“Anyone who declines to talk about interesting material because it’s in a blog post, or for that matter, a poem scrawled in blood on toilet paper, is not taking Science seriously. Why should I expect them to have anything important to say if I go to the further trouble of publishing a paper?”
What?
Vladimir is right not paying attention to blog entry with no published work is a great way to avoid crackpots. You have this all backwards you speak as if you have all these credentials so everyone should just take you seriously. In reality what credentials do you have? You built all this expectation for this grand theory and this vague outline is the best you can do? Where is the math? Where is the theory?
I think anyone in academia would be inclined to ask the same question of you why should they take some vague blog entry seriously when the writer controls the comments and can’t be bothered to submit his work for peer-review? You talk about wanting to write a PhD thesis this won’t help get you there. In fact this vague outline should do nothing but cast doubt in everyones mind as to whether you have a theory or not.
I have been following this TDT issue for a while and I for one would like to see some math and some worked out problems. Otherwise I would be inclined to call your bluff.
Eliezer have you ever published a paper in a peer-review journal? The way you talk about it says naive amateur. There is huge value especially for you since you don’t have a PhD or any successful companies or any of the other typical things that people who go the non-academic route tend to have.
Let’s face the music here, your one practical AI project that I am aware of Flare failed, and most of your writing has never been subjected to the rigor that all science should be subjected to. It seems to me if you want to do what you claim you need to start publishing.
I am sorry I am going to take a shortcut here and respond to a couple posts along with yours. So fine I partially insert my foot in my mouth… but the issue I think here is that the papers we need to be talking about are math papers right? Anyone can publish non-technical ideas as long as they are well reasoned, but the art of science is the technical mastery.
As for Eliezer’s comment concerning the irrelevance of Flare being a pre 2003 EY work I have to disagree. When you have no formal academic credentials and you are trying to make your mark in a technical field such as decision theory anything technical that you have done or attempted counts.
You essentially are building your credentials via work that you have done. I am speaking from experience since I didn’t complete college I went the business route. But I can also say that I did a lot of technical work so I built my credentials in the field by doing novel technical things.
I am trying to help here coming from a similar position and wanting a PhD etc. having various technical achievements as my prior work made all the difference in getting in to a PhD program without a B.S. or M.S. It also makes all the difference in being taken seriously by the scientific community.
Which circles back to my original point which is an vague outline is not enough to show you really have a theory much less a revolutionary one. Sadly asking to be taken seriously is just not enough, you have to prove that you meet the bar of admission (decision theory is going to be math).
If someone can show me some technical math work EY has done that would be great, but as of now I have very little confidence that he has a real theory (if someone can I will drop the issue.) Yes I am aware of the Bayesian Theory paper but this lets face it is fairly basic and is far from showing that EY has the ability to revolutionize decision theory.
The university would be Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Program (an esoteric area of CS)
As for the other parts I did some work in computer hardware specifically graphics hardware design, body armor design (bullet proof vests) etc. The body armor got to prototyping but was not marketable for a variety reasons to dull to go into. I am currently starting a video game company.
This vague outline is the result of Eliezer yielding to our pleas to say something—anything—about his confident solution to Newcomb’s problem. Now that it’s been posted as a not-obviously-formalizable text, and people are discussing it informally, I share a lot of your disappointment. But let’s give the topic some days and see how it crystallizes.
What’s Flare? (...looks it up...) Oh dear Cthulhu, oh no.
(Edit: I originally listed several specific users as “refusing to formalize”. That was wrong.)
These considerations lead to the following design for the decision algorithm S. S is coded with a vector of programs that it cares about, and a utility function on vectors of the form that defines its preferences on how those programs should run. When it receives an input X, it looks inside the programs P1, P2, P3, …, and uses its “mathematical intuition” to form a probability distribution P_Y over the set of vectors for each choice of output string Y. Finally, it outputs a string Y* that maximizes the expected utility Sum P_Y() U().
Which part do you find insufficiently formal? Of course I use “mathematical intuition” as a black box without explaining how it works, but that’s just like EDT using “prior” without explaining where it comes from, or CDT using “causal probability” as a black box. It’s an unsolved problem, not refusal to formalize.
Your decision theory is formal enough for me, but it seems to be different from Eliezer’s, which I was talking about. If they’re really the same, could you explain how?
In that case, I never said I understood Eliezer’s version well enough that I could formalize it if I wanted to, and I don’t think Nesov and Drescher claimed that either, so I don’t know why you mentioned our names in connection with “refuse to formalize”. Actually I explicitly said that I don’t understand Eliezer’s theory very well yet.
“Anyone who declines to talk about interesting material because it’s in a blog post, or for that matter, a poem scrawled in blood on toilet paper, is not taking Science seriously. Why should I expect them to have anything important to say if I go to the further trouble of publishing a paper?”
What?
Vladimir is right not paying attention to blog entry with no published work is a great way to avoid crackpots. You have this all backwards you speak as if you have all these credentials so everyone should just take you seriously. In reality what credentials do you have? You built all this expectation for this grand theory and this vague outline is the best you can do? Where is the math? Where is the theory?
I think anyone in academia would be inclined to ask the same question of you why should they take some vague blog entry seriously when the writer controls the comments and can’t be bothered to submit his work for peer-review? You talk about wanting to write a PhD thesis this won’t help get you there. In fact this vague outline should do nothing but cast doubt in everyones mind as to whether you have a theory or not.
I have been following this TDT issue for a while and I for one would like to see some math and some worked out problems. Otherwise I would be inclined to call your bluff.
Eliezer have you ever published a paper in a peer-review journal? The way you talk about it says naive amateur. There is huge value especially for you since you don’t have a PhD or any successful companies or any of the other typical things that people who go the non-academic route tend to have.
Let’s face the music here, your one practical AI project that I am aware of Flare failed, and most of your writing has never been subjected to the rigor that all science should be subjected to. It seems to me if you want to do what you claim you need to start publishing.
“Levels of Organization in General Intelligence” appeared in the Springer volume Artificial General Intelligence. “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risks” (PDF) and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” (PDF) appeared in the Oxford University Press volume Global Catastrophic Risks. They’re not mathy papers, though.
I am sorry I am going to take a shortcut here and respond to a couple posts along with yours. So fine I partially insert my foot in my mouth… but the issue I think here is that the papers we need to be talking about are math papers right? Anyone can publish non-technical ideas as long as they are well reasoned, but the art of science is the technical mastery.
As for Eliezer’s comment concerning the irrelevance of Flare being a pre 2003 EY work I have to disagree. When you have no formal academic credentials and you are trying to make your mark in a technical field such as decision theory anything technical that you have done or attempted counts.
You essentially are building your credentials via work that you have done. I am speaking from experience since I didn’t complete college I went the business route. But I can also say that I did a lot of technical work so I built my credentials in the field by doing novel technical things.
I am trying to help here coming from a similar position and wanting a PhD etc. having various technical achievements as my prior work made all the difference in getting in to a PhD program without a B.S. or M.S. It also makes all the difference in being taken seriously by the scientific community.
Which circles back to my original point which is an vague outline is not enough to show you really have a theory much less a revolutionary one. Sadly asking to be taken seriously is just not enough, you have to prove that you meet the bar of admission (decision theory is going to be math).
If someone can show me some technical math work EY has done that would be great, but as of now I have very little confidence that he has a real theory (if someone can I will drop the issue.) Yes I am aware of the Bayesian Theory paper but this lets face it is fairly basic and is far from showing that EY has the ability to revolutionize decision theory.
Where? What university?
The university would be Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Program (an esoteric area of CS)
As for the other parts I did some work in computer hardware specifically graphics hardware design, body armor design (bullet proof vests) etc. The body armor got to prototyping but was not marketable for a variety reasons to dull to go into. I am currently starting a video game company.
Also, volume-editing isn’t as (pointlessly? signallingly?) difficult as journal peer-review.
This vague outline is the result of Eliezer yielding to our pleas to say something—anything—about his confident solution to Newcomb’s problem. Now that it’s been posted as a not-obviously-formalizable text, and people are discussing it informally, I share a lot of your disappointment. But let’s give the topic some days and see how it crystallizes.
What’s Flare? (...looks it up...) Oh dear Cthulhu, oh no.
(Edit: I originally listed several specific users as “refusing to formalize”. That was wrong.)
A legacy of pre-2003 Eliezer, of no particular importance one way or another.
What about what I wrote?
Which part do you find insufficiently formal? Of course I use “mathematical intuition” as a black box without explaining how it works, but that’s just like EDT using “prior” without explaining where it comes from, or CDT using “causal probability” as a black box. It’s an unsolved problem, not refusal to formalize.
Your decision theory is formal enough for me, but it seems to be different from Eliezer’s, which I was talking about. If they’re really the same, could you explain how?
In that case, I never said I understood Eliezer’s version well enough that I could formalize it if I wanted to, and I don’t think Nesov and Drescher claimed that either, so I don’t know why you mentioned our names in connection with “refuse to formalize”. Actually I explicitly said that I don’t understand Eliezer’s theory very well yet.
You’re right. I apologize. Amended the comment.