Honestly, this post seems very confused to me. You are clearly thinking about this in an unproductive manner. (Also a bit overtly hostile.)
The idea that there are no natural abstractions is deeply silly. To gesture at a brief proof, the counting numbers ‘1’ ‘2’ ‘3’ ‘4’ etc as applied to objects. There is no doubt these are natural abstractions. See also ‘on land’, ‘underwater’, ‘in the sky’ etc. Others include things like ‘empty’ vs ‘full’ vs ‘partially full and partially empty’ as well as ‘bigger’, ‘smaller’, ‘lighter’, ‘heavier’ etc.
The utility functions (not that we actually have them) obviously don’t need to be related. The domain of the abstraction does need need to be one that the intelligence is actually trying to abstract, but in many cases, that is literally all that is required for the natural abstraction to be eventually discovered with enough time. It is ‘natural abstraction’ not ‘that thing everyone already knows’.
I don’t need to care about honeybees to understand the abstractions around them ‘dancing’ to ‘communicate’ the ‘location’ of ‘food’ because we already abstracted all those things naturally despite very different data. Also, honeybees aren’t actually smart enough to be doing abstraction, they naturally do these things which match the abstractions because the process which made honeybees settled on them too (despite not even being intelligent and not actually abstracting things either).
Its late where I am now so I’m going to read carefully and respond to comments tomorrow, but before I go to bed I want to quickly respond to your claim that you found the post hostile because I don’t want to leave it hanging.
I wanted to express my disagreements/misunderstandings/whatever as clearly as I could but had no intention to express hostility. I bear no hostility towards anyone reading this, especially people who have worked hard thinking about important issues like AI alignment. Apologies to you and anyone else who found the post hostile.
When reading the piece, it seemed to assume far too much (and many of the assumptions are ones I obviously disagree with). I would call many of the assumptions made to be a relative of the false dichotomy (though I don’t know what it is called when you present more than two possibilities as exhaustive but they really aren’t.) If you were more open in your writing to the idea that you don’t necessarily know what the believers in natural abstractions mean, and that the possibilities mentioned were not exhaustive, I probably would have had a less negative reaction.
When combined with a dismissive tone, many (me included) will read it as hostile, regardless of actual intent (though frustration is actually just as good a possibility for why someone would write in that manner, and genuine confusion over what people believe is also likely). People are always on the lookout for potential hostility it seems (probably a safety related instinct) and usually err on the side of seeing it (though some overcorrect against the instinct instead).
I’m sure I come across as hostile when I write reasonably often though that is rarely my intent.
I don’t actualy think your post was hostile, but I think I get where deepthoughtlife is coming from. At the least, I can share about how I felt reading this post and point out to why, since you seem keen on avoiding the negative side. Btw I don’t think you avoid causing any frustration in readers, they are too diverse, so don’t worry too much about it either.
The title of the piece is strongly worded and there’s no epistimic status disclaimer to state this is exploratory, so I actually came in expecting much stronger arguments. Your post is good as an exposition of your thoughts and conversation started, but it’s not a good counter argument to NAH imo, so shouldn’t be worded as such. Like deepthoughtlife, I feel your post is confused re NAH, which is totally fine when stated as such, but a bit grating when I came in expecting more rigor or knowledge of NAH.
Here’s a reaction to the first part : - in “Systems must have similar observational apparatus” you argue that different apparatus lead to different abstractions and claim a blind deaf person is such an example, yet in practice blind deaf people can manipulate all the abstractions others can (with perhaps a different inner representation), that’s what general intelligence is about. You can check out this wiki page and video for some of how it’s done https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadoma . The point is that all the abstractions can be understood and must be understood by a general intelligence trying to act effectively, and in practice Helen Keler could learn to speak by using other senses than hearing, in the same way we learn all of physics despite limited native instruments.
I think I had similar reactions to other parts, feeling they were missing the point about NAH and some background assumptions.
I appreciate the brevity of the title as it stands. It’s normal for a title to summarize the thesis of a post or paper and this is also standard practice on LessWrong. For example:
The introductory paragraphs sufficiently described the epistemic status of the author for my purposes. Overall, I found the post easier to engage with because it made its arguments without hedging.
Your reaction seems fair, thanks for your thoughts! Its a good a suggestion to add an epistemic status—I’ll be sure to add one next time I write something like this.
Agreed on the examples of natural abstractions. I held a couple abstraction examples in my mind (e.g. atom, food, agent) while reading the post and found that it never really managed to attack these truly very general (dare I say natural) abstractions.
Honestly, this post seems very confused to me. You are clearly thinking about this in an unproductive manner. (Also a bit overtly hostile.)
The idea that there are no natural abstractions is deeply silly. To gesture at a brief proof, the counting numbers ‘1’ ‘2’ ‘3’ ‘4’ etc as applied to objects. There is no doubt these are natural abstractions. See also ‘on land’, ‘underwater’, ‘in the sky’ etc. Others include things like ‘empty’ vs ‘full’ vs ‘partially full and partially empty’ as well as ‘bigger’, ‘smaller’, ‘lighter’, ‘heavier’ etc.
The utility functions (not that we actually have them) obviously don’t need to be related. The domain of the abstraction does need need to be one that the intelligence is actually trying to abstract, but in many cases, that is literally all that is required for the natural abstraction to be eventually discovered with enough time. It is ‘natural abstraction’ not ‘that thing everyone already knows’.
I don’t need to care about honeybees to understand the abstractions around them ‘dancing’ to ‘communicate’ the ‘location’ of ‘food’ because we already abstracted all those things naturally despite very different data. Also, honeybees aren’t actually smart enough to be doing abstraction, they naturally do these things which match the abstractions because the process which made honeybees settled on them too (despite not even being intelligent and not actually abstracting things either).
Its late where I am now so I’m going to read carefully and respond to comments tomorrow, but before I go to bed I want to quickly respond to your claim that you found the post hostile because I don’t want to leave it hanging.
I wanted to express my disagreements/misunderstandings/whatever as clearly as I could but had no intention to express hostility. I bear no hostility towards anyone reading this, especially people who have worked hard thinking about important issues like AI alignment. Apologies to you and anyone else who found the post hostile.
Fwiw I didn’t find the post hostile.
When reading the piece, it seemed to assume far too much (and many of the assumptions are ones I obviously disagree with). I would call many of the assumptions made to be a relative of the false dichotomy (though I don’t know what it is called when you present more than two possibilities as exhaustive but they really aren’t.) If you were more open in your writing to the idea that you don’t necessarily know what the believers in natural abstractions mean, and that the possibilities mentioned were not exhaustive, I probably would have had a less negative reaction.
When combined with a dismissive tone, many (me included) will read it as hostile, regardless of actual intent (though frustration is actually just as good a possibility for why someone would write in that manner, and genuine confusion over what people believe is also likely). People are always on the lookout for potential hostility it seems (probably a safety related instinct) and usually err on the side of seeing it (though some overcorrect against the instinct instead).
I’m sure I come across as hostile when I write reasonably often though that is rarely my intent.
I don’t actualy think your post was hostile, but I think I get where deepthoughtlife is coming from. At the least, I can share about how I felt reading this post and point out to why, since you seem keen on avoiding the negative side. Btw I don’t think you avoid causing any frustration in readers, they are too diverse, so don’t worry too much about it either.
The title of the piece is strongly worded and there’s no epistimic status disclaimer to state this is exploratory, so I actually came in expecting much stronger arguments. Your post is good as an exposition of your thoughts and conversation started, but it’s not a good counter argument to NAH imo, so shouldn’t be worded as such. Like deepthoughtlife, I feel your post is confused re NAH, which is totally fine when stated as such, but a bit grating when I came in expecting more rigor or knowledge of NAH.
Here’s a reaction to the first part :
- in “Systems must have similar observational apparatus” you argue that different apparatus lead to different abstractions and claim a blind deaf person is such an example, yet in practice blind deaf people can manipulate all the abstractions others can (with perhaps a different inner representation), that’s what general intelligence is about. You can check out this wiki page and video for some of how it’s done https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadoma . The point is that all the abstractions can be understood and must be understood by a general intelligence trying to act effectively, and in practice Helen Keler could learn to speak by using other senses than hearing, in the same way we learn all of physics despite limited native instruments.
I think I had similar reactions to other parts, feeling they were missing the point about NAH and some background assumptions.
Thanks for posting!
I appreciate the brevity of the title as it stands. It’s normal for a title to summarize the thesis of a post or paper and this is also standard practice on LessWrong. For example:
The sun is big but superintelligences will not spare the Earth a little sunlight.
The point of trade
There’s no fire alarm for AGI
The introductory paragraphs sufficiently described the epistemic status of the author for my purposes. Overall, I found the post easier to engage with because it made its arguments without hedging.
Your reaction seems fair, thanks for your thoughts! Its a good a suggestion to add an epistemic status—I’ll be sure to add one next time I write something like this.
Agreed on the examples of natural abstractions. I held a couple abstraction examples in my mind (e.g. atom, food, agent) while reading the post and found that it never really managed to attack these truly very general (dare I say natural) abstractions.
The good thing about existence proofs is that you really just have to find an example. Sometimes, I can do that.