Sometimes you can say something isn’t quite right but you can’t provide an alternative.
rejecting the null hypothesis
give a (partial) countermodel that shows that certain proof methods can’t prove $A$ without proving $\neg A$.
Looking at Scott Garrabrant’s game of life board—it’s not white noise but I can’t say why
Difference between ‘generation of ideas’ and ‘filtration of ideas’ - i.e. babble and prune.
ScottG: Bayesian learning assumes we are in a babble-rich environment and only does pruning.
ScottG: Bayesism doesn’t say ‘this thing is wrong’ it says ‘this other thing is better’.
Alexander: Nonrealizability the Bayesian way of saying: not enough babble?
Scott G: mwah, that suggests the thing is ‘generate more babble’ when the real solution is ‘factor out your model in pieces and see where the culprit is’.
ergo, locality is a virtue
Alexander: locality just means conditional independence? Or does it mean something more?
ScottG: loss of locality means there is existenial risk
Alexander: reminds me of Vanessa’s story:
trapped environments aren’t in general learnable. This is a problem since real life is trapped. A single human life is filled to the brim with irreversible transitions & decisions. Humanity as a whole is much more robust because of locality: it is effectively playing the human life game lots of times in parallel. The knowledge gained is then redistributed through culture and genes. This breaks down when locality breaks down → existential risk.
(conversation with Scott Garrabrant)
Destructive Criticism
Sometimes you can say something isn’t quite right but you can’t provide an alternative.
rejecting the null hypothesis
give a (partial) countermodel that shows that certain proof methods can’t prove $A$ without proving $\neg A$.
Looking at Scott Garrabrant’s game of life board—it’s not white noise but I can’t say why
Difference between ‘generation of ideas’ and ‘filtration of ideas’ - i.e. babble and prune.
ScottG: Bayesian learning assumes we are in a babble-rich environment and only does pruning.
ScottG: Bayesism doesn’t say ‘this thing is wrong’ it says ‘this other thing is better’.
Alexander: Nonrealizability the Bayesian way of saying: not enough babble?
Scott G: mwah, that suggests the thing is ‘generate more babble’ when the real solution is ‘factor out your model in pieces and see where the culprit is’.
ergo, locality is a virtue
Alexander: locality just means conditional independence? Or does it mean something more?
ScottG: loss of locality means there is existenial risk
Alexander: reminds me of Vanessa’s story:
trapped environments aren’t in general learnable. This is a problem since real life is trapped. A single human life is filled to the brim with irreversible transitions & decisions. Humanity as a whole is much more robust because of locality: it is effectively playing the human life game lots of times in parallel. The knowledge gained is then redistributed through culture and genes. This breaks down when locality breaks down → existential risk.