ME3

Karma: 24

ME3 29 Jul 2008 14:59 UTC
−6 points
on: The Meaning of Right
You know, I think Caledonian is the only one who has the right idea about the nature of what’s being written on this blog. I will miss him because I don’t have the energy to battle this intellectual vomit every single day. And yet, somehow I am forced to continue looking. Eliezer, how does your metamorality explain the desire to keep watching a trainwreck?

ME3 25 Jul 2008 15:15 UTC
2 points
on: Math is Subjunctively Objective
I think it doesn’t make sense to suggest that 2 + 3 = 5 is a belief. It is the result of a set of definitions. As long as we agree on what 2, +, 3, =, and 5 mean, we have to agree on what 2 + 3 = 5 means. I think that if your brain were subject to a neutrino storm and you somehow felt that 2 + 3 = 6, you would still be able to verify that 2 + 3 = 6 by other means, such as counting on your fingers.

I think once you start asking why these things are the way they are, don’t you have to start asking why anything exists at all, and what it means for anything to exist? And I’m pretty sure at that point, we are firmly in the province of philosophy and there are no equations to be written, because the existence of the equations themselves is part of the question we’re asking.

But I mean, this question has been in my mind since the beginning of the quantum series. I’ve written a lot of useful software since then, though, without entertaining it much. Do you think maybe it’s just better to get on with our lives? It’s not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.

ME3 8 Jul 2008 14:20 UTC
−7 points
on: Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
I read it as saying, “Suppose there is a mind with an anti-Occamian and anti-Laplacian prior. This mind believes that . . .” but of course saying “there is a possible mind in mind design space” is a much stronger statement than that, and I agree that it must be justified. I don’t see how such a mind could possibly do anything that we consider mind-like, in practice.

Really, I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but formal systems and the experimental process were developed centuries ago to solve the very problems that you keep talking about (rationality, avoiding self deception, etc). Why do you keep trying to bring us back to 500 BC and the methods of the ancient greeks? Is it because you find actual math too difficult? Trust me, it’s still easier to do math right than to do informal reasoning right. On the other hand, it’s much more rewarding to do informal reasoning wrong than to do the math wrong. This may be the source of the problem.

ME3 1 Jul 2008 14:03 UTC
0 points
on: Created Already In Motion
Isn’t a silicon chip technically a rock?

Also, I take it that this means you don’t believe in the whole, “if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk” thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

ME3 30 Jun 2008 14:31 UTC
−1 points
on: The Moral Void
If everything I do and believe is a consequence of the structure of the universe, then what does it mean to say my morality is/isn’t built into the structure of the universe? What’s the distinction? As far as I’m concerned, I am (part of) the structure of the universe.

Also, regarding the previous post, what does it mean to say that nothing is right? It’s like if you said, “Imagine if I proved to you that nothing is actually yellow. How would you proceed?” It’s a bizarre question because yellowness is something that is in the mind anyway. There is simply no fact of the matter as to whether yellowness exists or not.

ME3 26 Jun 2008 14:22 UTC
2 points
on: No Universally Compelling Arguments
Presumably, morals can be derived from game-theoretic arguments about human society just like aerodynamically efficient shapes can be derived from Newtonian mechanics. Presumably, Eliezer’s simulated planet of Einsteins would be able to infer everything about the tentacle-creatures’ morality simply based on the creatures’ biology and evolutionary past. So I think this hypothetical super-AI could in fact figure out what morality humans subscribe to. But of course that morality wouldn’t apply to the super-AI, since the super-AI is not human.

ME3 24 Jun 2008 15:09 UTC
1 point
on: The Psychological Unity of Humankind
I agree with the basic points about humans. But if we agree that intelligence is basically a guided search algorithm through design-space, then the interesting part is what guides the algorithm. And it seems like at least some of our emotions are an intrinsic part of this process, e.g. perception of beauty, laziness, patience or lack thereof, etc. In fact, I think that many of the biases discussed on this site are not really bugs but features that ordinarily work so well for the task that we don’t notice them unless they give the wrong result (just like optical illusions). In short, I think any guided optimization process will resemble human intelligence in some ways (don’t know which ones), for reasons that I explained in my response to the last post.

Which actually makes me think of something interesting: possibly, there is no optimal guided search strategy. The reason why humans appear to succeed at it is because there are many of us thinking about the same thing at any given time, and each of us has a slightly differently tuned algorithm. So, one of is likely to end up converging on the solution even though nobody has an algorithm that can find every solution. And people self-select for types of problems that they’re good at.

ME3 23 Jun 2008 14:48 UTC
2 points
on: Optimization and the Singularity
talk as if the simple instruction to “Test ideas by experiment” or the p

I think you’re missing something really big here. There is such a thing as an optimal algorithm (or process). The most naive implementation of a process in much worse than the optimal, but infinitely better than nothing. Every successive improvement to the process asymptotically brings us closer to the optimal algorithm, but they can’t give you the same order of improvement as the preceding ones. Just because we’ve gone from O(n^2) to O(n log(n)) in sorting algorithms doesn’t mean we’ll eventually get to O(1).

Aha! You say. But human brains are so inefficient that actually we haven’t even gone a smidgeon of the path to the optimal algorithm and there is a ton more space to go. But computers already overcome many of the inefficiencies of human brains. Our brains do a decent job of pruning the search space up to the near-optimal solution, and computers take care of the work intensive step of going from near-optimal to optimal. And as our software gets better, we have to prune the search space less and less before we give the problem to the computer.

Of course, maybe we still have many orders of magnitude of improvement to go. But you can’t just assume that.

ME3 17 Jun 2008 14:43 UTC
0 points
on: Grasping Slippery Things
I think that the “could” idea does not need to be confined to the process of planning future actions.

Suppose we think of the universe as a large state transition matrix, with some states being defined as intervals because of our imperfect knowledge of them. Then, any state in the interval is a “possible state” in the sense that it is consistent with our knowledge of the world, but we have no way to verify that this is in fact the actual state.

Now something that “could” happen corresponds to a state that is reachable from any of the “possible states” using the state transition matrix (in the linear systems sense of reachable). This applies to the world outside (“A meteor could hit me at any moment”) or to my internal state (“I could jump off a cliff”) in the sense that given my imperfect knowledge of my own state and other factors, the jump-off-a-cliff state is reachable from this fuzzy cloud of states.

ME3 16 Jun 2008 16:01 UTC
0 points
on: Passing the Recursive Buck
In other words, the algorithm is,

explain_box(box) { if(|box.boxes| > 1) print(boxes) else explain_box(box.boxes[0]) }

which works for most real-world concepts, but gets into an infinite loop if the concept is irreducible.

ME3 30 May 2008 16:31 UTC
1 point
on: Einstein’s Superpowers
There was an article in some magazine not too long ago that most people here have probably read, about how if you tell kids that they did good work because they are smart, they will not try as hard next time, whereas if you tell kids that they did good work because they worked hard, they will try harder and do better. This matches my own experience very well, because for a long time, I had this “smart person” approach to things, where I would try just hard enough to make a little headway, then either dismiss the problem as easy or give up. I see a lot of people falling into this trap, and they almost always are the ones who think they are smart, and who are referred to by others as smart.

I think that maybe it’s not about choosing problems, even. I think that it’s about walking any given path for long enough that you get to a place where nobody else has been, and that’s when you achieve some kind of status in other people’s eyes.

ME3 29 May 2008 15:00 UTC
3 points
on: Timeless Causality
Isn’t causality strictly a map of a world strictly governed by physical laws? If a billiard ball strikes another ball, causing it to move, that is just our way of describing the motions of the balls. And besides, the universe doesn’t even split the world up into individual “objects” or “events,” so how can causality really exist?

By the way, any physical system is defined not just by its positions, but by its derivatives and second derivatives as well (I believe this is enough to describe the complete state of a system?). So when you talk about frozen states in a timeless universe, they still have to have time derivatives (in our perception of them). In other words, a sequence of still claymation frames and continuous motion may produce the same movie, but they correspond to very different realities.

ME3 29 May 2008 14:59 UTC
0 points
on: Timeless Causality
Isn’t causality strictly a map of a world strictly governed by physical laws? If a billiard ball strikes another ball, causing it to move, that is just our way of describing the motions of the balls. And besides, the universe doesn’t even split the world up into individual “objects” or “events,” so how can causality really exist?

By the way, any physical system is defined not just by its positions, but by its derivatives and second derivatives as well (I believe this is enough to describe the complete state of a system?). So when you talk about frozen states in a timeless universe, they still have to have time derivatives (in our perception of them). In other words, a sequence of still claymation frames and continuous motion may produce the same movie, but they correspond to very different realities.

ME3 28 May 2008 15:09 UTC
0 points
on: Timeless Beauty
iwdw: there has been some thinking about the universe as an actual game of life, Steven Wolfram’s New Kind of Science is the one that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are more reputable sources that he stole the idea from. I believe that this thinking runs into trouble with special relativity.

Speaking of which, has anyone ever attempted to actually model space as a graph of relationships between points, in a computer program? Something like the distance-configuration-space in the last post? It occurs to me that this could actually be a more robust representation for some purposes than just storing the xyz coordinates.

Eliezer: I actually have been getting the insights you speak of repeatedly throughout this series, and it’s one of the reasons why I find it helpful to post comments—because it forces me to think through the ideas well enough to get their occasional mind-bendingness. It’s also why I have continued reading despite all the what-is-Science business.

But I still think that the subjective time-like-ness of time, as well as the concept of causality, are all caused (ha-ha) by the universe starting out in a low-entropy state. So if you had a toy block universe in your hands, you would still see a direction in the block corresponding to time. There is no way to assign a meaningful distance in that direction for the whole universe because of the locality of physics, but the direction is global, isn’t it?

ME3 27 May 2008 17:29 UTC
0 points
on: Timeless Physics
But the main thing that’s different about time is that it has a clear direction whereas the space dimensions don’t. This is caused by the fact that the universe started out in a very low-entropy state, and since then has been evolving into higher entropy. I don’t know if it’s even possible to answer the question of why the universe started out the way it did—it’s almost like asking why anything exists at all. But whatever the reason, the universe is very uniform in its space dimensions, but very non-uniform in its time dimension.

ME3 27 May 2008 15:36 UTC
3 points
on: Timeless Physics
Doesn’t the Lorentz invariant already pretty much take care of the relativity of time? As long as we’re using the Lorentz invariant, we’re free to reparameterize the universe any way we want, and our description will be the same. So I don’t see what this Barbour guy is going on about, it seems like standard physics. Whether you write your function f(x,t) or f(y) where y = g(x,t) or even just f(x) where t = h(x) is totally irrelevant to the universe. It’s just another coordinate transformation just like translating the whole universe by ten meters to the left.

Now, if you have a new invariant to propose, THAT would amount to an actual change in the laws of physics.

ME3 23 May 2008 15:48 UTC
1 point
on: My Childhood Role Model
By the way, when the best introduction to a supposedly academic field is works of science fiction, it sets off alarm bells in my head. I know that some of the best ideas come from sci-fi and yada, yada, but just throwing that out there. I mean, when your response to an AI researcher’s disagreement is “Like, duh! Go read some sci-fi and then we’ll talk!” who is really in the wrong here?

ME3 23 May 2008 14:56 UTC
−2 points
on: My Childhood Role Model
Likewise the fact that the human brain must use its full power and concentration, with trillions of synapses firing, to multiply out two three-digit numbers without a paper and pencil.

Some people can do it without much effort at all, and not all of them are autistic, so you can’t just say that they’ve repurposed part of their brain for arithmetic. Furthermore, other people learn to multiply with less effort through tricks. So, I don’t think it’s really a flaw in our brains, per se.

ME3 22 May 2008 15:22 UTC
−12 points
on: That Alien Message
Apropos of this, the Eliezer-persuading-his-Jailer-to-let-him-out thing was on reddit yesterday. I read through it and today there’s this. Coincidence?

Anyway, I was thinking about the AI Jailer last night, and my thoughts apply to this equally. I am sure Eliezer has thought of this so maybe he has a clear explanation that he can give me: what makes you think there is such a thing as “intelligence” at all? How do we know that what we have is one thing, and not just a bunch of tricks that help us get around in the world?

It seems to me a kind of anthropocentric fallacy, akin to the ancient peoples thinking that the gods were literally giant humans up in the sky. Now we don’t believe that anymore but we still think any superior being must essentially be a giant human, mind-wise.

To give an analogy: imagine a world with no wheels (and maybe no atmosphere so no flight either). The only way to move is through leg-based locomotion. We rank humans in running ability, and some other species fit into this ranking also, but would it make sense to then talk about making an “Artificial Runner” that can out-run all of us, and run to the store to buy us milk? And if the AR is really that fast, how will we control it, given that it can outrun the fastest human runners? Will the AR cause the human species to go extinct by outrunning all the males to mate with the females and replace us with its own offspring?

ME3 20 May 2008 15:15 UTC
3 points
on: Faster Than Science
I think that I have only now really understood what Eliezer has been getting at with the past ten or so posts, this idea that you could be a scientist if you generated hypotheses using a robot controlled Ouija board. I think other readers have already said this numerous times, but this strikes me as terribly wrong.

First of all, good luck getting research funding for such hypotheses (and it wouldn’t be fair to leave out funding from the description of Science if you’re including institutional inertia and bias).

And I think we all know that in general, someone who used this method would never be able to get anywhere in academia, simply because they wouldn’t be respected.

That, I think, teaches an important lesson. Individual scientists are not required to come up with correct or even plausible hypotheses because we all know that individual rationality is flawed. But the aggregate community of scientists and the people who fund them work together to evaluate the plausibility of a given hypothesis, and thereby effectively carry out the Bayesian analysis that Eliezer speaks of.

So one of many thousands of scientists can propose an utterly harebrained theory, and even spend his life on it if he wants, and it will barely register as a blip on the collective scientific radar. But when SR and GR were proposed, it was pretty much taken as a given that they were true, because they HAD to be true. I read somewhere that the experiment done by Eddington to verify the bending of light around the sun was far from accurate enough to actually be a verification of relativity. But it was still taken as a verification, because everyone was pretty much convinced anyway. And conversely, no matter how many experiments the cold fusion people do that show some unexpected effects, nobody takes them very seriously.

Now, you might say that this system is horribly inefficient, and many people say this on a regular basis. But here, the problem is simply that no individual human being can process that much information, and so the time it takes for a given data point to propagate through the community is very long. Of course, the internet helps, and if scientific journals were free, that would probably help also. But ultimately, I think this inefficiency is precisely the cost of a network evaluating all of the priors to find out the plausibility of a theory.

Of course, it also reduces a scientist to nothing more than a cog in a machine, and many people who want to be heroic can’t deal with that. But in real life, no scientist is expected to evaluate his own hypothesis. They are expected to come up with a hypothesis, and try to verify it if they can get funding, and let the community decide to what extent the results are valid.