latanius

Karma: 364

latanius 28 Dec 2013 17:48 UTC
8 points
on: Doubt, Science, and Magical Creatures—a Child’s Perspective
… I did my fair share too, Santa vs. thin threads spun across the way between where the presents were supposed to emerge and the door… “stand back, I’m going to try Science” for the first time I remember.

Actually, it was a really nice experience not only about Science but also about how compartmentalization feels from the inside. I definitely remember thinking both that it’s my parents and that it’s some kind of mystical thingy, the only new thing that year was that these two aren’t supposed to coexist in the same world. Not surprisingly, it’s the very same feeling that I felt after being exposed to a semester of catholic middle school. Didn’t have a name for it then though...

latanius 4 Nov 2013 2:14 UTC
19 points
on: Halloween thread—rationalist’s horrors.
Martial arts training camp. Average sleep time was around 4 hours per day, also, guard shifts round the day, so sometimes it ended up being 2. So towards the end of the week I was quite… sleepy. And this seems to have an interesting effect on visual pattern recognition.

One day, me and another guy were standing guard, around 4 in the morning, the sun was just about to come up. Making circles around the countryside weekend house we were staying in, I noticed that some people appeared with a truck and started to pick grapes from the nearby field. I promptly went and reported it to the other guy, so I was pretty sure of this observation, until I went back, and...

the truck and the people somehow turned into grapes and new people appeared to pick them.

Later that week I actually made up a rule saying “the guy standing in front of the house is, regardless of how much he seems to move around, a tree”. Since I actually went there once and checked previously. Science over unreliable visual cortices...

latanius 26 Oct 2013 6:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open Thread, October 20 − 26, 2013
k2pdfopt. It slices up pdfs so that you can read them without zooming on a much narrower screen, and since its output pdfs are essentially images, it eats everything up to (and including )very math-heavy papers, regardless of the number of columns they have. Also, it works with scanned stuff too.

(And even though the output is a bit bigger than the originals, I didn’t encounter any problems with 600 page books… the result was about 50 megs tops.)

latanius 18 May 2013 16:53 UTC
8 points
on: Education control?
Possibly relevant: Sudbury schools, with the curriculum of “do whatever you want, as long as you’re in school, surrounded by interesting stuff”. Also, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn. It really seems that we are doing quite bad by default...

As it turns out, for example, kids are quite good at learning stuff from each other (including things like reading… “I can’t always get the big kids to read me stories, so I’d better go and learn this <> thing from them”...)

Now, find a way to prevent that from happening. Sorting kids by age and separating the groups? Perfect.

latanius 2 May 2013 3:48 UTC
11 points
in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013
Your “running different code” approach is nice… especially paired up with the notion of “how the algorithm feels from the inside”, seems to explain lots of things. You can read books about what that code does, but the best you can get is some low quality software emulation… meanwhile, if you’re running it, you don’t even pay attention to that stuff as this is what you are.

latanius 2 May 2013 3:39 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Adele_L’s comment on: Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013
Aren’t utility functions kind of… invariant to scaling and addition of a constant value?

That is, you can say that “I would like A more than B” but not “having A makes me happier than you would be having it”. Neither “I’m neither happy or unhappy, so me not existing wouldn’t change anything”. It’s just not defined.

Actually, the only place different people’s utility functions can be added up is in a single person’s mind, that is, “I value seeing X and Y both feeling well twice as much as just X being in such a state”. So “destroying beings with less than average utility” would appeal to those who tend to average utilities instead of summing them. And, of course, it also depends on what they think of those utility functions.

(that is, do we count the utility function of the person before or after giving them antidepressants?)

Of course, the additional problem is that no one sums up utility functions the same way, but there seems to be just enough correllation between individual results that we can start debates over the “right way of summing utiliity functions”.

latanius 2 May 2013 3:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ThereIsNoJustice’s comment on: Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013
You won. Aren’t rationalists supposed to be doing that?

As far as you know, your probability estimate for “you will win the lottery” (in your mind) was wrong. It is another question how that updates the probability of “you would win the lottery if you played next week”, but whatever made you buy that ticket (even though the “rational” estimates voted against it… “trying random things”, whatever it was) should be applied more in the future.

Of course, the result is quite likely to be “learning lots of nonsense from a measurement error”, but you should definitely should update having seen that, and a decision you use for updates causing that decision to be made more in the future is definitely a right one.

If I won the lottery, I would definitely spend $5 for another ticket. And eventually you might realize that it’s just Omega having fun. (actually, isn’t one-boxing the same question?)

latanius 19 Apr 2013 1:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013
… this is the thing I’ve been looking for! (I think I had some strange cached thought from who knows where that posts do not have comments feeds, so I didn’t even check… thanks for the update!)

latanius 16 Apr 2013 4:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013
Didn’t they do the same with set theory? You can derive a contradiction from the existence of “the set of sets that don’t contain themselves”… therefore, build a system where you just can’t do that.

(of course, coming from the axioms, it’s more like “it wasn’t ever allowed”, like in Kindly’s comment, but the “new and updated” axioms were invented specifically so that wouldn’t happen.)

latanius 16 Apr 2013 1:37 UTC
3 points
on: Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013
Is there a nice way of being notified about new comments on posts I found interesting / commented on / etc? I know there is a “comments” RSS feed, but it’s hard to filter out interesting stuff from there.

… or a “number of green posts” indicator near the post titles when listing them? (I know it’s a) takes someone to code it b) my gut feeling is that it would take a little more than usual resources, but maybe someone knows of an easier way of the same effect.)

latanius 16 Apr 2013 1:32 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ModusPonies’s comment on: Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013
P(Luminosity fan | reads this comment) is probably not a good estimate… (count me in with a “no” data point though :)) Also, what is the ratio of “Luminosity fan because of Twilight” and “read it even though… Twilight, and liked it” populations?

(with “read Twilight because of Luminosity” also a valid case.)

latanius 16 Apr 2013 1:11 UTC
4 points
in reply to: nonplussed’s comment on: Help us name the Sequences ebook
Also, who is the target audience and what are the plans for reaching it? I don’t think there are many people who are willing to invest time AND money into a book like this while still not having read the sequences (available freely on the web, and also in all kinds of e-book formats).

For the two use cases I imagine at the moment:
- giving it as a gift as an introduction to rationalist stuff feels better with a physical book indeed. Yes, there is a difference between buying an e-book for yourself and downloading the same stuff for free, especially in terms of motivation to actually read it, but on the receiving end e-books still might feel like being sent long pdf-s with a label “you should definitely read this”, in addition to the e-book gifting weirdness (I might be wrong, I never did such a thing before).
- buying it for yourself, to be able to put it on your bookshelf. Obviously, also much harder to do with an e-book.
(I usually prefer e-books to dead-tree versions, but then I had nothing against reading the Sequences on the web either.)

latanius 14 Apr 2013 19:42 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Baughn’s comment on: NES-game playing AI [video link and AI-boxing-related comment]
The point is that it’s not, but making it so is a design goal of the paper.

Example: Mario immediately jumping into a pit at level 2. According to the learned utility function of the system, it’s a good idea. According to ours, it’s not.

Just as with optimizing smiling faces. But while that one was purely a thought experiment, this paper presents a practical, experimentally testable benchmark for utility function learning, and, by the way, shows a not-yet-perfect but working solution for it. (After all, Mario’s Flying Goomba Kick of High Munchkinry definitely satisfies our utility functions.)

latanius 14 Apr 2013 19:14 UTC
4 points
in reply to: elharo’s comment on: Grad Student Advice Repository
I heard the opposite too: don’t try to push your own research too hard, especially in the beginning, but try to find something the others in the lab group are working on, learn stuff from them, and after a while you’ll end up with your own ideas anyway.

Pros and cons for both of the approaches exist, but “picking a thesis early on” might be hard as you don’t necessarily know what the good problems are in your field. But that might depend on your field / advisor too.

latanius 14 Apr 2013 19:07 UTC
7 points
in reply to: JoshuaFox’s comment on: Grad Student Advice Repository

You see that you won’t get stuck: that you’ll finish relatively fast.

Do you know of a way for estimating this? Every research problem (and the entire PhD itself) might look much easier before you start working on it (you don’t have an outside view perspective before starting).

latanius 13 Apr 2013 6:32 UTC
11 points
on: NES-game playing AI [video link and AI-boxing-related comment]
This thing looks more and more relevant as I think about it. What it does is not just optimizing an objective function in a weird and unexpected way, but actually learning it in all its complicatedness from observed human behavior.

Would it be an overestimation to call this a FAI research paper?

latanius 13 Apr 2013 1:32 UTC
14 points
on: NES-game playing AI [video link and AI-boxing-related comment]
Wow. First thought: who is this guy who submits a really cool scientific result to a thing like SIGBOVIK? He could have sent this thing to a real conference! It’s a thing no one has ever tried!

Then I checked out his website. The academic one. And the others.

Well, short description: “Superhero of Productivity”. The list of stuff he created doesn’t fit on his site. Sites. Also, see this remark of his,

One of the best things about grad school was that if you get your work done then you get to do other stuff too.

(I’m also at CS grad school, am happy if I have time to sleep, and my only productive output is… LW comments… does that count?)

latanius 13 Apr 2013 1:02 UTC
9 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: NES-game playing AI [video link and AI-boxing-related comment]
Also, Tom’s academic website. It’s the coolest academic website I’ve ever seen.

latanius 3 Apr 2013 14:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jooyous’s comment on: Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013
In the class I TA for, the students can go to the professor’s office hours after the midterm / final, and if they can solve the problem there, they still get… half of the points? I wonder how that one affects test-taking performance.

Also, this whole thing seems to be annoyingly resistant to Bayesian updates… “Every time I’m anxious I perform bad, and now I’m worried about being too worried for this exam”, and, since performing bad is a very valid prediction in this state of mind, worry is there to stay.

Maybe if the tests are called “quizzes” the students end up in the other stable state of “not being worried”?

latanius 1 Apr 2013 21:38 UTC
4 points
in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?

Sure, games about physics should be able to present a reasonably accurate model so that if you understand their model, you end up knowing something about physics… but with history:

actually, what’s the goal of studying history?
- if the goal is to do well on tests, we already have a nice model for that, under the name of Anki. Of course, this doesn’t make things really fun, but still.
- if we want to make students remember what happened and approximately why (that is, “should be able to write an essay about it”), we can make up an arbitrary, dumb and scripted thing, not even close to a real model, but exhibiting some mechanics that cover the actual reasons. (e.g. if one of the causes would have been “not enough well-trained soldiers”, then make “Level 8 Advanced Phalanx” the thing to build if you want to survive the next wave of attacks.)
- if we’d like to see students discover general ideas throughout history, maybe build a game with the same mechanics across multiple levels? (and they also don’t need to be really accurate or realistic.)
- and finally, if we want to train historians who could come up with new theories, or replacement emperors to be sent back in time to fix Rome… well, for that we would need a much better model indeed. Which we are unlikely to end up with. But do we need this level in most of the cases?
TL;DR by creating games with wildly unrealistic but textbook-accurate mechanics we are unlikely to train good emperors, but at least students would understand textbook things much more than the current “study, exam, forget” level.