Has EY ever published a single math paper in for example a real math journal like AMS? Has he published findings on FAI in something like IEEE?
No. No. Both relevant.
Indeed, they are very relevant. As far as I can tell, Eliezer’s job description is “blogger”. He is, indeed, brilliant at it, but I haven’t seen evidence that he’s done anything else of value. As for TDT, everyone here ought to remember the rule for academic research: if it’s not published, it doesn’t count.
Which is why I don’t fault anyone for accusing Eliezer of not having done anything—because they’re right.
As for TDT, everyone here ought to remember the rule for academic research: if it’s not published, it doesn’t count.
It takes some hard work against my natural inclinations not to walk out on academia entirely so long as they have a rule like that. By nature and personality I have an extremely low tolerance for tribal inbreeding rules and dimwit status games. If it were anything other than Academia—a corporation with the same rule about its own internal journals, say—I would just shrug and write them off as idiots whose elaborate little games I have no interest in playing, and go off to find someone else who can scrape up some interest in reality rather than appearances.
As it stands I’m happy to see the non-direct-FAI-research end of SIAI trying to publish papers, but it seems to me that the direct-FAI-research end should have a pretty hard-and-fast rule of not wasting time and in dealing with reality rather than appearances. That sort of thing isn’t a one-off decision rule, it’s a lifestyle and a habit of thinking. For myself I’m not sure that I lose much from dealing only with academics who are willing to lower themselves to discuss a blog post. Sure, I must be losing something that I would gain if I magically by surgical intervention gained a PhD. Sure, there are people who are in fact smart who won’t in fact deal with me. But there are other smart people who are more relaxed and more grounded than that, so why not just deal with them instead?
There is no such clear-cut general rule wherein you are required to publish your results in a special ritual form to make an impact (in most cases, it’s merely a bureaucratic formality in the funding/hiring process; history abounds with informally-distributed works that were built upon, it’s just that in most cases good works are also published, ’cause “why not?”). There is a simple need for a clear self-contained explanation that it’s possible to understand for other people, without devoting a special research project to figuring out what you meant and hunting down notes on the margins. The same reason you are writing a book. Once a good explanation is prepared, there are usually ways to also “publish” it.
I agree with Nesov and can offer a personal example here. I have a crypto design that was only “published” to a mailing list and on my homepage, and it still got eighty-some citations according to Google Scholar.
Also, just because you (Eliezer) don’t like playing status games, doesn’t mean it’s not rational to play them. I hate status games too, but I can get away with ignoring them since I can work on things that interest me without needing external funding. Your plans, on the other hand, depend on donors, and most potential donors aren’t AI or decision theory experts. What do they have to go on except status? What Nesov calls “a bureaucratic formality in the funding/hiring process” is actually a human approximation to group rationality, I think.
That’s fair enough. In which case I can only answer that some things are higher-priority than others, which is why I’m writing that book and not a TDT paper.
I empathize rather strongly with the position you are taking here. Even so, I am very much looking forward to seeing (for example) a published TDT. I don’t particularly care whether it is published in blog format or in a journal. There are reasons for doing so that are not status related.
What’s the difference between an real artist and a poseur?
Artists ship.
And you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, haven’t shipped.
Until you publish something, you haven’t really done anything. Your “timeless decision theory”, for example, isn’t even published on a web page. It’s vaporware. Until you actually write down your ideas, you really can’t call yourself a scientist, any more than someone who hasn’t published a story can claim the title of author. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, what great work will you have left behind? Is there something in the SIAI vault that I don’t know about, or is it all locked up in that head of yours where nobody can get to it? I don’t expect you to magically produce a FAI out of your hat, but any advance that isn’t written down might as well not exist, for all the good it will do.
Eh? TDT was explained in enough detail for Dai and some others to get it. It might not make sense to a lay audience but any philosophically competent fellow who’s read the referenced books could reconstruct TDT out of Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory.
I don’t understand your concept of “shipping”. There are many things I want to understand, some I understand already, a few of those that I’ve gone so far as to explain for the sake of people who are actually interested in them, and anything beyond that falls under the heading of PR and publicity.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find that no matter how much I do, the people who previously told me that I hadn’t yet achieved it, find something else that I haven’t yet achieved to focus on. First it’s “show you can invent something new”, and then when you invent it, “show you can get it published in a journal”, and if my priority schedule ever gets to the point I can do that, I have no doubt that the same sort of people will turn around and say “Anyone can publish a paper, where are the prominent scholars who support you?” and after that they will say “Does the whole field agree with you?” I have no personal taste for any part of this endless sequence except the part where I actually figure something out. TDT is rare in that I can talk about it openly and it looks like other people are actually making progress on it.
TDT was explained in enough detail for Dai and some others to get it.
It’s explained in enough detail for me to get an intuitive understanding of it, and to obtain some inspirations and research ideas to follow up. But it’s not enough for me to try to find flaws in it. I think that should be the standard of detail in scientific publication: the description must be detailed enough that if the described idea or research were to have a flaw, then a reader would be able to find it from the description.
It might not make sense to a lay audience but any philosophically competent fellow who’s read the referenced books could reconstruct TDT out of Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory.
Ok, but what if TDT is flawed? In that case, whoever is trying to reconstruct TDT would just get stuck somewhere before they got to a coherent theory, unless they recreated the same flaw by coincidence. If they do get stuck, how can they know or convince you that it’s your fault, and not theirs? Unless they have super high motivation and trust in you, they’ll just give up and do something else, or never attempt the reconstruction in the first place.
I already know it’s got a couple of flaws (the “Problems I Can’t Solve” post, you solved one of them). The “Ingredients” page should let someone get as far as I got, no further, if they had all the standard published background knowledge that I had.
The theory has two main formal parts that I know how to formalize. One is the “decision diagonal”, and I wrote that out as an equation. It contains a black box, but I haven’t finished formalizing that black box either! The other main part that needs formalizing is the causal network. Judea Pearl wrote all this up in great detail; why should I write it again? There’s an amendment of the causal network to include logical uncertainty. I can describe this in the same intuitive way that CDT theorists took for granted when they were having their counterfactual distributions fall out of the sky as manna from heaven, but I don’t know how to give it a Pearl-grade formalization.
Hear me well! If I wanted to look impressive, I could certainly attach Greek symbols to key concepts—just like the classical causal decision theory theorists did in order to make CDT look much more formalized than it actually was. This is status-seeking and self-deception and it got in the way of their noticing what work they had left to do. It was a mistake for them to pretend to formality that way. It is part of the explanation for how they bogged down. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
It’s explained in enough detail for me to get an intuitive understanding of it, and to obtain some inspirations and research ideas to follow up. But it’s not enough for me to try to find flaws in it. I think that should be the standard of detail in scientific publication: the description must be detailed enough that if the described idea or research were to have a flaw, then a reader would be able to find it from the description.
This is where I get stuck. I can get an intuitive understanding of it easily enough. In fact, I got a reasonable intuitive understanding of it just from observing application to problem cases. But I know I don’t have enough to go on to find flaws. I would have to do quite a lot of further background research to construct the difficult parts of the theory and I know that even then I would not be able to fully trust my own reasoning without dedicating several years to related fields.
Basically, it would be easier for me to verify a completed theory if I just created it myself from the premise “a decision theory shouldn’t be bloody stupid”. That way I wouldn’t have to second guess someone else’s reasoning.
Since I know I do not have the alliances necessary to get a commensurate status pay-off for any work I put into such research that probably isn’t the best way to satisfy my curiosity. Ricardo would suggest that the most practical approach would be for me to spend my time leveraging my existing position to earn cash and making a donation earmarked for ‘getting someone to finish the TDT theory’.
Eh? TDT was explained in enough detail for Dai and some others to get it. It might not make sense to a lay audience but any philosophically competent fellow who’s read the referenced books could reconstruct TDT out of Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find that no matter how much I do, the people who previously told me that I hadn’t yet achieved it, find something else that I haven’t yet achieved to focus on.”
Such is the price of being an innovator or claiming innovation...
“First it’s “show you can invent something new”, and then when you invent it, “show you can get it published in a journal”, and if my priority schedule ever gets to the point I can do that, I have no doubt that the same sort of people will turn around and say “Anyone can publish a paper, where are the prominent scholars who support you?”″
Sure, but you have not invented a decision theory using the example of TDT until you have math to back it up. Decision theory is a mathematical theory not just some philosophical ideas. What-is-more thanks to programs like Mathematica etc. there are easy ways to post equations online. For example “[Nu] Derivative[2][w][[Nu]] + 2 Derivative[1][w][[Nu]] + ArcCos[z]^2 [Nu] w[[Nu]] == 0 /; w[[Nu]] == Subscript[c, 1] GegenbauerC[[Nu], z] + Subscript[c, 2] (1/[Nu]) ChebyshevU[[Nu], z]” put this in mathematica and presto.
Further the publication of the theory is necessary part of getting the theory accepted be that good or bad. Not only that but it helps in formalizing ones ideas which is positive especially when working with other people and trying to explain what you are doing.
“and after that they will say “Does the whole field agree with you?” I have no personal taste for any part of this endless sequence except the part where I actually figure something out. TDT is rare in that I can talk about it openly and it looks like other people are actually making progress on it.”
There are huge areas of non-FAI specific work and people who’s help would be of value. For example knowledge representation, embodiment virtual or real, and sensory stimulus recognition… Each of these will need work to make FAI practical and there are people who can help you and probably know more about those specific areas then you.
Indeed, they are very relevant. As far as I can tell, Eliezer’s job description is “blogger”. He is, indeed, brilliant at it, but I haven’t seen evidence that he’s done anything else of value. As for TDT, everyone here ought to remember the rule for academic research: if it’s not published, it doesn’t count.
Which is why I don’t fault anyone for accusing Eliezer of not having done anything—because they’re right.
It takes some hard work against my natural inclinations not to walk out on academia entirely so long as they have a rule like that. By nature and personality I have an extremely low tolerance for tribal inbreeding rules and dimwit status games. If it were anything other than Academia—a corporation with the same rule about its own internal journals, say—I would just shrug and write them off as idiots whose elaborate little games I have no interest in playing, and go off to find someone else who can scrape up some interest in reality rather than appearances.
As it stands I’m happy to see the non-direct-FAI-research end of SIAI trying to publish papers, but it seems to me that the direct-FAI-research end should have a pretty hard-and-fast rule of not wasting time and in dealing with reality rather than appearances. That sort of thing isn’t a one-off decision rule, it’s a lifestyle and a habit of thinking. For myself I’m not sure that I lose much from dealing only with academics who are willing to lower themselves to discuss a blog post. Sure, I must be losing something that I would gain if I magically by surgical intervention gained a PhD. Sure, there are people who are in fact smart who won’t in fact deal with me. But there are other smart people who are more relaxed and more grounded than that, so why not just deal with them instead?
There is no such clear-cut general rule wherein you are required to publish your results in a special ritual form to make an impact (in most cases, it’s merely a bureaucratic formality in the funding/hiring process; history abounds with informally-distributed works that were built upon, it’s just that in most cases good works are also published, ’cause “why not?”). There is a simple need for a clear self-contained explanation that it’s possible to understand for other people, without devoting a special research project to figuring out what you meant and hunting down notes on the margins. The same reason you are writing a book. Once a good explanation is prepared, there are usually ways to also “publish” it.
I agree with Nesov and can offer a personal example here. I have a crypto design that was only “published” to a mailing list and on my homepage, and it still got eighty-some citations according to Google Scholar.
Also, just because you (Eliezer) don’t like playing status games, doesn’t mean it’s not rational to play them. I hate status games too, but I can get away with ignoring them since I can work on things that interest me without needing external funding. Your plans, on the other hand, depend on donors, and most potential donors aren’t AI or decision theory experts. What do they have to go on except status? What Nesov calls “a bureaucratic formality in the funding/hiring process” is actually a human approximation to group rationality, I think.
That’s fair enough. In which case I can only answer that some things are higher-priority than others, which is why I’m writing that book and not a TDT paper.
I empathize rather strongly with the position you are taking here. Even so, I am very much looking forward to seeing (for example) a published TDT. I don’t particularly care whether it is published in blog format or in a journal. There are reasons for doing so that are not status related.
What’s the difference between an real artist and a poseur?
Artists ship.
And you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, haven’t shipped.
Until you publish something, you haven’t really done anything. Your “timeless decision theory”, for example, isn’t even published on a web page. It’s vaporware. Until you actually write down your ideas, you really can’t call yourself a scientist, any more than someone who hasn’t published a story can claim the title of author. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, what great work will you have left behind? Is there something in the SIAI vault that I don’t know about, or is it all locked up in that head of yours where nobody can get to it? I don’t expect you to magically produce a FAI out of your hat, but any advance that isn’t written down might as well not exist, for all the good it will do.
Eh? TDT was explained in enough detail for Dai and some others to get it. It might not make sense to a lay audience but any philosophically competent fellow who’s read the referenced books could reconstruct TDT out of Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory.
I don’t understand your concept of “shipping”. There are many things I want to understand, some I understand already, a few of those that I’ve gone so far as to explain for the sake of people who are actually interested in them, and anything beyond that falls under the heading of PR and publicity.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find that no matter how much I do, the people who previously told me that I hadn’t yet achieved it, find something else that I haven’t yet achieved to focus on. First it’s “show you can invent something new”, and then when you invent it, “show you can get it published in a journal”, and if my priority schedule ever gets to the point I can do that, I have no doubt that the same sort of people will turn around and say “Anyone can publish a paper, where are the prominent scholars who support you?” and after that they will say “Does the whole field agree with you?” I have no personal taste for any part of this endless sequence except the part where I actually figure something out. TDT is rare in that I can talk about it openly and it looks like other people are actually making progress on it.
It’s explained in enough detail for me to get an intuitive understanding of it, and to obtain some inspirations and research ideas to follow up. But it’s not enough for me to try to find flaws in it. I think that should be the standard of detail in scientific publication: the description must be detailed enough that if the described idea or research were to have a flaw, then a reader would be able to find it from the description.
Ok, but what if TDT is flawed? In that case, whoever is trying to reconstruct TDT would just get stuck somewhere before they got to a coherent theory, unless they recreated the same flaw by coincidence. If they do get stuck, how can they know or convince you that it’s your fault, and not theirs? Unless they have super high motivation and trust in you, they’ll just give up and do something else, or never attempt the reconstruction in the first place.
I already know it’s got a couple of flaws (the “Problems I Can’t Solve” post, you solved one of them). The “Ingredients” page should let someone get as far as I got, no further, if they had all the standard published background knowledge that I had.
The theory has two main formal parts that I know how to formalize. One is the “decision diagonal”, and I wrote that out as an equation. It contains a black box, but I haven’t finished formalizing that black box either! The other main part that needs formalizing is the causal network. Judea Pearl wrote all this up in great detail; why should I write it again? There’s an amendment of the causal network to include logical uncertainty. I can describe this in the same intuitive way that CDT theorists took for granted when they were having their counterfactual distributions fall out of the sky as manna from heaven, but I don’t know how to give it a Pearl-grade formalization.
Hear me well! If I wanted to look impressive, I could certainly attach Greek symbols to key concepts—just like the classical causal decision theory theorists did in order to make CDT look much more formalized than it actually was. This is status-seeking and self-deception and it got in the way of their noticing what work they had left to do. It was a mistake for them to pretend to formality that way. It is part of the explanation for how they bogged down. I don’t intend to make the same mistake.
This is where I get stuck. I can get an intuitive understanding of it easily enough. In fact, I got a reasonable intuitive understanding of it just from observing application to problem cases. But I know I don’t have enough to go on to find flaws. I would have to do quite a lot of further background research to construct the difficult parts of the theory and I know that even then I would not be able to fully trust my own reasoning without dedicating several years to related fields.
Basically, it would be easier for me to verify a completed theory if I just created it myself from the premise “a decision theory shouldn’t be bloody stupid”. That way I wouldn’t have to second guess someone else’s reasoning.
Since I know I do not have the alliances necessary to get a commensurate status pay-off for any work I put into such research that probably isn’t the best way to satisfy my curiosity. Ricardo would suggest that the most practical approach would be for me to spend my time leveraging my existing position to earn cash and making a donation earmarked for ‘getting someone to finish the TDT theory’.
All right, then.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find that no matter how much I do, the people who previously told me that I hadn’t yet achieved it, find something else that I haven’t yet achieved to focus on.”
Such is the price of being an innovator or claiming innovation...
“First it’s “show you can invent something new”, and then when you invent it, “show you can get it published in a journal”, and if my priority schedule ever gets to the point I can do that, I have no doubt that the same sort of people will turn around and say “Anyone can publish a paper, where are the prominent scholars who support you?”″
Sure, but you have not invented a decision theory using the example of TDT until you have math to back it up. Decision theory is a mathematical theory not just some philosophical ideas. What-is-more thanks to programs like Mathematica etc. there are easy ways to post equations online. For example “[Nu] Derivative[2][w][[Nu]] + 2 Derivative[1][w][[Nu]] + ArcCos[z]^2 [Nu] w[[Nu]] == 0 /; w[[Nu]] == Subscript[c, 1] GegenbauerC[[Nu], z] + Subscript[c, 2] (1/[Nu]) ChebyshevU[[Nu], z]” put this in mathematica and presto. Further the publication of the theory is necessary part of getting the theory accepted be that good or bad. Not only that but it helps in formalizing ones ideas which is positive especially when working with other people and trying to explain what you are doing.
“and after that they will say “Does the whole field agree with you?” I have no personal taste for any part of this endless sequence except the part where I actually figure something out. TDT is rare in that I can talk about it openly and it looks like other people are actually making progress on it.”
There are huge areas of non-FAI specific work and people who’s help would be of value. For example knowledge representation, embodiment virtual or real, and sensory stimulus recognition… Each of these will need work to make FAI practical and there are people who can help you and probably know more about those specific areas then you.