Jameson Quinn

• Jameson QuinnJul 22, 2020, 5:42 PM

  3 points

  on: [AN #109]: Teach­ing neu­ral nets to gen­er­al­ize the way hu­mans would

  This seems to be unreadably mis-formatted for me in Safari.

• Jameson QuinnJul 22, 2020, 5:37 PM

  12 points

  on: Swiss Poli­ti­cal Sys­tem: More than You ever Wanted to Know (II.)

  Thank you.

  Bit of trivia on Switzerland and voting methods: I’ve heard (but have not seen primary sources for) that in 1798 the briefly-independent city-state of Geneva used the median-based voting method we anachronously know as “Bucklin” after its US-based reinventor. This was at the (posthmous) suggestion of the Marquis de Condorcet. Notably that suggestion was not to use what we know of as “Condorcet” voting, as that would have been logistically too complex for the time.

  Also, if I’m not mistaken, Swiss municipal councils use a biproportional voting method; one of the only such methods in public use.

  In other words, Switzerland, like Sweden, is a place for interesting voting methods.

• Jameson QuinnJul 22, 2020, 5:23 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.5.3: Added “Bringing it all together” (85% complete)

[not on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

• Jameson QuinnJul 22, 2020, 12:50 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Version 0.5.2: Added “Equalizing voter power” and “Measuring “Representation quality”, separate from power” sections.

• Jameson QuinnJul 21, 2020, 1:43 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Done.

• Jameson QuinnJul 20, 2020, 9:05 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Thomas Sepulchre’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  I rewrote the article to incorporate your contribution. I think you’d be interested to read what I added afterwards discussing this idea.

• Jameson QuinnJul 20, 2020, 8:57 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Ping 2.5 of 3; that is, unexpectedly, I got input that superceded the old ping 2 of 3, and I’ve now incorporated it.

• Jameson QuinnJul 20, 2020, 8:55 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Rewritten to reflect Thomas Sepulchre’s contribution. Which is awesome, by the way.

  Or in other words...

  V 0.5.1: the main changes since the previous version 0.5.0 are a complete rewrite of the “Tentative Answer” section based on a helpful comment by a reader here, with further discussion of that solution; including the new Shorter “Solution” Statement subsection. I also added a sketch to visualize the loss I’m using.

• Jameson QuinnJul 20, 2020, 6:57 PM

  11 points

  on: The Credit As­sign­ment Problem

  (Comment rewritten from scratch after comment editor glitched.)

  This article is not about what I expected from the title. I’ve been thinking about “retroactively allocating responsibility”, which sounds a lot like “assigning credit”, in the context of multi-winner voting methods: which voters get credit for ensuring a given candidate won? The problem here is that in most cases no individual voter could change their vote to have any impact whatsoever on the outcome; in ML terms, this is a form of “vanishing gradient”. The solution I’ve arrived at was suggested to me here; essentially, it’s imposing a (random) artificial order on the inputs, then using a model to reason about the “worst”-possible outcome after any subset of the inputs, and giving each of the inputs “credit” for the change in that “worst” outcome.

  I’m not sure if this is relevant to the article as it stands, but it’s certainly relevant to the title as it stands.

• Jameson QuinnJul 17, 2020, 6:13 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: Thomas Sepulchre’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Nice. Thank you!!!

  This corresponds to the Shapley-Shubik index. I had previously discounted this idea but after your comment I took another look and I think it’s the right answer. So I’m sincerely grateful to you for this comment.

  What links here?

  • Ben Pace's comment on Weighted Vot­ing De­lenda Est by Czynski (Mar 3, 2021, 7:13 AM; 8 points)
  • Vaniver's comment on Weighted Vot­ing De­lenda Est by Czynski (Mar 3, 2021, 10:43 PM; 2 points)

• Jameson QuinnJul 17, 2020, 9:27 AM

  1 point

  on: What should be the topic of my LW mini-talk this Sun­day (July 18th)?

  I thik I’m gonna do something about why high-dimensional is hard. I’ll mention the voting context, but mostly discuss the problem in abstract.

• Jameson QuinnJul 16, 2020, 4:53 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Clas­sifi­ca­tion of AI al­ign­ment re­search: de­con­fu­sion, “good enough” non-su­per­in­tel­li­gent AI al­ign­ment, su­per­in­tel­li­gent AI alignment

  This is very well-said, but I still want to dispute the possibility of “perfect alignment”. In your clustering analogy: the very existence of clusters presupposes definitions of entities-that-correspond-to-points, dimensions-of-the-space-of-points, and measurements-of-given-points-in-given-dimensions. All of those definitions involve imperfect modeling assumptions and simplifications. Your analogy also assumes that a normal-mixture-model is capable of perfectly capturing reality; I’m aware that this is provably asymptotically true for an infinite-cluster Dirichlet process mixture, but we don’t live in asymptopia and in reality it is effectively yet another strong assumption that holds at best weakly.

  In other words, while I agree with (and appreciate your clear expression of) your main point that it’s possible to have a well-defined category without being able to do perfect categorization, I dispute the idea that it is possible even in theory to have a perfectly-defined one.

[Question] What should be the topic of my LW mini-talk this Sun­day (July 18th)?

• Jameson QuinnJul 16, 2020, 2:07 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Ping 2 of 3

• Jameson QuinnJul 16, 2020, 2:05 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  OK, I think I’m “over the hump”. That is, there’s still plenty left to write and plenty of details left to work out, but I think that an ideal reader could begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, could begin to grasp the overall scale and shape of what I’m trying to do here. I’m going to ping again.

• Jameson QuinnJul 15, 2020, 2:45 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Key to strange punctuation I use: “((...))” are technical notes that you can safely skip if you don’t understand; the extra parens are to emphasize the skippability. ”))(...)((” are digressions that break the narrative flow, but are actually important; the inner normal parens are to mark digression and the doubled outer reverse parens are to mark importance.

  Also I wrote TLD̦R instead of TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) because on my keyboard the semicolon is a dead key that combines with space or enter to be an ordinary semicolon but combines with letters to add accents. I think making TLD̦R one character shorter is in the spirit of TL;DR.

• Jameson QuinnJul 15, 2020, 3:27 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  Beginning “a proposed solution” but it’s slow going — haven’t actually gotten to the solution part of the solution yet. Also wrote a bit more above on what “MSE” means in this context — it’s less intiutive than you might think when you first read the acronym.

• Jameson QuinnJul 14, 2020, 11:55 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: (an­swered: yes) Has any­one writ­ten up a con­sid­er­a­tion of Downs’s “Para­dox of Vot­ing” from the per­spec­tive of MIRI-ish de­ci­sion the­o­ries (UDT, FDT, or even just EDT)?

  Consider a 2-option election, with 2N voters, each of whom has probability p of choosing the first option. If p is a fixed number, then as N goes to infinity, (chances of an exact tie times N) go to 0 if N isn’t exactly .5, and to infinity if it is. Since the event of p is exactly .5 has measure 0, this model supports the paradox of voting (PoV).

  But! If p itself is drawn from an ordinary continuous distribution with nonzero probability density d around .5, then (chances of an exact tie times N) go to … I think it’s just d/​2. Maybe there’s some correction factor that comes into play for bizarre distributions of p, but if we make the conventional assumption that it’s beta-distributed, then d/​2 is the answer.

  I think that the PoV literature is relying on the “fixed p” model. I think the “uncertain p” model is more realistic, but it’s still worth engaging with “fixed p” and seeing the implications of those assumptions.

• Jameson QuinnJul 7, 2020, 2:07 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: (an­swered: yes) Has any­one writ­ten up a con­sid­er­a­tion of Downs’s “Para­dox of Vot­ing” from the per­spec­tive of MIRI-ish de­ci­sion the­o­ries (UDT, FDT, or even just EDT)?

  That book is from 2006. I understand that it deals with the Paradox of Voting, but does it have anything that would be directly relevant to considering it in light of “acausal decision theories”? As far as I know, such theories pretty much didn’t exist back then.