aaronde

Karma: 309

aaronde Nov 24, 2012, 3:26 AM
2 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012
I get that. What I’m really wondering is how this extends to probabilistic reasoning. I can think of an obvious analog. If the algorithm assigns zero probability that it will choose $5, then when it explores the counterfactual hypothesis “I choose $5”, it gets nonsense when it tries to condition on the hypothesis. That is, for all U,
- P(utility=U | action=$5) = P(utility=U and action=$5) / P(action=$5) = ⁰⁄₀
is undefined. But is there an analog for this problem under uncertainty, or was my sketch correct about how that would work out?

aaronde Nov 21, 2012, 7:17 PM
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012
That’s exactly the impression that I got. That it was awkward phrasing, because you just didn’t know how to phrase it—but that it wasn’t a coincidence that you defaulted to that particular awkward phrasing. It seems that, on some level, you were surprised to see people outside lesswrong discussing “lesswrong ideas.” Even though, intellectually, you know that most of the good ideas on lesswrong didn’t originate here. Don’t be too hard on yourself. I probably have the opposite problem, where, as a meta-contrarian, I can’t do anything but criticize lesswrong.

If you want to avoid sounding like a cheerleader, I think the best rule of thumb is to just not name-drop. It’s great if you get a lot of ideas from Eliezer and lesswrong, but then communicate those ideas in a way that makes it difficult to trace them back to lesswrong. This should come naturally, because you shouldn’t believe everything you hear on lesswrong anyway. Confirm what you hear with an independent source, and then you can refer to that source instead of lesswrong, just like you would with information you learned on wikipedia.

aaronde Nov 21, 2012, 12:05 AM
0 points
in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012
I don’t understand how Uspensky’s definition is different from Eliezer’s. Is there some minimum number of people a proof has to convince? Does it have to convince everyone? If I’m the only person in the world, is writing a proof impossible, or trivial? It seems that both definitions are saying that a proof will be considered valid by those people who find it absolutely convincing. And those people who do not find it absolutely convincing will not consider it valid. More importantly, it seems that this is all those two definitions are saying, which is why neither of them is very helpful if we want something more concrete than the colloquial sense of proof.

aaronde Nov 20, 2012, 11:24 PM
9 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012
I liked the fact that the author didn’t use cognitive bias as an excuse to give up on talking about politics altogether (which seems to be LWian consensus), but instead made demonstrable claims about politics.

EDIT: in response to the previous version of Michaelos’ post, I said:

It makes me uncomfortable when LWers say things like:

“Politics is the Mindkiller” appears to be acknowledged as early as the second sentence.

It smacks of, “Oh, look at the unenlightened people finally catching on.” Lesswrong didn’t invent cognitive science, and “politics is the mindkiller” is just our term for a well-established result of cognitive science. The article is about motivated reasoning, and the author isn’t “acknowledging” it, but explaining it.

aaronde Nov 20, 2012, 9:00 PM
0 points
on: Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012
Can anyone point me toward work that’s been done on the five-and-ten problem? Or does someone want to discuss it here? Specifically, I don’t understand why it is a problem for probabilistic algorithms. I would reason:

There is a high probability that I prefer $10 to $5. Therefore I will decide to choose $5, with low probability.

And there’s nowhere to go from there. If I try to use the fact that I chose $5 to prove that $5 was the better choice all along (because I’m rational), I get something like:

The probability that I prefer $5 to $10 is low. But I have very high confidence in my rationality, meaning that I assign high probability, a priori, to any choice I make being the choice I prefer. Therefore, given that I choose $5, the probability that I prefer $5 is high. So $5 doesn’t seem like a bad choice, since I’ll probably end up with what I prefer.

But things still turn out right, because:

However, the probability that I prefer $10, given that I choose $10, is even higher, because the probability that I prefer $10 was high to begin with. Therefore, $10 is a better choice than $5, because the probability that (I prefer $10 to $5 given that I choose $10) is higher than the probability that (I prefer $5 to $10 given that I choose $5).

So unless I’m missing something, the five-and-ten problem is just a problem of overconfidence.

aaronde Nov 14, 2012, 11:53 PM
4 points
in reply to: MileyCyrus’s comment on: Instrumental rationality for overcoming disability and lifestyle failure (a specific case)

Reading Less Wrong is consumptive, not productive. You need to have something to show for your work, ex. a novel draft, a fitter body, a cleaner house.

Isn’t easy/hard the more useful distinction than consumptive/productive? After all, reading the news is productive in the sense of having something to show for it, because you will seem more informed in conversation. And working out can be a form of consumption, if you buy a gym membership.

Personally, I’ve always loved working out. So I don’t have much to gain by trying to motivate myself to work out even more, because I’m obviously already very fit. And “forcing” myself to work out isn’t going to test my self-discipline either. If I’m going to put in 40 hours of scheduled “work” next week, then at least some of it should be spent on things I find hard, and therefore don’t do often enough.

Similarly, if reading geeky blog articles is what you do for fun, CAE_Jones, (which seems probable since you’re here) it’s unlikely that reading even more geeky blog articles will improve your life. That said, you might want to start off scheduling things you would expect yourself to do anyway, for the same reason that you might want to start off scheduling less that 40 hours a week, and slowly work your way up. Just to ease into it.

aaronde Nov 11, 2012, 8:26 PM
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Struck with a belief in Alien presence
little gray men emerging from airborn thingies is HUGE in itself.

Um, no. A short guy in a grey suit stepping off a helicopter is a little grey man emerging from an airborn thingy.

Or did you go through all previous sightings and came to that conclusion in every one case?

No. I don’t see the point in digging through all the reports, when the reports I have heard about have been so underwhelming. I was skipping around, watching bits and pieces of the video you linked, until Manfred pointed this out:

The geiger counter reading is reported as “10 times background,” which sounds impressive if you’ve never held a geiger counter, but really just means a nearby rock had some potassium in it, or a dozen other possibilities.

So they basically lied. I actually haven’t ever held a geiger counter, so I had no way of knowing this. If asked to explain it, I would have had to admit that something weird was going on that I couldn’t explain. Except there’s a perfectly mundane explanation, and the only reason I was confused is because I was misled about the significance of the reading in the first place. After that I didn’t see the value in watching the rest of the documentary.

So I have a better idea. You tell me what you think is the single most convincing incident, and I will tell you,
- How convincing I find the report on its own, and
- How convincing it would be, assuming that there were thousands of similar, equally reliable reports.

aaronde Nov 11, 2012, 3:38 PM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Struck with a belief in Alien presence
Even if you could rule out man-made and weather-related causes for some UFOs, that wouldn’t imply that they were caused by an extra-terrestrial civilization either. Some UFOs may still be unexplained, but all that means is that we don’t know enough about them to say what they are.

That said, I don’t think you can rule out weather and human craft. Others have already explained why I find the “primary” evidence unconvincing.

This is very speculative to me. I don’t think we can use it as evidence for or against.

Let me put it this way. My guess of what an interstellar civilization would look like makes predictions about what it would be like to encounter that civilization. Those predictions are not satisfied. This is strong evidence that no extra-terrestrial civilization (as I understand the term) has made it anywhere near us.

One of the reasons you were downvoted is that you asked us to evaluate evidence for “Aliens”. But that is impossible until you explain what you mean by “Aliens”. Obviously, there is something about these UFO sightings that makes you think they are more likely to be caused by aliens than by weather. Which implies that you think you know something about aliens that makes them a better explanation.

So what is it that you think you know about these “Aliens”?

aaronde Nov 11, 2012, 5:34 AM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Struck with a belief in Alien presence
Yes, I was wrong. I was explaining why I got so focused on the blank-slate version of the prior.

aaronde Nov 11, 2012, 3:45 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Struck with a belief in Alien presence
Right. What I want to do is calculate the probability that a random conscious entity would find itself living in a world where someone satisfying the definition of Julius Caesar had existed. And then calculate the conditional probability given the evidence, which is everything I’ve ever observed about the world including the newly discovered account.

Obviously that’s not what you do in real life, but the point remains that everything after the original prior (based on Kolmogorov complexity or something) is just conditioning. If we’re going to talk about how and why we should formulate priors, rather than what Bayes’ rule says, this is what we’re interested in.

aaronde Nov 11, 2012, 3:08 AM
7 points
on: Struck with a belief in Alien presence
I think you may be confused by an oversimplification of Occam’s Razor: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” That’s not actually how you derive a prior—the very word “extraordinary” implies that you already have experience about what is ordinary and what isn’t. If we really throw out all evidence that could tell us how likely aliens are, we end up with a probability which (by the usual method of generating priors), depends on the information-theoretic complexity of the statement “There are aliens on earth.” Which in turn depends on how precisely you define the word “aliens”. Aliens that fly around in saucers are more likely than aliens that fly around in saucers and want to probe our butts. And aliens that fly around in saucers and probe our butts are more likely than aliens that fly around in saucers and probe our butts and are abducting our politicians one by one to replace them with reptilian impersonators. Every extra caveat makes a statement less likely. Every extra belief you take on is one more way that you could be wrong. This is why you need to justify all your beliefs.

I don’t think that generic aliens should be considered especially improbable a priori—before the evidence is considered. I think that they are unlikely a posteriori—based on the fact that we don’t see them. I think that any intelligent space-faring life would be busy building spheres around stars (if not outright disassembling the stars) as quickly as they spread out into the cosmos. So we’d notice them by the wake of solar systems going dark. At the very least, there’s no reason to think that they would hide from us, which is what these scenarios tend to require (though I haven’t watched the documentary).

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say about the black swan. What a bayesian would do is assign a prior probability distribution over possible colorations of swans (say ¹⁄₂ white, ¹⁄₂ black), then calculate, based on the fact that ey has seen, say, a million white swans in a row, what the probability is that the next swan ey sees will be black. Needless to say, ey will be very surprised if the next swan actually is black. But this is a good thing, because, for the same reason, ey was very unsurprised by the previous swan, which was white, as well as swans number 999,999 and 999,998 and 999,997 and so on.

Anyway, I found this amusing.

aaronde Nov 11, 2012, 1:54 AM
3 points
in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Struck with a belief in Alien presence
Wait, what? Bayesians never assign 0 probability to anything, because it means the probability will always remain 0 regardless of future updates. And “prior probability”, by definition, means that we throw out all previous evidence.

aaronde Nov 8, 2012, 6:34 PM
4 points
on: FAI, FIA, and singularity politics
I endorse this idea, but have a minor nitpick:

In such a scenario, we could speak of “FIA”—friendly intelligence augmentation. A basic idea of existing FAI discourse is that the true human utility function needs to be determined, and then the values that make an AI human-friendly would be extrapolated from that.

This certainly gets proposed a lot. But isn’t it lesswrongian consensus that this is backwards? That the only way to build a FAI is to build an AI that will extrapolate and adopt the humane utility function on its own? (since human values are too complicated for mere humans to state explicitly).

aaronde Oct 31, 2012, 4:39 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Things philosophers have debated

How does trivialism differ from assuming the existence of a Tegmark IV universe?

Tegmark IV is the space of all computable mathematical structures. You can make true and false statements about this space, and there is nothing about it that implies a contradiction. You may think that any coherent empirical claim is true in Tegmark IV, in that anything we say about the world is true of some world. But being true in some world does not make it true in this world. If I say that the sky is green, I am implicitly referring to the sky that I experience, which is blue. That is, I am saying that the sky which is blue is green. So I’m contradicting myself, and the statement is false. You don’t even need to think of alternate universes to reason through this. After all, some planet in our galaxy surely has a green sky.

A spectral argument given in defense of trivialism in the dissertation runs like this...

It all looks shaky, but most obviously, just because every classical proposition may be interpreted in natural language doesn’t mean that every natural language proposition may be interpreted in classical logic. In particular, the aspects of natural language that make it inconsistent probably can’t be translated into classical logic. After all, that’s why we invented classical logic in the first place.

Did these points come up in the dissertation?

aaronde Oct 23, 2012, 7:28 PM
0 points
on: Naive TDT, Bayes nets, and counterfactual mugging
Isn’t temporal inconsistency just selfishness? That is, before you know whether the coin came up heads or tails, you care about both possible futures. But after you find out that you’re in the tails’ universe you stop caring about the heads’ universe, because you’re selfish. UDT acts differently, because it is selfless, in that it keeps the same importance weights over all conceivable worlds.

It makes perfect sense to me that a rational agent would want to restrict the choices of its future self. I want to make sure that future-me doesn’t run off and do his own thing, screwing current-me over.

aaronde Oct 19, 2012, 7:54 PM
0 points
in reply to: Kevin’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
This question is for anyone who says they saw a benefit from supplementation, not just Kevin.

What was your diet like at the time? Were you taking a daily multivitamin?

aaronde Sep 25, 2012, 1:18 AM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem
I also think that I am conscious, but you keep telling me I have the wrong definitions of words like this, so I don’t know if we agree. I would say being conscious means that some part of my brain is collating data about my mental states, such that I could report accurately on my mental states in a coherent manner.

aaronde Sep 24, 2012, 11:01 PM
−2 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem
How do I know whether I am having a conscious subjective experience of a sensation or emotion?

aaronde Sep 23, 2012, 5:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem
Okay, I’ve tabooed my words. Now it’s your turn. What do you mean by “feeling”?

aaronde Sep 23, 2012, 2:51 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem
You’re right, we’re starting to go around in circles. So we should wrap this up. I’ll just address what seems to be the main point.

I find it obvious that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that [your definition] completely misses.

This is the crux of our disagreement, and is unlikely to change. But you still seem to misunderstand me slightly, so maybe we can still make progress.

You have decided that pain is a certain kind of behaviour displayed by entities other than yourself and seen from the outside, and you have coded that up.

No, I have decided that pain is any stimulus—that is, a feeling—that causes a certain kind of behavior. This is not splitting hairs. It is relevant, because you keep telling me that my view doesn’t account for feelings, when it is all about feelings! What you really mean is that my view doesn’t account for qualia, which really just means I’m being consistent, because I don’t believe in qualia.

you can’t prefer to personally have certain experiences if there is no such thing as subjective experience.

Here for example, you seem to be equivocating between “experience” and “subjective experience”. If “subjective experience” means the same thing as “experience”, then I don’t think there is no such thing as subjective experience. But if “subjective experience” means something different, like “qualia”, then this statement doesn’t follow at all.

P.S. This may be off-point, but I just have to say, this:

I inspect the code, and find nothing that relates in any way to how I introspect pain or any other feeling.

...is because the code has no capacity for introspection—not because it has no capacity for pain.

Edit: maybe this last point presents room for common ground, like: “Qualia is awareness of ones own feelings, and therefore is possessed by anything that can accurately report on how it is responding to stimuli.”?