calef

Karma: 662

calef Jan 27, 2017, 2:35 AM
7 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Thoughts on “Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus”, Month 1
What can a “level 5 framework” do, operationally, that is different than what can be done with a Bayes net?

I admit that I don’t understand what you’re actually trying to argue, Christian.

calef Jan 18, 2017, 5:53 AM
6 points
on: John Nash’s Ideal Money: The Motivations of Savings and Thrift
Hi Flinter (and welcome to LessWrong)

You’ve resorted to a certain argumentative style in some of your responses, and I wanted to point it out to you. Essentially, someone criticizes one of your posts, and your response is something like:

“Don’t you understand how smart John Nash is? How could you possibly think your criticism is something that John Nash hadn’t thought of already?”

The thing about ideas, notwithstanding the brilliance of those ideas or where they might have come from, is that communicating those ideas effectively is just as important as the idea itself. Even if Nash’s Ideal Money scheme is the most important thing in the universe, if you can’t communicate the idea effectively, and if you can’t convincingly respond to criticism without hostility, no one will ever understand that idea but you.

A great modern example of this is Mochizuki’s interuniversal Teichmuller theory, which he singlehandedly developed over the course of a decade in near complete isolation. It’s an extremely technically dense new way of doing number theory that he claims resolves several outstanding conjectures in number theory (including the ABC Conjecture, among a couple others). And it’s taken over four years for some very high profile mathematicians to start verifying that it’s probably correct. This required workshops and hundreds of communications between Mochizuki and other mathematicians.

Point being: Progress is sociological as much as it is empirical. If you aren’t able to effectively communicate the importance of an idea, it might be because the community at large is hostile to new ideas, even when represented in the best way possible. But if a community—a community which is, nominally, dedicated to rationally evaluating ideas—is unable to understand your representation, or see the importance of it, it might just be because you’re bad at explaining it, the idea isn’t all that great, or both.

calef Mar 16, 2016, 2:33 AM
1 point
in reply to: SanguineEmpiricist’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016
I’ve found that I only ever get something sort of like sleep paralysis when I sleep flat on my back, so +1 for sleeping orientation mattering for some reason.

calef Mar 16, 2016, 2:31 AM
4 points
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016
This is essentially what username2 was getting at, but I’ll try a different direction.

It’s entirely possible that “what caused the big bang” is a nonsensical question. ‘Causes’ and ‘Effects’ only exist insofar as there are things which exist to cause causes and effect effects. The “cause and effect” apparatus could be entirely contained within the universe, in the same way that it’s not really sensible to talk about “before” the universe.

Alternatively, it could be that there’s no “before” because the universe has always existed. Or that our universe nucleated from another universe, and that one could follow the causal chain of universes nucleating within universe backwards forever. Or that time is circular.

I suspect that the reason I’m not religious is that I’m not at all bothered by the question “Why is there a universe, rather than not a universe?” not having a meaningful answer. Or rather, it feels overwhelmingly anthropocentric to expect that the answer to that question, if there even was one, would be comprehensible to me. Worse, if the answer really was “God did it,” I think I would just be disappointed.

calef Sep 4, 2015, 1:12 AM
1 point
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
If you aren’t interested in engaging with me, then why did you respond to my thread? Especially when the content of your post seems to be “No you’re wrong, and I don’t want to explain why I think so.”?

calef Sep 3, 2015, 11:28 PM
1 point
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
What precisely is Eliezer basically correct about on the physics?

It is true that non-unitary gates allow you to break physics in interesting ways. It is absolutely not true that violating conservation of energy will lead to a nonunitary gate. Eliezer even eventually admits (or at least admits that he ‘may have misunderstood’) an error in the physics here. (see this subthread).

This isn’t really a minor physics mistake. Unitarity really has nothing at all to do with energy conservation.

calef Sep 1, 2015, 8:35 PM
1 point
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
Haha fair enough!

calef Sep 1, 2015, 8:34 PM
1 point
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
I never claimed whether he was or not wasn’t Important. I just didn’t focus on that aspect of the argument because it’s been discussed at length elsewhere (the reddit thread, for example). And I’ve repeatedly offered to talk about the object level point if people were interested.

I’m not sure why someone’s sense of fairness would be rankled when I directly link to essentially all of the evidence on the matter. It would be different if I was just baldly claiming “Eliezer done screwed up” without supplying any evidence.

calef Sep 1, 2015, 7:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
I never said that determining the sincerity of criticism would be easy. I can step through the argument with links, I’d you’d like!

calef Sep 1, 2015, 7:39 PM
5 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
Yes, I wrote this article because Eliezer very publicly committed the typical sneering fallacy. But I’m not trying to character-assassinate Eliezer. I’m trying to identify a poisonous sort of reasoning, and indicate that everyone does it, even people that spends years of their life writing about how to be more rational.

I think Eliezer is pretty cool. I aso don’t think he’s immune from criticism, nor do I think he’s an inappropriate target of this sort of post.

calef Sep 1, 2015, 7:27 PM
2 points
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy

Which makes for a handy immunizing strategy against criticisms of your post, n’est-ce pas?

It’s my understanding that your criticism of my post was that the anecdote would be distracting. One of the explicit purposes of my post was to examine a polarizing example of [the fallacy of not taking criticism seriously] in action—an example which you proceed to not take seriously in your very first post in this thread simply because of a quote you have of Eliezer blowing the criticism off.

The ultimate goal here is to determine how to evaluate criticism. Learning how to do that when the criticism comes from across party lines is central.

calef Sep 1, 2015, 2:37 PM
2 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
I mean, if you’d like to talk about the object level point of “was the criticism of Eliezer actually true”, we can do that. The discussion elsewhere is kind of extensive, which is why I tried to focus on the meta-level point of the Typical Sneer Fallacy.

calef Sep 1, 2015, 4:14 AM
2 points
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Typical Sneer Fallacy
I suspect how reader’s respond to my anecdote about Eliezer will fall along party lines, so to speak.

Which is kind of the point of the whole post. How one responds to the criticism shouldn’t be a function of one’s loyalty to Eliezer. Especially when su3su2u1 explicitly isn’t just “making up most of” his criticism. Yes, his series of review-posts are snarky, but he does point out legitimate science errors. That he chooses to enjoy HPMOR via (c) rather than (a) shouldn’t have any bearing on the true-or-false-ness of his criticism.

I’ve read su3su2u1′s reviews. I agree with them. I also really enjoyed HPMOR. This doesn’t actually require cognitive dissonance.

(I do agree, though, that snarkiness isn’t really useful in trying to get people to listen to criticism, and often just backfires)

Typical Sneer Fallacy

calefSep 1, 2015, 3:13 AM

16 points

44 comments4 min readLW link

calef May 23, 2015, 11:30 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life
I mean, sure, but this observation (i.e., “We have tools that allow us to study the AI”) is only helpful if your reasoning techniques allow you to keep the AI in the box.

Which is, like, the entire point of contention, here (i.e., whether or not this can be done safely a priori).

I think that you think MIRI’s claim is “This cannot be done safely.” And I think your claim is “This obviously can be done safely” or perhaps “The onus is on MIRI to prove that this cannot be done safely.”

But, again, MIRI’s whole mission is to figure out the extent to which this can be done safely.

calef May 21, 2015, 11:06 PM
2 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life
As far as I can tell, you’re responding to the claim, “A group of humans can’t figure out complicated ideas given enough time.” But this isn’t my claim at all. My claim is, “One or many superintelligences would be difficult to predict/model/understand because they have a fundamentally more powerful way to reason about reality.” This is trivially true once the number of machines which are “smarter” than humans exceeds the total number of humans. The extent to which it is difficult to predict/model the “smarter” machines is a matter of contention. The precise number of “smarter” machines and how much “smarter” they need be before we should be “worried” is also a matter of contention. (How “worried” we should be is a matter of contention!)

But all of these points of contention are exactly the sorts of things that people at MIRI like to think about.

calef May 21, 2015, 8:51 PM
14 points
on: Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life

This argument is, however, nonsense. The human capacity for abstract reasoning over mathematical models is in principle a fully general intelligent behaviour, as the scientific revolution has shown: there is no aspect of the natural world which has remained beyond the reach of human understanding, once a sufficient amount of evidence is available. The wave-particle duality of quantum physics, or the 11-dimensional space of string theory may defy human intuition, i.e. our built-in intelligence. But we have proven ourselves perfectly capable of understanding the logical implications of models which employ them. We may not be able to build intuition for how a super-intelligence thinks. Maybe—that’s not proven either. But even if that is so, we will be able to reason about its intelligent behaviour in advance, just like string theorists are able to reason about 11-dimensional space-time without using their evolutionarily derived intuitions at all.

This may be retreating to the motte’s bailey, so to speak, but I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that a superintelligence would be literally impossible to understand. The worry is that there will be such a huge gulf between how superintelligences reason versus how we reason that it would take prohibitively long to understand them.

I think a laptop is a good example. There probably isn’t any single human on earth that knows how to build a modern laptop from scratch. There’s are computer scientists that know how the operating system is put together—how the operating system is programmed, how memory is written and retrieved from the various buses; there are other computer scientists and electrical engineers who designed the chips themselves, who arrayed circuits efficiently to dissipate heat and optimize signal latency. Even further, there are material scientists and physicists who designed the transistors and chip fabrication processes, and so on.

So, as an individual human, I don’t know what it’s like to know everything about a laptop all at once in my head, at a glance. I can zoom in on an individual piece and learn about it, but I don’t know all the nuances for each piece—just a sort of executive summary. The fundamental objects with which I can reason have a sort of characteristic size in mindspace—I can imagine 5, maybe 6 balls moving around with distinct trajectories (even then, I tend to group them into smaller subgroups). But I can’t individually imagine a hundred (I could sit down and trace out the paths of a hundred balls individually, of course, but not all at once).

This is the sense in which a superintelligence could be “dangerously” unpredictable. If the fundamental structures it uses for reasoning greatly exceed a human’s characteristic size of mindspace, it would be difficult to tease out its chain of logic. And this only gets worse the more intelligent it gets.

Now, I’ll grant you that the lesswrong community likes to sweep under the rug the great competition of timescales and “size”scales that are going on here. It might be prohibitively difficult, for fundamental reasons, to move from working-mind-RAM of size 5 to size 10. It may be that artificial intelligence research progresses so slowly that we never even see an intelligence explosion—just a gently sloped intelligence rise over the next few millennia. But I do think it’s a maybe not a mistake but certainly naiive to just proclaim, “Of course we’ll be able to understand them, we are generalized reasoners!”.

Edit: I should add that this is already a problem for, ironically, computer-assisted theorem proving. If a computer produces a 10,000,000 page “proof” of a mathematical theorem (i.e., something far longer than any human could check by hand), you’re putting a huge amount of trust in the correctness of the theorem-proving-software itself.

calef Feb 25, 2015, 9:54 PM
−1 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112
Perhaps because this might all be happening within the mirror, thus realizing both Harry!Riddle’s and Voldy!Riddle’s CEVs simultaneously.

calef Feb 24, 2015, 8:16 PM
6 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 110
It seems like Mirror-Dumbledore acted in accordance with exactly what Voldemort wanted to see. In fact, Mirror-Dumbledore didn’t even reveal any information that Voldemort didn’t already know or suspect.

Odds of Dumbledore actually being dead?

calef Feb 23, 2015, 3:34 AM
26 points
on: How to debate when authority is questioned, but really not needed?
Honestly, the only “winning” strategy here is to not argue with people on the comments sections of political articles.

If you must, try and cast the argument in a way that avoids the standard red tribe / blue tribe framing. Doing this can be hard because people generally aren’t in the business of having politics debate with an end goal of dissolving an issue—they just want to signal their tribe—hence why arguing on the internet is often a waste of time.

As to the question of authority: how would you expect the conversation to go if you were an economist?

Me: I think money printing by the Fed will cause inflation if they continue like this.

Random commenter: Are you an economist?

Me: Yes actually, I have a PhD in The Economy from Ivy League University.

Random commenter (possible response 1): I don’t believe you, and continue to believe what I believe.

Random commenter (possible response 2): Oh well that’s one of the (Conservative / Liberal) (pick one) schools, they’re obviously wrong and don’t know what they’re talking about.

Random commenter (possible response 3): Economists obviously don’t know what they’re talking about.

Again, it’s a mix of Dunning-Kruger and tribal signalling. There’s not actually any direction an appeal-to-authority debate can go that’s productive because the challenger has already made up their mind about the facts being discussed.

For a handful of relevant lesswrong posts: http://lesswrong.com/lw/axn/6_tips_for_productive_arguments/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3k/how_to_not_lose_an_argument/

calef

Typ­i­cal Sneer Fallacy

Typical Sneer Fallacy