I found some criticism of this post on a RationalWiki talk page.
For another example, “Clusters in Thingspace” has a number of issues. Most simply, it seriously undersells Aristotle’s ability to handle a nine-fingered person. Certainly, if you make ‘has ten fingers’ part of the definition of human, then you will be able to infer that a person without ten fingers is not a human; nobody, though, has ever seriously put forward such a proposal. For Aristotle’s part, he would simply say that having a certain number of fingers is not an essential property of being human (and so should not be factored into the definition). Yudkowsky is also wrong to say that the coordinate point (0,0,5) contains the same information as the HTML color blue. To the contrary, the coordinate point by itself contains no information; it can contain color information only when paired with some interpretation function I (in the case of HTML, the software provides this function). As for where else these ideas can be found, philosophers have been working on conceptual vagueness intensely since the mid-20th century, and cluster concepts were a relatively early innovation. The philosophical literature also has the benefit of being largely free of nebulous speculations about cognition and needless formalism (and the discussion of configuration space here is needless formalism, since Yudkowsky is drawing only qualitative conclusions and the practical constraints on constructing a configuration space even for robins alone are severe). The literature also uses terminology in the ordinary way familiar to everybody engaging these issues professionally (compare Yudkowsky’s muddled understanding of intension) and avoids the invention of needless terms like “thingspace”, which mainly achieve the isolation of LessWrong from the external literature (whose relative richness and rigor would doubtlessly benefit them far more than the Sequences, the works of a single, self-aggrandizing amateur). That’s not to say that there’s no good ideas in the article, only that it is unoriginal, muddled, imprecise, and parochial.
As for where else these ideas can be found, philosophers have been working on conceptual vagueness intensely since the mid-20th century, and cluster concepts were a relatively early innovation. The philosophical literature also has the benefit of being largely free of nebulous speculations about cognition and needless formalism … The literature also uses terminology in the ordinary way familiar to everybody engaging these issues professionally … and avoids the invention of needless terms like “thingspace”, which mainly achieve the isolation of LessWrong from the external literature.
I think there’s some validity to this critique. I read The Cluster Structure of Thingspace (TCSOTS) and was asking myself “isn’t this just talking about the problem of classification?” And classification definitely doesn’t require us to treat ‘birdness’ or ‘motherhood’ as a discrete, as if a creature either has it or doesn’t. Classification can be on a spectrum, with a score for ‘birdness’ or ‘motherhood’ that’s a function of many properties.
I welcome (!!) making these concepts more accessible to those who are unfamiliar with them, and for that reason I really enjoyed TCSOTS.But it also seems like there’d also be a lot of utility in then tying these concepts to the fields of math/CS/philosophy that are already addressing these exact questions. These ideas presented in The Cluster of Thingspace are not new; not even a little—so why not use them as a jumping-off-point for the broader literature on these subjects, to show how researchers in the field have approached these issues, and the solutions they’ve managed to come up with?
See: Fuzzy Math, Support Vector Machines, ANNs, Decision Trees, etc.
So: I think posts like this would have a stronger impact if tied into the broader literature that already covers the same subjects. The reader who started the article unfamiliar with the subject would, at the end, have a stronger idea of where the field stands, and they would also be better resourced for further exploring the subject on their own.
Note: this is probably also why most scientific papers start with a discussion of previous related work.
I do agree that a lot of seqeunces pages would benefit a lot from having discussion of previous work or at least stating what these ideas are called in the mainstream, but I feel Yudkowskys neologisms are just… better. Among the examples of similar concepts you mentioned, I definitely felt Yudkowsky was hinting at them with the whole dimensions thing, but I think “thingspace” is still a useful word and not even that complicated; if it was said in a conversation with someone familiar with ANNs I feel they would get what it meant. (Unlike a lot of other Yudkowskisms usually parroted around here, however...)
Most of this just seems to be nitpicking lack of specificity of implicit assumptions which were self-evident (to me), the criticism regarding “blue” pretty much depends on whether the html blue also needs an interpreter(Eg;human brain) to extract the information.
The lack of formality seems (to me as a new user) a repeated criticism of the sequences but, I thought that was also a self-evident assumption (maybe I’m just falling prey to the expecting short inferential distance bias) I think Eliezer has mentioned 16 years ago here:
“This blog is directed at a wider audience at least half the time, according to its policy. I’m not sure how else you think this post should have been written.”
I personally find sequences to be useful aggregator of various ideas I seem to find intriguing at the moment...
I found some criticism of this post on a RationalWiki talk page.
What do you guys think?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:LessWrong#EA_orgs_praising_AI_pseudoscience_charity._Is_it_useful.3F
I think there’s some validity to this critique. I read The Cluster Structure of Thingspace (TCSOTS) and was asking myself “isn’t this just talking about the problem of classification?” And classification definitely doesn’t require us to treat ‘birdness’ or ‘motherhood’ as a discrete, as if a creature either has it or doesn’t. Classification can be on a spectrum, with a score for ‘birdness’ or ‘motherhood’ that’s a function of many properties.
I welcome (!!) making these concepts more accessible to those who are unfamiliar with them, and for that reason I really enjoyed TCSOTS.But it also seems like there’d also be a lot of utility in then tying these concepts to the fields of math/CS/philosophy that are already addressing these exact questions. These ideas presented in The Cluster of Thingspace are not new; not even a little—so why not use them as a jumping-off-point for the broader literature on these subjects, to show how researchers in the field have approached these issues, and the solutions they’ve managed to come up with?
See: Fuzzy Math, Support Vector Machines, ANNs, Decision Trees, etc.
So: I think posts like this would have a stronger impact if tied into the broader literature that already covers the same subjects. The reader who started the article unfamiliar with the subject would, at the end, have a stronger idea of where the field stands, and they would also be better resourced for further exploring the subject on their own.
Note: this is probably also why most scientific papers start with a discussion of previous related work.
I do agree that a lot of seqeunces pages would benefit a lot from having discussion of previous work or at least stating what these ideas are called in the mainstream, but I feel Yudkowskys neologisms are just… better. Among the examples of similar concepts you mentioned, I definitely felt Yudkowsky was hinting at them with the whole dimensions thing, but I think “thingspace” is still a useful word and not even that complicated; if it was said in a conversation with someone familiar with ANNs I feel they would get what it meant. (Unlike a lot of other Yudkowskisms usually parroted around here, however...)
Most of this just seems to be nitpicking lack of specificity of implicit assumptions which were self-evident (to me), the criticism regarding “blue” pretty much depends on whether the html blue also needs an interpreter(Eg;human brain) to extract the information.
The lack of formality seems (to me as a new user) a repeated criticism of the sequences but, I thought that was also a self-evident assumption (maybe I’m just falling prey to the expecting short inferential distance bias) I think Eliezer has mentioned 16 years ago here:
“This blog is directed at a wider audience at least half the time, according to its policy. I’m not sure how else you think this post should have been written.”
I personally find sequences to be useful aggregator of various ideas I seem to find intriguing at the moment...