JohnDavidBustard

Karma: 159

JohnDavidBustard Oct 14, 2010, 10:34 PM
3 points
on: Strategies for dealing with emotional nihilism
I suggest just getting some casual exercise or watching some good films and tv shows. They’re full of emotionally motivating experiences.

I think there is a worrying tendency to promote puritan values on LW. I personally see no moral problem with procrastination, or even feeling bad every so often. I feel worried that I might not hit deadlines or experience some practical consequence from not working on a task but I wouldn’t want to add moral guilt. I think if people lose sight of the pleasures in life they become nihilistic which in turn leads them to be selfish and cruel as an expression of their pain.

If you can feel good about yourself and recognise that the positive playful fun that can come with idle pleasures might actually be the point. They represent the one value system that does seem pretty sensible. If you can enjoy them, you can feel the emotional energy to be nice and supportive to others. I certainly don’t want a friendly AI enforcing the morality of anti-procrastination, anti-unhealthy eating, anti-indulgence or any other form of self flagellating self improvement. Lets just be supportive of one another and try to have a good time.

JohnDavidBustard Oct 14, 2010, 10:14 PM
0 points
on: Recommended Reading for Friendly AI Research
I am sure these are interesting references for studying pure mathematics but do they contribute significantly to solving AI?

In particular, it is interesting that none of your references mention any existing research on AI. Are there any practical artificial intelligence problems that these mathematical ideas have directly contributed towards solving?

E.g. Vision, control, natural language processing, automated theorem proving?

While there is a lot of focus on specific, mathematically defined problems on LessWrong (usually based on some form of gambling), there seems to be very little discussion of the actual technical problems of GAI or a practical assessment of progress towards solving them. If this site is really devoted to rationality should we not at least define our problem and measure progress towards its solution. Otherwise we risk being merely a mathematical social club, or worse, a probability based religion?

JohnDavidBustard Oct 3, 2010, 8:36 PM
0 points
on: Which parts of philosophy are worth studying from a pragmatic perspective?
I’m not sure of the merit of studying philosophy as opposed to just personally thinking about philosophical ideas. For me, the most profound pragmatic benefit has been to deeply alter my own psychology as a result of examining ideas like free-will and morality. I had a lot of unexamined assumptions and strongly felt conventions and taboos that I managed to overcome through examining my own feelings in a philosophical way. This is very different from the kind of learnt understanding that can be obtained by reading other peoples ideas. I think it is very common for people to parrot philosophical statements without them actually altering a persons behaviour in any significant way. In particular, I find a lot of classic philosophy unsatisfying as it seems much less relevant in our society. I think this is particularly the case if you adopt a science is enough to explain everything and the brain is a computer perspective. I’d love to read some philosophy that gave me a new and distinct perspective that might alter my priorities, and thus my behaviour, but I have yet to read such material. The closest I’ve encountered would be status anxiety which helpfully reframes classic philosophical statements concerning status and value in a modern context. This really brought home the extent to which our values are culturally specific. This helped me to pursue my life with my own priorities, as well as giving me the perspective to enable me to examine what I actually value. In that sense I consider these philosophical ideas to be much more practically useful to determining my life than any piece of technical or theoretical understanding.

JohnDavidBustard Oct 3, 2010, 3:29 PM
1 point
on: Do you believe in consciousness?
Each time a question like this comes up it seems to get down voted as a bad question. I think it’s a great question, just one for which there are no obviously satisfactory answers. Dennet’s approach seems to be to say, if you just word things differently its all fine, nothing to see here. But to me this is a weird avoiding of the question.

We feel there is a difference between living things and inanimate ones. We believe that other people and some animals are feeling things that are similar to the feelings we have. Many people would find it absurd to think that devices or machines were feeling anything. Yet whatever computational model of our minds we create, it is hard to identify the point at which it starts to feel. It is easy to create a virtual character that appears to feel but most people doubt that it is doing any more than simulating feelings, similar to the inauthentic patterns of behaviour we form when we are acting or lying. I think one can imagine what life would feel like to be constantly acting, performing reasoned interactions without sincere emotion, if at heart we are computational why does all interaction not feel this way?

To me this distinction is what makes consciousness distinct and special. I think it is a fascinating consequence of a certain pattern of interacting systems. Implying that conscious feelings occur all over the place, perhaps every feedback system is feeling something.

My justification for this theory is an attempt to provide a simple explanation of the origin of conscious experience, based on a belief that explanations should be simple and lack special cases (I don’t find the idea that human beings are fundamentally distinct from other structures particularly elegant).

JohnDavidBustard Oct 3, 2010, 2:57 PM
0 points
on: Automated theorem proving
There have been (and continue to be) many approaches to this, in fact the term Good old fashioned AI basically refers to this. It is very interesting that significant progress has not been made with this approach. This has led to greater use of statistical techniques, such as support vector machines or Bayesian networks. A basic difficulty with any approach to AI is that many techniques merely change the problem of learning, generalisation and problem solving into another form rather than solving it. E.g. Formal methods for software development move the problem from that of programming to that of formal specification. It’s not clear that creating the specifications is any less error prone than the creation of the original program.

On the other hand there are enormous benefits to turning any knowledge into a form that a computer can manipulate. There has been some progress in doing this for mathematics. It is possibly one of the most depressing consequences of Godel’s theorem that there has not been more work in this area. Writing proofs informally on paper doesn’t get around Godel’s theorem, it just makes the work harder to validate.

It’s also a good challenge for those who feel that AI is just a matter of correctly applying Bayes theorem, as it is not clear how it could be applied to solve this problem.

JohnDavidBustard Oct 3, 2010, 2:23 PM
0 points
on: Proposal for a structured agreement tool
Has anyone encountered a formal version of this? I.e. a site for the creation of formal logical arguments. Users can create axioms, assign their confidence to them and structure arguments using them. Users can then see the logical consequences of their beliefs. I think it would make a very interesting format for turning debate into a competitive game, whose results are rigorous, machine readable, arguments.

JohnDavidBustard Oct 3, 2010, 1:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication
I think this comment highlights the distinction between popular and good.

High ranked posts are popular, good may or may not have anything to do with it.

Personally I find all this kowtowing to the old guard a bit distasteful. One of my favorite virtues of academia is the double blind submissions process. Perhaps there are similar approaches that could be taken here.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 22, 2010, 12:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: The Meaning of Life
Interesting points.

I suspect that predicting the economy with economics is like predicting a persons behaviour from studying their biology. My desire for wisdom is in the form of perspective, I want to know the rough landscape of the economy (like the internal workings of a body).

For example I have little grasp of the industries contributing most to GDP or the taxes within my (or any other) country. In terms of government spending this site provides a nice overview for the UK, but it is only the start. I would love to know the chain of businesses and systems that provide the products I use each day. In particular, I’m very interested in the potential for technologically supported self sufficiency as a means for providing a robust underpinning to society. To do this effectively its necesary to understand the systems that we depend upon.

While such understanding might not enable prediction, I think it does provide perspective on potential opportunities and threats (just as biology does). It also helps to focus on relative importance, similar to how concentrating on cash flow helps prioritise business decisions. E.g. the social equivalent of worrying about too much paper usage in office printers when there are entire business units that aren’t profitable. Or similarly, being blind to opportunities that could render many other problems irrelevant (such as easy self sufficiency reducing the necesity for potentially problematic government infrastructure).

JohnDavidBustard Sep 22, 2010, 8:25 AM
0 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears
I fear this would reduce LessWrong to referencing research papers. Perhaps there is more value in applying rigor as disagreements emerge. I.e. a process of going from two people flatly disagreeing to establishing criteria to choose between them. I.e. a norm concerning a process for reaching reasonable conclusions on a controversial topic. In this way there would be greater emphasis on turning ambiguous issues into reasonable ones. Which I view as one of the main benefits of rationality.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 19, 2010, 5:42 PM
4 points
in reply to: multifoliaterose’s comment on: The Meaning of Life
Thank you, I also agree with your comments on your posting. I generally prefer a balance of pragmatic action with theory. In fact, I view the ‘have a go’ approach to theoretical understanding to be very useful as well. I think just roughly listing ones thoughts on a topic and then categorising them can be very revealing and really help provide perspective. I recently had a go at my priorities (utility function) and came up with the following:
- To be loved
- To be wise
- To create things that I am proud of
- To be entertained
- To be respected
- To be independent (ideally including being safe, relatively healthy and financially secure)
This is probably not perfect but it is something to build on (and a list I wouldn’t mind a friendly AI optimising for either).

Also, as with the positive effects mentioned in your article, I’ve found giving to charity makes it easier for me to feel love (or at least friendship) towards others and to feel more cared for in return (perhaps simply because giving to charity makes me slightly nicer towards everyone I meet).

My current focus is wisdom, I feel uncomfortable that I don’t have perspective on problems in society or the structure of the economy (i.e. how my quality of life is maintained). When I mention these ideas to others their reaction is generally to describe the problems as being too hard or impossible, I think this is a very interesting form of rationality failure, because the same people would go to enormous lengths to construct a solution to a technical problem if they were told it was not possible. Why don’t creative, intellectual and rational people apply their problem solving skills to these kinds of issues? Why don’t they ‘have a go’?

JohnDavidBustard Sep 19, 2010, 4:27 PM
1 point
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Rationality Power Tools
True, in fact despite my comments I am optimistic of the potential for progress in some of these areas. I think one significant problem is the inability to collaborate on improving them. For example, research projects in robotics are hard to build on because replicating them requires building an equivalent robot, which is often impractical. The robocup is a start as at least it has a common criteria to measure progress with. I think a standardised simulator would help (with challenges that can be solved and shared within it) but even more useful would be to create robot designs that could be printed with a 3D printer (plus some assembly like lego) so that progress could be rapidly shared. I realise this is much less capable than human machinery but I feel there is a lot further to go with the software and AI side.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 19, 2010, 3:45 PM
1 point
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Rationality Power Tools
The real difficulty with both these control problems is that we lack a theory for how to ensure the stability of learning based control systems. Systems that appear stable can self destruct after a number of iterations. A number of engineering projects have attempted to incorporate learning. However, because of a few high profile disasters, such systems are generally avoided.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 19, 2010, 12:05 PM
2 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Rationality Power Tools
In terms of emulation, the resolution is currently good enough to identify molecules communicating across synapses. This enables an estimate of synapse strengths as well as a full wiring diagram of physical nerve shape. There are emulators for the electrical interactions of these systems. Also our brains are robust enough that significant brain damage and major chemical alteration (ecstasy etc.) are recoverable from, so if anything brains are much more robust than electronics. AI, in contrast, has real difficulty achieving anything but very specific problem areas which rarely generalise. For example, we cannot get a robot to walk and run in a robust way (BigDog is a start but it will be a while before its doing martial arts), we can’t create a face recognition algorithm that matches human performance. We can’t even make a robotic arm that can dynamically stabilise an arbitrary weight (i.e. pick up a general object reliably). All our learning algorithms have human tweaked parameters to achieve good results and hardly any of them can perform online learning beyond the constrained manually fed training data used to construct them. As a result there are very few commercial applications of AI that operate unaided (i.e. not as a specific tool equivalent to a word processor ). I would love to imagine otherwise, but I don’t understand where the confidence in AI performance is coming from. Does anyone even have a set of partial Turing-test like steps that might lead to an AI (dangerous or otherwise).

JohnDavidBustard Sep 19, 2010, 10:48 AM
4 points
on: The Meaning of Life
I really like this post. It touches on two topics that I am very interested in:

How society shapes our values (domesticates us)

and

What should we value (what is the meaning of life?)

I find the majority of discussions extremely narrow, focusing on details while rarely attempting to provide perspective. Like doing science without a theory, just performing lots of specific experiments without context or purpose.

1 Why are things the way they are and why do we value the things we value? A social and psychological focus, Less Wrong touches on these issues but appears focused on specific psychological studies rather than any overall perspective (I suspect this would start to touch on politics and so would not be discussed). I think our understanding of the system we are a part of significantly shapes our sense of meaning and purpose and, as a result, strongly influences our society.

I would go so far as to suggest we are psychologically incapable of pursuing goals that are inconsistent with our understanding of how the universe functions (sorry Clippy), i.e. if we are selfish gene darwinists we will value winning and reproductive success. If we have a Confucian belief that the universe is a conflict between order and chaos we will pursue social stability and tradition. I have my own take on this for those who are interested (How we obtain our values, the meaning of life)

2 What problems do we want to solve? It seems much easier to find problems to solve than goals to obtain. A recent post about Charity mentioned GiveWell. This organisation at least evaluates whether progress is made but as far as I am aware there is no economics of suffering no utilitarian (or otherwise) analysis of the relative significance of different problems. Is a destructive AI worse than global warming, or cancer or child abuse or obesity or terrorism. Is there a rational means to evaluate this for a given utility function? Has anyone tried? (this is an area I’m looking into so any links would be greatly appreciated)

3 What can we do? Within instrumental rationality and related fields there are a lot of discussions of actions to achieve improvements in capability. Likewise for charity, lots of good causes. However there seems to be relatively little discussion of what is likely to be achieved as a result of the action, as if any progress is justification enough to focus on it. For example, what will be the difference in quality of life if I pursue a maximally healthy lifestyle vs a typical no exercise slacker life. In particular, do I want to die of a heart attack or cancer and alzheimers (which given my family history are the two ways I’m likely to go). If we had a realistic assessment of return on investment, as well as how psychologically likely we are to achieve things, we could focus our actions rationally.

I suggest that if we know how things work, what the problems are and what we can do about them, then we have a pretty good start on the meaning of life. I am frequently frustrated by the lack of perspective on these issues, we seem culturally conditioned to focus on action and specific theoretical points rather than trying to get a handle on it all. Of course that might be more fun, and that might be a sensible utility function. But for my own peace of mind I’d like to check there isn’t an alternative.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 16, 2010, 10:59 PM
2 points
in reply to: Relsqui’s comment on: The Affect Heuristic, Sentiment, and Art
I think this section of your post is part of what makes me feel bad about your comment. The reason I said I like it, is because I think it’s important that people can talk about these things and the fact that your comments affect me in that way highlights that they are important to me.

I would have worded this more strongly, myself. In my experience, people who are themselves inclined towards reasoned debate, even civilly, drastically overestimate how much other people are also inclined towards debate and argument.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I don’t think I drastically overestimate others’ interest in debate, I’m painfully aware of how much hostility there is to making direct statements about even slightly controversial issues. When I talk that way with others, I’m not doing it to fit in, I’m doing it because I want to and because I feel driven to. I feel frustrated at having a different personality from the majority and don’t view others lifestyles as inherently more legitimate than my own. In particular, I have a desire to understand why society and my community works as it does. I feel there is a great deal of unspoken social dynamics and traditions which act as a mask to unjustified status hierarchies and passive aggressive conflict. I love the directness of reasoned argument because I feel that it is basically fair. It can quickly sear away self delusions and unjustified assumptions, getting to a lasting truth. A truth that while unpalatable is, at its best, independent of who has said it and how it has been said. Avoiding the undesirable (for me at least) political maneuvering that seems to dominate so much of society.

For me, I’m looking for a community which is honest and fearless with itself and others. I’m less interested in productivity or instrumental rationality than simply being able to discuss issues in a direct way so that I can get a better understanding of them for my own satisfaction. Without this opportunity, I feel I am engaging in a social dance that never satisfies my desire to find what is true and what is important.

In terms of a neutral opposite something like:

Psychologically accommodating

might be good. It emphasises the fact that the communication is designed to be easy to absorb without implying manipulation. Both sound like they would be useful and both subtly imply their weaknesses (i.e. insult and compromise).

Oh and I should add, I like your forest : )

JohnDavidBustard Sep 16, 2010, 9:08 PM
1 point
in reply to: satt’s comment on: Bayes’ rule =/= Bayesian inference
Thank you, that’s very interesting, and comforting.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 16, 2010, 7:23 PM
1 point
in reply to: satt’s comment on: Bayes’ rule =/= Bayesian inference
Thank you, this is very interesting. I’m not sure of the etiquette, but I’m reposting a question from an old article, that I would really appreciate your thoughts on.

Is it correct, to say that the entropy prior is a consequence of creating an internally consistent formalisation of the aesthetic heuristic of preferring simpler structures to complex ones?

If so I was wondering if it could be extended to reflect other aesthetics. For example, if an experiment produces a single result that is inconsistent with an existing simple physics theory, it may be that the simplest theory that explains this data is to treat this result as an isolated exception, however, aesthetically we find it more plausible that this exception is evidence of a larger theory that the sample is one part of.

In contrast when attempting to understand the rules of a human system (e.g. a bureaucracy) constructing a theory that lacked exceptions seems unlikely (“that’s a little too neat”). Indeed when stated informally the phrase might go “in my experience, that’s a little too neat” implying that we formulate priors based on learned patterns from experience. In the case of the bureaucracy, this may stem from a probabilistic understanding of the types of system that result from a particular ‘maker’ (i.e. politics).

However, this moves the problem to one of classifying contexts and determining which contexts are relevant, if this process is considered part of the theory, then it may considerably increase its complexity always preferring theories which ignore context. Unless of course the theory is complete (incorporating all contexts) in which case the simplest theory may share these contextual models and thus become the universal simplest model. It would therefore not be rational to apply Kolmogorov complexity to a problem in isolation. I.e. probability and reductionism are not compatible.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 16, 2010, 6:53 PM
0 points
in reply to: TobyBartels’s comment on: Bayes’ rule =/= Bayesian inference
Is there a bound on the amount of data that is necessary to adjust a prior of a given error magnitude? Likewise, if the probability is the result of a changing system I presume it could well be the case that the pdf estimates will be consistently inaccurate as they are constantly adjusting to events whose local probability is changing. Does the Bayesian approach help, over say, model fitting to arbitrary samples? Is it, in effect, an example of a model fitting strategy no more reasonable than any other?

JohnDavidBustard Sep 16, 2010, 6:43 PM
−1 points
in reply to: DSimon’s comment on: Bayes’ rule =/= Bayesian inference
I suppose the question is, how to calculate the priors so they do make sense. In particular, how can an AI estimate priors. I’m sure there is a lot of existing work on this. The problem with making statements about priors that don’t have a formal process for their calculation is that there is no basis for comparing two predictions. In the worst case, by adjusting the prior the resulting probabilities can be adjusted to any value. Making the approach a formal technique which is potentially just hiding the unknowns in the priors. In effect being no more reasonable because the priors are a guess.

JohnDavidBustard Sep 16, 2010, 4:12 PM
8 points
in reply to: Relsqui’s comment on: The Affect Heuristic, Sentiment, and Art
I like your post because it makes me feel bad.

What I mean by that is that it gets at something really important that I don’t like. The problem is that I get more pleasure from debates than almost anything else. I search for people who don’t react in the intensely negative way you describe, and I find it hard to empathise with those that do. I don’t do this because I think one method is ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’ I just don’t enjoy trying to conform to others expectations and prefer to find others who can behave in the same way. I think for most people deep down, community is more important than ideology (or indeed achieving anything), but a community where you cannot be yourself is one in which you always feel uncomfortable, whether this is intellectually confrontational or indirect. Does anyone know of any other environments like Less Wrong where an intellectually direct way of communicating wont get you flamed to death?