Marcello

Karma: 984

Marcello Jun 20, 2017, 9:00 PM
3 points
on: LessWrong 2.0 Feature Roadmap & Feature Suggestions
If you want to encourage engagement, don’t hide the new comment box all the way down at the bottom of the page! Put another one right after the post (or give the post a reply button of the same sort the comments have.)

Marcello Jun 20, 2017, 8:58 PM
1 point
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0 Feature Roadmap & Feature Suggestions
One UI for this I could imagine (for non-mobile wide-screen use) is to have the post and the comments appear in two columns with the post on the left and the comments on the right (Similar to the Mac OS X Finder’s column view.) Then when the user clicks on a comment the appropriate bit of the post would get highlighted.
In fact, I could see doing a similar thing for the individual comments themselves to create a view that would show the *ancestry* of a single comment, stretching left back to the post the conversation was originally about. This could save a fair amount of scrolling.

Marcello Jun 20, 2017, 8:51 PM
1 point
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0 Feature Roadmap & Feature Suggestions
Agreed. Also, at some point Eigenkarma is going to need to include a recency bias so that the system can react quickly to a commenter going sour.

Marcello Jun 20, 2017, 8:45 PM
4 points
in reply to: owencb’s comment on: Welcome to Lesswrong 2.0
I agree with the spirit of this. That said, if the goal is to calculate a Karma score which fails to be fooled by a user posting a large amount of low quality content, it might be better to do something roughly: sum((P*x if x < 0 else max(0, x-T)) for x in post_and_comment_scores). Only comments that hit a certain bar should count at all. Here P is the penalty multiplier for creating bad content, and T is the threshold a comment score needs to meet to begin counting as good content. Of course, I also agree that it’s probably worth weighting upvotes and downvotes separately and normalizing by reads to calculate these per-(comment or post) scores.

Marcello Apr 5, 2017, 12:39 AM
LW: 4 AF: 3
AF
on: Formal Open Problem in Decision Theory
From discussions I had with Sam, Scott, and Jack:

To solve the problem, it would suffice to find a reflexive domain $X$ with a retract onto $[0, 1]$ .

This is because if you have a reflexive domain $X$ , that is, an $X$ with a continuous surjective map $f :: X \to X^{X}$ , and $A$ is a retract of $X$ , then there’s also a continuous surjective map $g :: X \to A^{X}$ .

Proof: If $A$ is a retract of $X$ then we have a retraction $r :: X \to A$ and a section $s :: A \to X$ with $r \circ s = 1_{A}$ . Construct $g (x) := r \circ f (x)$ . To show that $g$ is a surjection consider an arbitrary $q \in A^{X}$ . Thus, $s \circ q :: X \to X$ . Since $f$ is a surjection there must be some $x$ with $f (x) = s \circ q$ . It follows that $g (x) = r \circ f (x) = r \circ s \circ q = q$ . Since $q$ was arbitrary, $g$ is also a surjection.

Marcello Apr 5, 2017, 12:26 AM
LW: 1 AF: 1
AF
on: Formal Open Problem in Decision Theory
“Self-Reference and Fixed Points: A Discussion and an Extension of Lawvere’s Theorem” by Jorge Soto-Andrade and Francisco J. Varela seems like a potentially relevant result. In particular, they prove a converse Lawvere result in the category of posets (though they mention doing this for $[0, 1]$ in an unsolved problem.) I’m currently reading through this and related papers with an eye to adapting their construction to $[0, 1]$ (I think you can’t just use it straight-forwardly because even though you can build a reflexive domain with a retract to an arbitrary poset, the paper uses a different notion of continuity for posets.)

Marcello Jan 23, 2013, 11:19 PM
14 points
in reply to: Mark_Eichenlaub’s comment on: Applied Rationality Workshops: Jan 25-28 and March 1-4

A bit of an aside, but for me the reference to “If” is a turn off. I read it as promoting a fairly-arbitrary code of stoicism rather than effectiveness. The main message I get is keep cool, don’t complain, don’t show that you’re affected by the world, and now you’ve achieved your goal,

I agree that the poem is about stoicism, but have a very different take on what stoicism is. Real stoicism is about training the elephant to be less afraid and more stable and thereby accomplish more. For example, the standard stoic meditation technique of thinking about the worst and scariest possible outcomes you could face will gradually chip away at instinctive fear responses and allow one to think in a more level headed way. Similarly, taking cold showers and deconditioning the flinch response (which to some extent also allows one not to flinch away from thoughts.)

Of course, all of these real stoic training techniques are challengingly unpleasant. It’s much easier to be a poser-stoic who explicitly optimizes for how stoic-looking of a face they put forward, by keeping cool, not complaining, and not emoting, rather than putting in all the hard work required to train the elephant and become a real stoic. This is, as you say, a recipe for disaster if pushed too hard. Most people out there who call themselves stoics are poser-stoics, just as Sturgeon’s Law would demand. After reading the article you linked to I now have the same oppinion of the kind of stoicism the Victorian school system demanded.

Marcello Aug 18, 2012, 4:31 AM
8 points
on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Short version: Make an Eckman-style micro-expression reader in a wearable computer.

Fleshed out version: You have a wearable computer (perhaps something like Google glass) which sends video from its camera (or perhaps two cameras if one camera is not enough) over to a high-powered CPU which processes the images, locates the faces, and then identifies micro expressions by matching and comparing the current image (or 3D model) to previous frames to infer which bits of the face have moved in which directions. If a strong enough micro-expression happens, the user is informed by a tone or other notification. Alternatively, one could go the more pedagogical route by showing then a still frame of the person doing the micro-expression some milliseconds prior with the relevant bits of the face highlighted.

Feasibility: We already can make computers are good at finding faces in images and creating 3D models from multiple camera perspectives. I’m pretty sure small cameras are good enough by now. We need the beefy CPU and/or GPU as a separate device for now because it’s going to be a while before wearables are good enough to do this kind of heavy-duty processing on their own, but wifi is good enough to transmit very high resolution video. The foggiest bit in my model would be whether current image processing techniques are up to the challenge. Would anyone with expertise in machine vision care to comment on this?

Possible positive consequences: Group collaboration easily succumbs to politics and scheming unless a certain (large) level of trust and empathy has been established. (For example, I’ve seen plenty of hacker news comments confirm that having a strong friendship with one’s startup cofounder is important.) A technology such as this would allow for much more rapid (and justified) trust-building between potential collaborators. This might also allow for the creation of larger groups of smart people who all trust each other. (Which would be invaluable for any project which produces information which shouldn’t be leaked because it would allow such projects to be larger.) Relatedly, this might also allow one to train really excellent therapist-empaths.

Possible negative consequence: Police states where the police are now better at reading people’s minds.

Marcello Sep 29, 2011, 10:02 PM
5 points
in reply to: jhuffman’s comment on: Quixey—startup applying LW-style rationality—hiring engineers
I didn’t leave due to burn-out.

Marcello Sep 28, 2011, 9:54 PM
4 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Quixey—startup applying LW-style rationality—hiring engineers
Quixey is a great place to work, and I learned a lot working there. My main reason for leaving was that I wanted to be able to devote more time and mental energy to some of my own thoughts and projects.

Marcello Jan 2, 2011, 8:42 AM
33 points
0
in reply to: Peter_de_Blanc’s comment on: Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting
Offhand, I’m guessing the very first response ought to be “Huzzah! I caught myself procrastinating!” in order to get the reverse version of the effect I mentioned. Then go on to “what would I like to do?”

Marcello Jan 2, 2011, 8:01 AM
53 points
0
on: Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting
Here’s a theory about one of the things that causes procrastination to be so hard to beat. I’m curious what people think of it.
1. Hypothesis: Many parts of the mind are influenced by something like reinforcement learning, where the emotional valances of our thoughts function as a gross reward signal that conditions their behaviors.
2. Reinforcement learning seems to have a far more powerful effect when feedback is instant.
3. We think of procrastinating as a bad thing, and tend to internally punish ourselves when we catch ourselves doing it.
4. Therefore, the negative feedback signal might end up exerting a much more powerful training effect on the “catcher” system (aka. whatever is activating frontal override) rather than on whatever it is that triggered the procrastination in the first place.
5. This results in a simple counter-intuitive piece of advice: when you catch yourself procrastinating, it might be a very bad idea to internally berate yourself about it; Thoughts of the form “%#&%! I’m procrastinating again! I really shouldn’t do that!” might actually cause more procrastinating in the long run. If I had to guess, things like meditation would be helpful for building up the skill required to catch the procrastination-berating subsystem in the act and get it to do something else.
TL;DR: It would probably be hugely helpful to try to train oneself to make the “flinch” less unpleasant.

Marcello Dec 23, 2009, 7:45 PM
1 point
on: Positive-affect-day-Schelling-point-mas Meetup
I am going to be there.

Positive-affect-day-Schelling-point-mas Meetup

MarcelloDec 23, 2009, 7:41 PM

5 points

32 comments1 min readLW link

Marcello Sep 9, 2009, 1:32 PM
5 points
in reply to: pengvado’s comment on: Outlawing Anthropics: An Updateless Dilemma
Why do I think anthropic reasoning and consciousness are related?

In a nutshell, I think subjective anticipation requires subjectivity. We humans feel dissatisfied with a description like “well, one system running a continuation of the computation in your brain ends up in a red room and two such systems end up in green rooms” because we feel that there’s this extra “me” thing, whose future we need to account for. We bother to ask how the “me” gets split up, what “I” should anticipate, because we feel that there’s “something it’s like to be me”, and that (unless we die) there will be in future “something it will be like to be me”. I suspect that the things I said in the previous sentence are at best confused and at worst nonsense. But the question of why people intuit crazy things like that is the philosophical question we label “consciousness”.

However, the feeling that there will be in future “something it will be like to be me”, and in particular that there will be one “something it will be like to be me” if taken seriously, forces us to have subjective anticipation, that is, to write probability distribution summing to one for which copy we end up as. Once you do that, if you wake up in a green room in Eliezer’s example, you are forced to update to 90% probability that the coin came up heads (provided you distributed your subjective anticipation evenly between all twenty copies in both the head and tail scenarios, which really seems like the only sane thing to do.)

Or, at least, the same amount of “something it is like to be me”-ness as we started with, in some ill-defined sense.

On the other hand, if you do not feel that there is any fact of the matter as to which copy you become, then you just want all your copies to execute whatever strategy is most likely to get all of them the most money from your initial perspective of ignorance of the coinflip.

Incidentally, the optimal strategy looks like an policy selected by updateless decision theory and not like any probability of the the coin having been heads or tails. PlaidX beat me to the counter-example for p=50%. Counter-examples of like PlaidX’s will work for any p<90%, and counter-examples like Eliezer’s will work for any p>50%, so that pretty much covers it. So, unless we want to include ugly hacks like responsibility, or unless we let the copies reason Goldenly (using Eliezer’s original TDT) about each other’s actions as tranposed versions of their own actions (which does correctly handle PlaidX’s counter-example, but might break in more complicated cases where no isomorphism is apparent) there simply isn’t a probability-of-heads that represents the right thing for the copies to do no matter the deal offered to them.

Marcello Jul 24, 2009, 2:57 AM
9 points
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: AndrewH’s observation and opportunity costs
The most effective version of this would probably be an iPhone (or similar mobile device) application that gives a dollar to charity when you push a button. If it’s going to work reliably it has to be something that can be used when the beggar/cause invocation is in sight: for most people, I’m guessing that akrasia would probably prevent a physical box or paper ledger from working properly.

Marcello Jul 23, 2009, 6:10 PM
10 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: AndrewH’s observation and opportunity costs
I recently visited Los Angeles with a friend. Whenever we got lost wandering around the city, he would find the nearest homeless person, ask them for directions and pay them a dollar. (Homeless people tend to know the street layout and bus routes of their city like the backs of their hands.)

Marcello Jul 16, 2009, 4:31 AM
7 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You

Yes, we have a name from this, Religion

Agreed, but the fact that religion exists makes the prospect of similar things whose existence we are not aware of all the scarier. Imagine, for example, if there were something like a religion one of whose tenants is that you have to fool yourself into thinking that the religion doesn’t exist most of the time.

Marcello Jul 15, 2009, 4:29 PM
52 points
on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
- We actually live in hyperspace: our universe really has four spacial dimensions. However, our bodies are fully four dimensional; we are not wafer thin slices a la flatland. We don’t perceive there to be four dimensions because our visual cortexes have a defect somewhat like that of people who can’t notice anything on the right side of their visual field.
- Not only do we have an absolute denial macro, but it is a programmable absolute denial macro and there are things much like computer viruses which use it and spread through human population. That is, if you modulated your voice in a certain way at someone, it would cause them (and you) to acquire a brand new self deception, and start transmitting it to others.
- Some of the people you believe are dead are actually alive, but no matter how hard they try to get other people to notice them, their actions are immediately forgotten and any changes caused by those actions are rationalized away.
- There are transparent contradictions inherent in all current mathematical systems for reasoning about real numbers, but no human mathematician/physicist can notice them because they rely heavily on visuospacial reasoning to construct real analysis proofs.

Marcello Jul 3, 2009, 12:56 AM
5 points
in reply to: Psychohistorian’s comment on: Harnessing Your Biases
I’m not sure the cost of privately held false beliefs is as low as you think it is. The universe is heavily Causally Entangled. Now even if in your example, the shape of the earth isn’t causally entangled with anything our mechanic cares about, that doesn’t get you off the hook. A false belief can shoot you in the foot in at least two ways. First, you might explicitly use it to reason about the value of some other variable in your causal graph. Second, your intuition might draw on it as an analogy when you are reasoning about something else.

If our car mechanic thinks his planet is a disc supported atop an infinite pile of turtles, when this is in fact not the case, then isn’t he more likely to conclude that other things which he may actually come into more interaction with (such as a complex device embedded inside a car which could be understood by our mechanic, if he took it apart and then took the pieces apart about five times) might also be “turtles all the way down”? If I actually lived on a disc on top of infinitely many turtles, then I would be nowhere near as reluctant to conclude that I had a genuine fractal device on my hands. If I actually lived in a world which was turtles all the way down, I would also be much more disturbed by paradoxes involving backward supertasks.

To sum up: False beliefs don’t contaminate your belief pool via the real links in the causal network in reality; they contaminate your belief pool via the associations in your mind.

Marcello

Pos­i­tive-af­fect-day-Schel­ling-point-mas Meetup

Positive-affect-day-Schelling-point-mas Meetup