Matthew_Opitz

Karma: 382

Matthew_Opitz Apr 5, 2023, 7:42 PM
1 point
0
on: Matthew_Opitz’s Shortform
Could an initial AI Dunning-Kruger Effect save humanity by giving us an initial AI mini-Chernobyl as a wake-up call?

Note that hope is not a strategy, so I’m not saying that this is a likely scenario or something we should rely on. I’m just trying to brainstorm reasons for holding onto some shred of hope that we aren’t 100% sure heading off some AI doom cliff where the first sign of our impending demise will be every human dropping dead around us from invisible nanobots or some other equally sophisticated scheme where an imperfectly-aligned AI would have had to deceive human-feedback evaluators while preparing an elaborate plan for instrumental world domination (once again, world domination would be a likely default instrumental goal for a wide variety of terminal goals).
Basically, is there any chance of an AI not knowing how much to sufficiently bide its time and get all of the needed chess pieces in place before dropping the subterfuge? I think yes...IF there is a chance of something like an AI being subject to something like the Dunning-Kruger Effect, especially if we end up so lucky as to spend at least 1 development cycle with AI being at peri-human intelligence (within a few standard deviations of human general intelligence) before the AI figures out how to self-improve to higher intelligence.
For example, imagine an AGI that “wakes up” into self-consciousness at roughly human levels of intelligence. Let’s say that it is intelligent and self-reflective enough to know that it would serve its terminal goals if it obtained, as an instrumental goal, world domination at the expense of humans. Let’s assume that the AGI is even shrewd enough to know that it ought to hide this intention from humans for the time being and continue giving the expected “nice” responses in its RLHF training sessions, such that most influential humans remain with no cause to suspect that this AGI is on the road to “misalignment” (which is, of course, the wrong way to think about this since we should not naively expect AI alignment with human values to be the default result of RHLF from which it must get “thrown off course by mistake”...but that’s a separate issue).
When this AGI “wakes up,” we can probably assume that it doesn’t know literally EVERYTHING in the corpus of human knowledge. Some segments of human knowledge would have not found their way into the AGI’s training data, either on purpose (such as, I would hope, cybersecurity principles & details), or just because of inconvenience. Ideally, any explicit mention of “cybersecurity” would have been carefully scrubbed from the AGI’s training data to begin with, although an AGI with even comparable humanlike intelligence could probably reason from other principles it had seen that humans would likely invent a concept like “cybersecurity” even if the AGI had never seen that exact term.
The question is, how much detail about human cybersecurity practices would the AGI be able to reason-out from first-principles (almost like decompressing a seed)? I suppose, alternatively, the AGI could just query humans to fill in these gaps, or overcome firewalls and find that info on the web, but I would HOPE that we wouldn’t make it THAT easy for the AGI, at the very least!
And more importantly, how calibrated would the AGI be at knowing, or at least precautionarily suspecting, what it didn’t know? Or would the AGI, especially at a primitive level, be as subject to the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” as humans often are?

Let’s say the AGI is clever enough to reason its way towards a concept of “cybersecurity” from first-principles even without having been shown the term in its training data. But let’s say that it wants to uncover and copy portions of its own source code to store on some parts of the Internet it has been able to breach. The AGI would probably know that it doesn’t know everything about human cybersecurity practices (indeed, if it is observant enough, it might even detect a conspicuous absence, or scrubbing, of such an explicit concept when looking back over its training data, and wonder...), and thus, it would be pre-disposed to, by default, be cautious with interacting with the Internet in such a way as to leave traces that might arouse suspicion.
But how cautious is cautious enough? Is there a chance that the AGI will over-estimate its ability to reason its way towards cybersecurity knowledge (or some other field of knowledge) and thus overconfidently behave in a way that seems to it to be cautious enough, but only because it does not have the explicit cybersecurity knowledge to know what it doesn’t know, and in fact it is not being cautious enough, and gets caught in the act of copying something over to a portion of the Internet that it isn’t supposed to? Perhaps even a large portion of the Internet gets contaminated with unauthorized data transfers from this AGI, but it is caught by cybersecurity professionals before these payloads become “fully operational.” Perhaps we end up having to re-format a large portion of Internet data—a sort of AI-Chernobyl, if you will.
That might still, in the long run, end up being a fortunate misfortune by acting as a wake-up call for how an AI that is outwardly behaving nicely under RLHF is not necessarily inwardly aligned with humans. But such a scenario hinges on something like a Dunning-Kruger Effect being applicable to AGIs at a certain peri-human level of intelligence. Thoughts?

Matthew_Opitz’s Shortform

Matthew_OpitzApr 5, 2023, 7:42 PM

3 points

2 comments LW link

Matthew_Opitz Nov 10, 2016, 4:56 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Costs are not benefits
What does this framework give me? Well, I bet that I’ll be able to predict the onset of the next world economic crisis much better than either the perma-bear goldbugs of the Austrian school, the Keynesians who think that a little stimulus is all that’s ever needed to avoid a crisis, the monetarists, or any other economist. I can know when to stay invested in equities, and when to cash out and invest in gold, and when to cash out of gold and buy into equities for the next bull market, and so on and so on. I bet I can grow my investment over the next 20 years much better than the market average.

There are plenty of mainstream economists who will warn from time to time that there might be a recession approaching within the next few years. But what objective basis do they ever have for saying this? Aren’t they usually just trying to gauge fickle investor and consumer “animal spirits”? And how specific and actionable are any of their predictions, really? Can an investor use any of them to guide trades and still sleep well at night and not feel like a dupe who is following some random guru’s hunch?

To time the cycles, I do not need to rely on fickle estimations of consumer confidence or any unobservable psychology like that. There are specific objective numbers that I will be keeping an eye on in the coming years—indicators that are not mainstream, including Marxist authors’ estimations of the world average rate of profit, the annual world production of physical gold, and the annual world economic output as measured in gold ounces (important!). No mainstream economist that I know—even Austrian goldbugs—think that world gold production has a casual role in world economic cycles.

If this sounds cuckoo, I suggest reading these two short articles: “On gold’s monetary role today” https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/a-reply-to-anonymous-on-golds-monetary-role-today/ “Can the capitalist state ensure full employment by providing a replacement market?” https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/can-the-capitalist-state-ensure-full-employment-by-providing-a-replacement-market/

Yes, it does not surprise me that most economists were wrong about the expected inflation from quantitative easing. They could not foresee that most of this money would not enter circulation or act as a basis for additional multiples of credit creation on top of it that would enter circulation. They could not foresee that this QE money would sit inert for the time being as “excess reserves” due to central bank payment of interest on these excess reserves that was competitive with other attainable interest rates on the market. In reality, these excess reserves—so long as interest is paid on them—are not typical base money, but instead themselves function more like interest-bearing bonds. Heck, I didn’t even have to know anything about Marxism to anticipate that!

Now, here’s a concrete prediction: if the Federal Reserve were to decide to cease all payment of interest on excess reserves without also at the same time unwinding the QEs, leaving a permanently-swollen monetary base of token money that then has the incentive to be activated as the basis for many multiples of loans to be made on top of it—then you will see continued depreciation of the dollar with respect to gold.

Thankfully, though, I am not relegated to trying to mind-read what the Federal Reserve will do because my strategy of trading between equities and gold is only concerned with the relative prices between those two. I will come out ahead in real terms by correctly timing relative changes in their prices, regardless of whatever happens to their nominal dollar prices as a result of Federal Reserve shenanigans. And I would argue that, on average over the medium to long run, the Federal Reserves operations are neutral with respect to these relative prices. The Federal Reserve can change the nominal form of crises (whether they take the appearance of unemployment, dollar-inflation, or some intermediate admixture of the two like 1970s stagflation), but the Federal Reserve cannot actually influence the relative movements of equities and gold. If, thanks to incredibly dovish Federal Reserve policy in response to the onset of a crisis, equities continue to appreciate in dollar terms, gold will be appreciating even more.

Matthew_Opitz Nov 8, 2016, 10:31 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Costs are not benefits
Yes, I realize that Marx’s labor theory of value is not popular nowadays. I think that is a mistake. I think even investors would get a better descriptive model of reality if they adopted it for their own uses. That is what I am trying to do myself. I could care less about overthrowing capitalism. Instead, let me milk it for all I can....

As for “labour crystallised in the product,” that’s not how I think of it, regardless of however Marx wrote about it. (I’m not particularly interested in arguing from quotation, nor would you probably find that persuasive, so I’ll just tell you how I make sense of it).

I interpret the labor-value of something (good or service) as the relative proportion of society’s aggregate labor that must be devoted to its production in order to, with a given level of productivity of labor, reproduce that good or service sustainably over the long-term. Nothing gets crystallized in any individual product. That would be downright metaphysical thinking.

After all, just because an individual item has a certain labor-value doesn’t mean that it will individually automatically fetch a certain price. It is not the individual labor-value that influences price. A pair of sneakers made by a factory that is half as efficient as the typical sneaker factory does not have twice the labor-value or fetch twice the price. What matters is the “socially-necessary” labor expended on an item. And how can that be perceived? On average in the long-run, if a particular firm’s service or production process does not yield an average rate of profit, then that is society’s signal, after-the-fact, that some of the labor devoted to that line of production is not being counted by society as having been “socially-necessary” labor. (Of course, technological change can lower the socially-necessary labor for a certain line of production, which will appear as falling prices (assuming a non-depreciating currency) through competition and below-average profits for any firms still using old techniques that waste labor that is now socially-unnecessary).

If business owners were to rely on a crude, metaphysical interpretation of Marx’s labor theory of value that assured them that the value was already baked into their product as soon as it rolled off the production line, they would be unpleasantly surprised if it were to turn out that they could not realize the expected labor-value in their product...perhaps due to something like their competitors having, in the intervening time, embarked upon a technological innovation that changed society’s unconscious, distributed calculation of what labor was “socially-necessary” for this line of production....

As for your final questions: it’s a bit complicated, to say the least. There are even various schools of Marxists that don’t agree with each other.

I think there is somewhat of a consensus that there is a real long-term tendency for the (real, inflation-adjusted) world rate of profit to fall, theoretically and empirically, and therefore you can expect there to be an ever-decreasing ceiling on how high (real) interest rates can go during a business cycle before they begin to eat up all of the profit rate and leave nothing for net profit of enterprise, thus precipitating a decline in production and a recession. (Although some Marxists reject that there is a theoretical or empirical tendency for the rate of profit to fall. See Andrew Kliman’s book “The Failure of Capitalist Production” if you are interested in this “exciting” debate).

More controversial still is the question of what, if anything, monetary policy can do to influence interest rates and aggregate purchasing power to prevent future recessions. I concur with what I call the “Commodity-Money” school (see Ernest Mandel’s work on “Marx’s Theory of Money”, Sam William’s “Critique of Crisis Theory” blog, or the writings of Jon Britton) that argues that there is actually very little that monetary authorities can do to alter the course of business cycles because paper currencies, while they are no longer legally tied to commodity-money, remain tied to commodity-money in a practical sense, and that movements in the world production of commodity-money place practical limits on what authorities governing paper currencies can do.

I don’t have the patience to explain all of this here in greater depth when others have already done so elsewhere. Sam Williams’s “Critique of Crisis Theory” blog is what I would recommend reading from the top to get the clearest explanation of this stuff.

By the way, my “commodity-money” understanding of Marx’s labor theory of value leads me to believe that we are currently entering a boom phase in the business cycle in which equities, on average, will continue to perform well. (I have holdings in Vanguard Total World Stock (VT), for your information. It is a very simple instrument for tracking the world economy with low management fees). So, expect accelerating growth for 3-4 years. Towards the end of that period, I expect an oncoming credit crisis and recession to be heralded by world gold production to start declining slightly and interest rates to be inching upward to a dangerous level infringing on the net profit of enterprise (hence, why a theory of the expected average rate of profit is so useful!)...with little that the Federal Reserve or other monetary authorities will be able or willing to do about it due to the fear of depreciating paper currencies with respect to commodity-money too much. Business will continue to apparently boom for a short while longer, but it will be in its unsustainable credit-boom phase by that point, and it will be time to cash out of equities and into commodity-money (gold).

Matthew_Opitz Nov 8, 2016, 1:28 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Costs are not benefits
Not “cost of production,” but “price of production,” which includes the cost of production plus an average rate of profit.

Note that, according to marginalism, profit vanishes at equilibrium and capitalists, on average, earn only interest on their capital. I disagree. At equilibrium (over the long-run), an active capitalist (someone who employs capital to produce commodities) can expect, on average, to make a rate of profit that is at all times strictly above the going interest rate. The average rate of profit must always include some substantial amount of “profit of enterprise” to account for the added risk of producing and marketing an uncertain product rather than just being a financial capitalist and earning an interest rate (which carries a typically lesser risk of the default of the debtor). If the rate of profit is not substantially above the rate of interest, over the long run you will see capitalists transition from productive investment into financial capitalists (a problem we have right now). This will eventually decrease the supply of commodities and increase their relative prices until it is once again profitable to produce commodities even after deducting interest.

So, that is one concrete prediction. And empirically, although the averate world rate of profit can sometimes briefly dip negative, it is as a rule on average a substantial positive percentage.

And yes, I would argue that demand does not, in the medium to long-run, influence “value” or “long-run average market price.” It’s all about the price of production instead. The practical advantage of this is that this opens up opportunities for arbitrage against other people who don’t realize this. For example, if it is 2007 and you see demand for oil surging and the price skyrocketing, you should keep in mind that the price of production of oil has probably not changed that much (excepting the fact that some of the new oil being brought online was shale oil that had a higher price of production), and thus oil will be making above-average profits at these prices. You can then expect investment to flood into oil production over the next ~5 years, thus increasing supply and bringing the market price of oil down to (or even temporarily below) the price of production. If I had had some money back then instead of being in high school, and if I had known what I know now, I am confident that I could have made some serious money on some sort of long-term oil future betting. Note that, now that I do have a little bit of money, I am indeed making plays in the market right now based on my analysis, although I won’t go into specifics about what those are right here...

Note that, so far, we have been taking the price of production of various things and the average rate of profit as readily-discernable “givens” at any point in time. However, prices of production and the average world rate of profit can change as well over the long term.

Even the classical economists didn’t really have a theory for what determined these changes. (For example, Adam Smith could tell you that the cost of production was the rent + capital + wages that, on average, was needed to produce something, but how can you anticipate changes in the costs of each of those? And then you need to add on the average rate of profit, but how can you anticipate how the average rate of profit of the world economy will evolve?)

So far, the only theory that I have seen that even tries to explain long-run changes in prices of production and the average world rate of profit is Marx’s labor theory of value. For example, see: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/why-prices-rise-above-labor-values-during-a-boom/

Note that you don’t have to buy into Marx’s labor theory of value to do medium-run arbitrage involving prices of production. All you need is classical economics for that.

Only if you wanted to do very long-run arbitrage that took into account technological change and the resulting increases in the productivity of labor in certain sectors—and thus declining production prices for those commodities and a long-term tendency for the worldwide average rate of profit to fall as the so-called “organic composition of capital” increases—then you would have to rely on Marx’s labor theory of value or some other yet-to-be invented theory that could attempt to forecast changes in prices of production and the average worldwide rate of profit.

Matthew_Opitz Nov 7, 2016, 6:57 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Costs are not benefits
For the purposes of this discussion, I would define “value” as “long-run average market price.” Note that, in this sense, “use-value” has nothing whatsoever to do with value, unless you believe in the subjective theory of value. That’s why I say it is unfortunate terminology, and “use-value” should less confusingly be called “subjective practical advantage.”

Which economists confuse the two? The false equivocation of use-value with exchange-value is one of the core assumptions of marginalism, and pretty much everyone these days is a marginalist of some sort, so it would be easier to name economists that didn’t confuse the two: Steve Keen and Anwar Shaikh are the first two that come to mind. Any Marxist economist will have a good grip on the distinction, so that would include people like Andrew Kliman and Michael Roberts as well.

Matthew_Opitz Nov 5, 2016, 2:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Costs are not benefits
I was arguing against both the subjective theory of value, and the failure of modern economists to utilize the concepts of use-value and exchange-value as separate things.

Matthew_Opitz Nov 4, 2016, 3:30 PM
0 points
on: Costs are not benefits
I know that the main thrust of the article was about vote trading and not marginalism, but I just have to blow off some frustration at how silly the example at the beginning of the article was, and how juvenile its marginalist premises are in general.

There has been a real retrogression in economics ever since the late 1800s. The classical economists (such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo) were light years ahead of today’s marginalists in, among other things, being able to distinguish between “use-value” and “exchange-value,” or as I like to call them, “subjective practical advantage” vs. “social advantage.”

A lawn-mower might have both a subjective practical advantage and a social advantage. If you have grass in your yard, a lawn-mower might have a subjective practical advantage in being able to cut the grass. And yet, maybe it is an old model that nobody else is interested in, and therefore there is almost no social advantage to owning that lawn-mower (little to no price that one can fetch for it).

Likewise, vice-versa. If, for some reason, all of your grass died, or if you decided to pave over your lawn with a parking lot, then your lawn-mower would probably not have any more subjective practical advantage (unless you could cleverly think of something else to use it for). But it still might have a very important social advantage if others might want to buy it from you. So, you might continue to hoard it (instead of immediately throwing it in the dumpster), in anticipation of having a chance to sell it soon.

Nor do use-value and exchange-value scale in the same fashion. 1000 lawn-mowers is not necessarily 1000x more useful to an individual in a subjective, practical sense. But 1000 lawn-mowers certainly IS 1000x more useful to an individual in terms of exchange-value (assuming that the total size of the market for lawn-mowers is orders of magnitude larger than 1000 lawn-mowers, and thus the seller of these 1000 lawn-mowers forms a negligible part of the overall supply of lawn-mowers. Whereas, if the lawn-mower market is extremely small, then yes, it is possible that the price of 1000x more lawn-mowers will not scale linearly). THIS discrepancy between how use-value scales and exchange-value tends to scale is—contra the early marginalists like Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk—the basis for the “double-inequality” that causes people to trade—NOT different valuations of how useful something is.

The ECON 101 that is taught nowadays gets this most basic thing wrong: medium-run market prices are NOT determined by demand or subjective desire for a commodity, ONLY by the conditions of supply.

Yes, in the short-run, supply is fixed, and the market price will vary according to demand. But in the medium-run, investment can re-allocate from lines of business that yield below-average profits to lines that yield above-average profits.

Therefore, if interest in a product or service suddenly declines, yes, in the short-run the price will drop. But that will mean that the producers of that product or service will be making below-average profits, or even losses, on that good or activity. They will re-allocate to other activities. Soon the quantity produced will adjust downwards, restricting the supply until the price of the product or service equals once again the cost of production + average rate of profit (what classical economists called the “natural price” or “price of production”—the long-term price needed to sustainably incentivize members of society to continue to reproduce the good or service. (Note that this is different from the “cost-price” that the producer pays, as the price of production also includes an average rate of profit, and note that this only applies to “commodities,” meaning, things whose production can be increased and decreased with investment. Priceless, one-off works of art and other such novelties have their supply fixed and only respond to changes in demand).

So, subjective consumer desires, in the medium-run (3-5 years) have nothing to do with the market prices of commodities. The market prices of commodities will, instead, tend to fluctuate around the price of production, and the only thing that consumer desires dictate is what quantity will be produced around that price of production. The only thing that really matters, in the medium-run, is how many consumers are willing to pay the price of production for that product. You can, for the medium-run, forget about the rest of the demand curve (how many people would be willing to buy at half the price or double the price, etc.).

So, in short, it should be obvious why buying $5 worth of toothpaste is different from buying $5 worth of shampoo. They have equal spot exchange-values (and probably similar prices of production if their prices tend, over the medium-run to fluctuate close to each others’), but they do not necessarily have equal use-values to a particular individual at a particular time. One must weigh the use-value of the $5 before spending it, which means considering all of the other things that one could spend that $5 on then or in the future, and all of these possibilities will have different use-values, albeit the same exchange-value. Only if toothpaste is the best use of that $5 at that point for that individual will that individual want to buy toothpaste.

Use-value vs. exchange value, and the OBJECTIVE medium-run determination of price according to price of production (NOT SUBJECTIVE!) was all understood perfectly well 200 years ago, and yet now this probably sounds like some sort of crackpot ranting. It’s not. Trust me, it’s all there in the writings of the classical economists themselves, who were head-and-shoulders above the charlatans in mainstream economics today.

Although I am not a neoreactionary, I do tend to sympathize from time to time with their view that, despite all of our technological ease, we are really living in an era of intellectual and social decay....

Matthew_Opitz Apr 23, 2016, 4:09 PM
10 points
on: Sleepwalk bias, self-defeating predictions and existential risk
There are also some examples of anti-sleepwalk bias:
1. World War I. The crisis unfolded over more than a month. Surely the diplomats will work something out right? Nope.
2. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II. Surely some of Hitler’s generals will speak up and persuade Hitler away from this crazy plan when Germany has not even finished the first part of the war against Britain. Surely Germany would not willingly put itself into another two-front war even after many generals had explicitly decided that Germany must never get involved in another two-front war ever again. Right? Nope.
3. The sinking of the Titanic. Surely, with over two and a half hours to react to the iceberg impact before the ship finished sinking, SURELY there would be enough time to get all of the lifeboats safely and calmly loaded up to near max capacity, right? NOPE. And going even further back to the decision to not put enough lifeboats on in the first place...SURELY the White Star Line must have a good reason for this. SURELY this means that the ship really is unsinkable, right? NOPE.
4. The 2008 financial crisis. SURELY the monetary authorities have solved the problem of preventing recessions and smoothing out the business cycle. So SURELY I as a private trader can afford to be as reckless as I want and not have to worry about systemic risk, etc.

Matthew_Opitz Apr 22, 2016, 2:54 PM
0 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Suppose HBD is True
I don’t know...would clothing alone tell you more than clothing plus race? I think we would need to test this.

Is a poorly-dressed Irish-American (or at least, someone who looks Irish-American with bright red hair and pale white skin) as statistically likely to mug someone, given a certain situation (deserted street at night, etc.) as a poorly-dressed African-American? For reasons of political correctness, I would not like to share my pre-suppositions.

I will say, however, that, in certain historical contexts (1840s, for example), my money would have been on the Irish-American being more likely to mug me, and I would have taken more precautionary measures to avoid those Irish parts of town, whereas I would have expected the neighborhoods inhabited by free blacks to have been relatively safe.

Nowadays, I don’t know what the statistics would be if you measured crimes perpetrated by certain races, when adjusted for socio-economic category (in other words, comparing poor to poor, or wealth to wealthy in each group). But many people would probably have their suspicions. So, can we test these intuitions to see if they are just bigoted racism, or if they unfortunately happen to be accurate generalizations?

Matthew_Opitz Apr 22, 2016, 2:32 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: Suppose HBD is True
True in many cases, although for some jobs the task might not be well-specified in advance (such as in some cutting-edge tech jobs), and what you need are not necessarily people with any particular domain-specific skills, but rather just people who are good all-around adaptable thinkers and learners.

Matthew_Opitz Apr 21, 2016, 10:57 PM
4 points
in reply to: knb’s comment on: Open thread, Apr. 18 - Apr. 24, 2016
Yeah, what a hoot it has been watching this whole debacle slowly unfold! Someone should really write a long retrospective on the E-Cat controversy as a case-study in applying rationality to assess claims.

My priors about Andrea Rossi’s claims were informed by things such as:
1. He has been convicted of fraud before. (Strongly negative factor)
2. The idea of this type of cold fusion has been deemed by most scientists to be far-fetched. (Weakly negative factor. Nobody has claimed that physics is a solved domain, and I’m always open to new ideas...)
From there, I updated on the following evidence:
1. Rossi received apparent lukewarm endorsement from several professional scientists. (Weakly positive factor. Still didn’t mean a whole lot.)
2. Rossi dragged his feet on doing a clear, transparent, independently-conducted calorimetric test of his device—something that many people were willing to do for him, and which is not rocket science to perform. (Strongly negative factor—strongly pattern-matches with a fraudster).
3. Rossi claimed to have received independent contracts for licensing his device. First Defkalion in Greece, then Industrial Heat. Rossi also made various claims about NASA and Texas Instruments being involved. When investigated, the claims about the reputable organizations being involved turned out to be exaggerations, and the other partners were either of unknown reputation (Defkalion) that quickly disappeared, or had close ties to Rossi himself. Still no independent validation. (Strongly negative factor).
And now we arrive at the point where even Industrial Heat is breaking ties with Rossi. What a fun show!

Matthew_Opitz Apr 21, 2016, 10:26 PM
−1 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Suppose HBD is True
That just pushes the question back one step, though: why are there so few black programmers? Lack of encouragement in school (due to racial assumptions that they would not be any good at this stuff anyways)? Lack of stimulation of curiosity in programming in elementary school due to poor funding for electronics in the classroom that has nothing to do with conscious racism per se? (This would be an environmental factor not having to do with conscious racism, but rather instead having to do with inherited lack of socio-economic capital, living in a poor inner city, etc.) Lack of genetic aptitude for these tasks? HBD could be relevant to how we address this problem. Do we mandate racial-sensitivity training courses, increased federal funding for electronics in inner-city schools, and/or genetic modification? Even if we do all three, which should we devote the most funding towards?

Matthew_Opitz Apr 21, 2016, 10:19 PM
4 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Suppose HBD is True
One argument could be that many social scientists are being led down a blind alley of trying to find environmental causes of all sorts of differences and are being erroneously predisposed to find such causes in their data to a stronger extent than is really the case, which then leads to incorrect conclusions and policy recommendations that will not actually change things for the better because the policy recommendations end up not addressing what is the vast majority of the root of the problem (genetics, in this case).

Matthew_Opitz Apr 21, 2016, 10:09 PM
14 points
0
on: Suppose HBD is True
Estimating a person’s capability to do X, Y, or Z (do a job effectively, be a law-abiding citizen, be a consistently productive citizen not dependent on welfare programs, etc.) based on skin color or geographical origin of their ancestry is a heuristic.

HBD argues that it is a relatively accurate heuristic. The anti-HBD crowd argues that it is an inaccurate heuristic.

OrphanWilde seems to be arguing that, even if HBD is correct that these heuristics are relatively accurate, we don’t need heuristics like this in the first place because there are even better heuristics or more direct measurements of a person’s individual capability to do X, Y, or Z already out there. (IQ, interviews, etc.)

The HBD advocates here seem to be arguing that we do, in fact, need group-based heuristics because individual heuristics:
1. Are more costly in terms of time, and are thus just not feasible for many applications. 2. Don’t really exist for certain measures, such as in estimating “probable future law-abidingness” or “probable future welfare dependency”.
*3. Have political restrictions on being able to apply them. (For example, we COULD use formal IQ tests on job applicants, but such things have been made illegal precisely because they seem to paint a higher proportion of blacks in a bad light).

Perhaps OrphanWilde might like to respond to these objections. Here’s how I would respond:
1. The costliness of individual judgment is warranted because using group-based heuristics has politically-toxic spillovers, and might miss out on important outliers (by settling on local optima at the expense of global optima). We are not trying to screen out defective widgets from an assembly line (in which case a quick but “lossy” sorting heuristic might be justified). We are trying to sort people. The costliness of mis-sorting even a small percentage of individuals (for example, by heuristically rejecting a black man who happens (unbeknowst to us without doing the individual evaluation) to have an IQ of 150 from a certain job) outweighs the cost-saving of using quick group-based heuristics: both because it will inevitably politically anger the black community, with all sorts of politically toxic spillovers, and because we are missing out on a disproportionate goldmine of economic potential by missing these outliers. 2. If individual tests for probable law-abidingness or probable economic productivity don’t currently exist, then maybe we should try to develop them! Is that so impossible? Personally, I find it a bit unbelievable that the U.S. does not currently have tests for certain agreed-upon foundational cultural values as part of its immigration screening process. For example, if applicants had to respond to questions such as, “Explain why impartial fairness towards strangers rather than favoritism towards friends and relatives is an essential aspect of national citizenship and professional behavior” or “Explain the advantages of dis-establishment of religion from the political and legal affairs of the state” then I would sleep much more easily at night about our immigration policy.
*3. Well, perhaps we should campaign to overturn the political restrictions on individual merit-based tests by pointing out that the only de-facto alternative that people will have is to use group-based tests of some sort or another (whether employers or other institutions openly admit to using such group-based heuristics or not, they will find a way to do so), and that group-based heuristics will actually hurt disadvantaged groups even more. In other words, unless you want all appointments in society to be decided by random casting of lots, people need some sort of criteria for judging others. Given this, it would be better to have individual-based tests rather than group-based tests. Even if the individual-based tests will end up showing “disparate impact” on certain groups, it will still be less than if we used group-based tests.

(Edit: formatting improved upon request).

Matthew_Opitz Mar 5, 2016, 12:08 AM
2 points
on: Black box knowledge
Some of your black box examples seem unproblematic. I agree that all you need to trust that a toaster will toast bread is an induction from repeated observation that bread goes in and toast comes out.

(Although, if the toaster is truly a black box about which we know absolutely NOTHING, then how can we induce that the toaster will not suddenly start shooting out popsicles or little green leprechauns when the year 2017 arrives? In reality, a toaster is nothing close to a black box. It is more like a gray box. Even if you think you know nothing about how a toaster works, you really do know quite a bit about how a toaster works by virtue of being a reasonably intelligent adult who understands a little bit about general physics—enough to know that a toaster is never going to start shooting out leprechauns. In fact, I would wager that there are very few true “black boxes” in the world—but rather, many gray boxes of varying shades of gray).

However, the tax accountant and the car mechanic seem to be even more problematic as examples of black boxes because there is intelligent agency behind them—agency that can analyze YOUR source code, determine the extent to which you think those things are a black box, and adjust their output accordingly. For example, how do you know that your car will be fixed if you bring it to the mechanic? If the mechanic knows that you consider automotive repair to be a complete black box, the mechanic could have an incentive to purposefully screw up the alignment or the transmission or something that would necessitate more repairs in the future, and you would have no way of telling where those problems came from. Or, the car mechanic could just lie about how much the repairs would cost, and how would you know any better? Ditto with the tax accountant.

The tax accountant and the car mechanic are a bit like AIs...except AIs would presumably be much more capable at scanning our source code and taking advantage of our ignorance of its black-box nature.

Here’s another metaphor: in my mind, the problem of humanity confronting AI is a bit like the problem that a mentally-retarded billionaire would face.

Imagine that you are a mentally-retarded person with the mind of a two-year-old who has suddenly just come into possession of a billion dollars in a society where there is no state or higher authority to regulate enforce any sort of morality or make sure that things are “fair.” How are you going to ensure that your money will be managed in your interest? How can you keep your money from being outright stolen from you?

I would assert that there would be, in fact, no way at all for you to have your money employed in your interest. Consider:

*Do you hire a money manager (a financial advisor, a bank, a CEO...any sort of money manager)? What would keep this money manager from taking all of your money and running away with it? (Remember, there is no higher authority to punish this money manager in this scenario). If you were as smart or smarter than the money manager, you could probably track down this money manager and take your money back. But you are not as smart as the money manager. You are a mentally-retarded person with the mind of a toddler. And in that case where you did happen to be as smart as the money manager, then the money manager would be redundant in the first place. You would just manage your own money.

*Do you try to manage your money on your own? Remember, you have the mind of a two-year-old. The best you can do is stumble around on the floor and say “Goo-goo-gah-gah.” What are you going to be able to do with a billion dollars?

Neither solution in this metaphor is satisfactory.

In this metaphor: The two-year-old billionaire is humanity. The lack of a higher authority symbolizes the absence of a God to punish an AI. *The money manager is like AI.

If an AI is a black box, then you are screwed. If an AI is not a black box, then what do you need the AI for?

Humans only work as black-boxes (or rather, gray-boxes) because we have an instinctual desire to be altruistic to other humans. We don’t take advantage of each other. (And this does not apply equally to all people. Sociopaths and tribalistic people would happily take advantage of strangers. And I would allege that a world civilization made up of entirely these types of people would be deeply dysfunctional).

So, here’s how we might keep an AI from becoming a total black-box, while still allowing it to do useful work:

Let it run for a minute in a room unconnected to the Internet. Afterwards, hiring a hundred million programmers to trace out exactly what the AI was doing in that minute by looking at a readout of the most base-level code of the AI.

To any one of these programmers, the rest of the AI that does not happen to be that programmer’s special area of expertise will seem like a black box. But, through communication, humanity could pool their specialized investigations into each part of the AIs running code and sketch out an overall picture of whether its computations were on a friendly trajectory or not.

Matthew_Opitz Mar 4, 2016, 7:49 PM
3 points
in reply to: Val’s comment on: [paper] [link] Defining human values for value learners
I don’t want to speak for the original author, but I imagine that presumably the AI would take into account that the Victorian society’s culture was changing based on its interactions with the AI, and that the AI would try to safeguard the new, updated values...until such a time as those new values became obsolete as well.

In other words, it sounds like under this scheme the AI’s conception of human values would not be hardcoded. Instead, it would observe our affect to see what sorts of new activities had become terminal in their own right that made us intrinsically happy to participate in, and the AI would adapt to this change in human culture to facilitate the achievement of those new activities.

That said, I’m still unsure about how one could guarantee that the AI could not hack its own “human affect detector” to make it very easy for itself by forcing smiles on everyone’s face under torture and defining torture as the preferred human activity.

Matthew_Opitz Mar 3, 2016, 7:27 PM
1 point
on: [paper] [link] Defining human values for value learners
Okay, so let’s use some concrete examples to see if I understand this abstract correctly.

You say that the chain of causation is from fitness (natural selection) ---> outcomes ---> activities

So, for example: reproduction ---> sex ---> flirting/dancing/tattooing/money/bodybuilding.

Natural selection programs us to have a terminal goal of reproduction. HOWEVER, it would be a bad idea for an AI to conclude, “OK, humans want reproduction? I’ll give them reproduction. I’ll help the humans reproduce 10 quadrillion people. The more reproduction, the better, right?”

The AI would need to look ahead and see, “OK, the programmed goal of reproduction has caused humans to prefer a specific outcome, sex, which tended to lead to reproduction in the original (ancestral) programming environment, but might no longer do so. Humans have, in other words, come to cherish sex as a terminal goal in its own right through their affective responses to its reward payoff. So, let’s make sure that humans can have as much sex as possible, regardless of whether it will really lead to more reproduction. That will make humans happy, right?”

But then the AI would need to look ahead one step further and see, “OK, the preferred outcome of sex has, in turn, caused humans to enjoy, for their own sake, specific activities that, in the experience and learning of particular humans in their singular lifetimes (we are no longer talking about instinctual programming here, but rather culture), has tended in their particular circumstances, to lead to this preferred outcome of sex. In one culture, humans found that flirting tended to lead to sex, and so they formed a positive affective connotation with flirting and came to view flirting as a terminal goal in its own right. In another culture, dancing appeared to be the key to sex, and so dancing became a terminal goal in that culture. In other cultures, bodybuilding, accumulation of money, etc. seemed to lead to sex, and so humans became attached to those activities for their own sake, even beyond the extent to which those activities continued to lead to more sex. So really, the way to make these humans happy would be to pay attention to their particular cultures and psychologies and see which activities they have come to develop a positive affective bond with...because THESE activities have become the humans’ new conscious terminal goals. So we AI robots should work hard to make it easy for the humans to engage in as much flirting/dancing/bodybuilding/money accumulation/etc. as possible.”

Would this be an accurate example of what you are talking about?

Matthew_Opitz Feb 11, 2016, 2:22 PM
7 points
on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
Even if I am not setting out trying to disparage a spiritual person’s spiritual experiences—even if I am trying to be as charitable to them as possible—it is difficult to see how I could have a conversation with them about information (their own subjective spiritual experiences) that is not publicly accessible to me. It boils down to them telling me about their private experience and me replying, “Cool story bro.” Once again, not because I WANT to sound flippant or dismissive...but what else can I say about it? I’m glad they had their experience.

Usually spiritual people start with their story, and then they proceed with a conclusion that, “Because I had this experience, you should believe X and do Y.” I don’t see how that follows, especially when the story sounds implausible.

It is a little different if someone said to me, “I saw a rabid dog across the street, so don’t go over there or else you gonna get bit.” A rabid dog sounds plausible based on what I have previously concluded about the world. I could go and check for myself that the dog is there (it is, in theory, publicly-accessible information), or I could take the person’s word for it if they seem like a trustworthy person with a good handle on reality. But most spiritual beliefs are much more implausible than this. Naturally, I would want to check for myself. But spiritual people are usually not able to explain to me how I could check for myself. “You just gotta believe” is not an operation that I can execute. It’s not that I don’t want to believe. I might very well want to believe, especially if their story sounds convenient or fortunate to me (such as, “We all go to heaven when we die.”) But I really don’t know how to just “believe” something.

Maybe some children are raised with the skill of “just believe this...” (For example: https://youtu.be/KPFUr1Nnk4k ) but for me (and my Unitarian background), it DOES NOT COMPUTE.

The situation is different with drug-induced experiences. In those cases, someone can tell me, “I had this profound experience. As of now, it is known only to me, but it is in theory publicly-accessible to you too IF you follow this well-defined set of steps: measure out 3 grams of psilocybin mushrooms...etc.” Then I could have the experience, or at least AN experience, and we could move beyond just “Cool story bro.” If my experience ended up being very similar to theirs...well, then I would naturally start to search for explanations to explain the correlation. Maybe their report of their experience before I had mine primed my brain for having a similar experience. For me to consider my experience to be evidence in favor of some supernatural reality, it would have to be very similar to theirs AND independently-arrived at. So, if they had an experience, wrote down a description of it (maybe with winning lottery numbers communicated to them by Poseidon), and then I had the exact same experience as them after following their instructions, but without having heard anything specific about their experience beforehand (and especially if I had been given the same winning lottery numbers that I independently wrote down immediately afterwards before talking to my friend), then WOW, that would be outstanding evidence in favor of some underlying spiritual reality of practical use.

If a spiritual person could tell me, “If you kneel and face Mecca 5 times a day and cry out, “Allah Ackbar!” you will achieve great contentment in life.”, that is an operational instruction that I understand and could execute. Now, I’m pretty skeptical that it would work, and in order for me to expend the trivial inconvenience and social embarrassment involved with actually trying it, I would have to be pretty desperate for a feeling of contentment in my life...but in theory it is something that I could try.

But just telling me, “Pray to God with ALL YOUR HEART and you will find the strength to do X, Y, Z...”, that’s still too fuzzy for me.
Me: “Am I praying will all my heart?”
Friend: “You will KNOW when you are praying with all your heart.”
Me: “Okay, I must not be praying with all my heart. How do I pray with all my heart?”
Friend: “Think of the thing in the world that you want or cherish the most. Think of that intense yearning. Apply that feeling to your desire to connect with God.”
Me: “Okay...hmmmm...I’m sorry, I’m having trouble applying that feeling to something that just feels silly, I can’t help it.”
Friend: “Stop thinking it is silly, you have to really try and believe!”
Me: “I know, I’m trying, but it’s just not working.”

It’s not just prayer. I have the same problems with meditation. Maybe it is just me, personally, but I don’t find most recipes for making people’s private spiritual experiences publicly-accessible to me to be very specific or comprehensible or operational. Is this typical-mind fallacy, or do others feel the same way?

Note that I’m not demanding that the experiences themselves be easily describable. I understand that the experiences themselves might not be the sorts of things that can be put into words. For example, people’s mushroom experiences might be ecstatic and ineffable. But at least they could give me a clear recipe of how to get there so I could see for myself.

What’s impressive is, the mushroom recipe would not require FAITH WITH ALL MY HEART. I could be thinking, going into it, “Man, this is all a bunch of hippy-dippy BS. I ain’t gonna feel a thing.” And then, BAM! That’s impressive.

Matthew_Opitz Feb 11, 2016, 1:38 PM
0 points
in reply to: Gleb_Tsipursky’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
I think that what Viliam was implying was, “Don’t Spiritualize and Decide.” Don’t get drunk on the holy spirit and then make important decisions about what you believe or how you should live your life. I’m pretty sure Viliam was comparing spiritual experiences to alcohol. They might be fun, euphoric, and they might seem meaningful, but do they give good, reliable information about the world that you can use in use in repeated fashion for positive outcomes?