DilGreen

Karma: 166

DilGreen Jul 12, 2016, 11:50 AM
5 points
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in reply to: Yvain2’s comment on: Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
It’s been a few years, but the answer is now—yes. Here’s a link to a New Scientist article from earlier this year. I’m afraid there’s a pay barrier: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083706-my-minds-eye-is-blind-so-whats-going-on-in-my-brain/ The article documents recent experiments and thinking about people who are poor or incapable (about 2 to 3% report this) of forming mental pictures (as opposed to manipulating concepts). Key quote:

To find out how MX’s brain worked, Zeman put him into an MRI scanner and showed him pictures of people he was likely to recognise, including former UK prime minister Tony Blair. The visual areas towards the back of his brain lit up in distinctive patterns as expected. However, when MX was asked to picture Blair’s face in his mind’s eye, those areas were silent. In other words, the visual circuits worked when they had a signal from the outside world, but MX couldn’t switch them on at will (Neuropsychologia, vol 48, p 145).

Test yourself here: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/MarksVVIQ.htm

DilGreen Oct 13, 2010, 12:49 AM
0 points
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in reply to: Caledonian2’s comment on: Excluding the Supernatural

No sane, rational, and sufficiently-educated person puts forward arguments incompatible with science.

The problem with this statement is that it puts 99.999% of everyone ‘beyond the pale’. It disallows meaningful conversations about things which have huge functional impacts on all humans, but about which science has little of use or coherence to say. It cripples conversation about things which our current science deems impossible, without allowing for the certainty that key aspects of what is currently accepted science will be superseded in the future.

In other words, it is an example of a reasonable sounding thing to say that is almost perfectly useless. You have argued yourself into a box.

I would suggest that no sane, rational and sufficiently-educated person ascribes zero probability to irrational seeming propositions.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 2:05 PM
9 points
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in reply to: Caledonian2’s comment on: Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words

Infants do not possess many inborn categories, if they have any at all. They perceive the world as directly as their senses permit. But they do not remain this way for long.

This seems to be objectively untrue. Many ingenious experiments with very young children forcefully suggest a wide range of inborn categories, including faces,. There is even evidence that male and female children pay different attention to different categories long before they can talk.

Further, there is strong evidence that children have inborn expectations of relationships between sensory input. The physics of the eye ensures that images focussed on the retina are upside-down, and experiment shows that, for a few days, this is how the world is perceived. But babies learn to invert the image, so that it tallies with reality. This happens automatically, and within days—presumably through some hard-wired expectation of the interrelation between senses—eg proprioception and sight.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 1:09 PM
7 points
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in reply to: David’s comment on: Planning Fallacy
As an architect and sometime builder, as an excellent procrastinator, I heartily concur with this comment.

The range of biases, psychological and ‘structural’ factors at work is wide. Here are a few:
- ‘tactical optimism’ : David Bohm’s term for the way in which humans overcome the (so far) inescapable assessment that; ‘in the long run, we’re all dead’. Specifically, within the building industry, rife with non-optimal ingrained conditions, you wouldn’t come to work if you weren’t an optimist. Builders who cease to have an optimistic outlook go and find other things to do.
- maintaining flexibility has benefits: non-trivial projects have hidden detail. It often happens that spending longer working around the project—at the expense of straight-ahead progress—can lead to higher quality at the end, as delayed completion has allowed a more elegant/efficient response to inherent, but unforeseen problems.
- self-application of pressure: as someone tending to procrastinate, I know that I sometimes use ambitious deadlines in order to attempt to manage myself—especially if I can advertise that deadline—as in the study
- deadline/sanction fatigue: if the loss incurred for missing deadlines is small, or alternatively if it is purely psychological, then the ‘weight’ of time pressure is diminished with each failure.
I’m going to stop now, before I lose the will to live.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 12:23 PM
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on: Magical Categories
So many of the comments here seem designed to illustrate the extreme difficulty, even for intelligent humans interested in rationality, and trying hard to participate usefully in a conversation about hard-edged situations of perceived non-trivial import, to avoid fairly simplistic anthropomorphisms of one kind or another.

Saying, of a supposed super-intelligent AI—one that works by being able to parallel, somehow, the ‘might as well be magic’ bits of intelligence that we currently have at best a crude assembly of speculative guesses for—any version of “of course, it would do X”, seems - well—foolish.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 12:16 PM
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in reply to: Dan_Burfoot’s comment on: Magical Categories
Whether or not the AI finds the abstraction of human happiness to be pertinent, and whether it considers increasing it to be worthwhile sacrificing other possible benefits for, are unpredictable, unless we have succeeded in achieving EY’s goal of pre-destining the AI to be Friendly.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 12:08 PM
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in reply to: Shane_Legg’s comment on: Magical Categories
Surely the discussion is not about the issue of whether an AI will be able to be sophisticated in forming abstractions—if it is of interest, then presumably it will be.

But the concern discussed here is how to determine beforehand that those abstractions will be formed in a context characterised here as Friendly AI. The concern is to pre-ordain that context before the AI achieves superintelligence.

Thus the limitations of communicating desirable concepts apply.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 11:48 AM
21 points
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in reply to: Tim_Tyler’s comment on: Magical Categories
A utility function measured in dollars seems fairly unambiguously to lead to decisions that are non-optimal for humans, without a sophisticated understanding of what dollars are.

Dollars mean something for humans because they are tokens in a vast, partly consensual and partially reified game. Economics, which is our approach to developing dollar maximising strategies, is non-trivial.

Training an AI to understand dollars as something more than data points would be similarly non-trivial to training an AI to faultlessly assess human happiness.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 2:42 AM
5 points
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in reply to: Tim_Tyler’s comment on: Surprised by Brains
Surely this is not an example of search-space compression, but an example of local islands of fitness within the space? Evolution does not ‘make observations’, or proceed on the basis of abstractions.

An even number of legs ‘works best’ precisely for the creatures who have evolved in the curtailed (as opposed to compressed) practical search space of a local maxima. This is not a proof that an even number of legs works best, period.

Once bilateral symmetry has evolved, the journey from bilateralism to any other viable body plan is simply too difficult to traverse. Nature DOES search the fringes of the space of centipedes with an odd number of legs- all the time.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/pl_arts_mutantbugs/

That space just turns out to be inhospitable, time and time again. One day, under different conditions, it might not.

BTW, I am not claiming, either, that it is untrue that an even number of legs works best—simply that the evolution of creatures with even numbers of legs and any experimental study showing that even numbers of legs are optimal are two different things. Mutually reinforcing, but distinct.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 2:20 AM
9 points
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in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Surprised by Brains
This comment crystallised for me the weirdness of this whole debate (I’m not picking sides, or even imagining that I have the capacity to do so intelligently).

In the spirit of the originating post, imagine two worms are discussing the likely characteristics of intelligent life, some time before it appears (I’m using worms as early creatures with brains, allowing for the possibility that intelligence is a continuum—that worms are as far from humans as humans are from some imagined AI that has foomed for a day or two);

Worm1: I tell you it’s really important to consider the possibility that these “intelligent beings” might want all the dead leaf matter for themselves, and wriggle much faster than us, with better sensory equipment.....

Worm2: But why can’t you see that, as super intelligent beings, they will understand the cycle of life, from dead leaves, to humous, to plants and back again. It is hard to imagine that they won’t understand that disrupting this flow will be sub-optimal....

I cannot imagine how, should effective AI come into existence, these debates will not seem as quaint as those ‘how many angels would fit onto the head of a pin’ ones that we fondly ridicule.

The problem is, that the same people who were talking about such ridiculous notions were also: laying the foundation stones of western philosophical thinking; preserving and transmitting classical texts; developing methodologies that eventually underpin the scientific method—and they didn’t distinguish between them!

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 2:02 AM
3 points
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in reply to: Will_Pearson’s comment on: Surprised by Brains
The space of possible gene combinations is not compressible—under the evolutionary mechanism.

The space of behaviours of Turing machines is not compressible, in the terms in which that compression has been envisaged.

The mechanism that compresses search space that Believer posits is something to do with brains; something to do with intelligence. And it works—we know it does; Kekule works on the structure of benzene without success; sleeps, dreams of a serpent biting its own tail, and waking, conceives of the benzene ring.

The mechanism (and everyone here believes that it is a mechanism) is currently mysterious. AI must possess this mechanism, or it will not be AI.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 1:52 AM
0 points
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on: Surprised by Brains
If nothing else, hugely entertaining, and covers a great deal of ground too.

DilGreen Oct 11, 2010, 12:35 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Will_Pearson’s comment on: The First World Takeover
Even a very small step forward in evolution, taken as a ‘short-cut’, would result in failure. - life changed the chemistry around it—headline is the relative abundance and influence of free oxygen relative to CO2.

The point is that the search is ALWAYS for near neighbour variants, and even then, the huge majority of these are failures.

The (seemingly) vastly improbable success of variants that are not near neighbours has, I think, to do with complexity and the concomitant law of unintended (in this context, ‘unwelcome’ would be a better word, since no intention is involved) consequences. The larger the step, the exponentially larger probability of corollary catastrophic implications.

DilGreen Oct 9, 2010, 11:34 PM
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in reply to: aausch’s comment on: Rationality quotes: October 2010
I imagine this is getting up-voted here in response to the sentiment, and I’m not going to vote it down. But this approach is more often used by deists against rationalists, and the next step is book-burning.

DilGreen Oct 9, 2010, 11:17 PM
−1 points
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in reply to: Jonathan_Graehl’s comment on: Rationality quotes: October 2010
The interesting thing about minds is that they are able to produce interesting conjunctions of and inferences from, seemingly unrelated data/experiences. Minds appear to be more than the sum of their experiences. This ability appears to defy the best efforts of coders to parallel.

EDIT: This got voted down, perhaps because of the above: it may be worth me stating that I am not posing a ‘mysterious question’ - the key words are ‘appears to’ - in other words, this is an aspect which needs significant further work..

I consider almost all code ‘banal’, in that almost all code ‘performs little computation of interest’. Pavitra clearly distinguishes between ‘interest’ and ‘value’.

Surely one way of looking at AI research is that it is an attempt to produce code that is not banal?

DilGreen Oct 9, 2010, 11:08 PM
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in reply to: Jonathan_Graehl’s comment on: Rationality quotes: October 2010
The implication is that connections between data are made by minds, and that minds that are not banal can make new and interesting connections between data.

DilGreen Oct 9, 2010, 10:14 PM
5 points
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in reply to: NihilCredo’s comment on: Rationality quotes: October 2010
from a European perspective, and simultaneously from the perspective of one who sees most state-sanctioned educational approaches as almost comically counter-productive, the idea that appears common in the US, that home schooled = fundamentalist christian parents is confusing. Many home educators in europe are specifically atheist.

DilGreen Oct 9, 2010, 9:47 PM
−4 points
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in reply to: magfrump’s comment on: The Irrationality Game
Um. I’ve still failed to be clear.

The nature of AI is that it is inherently sufficiently complex, that, although we may well be able to get better at predicting the kinds of characteristics that might result from implementation, the actuality of implementation will likely not just surprise us, but confound us.

I’m saying that any attempt to develop approaches that lead to Friendly AI , while they are surely interesting and as worthwhile as any other attempts to push understanding, cannot be relied on by implementers of AI as more than hopeful pointers.

It’s the relationship between the inevitable surprise and the attitude of researchers that is at the core of what I was trying to say, but having started out attempting to be contrarian, I’ve ended up risking appearing mean. I’m going to stop here.

DilGreen Oct 7, 2010, 2:40 PM
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in reply to: magfrump’s comment on: The Irrationality Game
I accept this analysis of what I wrote. In the attempt to be concise, I haven’t really said what I meant very clearly.

I don’t mean that “we can’t say anything about AI”, but what I am saying is that we are a very long way from being able to say anything particularly worth saying about AI.

By which I mean to say that we are in some situation analogous to that of a 19th century weather forecaster, trying to predict the following week’s weather. It’s worth pushing the quality of the tools and the analysis, but don’t expect any useful, real-world applicable information for a few lifetimes. And my confidence goes up the more I think about it.

Which, in the context of the audience of LW, I hoped would be seen as more contrarian than it has been! Perhaps this clarification will help.

DilGreen Oct 7, 2010, 2:28 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: I need to understand more about...
Well, I promised I wouldn’t, so I won’t, but there are lots of broad statements without justification here, that I would love to expand.

Nevertheless my actual question is being answered, if you and SarahC are at all representative (obviously, I understand that many other opinions will exist). Climate change IS seen as a serious threat, but the idea of changing lifestyles/direction of industrilaisation is seen variously as difficult/impossible/not objectively worthwhile—so we’ll deal with the consequences as they arise.