endoself

Karma: 1,979

endoself Oct 6, 2013, 10:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: The Cause of Time
Yes, but this is a completely different matter than your original post. Obviously this is how we should handle this weird state of information that you’re constructing, but it doesn’t have the causal interpretation you give it. You are doing something, but it isn’t causal analysis. Also, in the scenario you describe, you have the association information, so you should be using it.

endoself Oct 6, 2013, 6:57 AM
0 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: The Cause of Time

Causal networks do not make an iid assumption.

Yeah, I guess that’s way too strong; there are a lot of alternative assumptions also that justify using them.

What is a sample? How do we know two numbers (or other strings) came from the same sample?

I think we just have to assume this problem solved. Whenever we use causal networks in practice, we know what a sample is. You can try to weaken this and see if you still get anything useful, but this is very different then ‘conditioning on time’ as you present in the post.

Since the association contains information separate from the values themselves, how can we incorporate that information into the framework explicitly?

Bayes theorem? If we have a strong enough prior and enough information to reverse-engineer the association reasonably well, then we might be able to learn something. If you’re running a clinical trial and you recorded which drugs were given out, but not to which patients, then you need other information, such as a prior about which side-effects they cause and measurements of side-effects that are associated with specific patients. Otherwise you just don’t have the data necessary to construct the model.

endoself Oct 6, 2013, 4:07 AM
3 points
on: The Cause of Time

In fact, in order to truly ignore time data, we cannot even order the points according to time! But that means that we no longer have any way to line up the points T0 with e0, T1 with e1, etc.

What? This makes no sense.

I guess you haven’t seen this stated explicitly, but the framework of causal networks makes an iid assumption. The idea is that the causal network represents some process that occurs a lot, and we can watch it occur until we get a reasonably good understanding of the joint distribution of variables. Part of this is that it the same process occurring, so there is no time dependence built into the framework.

For some purposes, we can model time by simply including it as an observed variable, which you do in this post. However, the different measurements of each variable are associated because they come from the same sample of the (iid) causal process, whether or not we are conditioning on time. The way you are trying to condition on time isn’t correct, and the correlation does exists in both cases. (Really, we care about dependence rather than correlation, but it doesn’t make a difference here.)

I do think that this is a useful general direction of analysis. If the question is meaningful at all, then the answer is probably that given by Armok_GoB in the original thread, but it would be useful to clarify what exactly the question means. There is probably a lot of work to be done before we really understand such things, but I would advise you to better understand the ideas behind causal networks before trying to contribute.

endoself Sep 26, 2013, 4:55 AM
5 points
in reply to: bokov’s comment on: What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren’t based on a misunderstanding of reality?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p2/hand_vs_fingers/

endoself Sep 26, 2013, 4:53 AM
1 point
in reply to: bokov’s comment on: What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren’t based on a misunderstanding of reality?

I, for one, have the terminal value of continued personal existence (a.k.a. being alive). On LW I’m learning that continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn’t there in the first place

I am confused about this as well. I think the right thing to do here is to recognize that there is a lot we don’t know about, e.g. personhood, and that there is a lot we can do to clarify our thinking on personhood. When we aren’t confused about this stuff anymore, we can look over it and decide what parts we really valued; our intuitive idea of personhood clearly describes something, even recognizing that a lot of the ideas of the past are wrong. Note also that we don’t gain anything by remaining ignorant (I’m not sure if you’ve realized this yet).

endoself Aug 28, 2013, 2:32 AM
2 points
in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: Lesswrong Philosophy and Personal Identity
Can you elaborate? This sounds interesting.

endoself Aug 8, 2013, 11:30 PM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: A summary of Savage’s foundations for probability and utility.
Neural signals represent things cardinally rather than ordinally, so those voting paradoxes probably won’t apply.

Even conditional on humans not having transitive preferences even in an approximate sense, I find it likely that it would be useful to come up with some ‘transativization’ of human preferences.

Agreed that there’s a good chance that game-theoretic reasoning about interacting submodules will be important for clarifying the structure of human preferences.

endoself Jul 26, 2013, 4:38 AM
1 point
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities
What’s wrong with the surreals? It’s not like we have reason to keep our sets small here. The surreals are prettier, don’t require an arbitrary nonconstructive ultrafilter, are more likely to fall out of an axiomatic approach, and can’t accidently end up being too small (up to some quibbles about Grothendieck universes).

endoself Jul 14, 2013, 7:51 AM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes
No, that’s not what I meant at all. In what you said, the agent needs to be separate from the system in order to preform do-actions. I want an agent that knows it’s an agent, so it has to have a self-model and, in particular, has to be inside the system that is modelled by our causal graph.

One of the guiding heuristics in FAI theory is that an agent should model itself the same way it models other things. Roughly, the agent isn’t actually tagged as different from nonagent things in reality, so any desired behaviour that depends on correctly making this distinction cannot be regulated with evidence as to whether it is actually making the distinction the way we want it to. A common example of this is the distinction between self-modification and creating a successor AI; an FAI should not need to distinguish these, since they’re functionally the same. These sorts of ideas are why I want the agent to be modelled within its own causal graph.

endoself Jul 9, 2013, 12:09 PM
7 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes

Look, HIV patients who get HAART die more often (because people who get HAART are already very sick). We don’t get to see the health status confounder because we don’t get to observe everything we want. Given this, is HAART in fact killing people, or not?

Well, of course I can’t give the right answer if the right answer depends on information you’ve just specified I don’t have.

You’re sort of missing what Ilya is trying to say. You might have to look at the actual details of the example he is referring to in order for this to make sense. The general idea is that even though we can’t observe certain variables, we still have enough evidence to justify the causal model where HAART leads to fewer people die, so we can conclude that we should prescribe it.

I would object to Ilya’s more general point though. Saying that EDT would use E(death|HAART) to determine whether to prescribe HAART is making the same sort of reference class error you discuss in the post. EDT agents use EDT, not the procedures used to A0 and A1 in the example, so we really need to calculate E(death|EDT agent prescribes HAART). I would expect this to produce essentially the same results as a Pearlian E(death | do(HAART)), and would probably regard it as a failure of EDT if it did not add up to the same thing, but I think that there is value in discovering how exactly this works out, if it does.

endoself Jul 9, 2013, 9:39 AM
4 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes
If you want to change what you want, then you’ve decided that your first-orded preferences were bad. EDT recognizing that it can replace itself with a better decision theory is not the same as it getting the answer right; the thing that makes the decision is not EDT anymore.

endoself Jul 8, 2013, 10:54 AM
7 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes

No. For example, AIXI is what I would regard as essentially a Bayesian agent, but it has a notion of causality because it has a notion of the environment taking its actions as an input.

This looks like a symptom of AIXI’s inability to self-model. Of course causality is going to look fundamental when you think you can magically intervene from outside the system.

Do you share the intuition I mention in my other comment? I feel that they way this post reframes CDT and TDT as attempts to clarify bad self-modelling by naive EDT is very similar to the way I would reframe Pearl’s positions as an attempt to clarify bad self-modelling by naive probability theory a la AIXI.

endoself Jul 8, 2013, 10:37 AM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes

These three causal graphs cannot be distinguished by the observational statistics. The causal information given in the problem is an essential part of its statement, and no decision theory which ignores causation can solve it.

I think this isn’t actually compatible with the thought experiment. Our hypothetical agent knows that it is an agent. I can’t yet formalize what I mean by this, but I think that it requires probability distributions corresponding to a certain causal structure, which would allow us to distinguish it from the other graphs. I don’t know how to write down a probability distribution that contains myself as I write it, but it seems that such a thing would encode the interventional information about the system that I am interacting with on a purely probabilistic level. If this is correct, you wouldn’t need a separate representation of causality to decide correctly.
What links here?
- endoself's comment on Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes by Qiaochu_Yuan (Jul 8, 2013, 10:54 AM; 7 points)

endoself Jul 8, 2013, 8:57 AM
4 points
on: Evidential Decision Theory, Selection Bias, and Reference Classes

UDT corresponds to something more mysterious

Don’t update at all, but instead optimize yourself, viewed as a function from observations to actions, over all possible worlds.

There are tons of details, but it doesn’t seem impossible to summarize in a sentence.

endoself Jul 4, 2013, 12:01 AM
11 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Progress on automated mathematical theorem proving?
I’d like to make explicit the connection of this idea to hard takeoff, since it’s something I’ve thought about before but isn’t stated explicitly very often. Namely, this provides some reason to think that by the time an AGI is human-level in the things humans have evolved to do, it will be very superhuman in things that humans have more difficulty with, like math and engineering.

endoself Jun 11, 2013, 9:40 AM
0 points
in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: Useful Concepts Repository
It provides a usefully concept, which can be carried over into other domains. I suppose there are other techniques that use a temperature, but I’m much less familiar with them and they are more complicated. Is understanding other metaheuristics more useful to people who aren’t actually writing a program preforms some optimization than just understanding simulated annealing?

endoself Jun 10, 2013, 9:20 PM
1 point
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Useful Concepts Repository
But it’s actually important to the example. If someone intends to allocate their time searching for small and large improvements to their life, then simulated annealing suggests that they should make more of the big ones first. (The person you describe has may not have done this, since they’ve settled into a local optimum but now decide to find a completely different point on the fitness landscape, though without more details it’s entirely possible they’ve decided correctly here.)

endoself Jun 10, 2013, 8:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Useful Concepts Repository
Your second paragraph could benefit from the concept of simulated annealing.

endoself Jun 6, 2013, 12:52 AM
2 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Prisoner’s Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament
I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean the scores given that you choose to cooperate and defect? There’s a lot of complexity hiding in ‘given that’, and we don’t understand a lot of it. This is definitely not a trivial fix to Lumifer’s program.

endoself Jun 5, 2013, 11:55 PM
7 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Prisoner’s Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament
Another problem is that you cooperate agains CooperateBot.