Or more succinctly and broadly, learn to:
- pay attention
- correct bias
- anticipate bias
- estimate well
With a single specific enumeration of means to accomplish these competencies you risk ignoring other possible curricula. And you encourage the same blind spots for the entire community of aspiring rationalists so educated.

MendelSchmiedekamp 1 Dec 2009 18:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies
This parallels some of the work I’m doing with fun-theoretic utility, at least in terms of using information theory. One big concern is what measure of complexity to use, as you certainly don’t want to use a classical information measure—otherwise Kolmogorov random outcomes will be preferred to all others.

MendelSchmiedekamp 24 Nov 2009 19:23 UTC
0 points
on: Rational lies
Lies, truth, and radical honesty are all that get in the way in understanding what is going on here.

You are communicating with someone, several of the many constantly changing layers (in addition to status signaling, empathy broadcasting, and performatives) of this communication are the transfer of information from you to that someone. The effectiveness of the communication of this information and its accuracy when received is something we can talk about fairly easily in terms of both instrumental (effectiveness) and epistemic (accurate) rationality.

To classify that communication as a lie or as truth or as honest (from your own perspective) involves unpacking social signals, conscious and unconscious intent, and is entirely irrelevant to any rational goal.

Considering that our societies place value on the signals shown by these terms, it may matter how our signals are received. This is an instrumental rationality question about increasing the likelihood of being seen as honest or as telling a lie.

It is essential not to confuse these two very different things. One of the first clues is to realize that when we talk about truth in rationality we mean something closely related to accuracy, but in communication it may be the same word, but it means something entirely different. This means that we should ban ourselves from using the word until we are quite sure we know what we mean by it.

MendelSchmiedekamp 20 Nov 2009 21:58 UTC
0 points
in reply to: pre’s comment on: Request For Article: Many-Worlds Quantum Computing
My post does describe a distinct model based on a Many Worlds interpretation where the probabilities are computed differently based on whether entanglement occurs or not—i.e. whether the universes influence each other. It is distinct from the typical model of decoherence.

As for photosythesis, it ought to behave in much the same way, as a network of states propagating through entangled universes, with the interactions of the states in those branches causing the highest probabilities to be assigned to the branches which have the lowest energy barriers.

Of note, there are other, more esoteric models based on even more unusual interpretations of quantum mechanics, but I suspect that’s not something we need to get into here.

MendelSchmiedekamp 20 Nov 2009 21:41 UTC
11 points
on: A Less Wrong singularity article?
It’s as though no one here has ever heard of the bystander effect. The deadline is January 15th. Setting up a wiki page and saying “Anyone’s free to edit.” is the equivalent to killing this thing.

Also this is a philosophy, psychology, and technology journal, which means that despite the list of references for Singularity research you will also need to link this with the philosophical and/or public policy issues that the journal wants you to address (take a look at the two guest editors).

Another worry to me is that in all the back issues of this journal I looked over, the papers were almost always monographs (and baring that 2). I suspect that having many authors might kill the chances for this paper.

MendelSchmiedekamp 20 Nov 2009 20:03 UTC
7 points
on: Request For Article: Many-Worlds Quantum Computing
First of all consider a computer is incomplete without a program, so lets just think of a programmed computer—whether in hardware or software doesn’t matter for our purposes.

This gives us a system that goes from some known start state to some outcome state through a series of intermediate steps. If each of these steps is deterministic, then the entire system reaches the same outcome in all universes where it had the same starting point.

If those steps were stochastic, perhaps because there is chance of memory corruption in our computer or because of a random guess, than in some universes the system arrives as a different outcome, based on the probability of that branch of the intermediate states. This can produce many branches, but because each of these branches cannot affect the others the result is tree of intermediate states, leading to the outcomes of our computer and its program.

Now, both of these are classical computers, but it helps to know what a classical computer looks like in a many worlds interpretation, before mapping a quantum computer there. This is because all computers, classical or quantum share a property—they are computers. This means there must be a path from the starting state to the outcome state. We can influence that path in many ways, but the path is part of how we define and build a computer and a program.

In quantum mechanics, there is a phenomena called entanglement, which loosely means that the events in very similar worlds can affect the probabilities of events in all of those worlds. You can think of this as the boundaries between the many worlds smoothing out as you get to a small scale.

This means that unlike our stochastic tree of states, the quantum computer can have a more complex structure. It is even possible, for two branches to converge back into one and to have branches cancel out.* In practice, these are more approximate than precise, so you will find a dominant combination of two branches or a near cancellation. Using this interaction a skilled quantum algorithm designer can use a variety of tricks to make correct answers more likely, by canceling wrong answers, and by increasing the probability of correction ones.

There is no uniform solution to this problem, for example, the best known quantum algorithm, the Shor algorithm for prime factorization exploits frequency of a possible prime factorization using number theory. This works well on quantum computers because the frequency difference is also a critical value for determining the probability of the combination of two quantum variables.

In each case, a computer and its program produce a path of execution, but by exploiting the features of or needing to deal with the problems of non-determinism and quantum mechanics, the nature of that computation becomes more complex and difficult to see. Any one world’s view is not sufficient, especially in the case of quantum computing where the probabilities which govern a world’s execution are not derived solely from within that world.
- I’m fairly sure one this, but I’m a little rusty, so I could be wrong.

MendelSchmiedekamp 17 Nov 2009 16:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Money pumping: the axiomatic approach
I meant that setting the limit to no preference for a given C doesn’t equate to a globally continuous function. But that when you adjust your preferences function to approximate the discontinuous function by a continuous one, the result will contain (at least one) no preference point between any two A < B.

Now perhaps there is a result which says that if you take the limit as you set all discontinuous C to no preference, that the resulting function is complete, consistent, transitive, and continuous, but I wouldn’t take that to be automatic.

Consider, for example, a step discontinuity, where an entire swatch of pA + (1-p)B are stuck on the same set of < and = mappings and then there is a sharp jump to a very large set of < and = mappings at a critical p’. If you map the ordinals to the real line, this is analogous to a y-coordinate jump. To remove this discontinuity you would need to do more than split the preferences at p’ around no preference, because all this does is add a single point to the mix. To fully resolve it, you need to add an entire continuous curve, which means a process of selecting new A, B, and C, and showing that the transfinite limit always converges to a valid result.

MendelSchmiedekamp 16 Nov 2009 15:58 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Money pumping: the axiomatic approach
We are talking about the same thing here just at different levels of generality. The function you describe is the same as the one I’m describing, except on a much narrower domain (only a single binary lottery between A and B). Then you project the range to just a question about C.

In the specific function you are talking about, you must hold that this is true for all A, B, and C to get continuity. In the function I describe, the A, B, and C are generalized out, so the continuity property is equivalent to the continuity of the function.

MendelSchmiedekamp 11 Nov 2009 18:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Money pumping: the axiomatic approach
I was talking about utility functions, but I can see your point about generalizing the result to the mapping from arbitrary dilemmas to preferences. Realize though, that preference space isn’t discrete.

You can describe it as the function from a mixed dilemma to the joint relation space for < and =. Which you can treat as a somewhat more complex version of the ordinals (certainly you can construct a map to a dense version of the ordinals if you have at least 2 dilemmas and dense probability space). That gives you a notion of the preference space where a calculus concept of continuity does apply (as the continuity axiom is a variation on the intermediate value theorem for this space which implies typical continuity).

From this perspective, the point I’m making about continuous approximations should make more sense.

MendelSchmiedekamp 10 Nov 2009 17:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Money pumping: the axiomatic approach
That is my reading of it too. I know Stuart is putting forward analytic results here, I was concerned that this one was not correctly represented.