ahbwramc

Karma: 739

ahbwramc May 21, 2015, 2:43 PM
2 points
on: Brainstorming new senses
I feel like there are interesting applications here for programmers, but I’m not exactly sure what. Maybe you could link up a particular programming language’s syntax to our sense of grammar, so programs that wouldn’t compile would seem as wrong to you as the sentence “I seen her”. Experienced programmers probably already have something like this I suppose, but it could make learning a new programming language easier.

ahbwramc May 21, 2015, 1:44 PM
1 point
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre

I have a cold start problem: in order for people to understand the importance of the information that I have to convey, they need to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but without having seen the importance of the information, they’re not able to distinguish me from being a crackpot.

For what it’s worth, these recent comments of yours have been working on me, at least sort of. I used to think you were just naively arrogant, but now it’s seeming more plausible that you’re actually justifiably arrogant. I don’t know if I buy everything you’re saying, but I’ll be paying more attention to you in the future anyway.

I’ve tried to convey certain hard-to-explain LessWrong concepts to people before and failed miserably. I’m recognizing the same frustration in you that I felt in those situations. And I really don’t want to be on the wrong side of another LW-sized epistemic gap.

ahbwramc May 21, 2015, 3:53 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre
Fair.

So, random anecdote time: I remember when I was younger my sister would often say things that would upset my parents; usually this ended up causing some kind of confrontation/fight. And whenever she would say these upsetting things, the second the words left her mouth I would cringe, because it was extremely obvious to me that what she had said was very much the wrong thing to say—I could tell it would only make my parents madder. And I was never quite sure (and am still not sure) whether she also recognized that what she was saying would only worsen the situation (but she still couldn’t resist saying it because she was angry or whatever) or whether she was just blind to how her words would make my parents feel. So my question to you would be: can you predict when your LW comments will get a negative reaction? Do you think “yeah, this will probably get negative karma but I’m going to say it anyway”? Or are you surprised when you get downvoted?

(Not to say that it’s irrational to post something you expect to be downvoted, of course, whereas it would be sort of irrational for my sister to say something in a fit of anger that she knew would only make things worse. I’m just trying to get a sense of how you’re modelling LWer’s)

ahbwramc May 21, 2015, 3:08 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre

But my focus here is on the meta-level: I perceive a non-contingency about the situation, where even if I did have extremely valuable information to share that I couldn’t share without signaling high status, people would still react negatively to me trying to share it. My subjective sense is that to the extent that people doubt the value of what I have to share, this comes primarily from a predetermined bottom line of the type “if what he’s saying were true, then he would get really high status: it’s so arrogant of him to say things that would make him high status if true, so what he’s saying must not be true.”

I have no particular suggestions for you, but it’s clear that it’s at least possible to convey valuable information to LW without giving off a status-grabbing impression, because plenty of people have done it (eg lukeprog, Yvain, etc)

ahbwramc May 5, 2015, 3:27 PM
13 points
on: Group rationality diary, May 5th − 23rd
I’ve been trying to be more “agenty” and less NPC-ish lately, and having some reasonable success. In the past month I’ve:

-Gone to a SlateStarCodex meetup

This involved taking a greyhound bus, crossing the border into a different country, and navigating my way around an unfamiliar city—all things that would have stopped me from even considering going a few years ago. But I realized that none of those things were actually that big of a deal, that what was really stopping me was that it just wasn’t something I would normally do. And since there was no real reason I couldn’t go, and because I knew I really wanted to go, I just up and did it.

(had a great time btw, no regrets)

-Purchased a used (piano) keyboard

I used to just kind of vaguely wish that I had a keyboard, because it seemed like it would be a fun thing to learn. I would think this resignedly, as if it were an immutable fact of the universe that I couldn’t have a keyboard—for some reason going out and buying one didn’t really occur to me. Now that I have one I’m enjoying it, although I’m mostly just messing around and it’s clear that I’ll need more structure if I’m really going to make progress.

-Signed up for an interview for the MIRI Summer Fellows program

Working at MIRI would be amazing, a dream come true. But I always just sort of assumed I wasn’t cut out for it. And that may well be true, but here’s a practically zero-cost chance to find out. Why not take it? (Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m just wasting Anna Salamon’s time, which I wouldn’t want to do. But I don’t think I’m so obviously underqualified that that would be the case). Again, I don’t think is something I would have done even a year ago.

I’ve also been having much more success consistently writing for my blog, which I used to always enjoy but rarely do.

Basically I’ve gotten a ton of mileage out of just having the concept of agency installed in my brain. Knowing that I can just do the things I want, even if they’re weird or I haven’t done them before, is pretty freeing and pretty cool. The whole “Roles” arc of HPMOR really drove this idea home for me I think.

ahbwramc May 4, 2015, 9:37 PM
0 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Is Scott Alexander bad at math?
Sure, I understand the identity now of course (or at least I have more of an understanding of it). All I meant was that if you’re introduced to Euler’s identity at a time when exponentiation just means “multiply this number by itself some number of times”, then it’s probably going to seem really odd to you. How exactly does one multiply 2.718 by itself sqrt(-1)*3.14 times?

ahbwramc May 4, 2015, 7:19 PM
2 points
0
on: Is Scott Alexander bad at math?
I remember my mom, who was a math teacher, telling me for the first time that e^(i*pi) = −1. My immediate reaction was incredulity—I literally said “What??!” and grabbed a piece of paper to try to work out how that could be true. Of course I had none of the required tools to grapple with that kind of thing, so I got precisely nowhere with it. But that’s the closest I’ve come to having a reaction like you describe with Scott and quintics. I consider the quintic thing far more impressive of course—the weirdness of Euler’s identity isn’t exactly subtle, after all.

So do you think you could predict mathematical ability by simply giving students a list of “deep” mathematical facts and seeing which ones (if any) they’re surprised by or curious about?

ahbwramc May 4, 2015, 5:02 PM
14 points
on: Is Scott Alexander bad at math?
Since much of this sequence has focused on case studies (Grothendiek, Scott Alexander), I’d be curious as to what you think of Douglas Hofstadter. How does he fit into this whole picture? He’s obviously a man of incredible talent in something—I don’t know whether to call it math or philosophy (or both). Either way it’s clear that he has the aesthetic sense you’re talking about here in spades. But I distinctly remember him writing something along the lines of how, upon reaching graduate mathematics he hit a “wall of abstraction” and couldn’t progress any further. Does your picture of mathematical ability leave room for something like that to happen? I mean, this is Douglas freakin’ Hofstadter we’re talking about—it’s hard to picture someone being more of a mathematical aesthete than he is. And even he ran into a wall!

ahbwramc May 3, 2015, 8:03 PM
1 point
in reply to: brainmaps’s comment on: Shawn Mikula on Brain Preservation Protocols and Extensions
You seem to be discussing in good faith here, and I think it’s worth continuing so we can both get a better idea of what the other is saying. I think differing non-verbal intuitions drive a lot of these debates, and so to avoid talking past one another it’s best to try to zoom in on intuitions and verbalize them as much as possible. To that end (keeping in mind that I’m still very confused about consciousness in general): I think a large part of what makes me a machine functionalist is an intuition that neurons...aren’t that special. Like, you view the China Brain argument as a reductio because it seems so absurd. And I guess I actually kind of agree with that, it does seem absurd that a bunch of people talking to one another via walkie-talkie could generate consciousness. But it seems no more absurd to me than consciousness being generated by a bunch of cells sending action potentials to one another. Why should we have expected either of those processes to generate consciousness? In both cases you just have non-mental, syntactical operations taking place. If you hadn’t heard of neurons, wouldn’t they also seem like a reductio to you?

What it comes down to is that consciousness seems mysterious to me. And (on an intuitive level) it kind of feels like I need to throw something “special” at consciousness to explain it. What kind of special something? Well, you could say that the brain has the special something, by virtue of the fact that it’s made of neurons. But that doesn’t seem like the right kind of specialness to me, somehow. Yes, neurons are special in that they have a “unique” physico-chemical causal structure, by why single that out? To me that seems as arbitrary as singling out only specific types of atoms as being able to instantiate consciousness (which some people seem to do, and which I don’t think you’re doing, correct?). It just seems too contingent, too earth-specific an explanation. What if you came across aliens that acted conscious but didn’t have any neurons or a close equivalent? I think you’d have to concede that they were conscious, wouldn’t you? Of course, such aliens may not exist, so I can’t really make an argument based on that. But still—really, the answer to the mystery of consciousness is going to come down to the fact that particular kinds of cells evolved in earth animals? Not special enough! (or so say my intuitions, anyway)

So I’m led in a different direction. When I look at the brain and try to see what could be generating consciousness, what pops out to me is that the brain does computations. It has a particular pattern, a particular high-level causal structure that seems to lie at the heart of its ability to perform the amazing mental feats it does. The computations it performs are implemented on neurons, of course, but that doesn’t seem central to me—if they were implemented on some other substrate, the amazing feats would still get done (Shakespeare would still get written, Fermat’s Last Theorem would still get proved). What does seem central, then? Well, the way the neurons are wired up. My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that in a neural network such as the brain, any given neuron fires iff all the inhibitory and excitatory inputs feeding into the neuron exceed some threshold. So roughly speaking, any given brain can be characterized by which neurons are connected to which other neurons, and what the weights of those connections are, yes? In that case (forgetting consciousness for a moment), what really matters in terms of creating a brain that can perform impressive mental feats is setting up those connections in the right way. But that just amounts to defining a specific high-level causal structure—and yes, that will require you to define a set of counterfactual dependencies (if neurons A and B had fired, then neuron C wouldn’t have fired, etc). I was kind of surprised that you were surprised that we brought up counterfactual dependence earlier in the discussion. For one I think it’s a standard-ish way of defining causality in philosophy (it’s at least the first section in the wikipedia article, anyway, and it’s the definition that makes the most sense to me). But even beyond that, it seems intuitively obvious to me that your brain’s counterfactual dependencies are what make your brain, your brain. If you had a different set of dependencies, you would have to have different neuronal wirings and therefore a different brain.

Anyway, this whole business of computation and higher-level causal structure and counterfactual dependencies: that does seem to have the right kind of specialness to me to generate consciousness. It’s hard for me to break the intuition down further than that, beyond saying that it’s the if-then pattern that seems like the really important thing here. I just can’t see what else it could be. And this view does have some nice features—if you wind up meeting apparently-conscious aliens, you don’t have to look to see if they have neurons. You can just look to see if they have the right if-then pattern in their mind.

To answer your question about simulations not being the thing that they’re simulating: I think the view of consciousness as a particular causal pattern kind of dissolves that question. If you think the only thing that matters in terms of creating consciousness is that there be a particular if-then causal structure (as I do), then in what sense are you “simulating” the causal structure when you implement it on a computer? It’s still the same structure, still has the same dependencies. That seems just as real to me as what the brain does—you could just as easily say that neurons are “simulating” consciousness. Essentially machine functionalists think that causal structure is all there is in terms of consciousness, and under that view the line between something being a “simulation” versus being “real” kind of disappears.

Does that help you understand where I’m coming from? I’d be interested to hear where in that line of arguments/intuitions I lost you.

ahbwramc May 1, 2015, 3:37 PM
4 points
in reply to: brainmaps’s comment on: Shawn Mikula on Brain Preservation Protocols and Extensions
I think we might be working with different definitions of the term “causal structure”? The way I see it, what matters for whether or not two things have the same causal structure is counterfactual dependency—if neuron A hadn’t have fired, then neuron B would have fired. And we all agree that in a perfect simulation this kind of dependency is preserved. So yes, neurons and transistors have different lower-level causal behaviour, but I wouldn’t call that a different causal structure as long as they both implement a system that behaves the same under different counterfactuals. That’s what I think is wrong with your GIF example, btw—there’s no counterfactual dependency whatsoever. If I delete a particular pixel from one frame of the animation, the next frame wouldn’t change at all. Of course there was the proper dependency when the GIF was originally computed, and I would certainly say that that computation, however it was implemented, was conscious. But not the GIF itself, no.

Anyway, beyond that, we’re obviously working from very different intuitions, because I don’t see the China Brain or Turing machine examples as reductio’s at all—I’m perfectly willing to accept that those entities would be conscious.

ahbwramc Apr 29, 2015, 1:46 PM
2 points
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
Well, since I’m on LW the first article to come to mind was Outside the Laboratory, although that’s not really arguing for the proposition per se.

As for the stooping thing, I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but the first thing that came to mind was that maybe you have a rule out rather than rule in criteria for judging intelligence? As in: someone can say a bunch of smart things, but at best that just earns them provisional smart status. On the other hand if they say one sufficiently dumb thing that’s enough to rule them out as being truly intelligent.

ahbwramc Apr 29, 2015, 2:38 AM
4 points
on: CFAR-run MIRI Summer Fellows program: July 7-26
Well, I signed up for an interview (probably won’t amount to anything, but it’s too good of an opportunity to just ignore). After signing up though it occurred to me that this might be a US-only deal. Would my being Canadian be a deal-breaker?

ahbwramc Apr 17, 2015, 3:47 PM
1 point
in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: LessWrong experience on Alcohol
Oh hey, convenient. Someone already wrote my reply.

ahbwramc Apr 13, 2015, 4:14 PM
15 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015
In my experience hostels are a lot more like the fictional bars you describe.

ahbwramc Apr 2, 2015, 12:23 AM
4 points
on: Innate Mathematical Ability
Any more of this sequence forthcoming? I was looking forward to it continuing.

ahbwramc Feb 19, 2015, 3:56 AM
1 point
in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: Innate Mathematical Ability
I tried for maybe thirty seconds to solve it, but couldn’t see anything obvious, so I decided to just truncate the fraction to see if it was close to anything I knew. From that it was clear the answer was root 2, but I still couldn’t see how to solve it. Once I got into work though I had another look, and then (maybe because I knew what the answer was and could see that it was simple algebraically) I was able to come up with the above solution.

ahbwramc Feb 19, 2015, 3:48 AM
0 points
in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: Innate Mathematical Ability
Also how I did it. FWIW I know it took me more than a minute, but definitely less than five.

ahbwramc Feb 7, 2015, 4:28 AM
5 points
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: MIRI’s technical agenda: an annotated bibliography, and other updates
As a MIRI donor, glad to here it! Good luck to you guys, you’re doing important work to say the least.

ahbwramc Feb 6, 2015, 6:47 PM
7 points
on: MIRI’s technical agenda: an annotated bibliography, and other updates
I’m curious, has this recent series of papers garnered much interest from the wider (or “mainstream”) AI community? It seems like MIRI has made a lot of progress over the past few years in getting a lot of very smart people to take their ideas seriously (and in cultivating a more respectable, “serious” image). I was wondering if similar progress had been made in creating inroads into academia.

ahbwramc Jan 29, 2015, 1:09 AM
2 points
in reply to: KatjaGrace’s comment on: Superintelligence 20: The value-loading problem
Did anyone else immediately try to come up with ways Davis’ plan would fail? One obvious failure mode would be in specifying which dead people count—if you say “the people described in these books,” the AI could just grab the books and rewrite them. Hmm, come to think of it: is any attempt to pin down human preferences by physical reference rather than logical reference vulnerable to tampering of this kind, and therefore unworkable? I know EY has written many times before about a “giant logical function that computes morality”, but this puts that notion in a bit of a different light for me. Anyway, I’m sure there other less obvious ways Davis’ plan could go wrong too. I also suspect he’s sneaking a lot into that little word, “disapprove”.

In general though, I’m continually astounded at how many people, upon being introduced to the value loading problem and some of the pitfalls that “common-sense” approaches have, still say “Okay, but why couldn’t we just do [idea I came up with in five seconds]?”