Bunthut

Karma: 350

Bunthut Mar 15, 2022, 12:31 PM
4 points
on: Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal
I think your assessments of whats psychologically realistic are off.
I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than “doesn’t look like an Oliver” is attached to something in your head.
I think before writing that, Yud imagined calling [unambiguously gendered friend] either pronoun, and asked himself if it felt wrong, and found that it didn’t. This seems realistic to me: I’ve experienced my emotional introspection becoming blank on topics I’ve put a lot of thinking into. This doesn’t prevent doing the same automatic actions you always did, or knowing what those would be in a given situation. If something like this happened to him for gender long enough ago, he may well not be able to imagine otherwise.
But the “everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk” characterization seems to agree that the motivation was joking/trolling. How did everyone present know? Because it’s absurd to infer a particular name from someone’s appearance.
It’s unreasonable, but it seems totally plausible that on one occasion you would feel like you know someone has a certain name, and continue feeling that way even after being rationally convinced you’re wrong. That there are many names only means that the odds of any particular name featuring in such a situation is low, not that the class as a whole has low odds, and I don’t see why the prior for that would be lower than for e.g. mistaken deja vu experiences.

Bunthut Dec 22, 2021, 10:22 PM
1 point
on: The Case for Radical Optimism about Interpretability
I don’t think the analogy to biological brains is quite as strong. For example, biological brains need to be “robust” not only to variations in the input, but also in a literal sense, to forceful impact or to parasites trying to control it. It intentionally has very bad suppressability, and this means there needs to be a lot of redundancy, which makes “just stick an electrode in that area” work. More generally, it is under many constraints that a ML system isn’t, probably too many for us to think of, and it generally prioritizes safety over performance. Both lead away from the sort of maximally efficient compression that makes ML systems hard to interpret.
Analogously: Imagine a programmer would write the shortest program that does a given task. That would be terrible. It would be impossible to change anything without essentially redesigning everything, and trying to understand what it does just from reading the code would be very hard, and giving a compressed explanation of how it does that would be impossible. In practice, we don’t write code like that, because we face constraints like those mentioned above—but its very easy to imagine that some optimization-based “automatic coder” would program like that. Indeed, on the occasion that we need to really optimize runtimes, we move in that direction ourselves.
So I don’t think brains tell us much about the interpretability of the standard, highly optimized neural nets.

Bunthut Dec 21, 2021, 10:33 PM
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
Probably way too old here, but I had multible experiences relevant to the thread.
Once I had a dream and then, in the dream, I remembered I had dreamt this exact thing before, and wondered if I was dreaming now, and everything looked so real and vivid that I concluded I was not.
I can create a kind of half-dream, where I see random images and moving sequences at most 3 seconds or so long, in succession. I am really dimmed but not sleeping, and I am aware in the back of my head that they are only schematic and vague.
I would say the backstories in dreams are different in that they can be clearly nonsensical. E.g. I hold and look at a glass relief, there is no movement at all, and I know it to be a movie. I know nothing of its content, and I dont believe the image of the relief to be in the movie.

Bunthut May 25, 2021, 8:48 PM
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
I think its still possible to have a scenario like this. Lets say each trader would buy or sell a certain amount when the price is below/above what they think it to be, but the transition being very steep instead of instant. Then you could still have long price intervalls where the amounts bought and sold remain constant, and then every point in there could be the market price.
I’m not sure if this is significant. I see no reason to set the traders up this way other than the result in the particular scenario that kicked this off, and adding traders who don’t follow this pattern breaks it. Still, its a bit worrying that trading strategies seem to matter in addition to beliefs, because what do they represent? A traders initial wealth is supposed to be our confidence in its heuristics—but if a trader is mathematical heuristics and trading strategy packaged, then what does confidence in the trading strategy mean epistemically? Two things to think about:
Is it possible to consistently define the set of traders with the same beliefs as trader X?
It seems that logical induction is using a trick, where it avoids inconsistent discrete traders, but includes an infinite sequence of continuous traders with ever steeper transitions to get some of the effects. This could lead to unexpected differences between behaviour “at all finite steps” vs “at the limit”. What can we say about logical induction if trading strategies need to be lipschitz-continuous with a shared upper limit on the lipschitz constant?

Bunthut May 25, 2021, 8:31 PM
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
So I’m not sure what’s going on with my mental sim. Maybe I just have a super-broad ‘crypto-moral detector’ that goes off way more often than yours (w/o explicitly labeling things as crypto-moral for me).
Maybe. How were your intuitions before you encountered LW? If you already had a hypocrisy intuition, then trying to internalize the rationalist perspective might have lead it to ignore the morality-distinction.

Bunthut May 20, 2021, 8:38 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
My father playing golf with me today, telling me to lean down more to stop them going out left so much.

Bunthut May 19, 2021, 2:16 PM
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
I don’t strongly relate to any of these descriptions. I can say that I don’t feel like I have to pretend advice from equals is more helpful than it is, which I suppose means its not face. The most common way to reject advice is a comment like “eh, whatever” and ignoring it. Some nerds get really mad at this and seem to demand intellectual debate. This is not well received. Most people give advice with the expectation of intellectual debate only on crypto-moral topics (this is also not well received generally, but the speaker seems to accept that as an “identity cost”), or not at all.

Bunthut May 19, 2021, 1:46 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
You mean advice to diet, or “technical” advice once its established that person wants to diet? I don’t have experience with either, but the first is definitely crypto-moral.

Bunthut May 19, 2021, 1:26 PM
3 points
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
This excludes worlds which the deductive process has ruled out, so for example if $A \lor B$ has been proved, all worlds will have either A or B. So if you had a bet which would pay $10 on A, and a bet which would pay $2 on B, you’re treated as if you have $2 to spend.
I agree you can arbitrage inconsistencies this way, but it seems very questionable. For one, it means the market maker needs to interpret the output of the deductive process semantically. And it makes him go bankrupt if that logic is inconsistent. And there could be a case where a proposition is undecidable, and a meta-proposition about it is undecidable, and a meta-meta-propopsition about it is undecidable, all the way up, and then something bad happens, though I’m not sure what concretely.

Bunthut May 19, 2021, 1:08 PM
LW: 1 AF: 1
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
Why is the price of the un-actualized bet constant? My argument in the OP was to suppose that PCH is the dominant hypothesis, so, mostly controls market prices.
Thinking about this in detail, it seems like what influence traders have on the market price depends on a lot more of their inner workings than just their beliefs. I was thinking in a way where each trader only had one price for the bet, below which they bought and above which they sold, no matter how many units they traded (this might contradict “continuous trading strategies” because of finite wealth), in which case there would be a range of prices that could be the “market” price, and it could stay constant even with one end of that range shifting. But there could also be an outcome like yours, if the agents demand better and better prices to trade one more unit of the bet.

Bunthut May 19, 2021, 12:40 PM
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
But now, you seem to be complaining that a method that explicitly avoids Troll Bridge would be too restrictive?
No, I think finding such a no-learning-needed method would be great. It just means your learning-based approach wouldn’t be needed.
You seem to be arguing that being susceptible to Troll Bridge should be judged as a necessary/positive trait of a decision theory.
No. I’m saying if our “good” reasoning can’t tell us where in Troll Bridge the mistake is, then something that learns to make “good” inferences would have to fall for it.
But there are decision theories which don’t have this property, such as regular CDT, or TDT (depending on the logical-causality graph). Are you saying that those are all necessarily wrong, due to this?
A CDT is only worth as much as its method of generating counterfactuals. We generally consider regular CDT (which I interpret as “getting its counterfactuals from something-like-epsilon-exploration”) to miss important logical connections. “TDT” doesn’t have such a method. There is a (logical) causality graph that makes you do the intuitively right thing on Troll Bridge, but how to find it formally?
A strong candidate from my perspective is the inference from $\neg (A \land B)$ to $C (A | B) = 0$
Isn’t this just a rephrasing of your idea that the agent should act based on C(A|B) instead of B->A? I don’t see any occurance of ~(A&B) in the troll bridge argument. Now, it is equivalent to B->~A, so perhaps you think one of the propositions that occur as implications in troll bridge should be parsed this way? My modified troll bridge parses them all as counterfactual implication.
For example, I could have a lot of prior mass on “crossing gives me +10, not crossing gives me 0”. Then my +10 hypothesis would only be confirmed by experience. I could reason using counterfactuals
I’ve said why I don’t think “using counterfactuals”, absent further specification, is a solution. For the simple “crossing is +10″ belief… you’re right its succeeds, and insofar as you just wanted to show that its rationally possible to cross, I suppose it does.
This… really didn’t fit into my intuitions about learning. Consider that there is also the alternative agent who believes that crossing is −10, and sticks to that. And the reason he sticks to that isn’t that hes to afraid and VOI isn’t worth it: while its true that he never empirically confirms it, he is right, and the bridge would blow up if he were to cross it. That method works because it ignores the information in the problem description, and has us insert the relevant takeaway without any of the confusing stuff directly into its prior. Are you really willing to say: Yup, thats basically the solution to counterfactuals, just a bit of formalism left to work out?

Bunthut May 18, 2021, 8:03 AM
1 point
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
So I don’t see how we can be sure that PCH loses out overall. LCH has to exploit PCH—but if LCH tries it, then we’re seemingly in a situation where LCH has to sell for PCH’s prices, in which case it suffers the loss I described in the OP.
So I’ve reread the logical induction paper for this, and I’m not sure I understand exploitation. Under 3.5, it says:
On each day, the reasoner receives 50¢ from T, but after day t, the reasoner must pay $1 every day thereafter.
So this sounds like before day t, T buys a share every day, and those shares never pay out—otherwise T would receive $t on day t in addition to everything mentioned here. Why?
In the version that I have in my head, theres a market with PCH and LCH in it that assigns constant price to the unactualised bet, so neither of them gain or lose anything with their trades on it, and LCH exploits PCH on the actualised ones.
But the special bundled contract doesn’t go to zero like this, because the conditional contract only really pays out when the condition is satisfied or refuted.
So if I’m understanding this correctly: The conditional contract on (a|b) pays if a&b is proved, if a&~b is proved, and if ~a&~b is proved.
Now I have another question: how does logical induction arbitrage against contradiction? The bet on a pays $1 if a is proved. The bet on ~a pays $1 if not-a is proved. But the bet on ~a isn’t “settled” when a is proved—why can’t the market just go on believing its .7? (Likely this is related to my confusion with the paper).
My proposal is essentially similar to that, except I am trying to respect logic in most of the system, simply reducing its impact on action selection. But within my proposed system, I think the wrong ‘prior’ (ie distribution of wealth for traders) can make it susceptible again.
I’m not blocking Troll Bridge problems, I’m making the definition of rational agent broad enough that crossing is permissible. But if I think the Troll Bridge proof is actively irrational, I should be able to actually rule it out. IE, specify an X which is inconsistent with PA.
What makes you think that theres a “right” prior? You want a “good” learning mechanism for counterfactuals. To be good, such a mechanism would have to learn to make the inferences we consider good, at least with the “right” prior. But we can’t pinpoint any wrong inference in Troll Bridge. It doesn’t seem like whats stopping us from pinpointing the mistake in Troll Bridge is a lack of empirical data. So, a good mechanism would have to learn to be susceptible to Troll Bridge, especially with the “right” prior. I just don’t see what would be a good reason for thinking theres a “right” prior that avoids Troll Bridge (other than “there just has to be some way of avoiding it”), that wouldn’t also let us tell directly how to think about Troll Bridge, no learning needed.

Bunthut May 18, 2021, 6:20 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
So your social experience is different in this respect?
I’ve never experienced this example in particular, but I would not expect such a backlash. Can you think of another scenario with non-moral advice that I have likely experienced?

Bunthut May 17, 2021, 4:16 PM
4 points
0
on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
It seems to me that this habit is universal in American culture, and I’d be surprised (and intrigued!) to hear about any culture where it isn’t.
I live in Austria. I would say we do have norms against hypocrisy, but your example with the drivers license seems absurd to me. I would be surprised (and intrigued!) if agreement with this one in particular is actually universal in American culture. In my experience, hypocrisy norms are for moral and crypto-moral topics.
For normies, morality is an imposition. Telling them of new moral requirements increases how much they have to do things that suck to stay a good person. From this perspective, the anti-hypocrisy norm is great. If people don’t follow the new requirement they suggest (or can be construed as not doing so), you get to ignore it without further litigation.
Now the classical LW position is that thats wrong, and that you ought to be glad someone informed you how much good you can do by giving away large fractions of your income, because this gave you the opportunity to do so. Because you ought to believe morality in your heart. From this perspective, the anti-hypocrisy norm is useless. It might also be why the drivers license example is a natural fit for you: its all “advice” to you. If you’ve failed to Chestertons fence, I think its this previous step where it happened.

Bunthut May 17, 2021, 3:43 PM
1 point
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
The payoff for 2-boxing is dependent on beliefs after 1-boxing because all share prices update every market day and the “payout” for a share is essentially what you can sell it for.
If a sentence is undecidable, then you could have two traders who disagree on its value indefinitely: one would have a highest price to buy, thats below the others lowest price to sell. But then anything between those two prices could be the “market price”, in the classical supply and demand sense. If you say that the “payout” of a share is what you can sell it for… well, the “physical causation” trader is also buying shares on the counterfactual option that won’t happen. And if he had to sell those, he couldn’t sell them at a price close to where he bought them—he could only sell them at how much the “logical causation” trader values them, and so both would be losing “payout” on their trades with the unrealized option. Thats one interpretation of “sell”. If theres a “market maker” in addition to both traders, it depends on what prices he makes—and as outlined above, there is a wide range of prices that would be consistent for him to offer as a market maker, including ways which are very close to the logical traders valuations—in which case, the logical trader is gaining on the physical one.
Trying to communicate a vague intuition here: There is a set of methods which rely on there being a time when “everything is done”, to then look back from there and do credit assignment for everything that happened before. They characteristically use backwards induction to prove things. I think markets fall into this: the argument for why ideal markets don’t have bubbles is that eventually, the real value will be revealed, and so the bubble has to pop, and then someone holds the bag, and you don’t want to be that someone, and people predicting this and trying to avoid it will make the bubble pop earlier, in the idealised case instantly. I also think these methods aren’t going to work well with embedding. They essentially use “after the world” as a subsitute for “outside the world”.
My claim is: eventually, if you observe enough cases of “crossing” in similar circumstances, your expectation for “cross” should be consistent with the empirical history
My question was more “how should this roughly work” rather than “what conditions should it fulfill”, because I think thinking about this illuminates my next point.
The hope is that we can block the troll argument completely if proving B->A does not imply cf(A|B)=1
This doesn’t help against what I’m imagining, I’m not touching indicative B->A. So, standard Troll Bridge:
- Reasoning within PA (ie, the logic of the agent):
  - Suppose the agent crosses.
    Further suppose that the agent proves that crossing implies U=-10.
    Examining the source code of the agent, because we’re assuming the agent crosses, either PA proved that crossing implies U=+10, or it proved that crossing implies U=0.
    So, either way, PA is inconsistent—by way of 0=-10 or +10=-10.
    So the troll actually blows up the bridge, and really, U=-10.
    Therefore (popping out of the second assumption), if the agent proves that crossing implies U=-10, then in fact crossing implies U=-10.
    By Löb’s theorem, crossing really implies U=-10.
    So (since we’re still under the assumption that the agent crosses), U=-10.
  - So (popping out of the assumption that the agent crosses), the agent crossing implies U=-10.
- Since we proved all of this in PA, the agent proves it, and proves no better utility in addition (unless PA is truly inconsistent). On the other hand, it will prove that not crossing gives it a safe U=0. So it will in fact not cross.
But now, say the agents counterfactual reasoning comes not from PA, but from system X. Then the argument fails because “suppose the agent proves crossing->U=-10 in PA” doesn’t go any further because examining the sourcecode of the agent doesn’t say anything about PA anymore, and “suppose the agent proves crossing->U=-10 in X” doesn’t show that PA is inconsistent, so the bridge isn’t blown up. But lets have a troll that blows up the bridge if X is inconsistent. Then we can make an argument like this:
- Reasoning within X (ie, the logic of counterfactuals):
  - Suppose the agent crosses.
    Further suppose that the agent proves in X that crossing implies U=-10.
    Examining the source code of the agent, because we’re assuming the agent crosses, either X proved that crossing implies U=+10, or it proved that crossing implies U=0.
    So, either way, X is inconsistent—by way of 0=-10 or +10=-10.
    So the troll actually blows up the bridge, and really, U=-10.
    Therefore (popping out of the second assumption), if the agent proves that crossing implies U=-10, then in fact crossing implies U=-10.
    By Löb’s theorem, crossing really implies U=-10.
    So (since we’re still under the assumption that the agent crosses), U=-10.
  - So (popping out of the assumption that the agent crosses), the agent crossing implies U=-10.
- Since we proved all of this in X, the agent proves it, and proves no better utility in addition (unless X is truly inconsistent). On the other hand, it will prove that not crossing gives it a safe U=0. So it will in fact not cross.
Now, this argument relies on X and counterfactual reasoning having a lot of the properties of PA and normal reasoning. But even a system that doesn’t run on proofs per se could still end up implementing something a lot like logic, and then it would have a property thats a lot like inconsistency, and then the troll could blow up the bridge conditionally on that. Basically, it still seems reasonable to me that counterfactual worlds should be closed under inference, up to our ability to infer. And I don’t see which of the rules for manipulating logical implications wouldn’t be valid for counterfactual implications in their own closed system, if you formally separate them. If you want your X to avoid this argument, then it needs to not-do something PA does. “Formal separation” between the systems isn’t enough, because the results of counterfactual reasoning still really do effect your actions, and if the counterfactual reasoning system can understand this, Troll Bridge returns. And if there was such a something, we could just use a logic that doesn’t do this in the first place, no need for the two-layer approach.
a convincing optimality result could
I’m also sceptical of optimality results. When you’re doing subjective probability, any method you come up with will be proven optimal relative to its own prior—the difference between different subjective methods is only in their ontology, and the optimality results don’t protect you against mistakes there. Also, when you’re doing subjectivism, and it turns out the methods required to reach some optimality condition aren’t subjectively optimal, you say “Don’t be a stupid frequentist and do the subjectively optimal thing instead”. So, your bottom line is written. If the optimality condition does come out in your favour, you can’t be more sure because of it—that holds even under the radical version of expected evidence conservation. I also suspect that as subjectivism gets more “radical”, there will be fewer optimality results besides the one relative to prior.

Bunthut Apr 24, 2021, 11:37 AM
1 point
AF
on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
Because we have a “basic counterfactual” proposition for what would happen if we 1-box and what would happen if we 2-box, and both of those propositions stick around, LCH’s bets about what happens in either case both matter. This is unlike conditional bets, where if we 1-box, then bets conditional on 2-boxing disappear, refunded, as if they were never made in the first place.
I don’t understand this part. Your explanation of PCDT at least didn’t prepare me for it, it doesn’t mention betting. And why is the payoff for the counterfactual-2-boxing determined by the beliefs of the agent after 1-boxing?
And what I think is mostly independent of that confusion: I don’t think things are as settled.
I’m more worried about the embedding problems with the trader in dutch book arguments, so the one against CDT isn’t as decisive for me.
In the Troll Bridge hypothetical, we prove that [cross]->[U=-10]. This will make the conditional expectations poor. But this doesn’t have to change the counterfactuals.
But how is the counterfactual supposed to actually think? I don’t think just having the agent unrevisably believe that crossing is counterfactually +10 is a reasonable answer, even if it doesn’t have any instrumental problems in this case. I think it ought to be possible to get something like “whether to cross in troll bridge depends only on what you otherwise think about PAs consistency” with some logical method. But even short of that, there needs to be some method to adjust your counterfactuals if they fail to really match you conditionals. And if we had an actual concrete model of counterfactual reasoning instead of a list of desiderata, it might be possible to make a troll based on the consistency of whatever is inside this model, as opposed to PA.
I also think there is a good chance the answer to the cartesian boundary problem won’t be “heres how to calculate where your boundary is”, but something else of which boundaries are an approximation, and then something similar would go for counterfactuals, and then there won’t be a counterfactual theory which respects embedding.
These later two considerations suggest the leftover work isn’t just formalisation.

Bunthut Apr 24, 2021, 9:50 AM
1 point
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Identifiability Problem for Superrational Decision Theories
are the two players physically precisely the same (including environment), at least insofar as the players can tell?
In the examples I gave yes. Because thats the case where we have a guarantee of equal policy, from which people try to generalize. If we say players can see their number, then the twins in the prisoners dilemma needn’t play the same way either.
But this is one reason why correlated equilibria are, usually, a better abstraction than Nash equilibria.
The “signals” players receive for correlated equilibria are already semantic. So I’m suspicious that they are better by calling on our intuition more to be used, with the implied risks. For example I remember reading about a result to the effect that correlated equilibria are easier to learn. This is not something we would expect from your explanation of the differences: If we explicitly added something (like the signals) into the game, it would generally get more complicated.

Bunthut Apr 12, 2021, 9:32 PM
1 point
in reply to: adamShimi’s comment on: Identifiability Problem for Superrational Decision Theories
Hum, then I’m not sure I understand in what way classical game theory is neater here?
Changing the labels doesn’t make a difference classically.
As long as the probabilistic coin flips are independent on both sides
Yes.
Do you have examples of problems with copies that I could look at and that you think would be useful to study?
No, I think you should take the problems of distributed computing, and translate them into decision problems, that you then have a solution to.

Bunthut Apr 12, 2021, 11:12 AM
1 point
AF
in reply to: adamShimi’s comment on: Identifiability Problem for Superrational Decision Theories
Well, if I understand the post correctly, you’re saying that these two problems are fundamentally the same problem
No. I think:
...the reasoning presented is correct in both cases, and the lesson here is for our expectations of rationality...
As outlined in the last paragraph of the post. I want to convince people that TDT-like decision theories won’t give a “neat” game theory, by giving an example where they’re even less neat than classical game theory.
Actually it could.
I think you’re thinking about a realistic case (same algorithm, similar environment) rather than the perfect symmetry used in the argument. A communication channel is of no use there because you could just ask yourself what you would send, if you had one, and then you know you would have just gotten that message from the copy as well.
I can use my knowledge of distributed computing to look at the sort of decision problems where you play with copies
I’d be interested. I think even just more solved examples of the reasoning we want are useful currently.

Bunthut Apr 12, 2021, 8:44 AM
1 point
in reply to: adamShimi’s comment on: Phylactery Decision Theory
The link would have been to better illustrate how the proposed system works, not about motivation. So, it seems that you understood the proposal, and wouldn’t have needed it.
I don’t exactly want to learn the cartesian boundary. A cartesian agent believes that its input set fully screens off any other influence on its thinking, and the outputs screen off any influence of the thinking on the world. Its very hard to find things that actually fulfill this. I explain how PDT can learn cartesian boundaries, if there are any, as a sanity/conservative extension check. But it can also learn that it controls copies or predictions of itself for example.