You don’t need to solve the integral for the posterior analytically, you can usually Monte-Carlo your way into an approximation. That technique is powerful enough on reasonably-sized computers that I find myself doubting that this is the only hurdle to superhuman AI.
moshez
Karma: 405
I took it. No SAT scores or classical IQ scores, didn’t take Myer-Briggs (because it’s stupid) or Autism (because freakin’ hell, amateur psychology diagnosis on the ’net).
I’m not sure that adding the conjunction (R(x,y,z)&R(x,y,w)->z=w) would have made things clearer...I thought it was obvious the hypothetical mathematician was just explaining what kind of steps you need to “taboo addition”
It so happens that the three “big lies” death mentions are all related to morality/ethics, which is a hard question. But let me take the conversation and change it a bit:
“So we can believe the big ones?”
Yes. Anger. Happiness. Pain. That sort of thing.
“They’re not the same at all!”
You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of happiness, one molecule of pain.
In this version, the final argument is still correct—if I take the universe and grind it down to a sieve, I will not be able to say “woo! that carbon atom is an atom of happiness”. Since the penultimate question of this meditation was “Is there anything else”, at least I can answer that question.
Clearly, we want to talk about happiness for many reasons—even if we do not value happiness in itself (for ourselves or others), predicting what will make humans happy is useful to know stuff about the world. Therefore, it is useful to find a way that allows us to talk about happiness. Happiness, though, is complicated, so let us put it aside for a minute to ponder something simpler: a solar system. I will simplify here, a solar system is one star and a bunch of planets rotating around it. Though solar systems effect each other through gravity or radiation, most of the effects of the relative motions inside a solar system comes from inside itself, and this pattern repeats itself throughout the galaxy. Much like happiness, being able to talk about solar systems is useful—though I do not particularly value solar systems in and of themselves, it’s useful to have a concept of “a solar system”, which describes things with commonalities, and allows me to generalize.
If I grind the universe, I cannot find an atom that is a solar system atom—grinding the universe down destroys the “solar system” useful pattern. For bounded minds, having these patterns leads to good predictive strength without having to figure out each and every atom in the solar system.
In essence, happiness is no different than solar system—both are crude words to describe common patterns. It’s just that happiness is a feature of minds (mostly human minds, but we talk about how dogs or lizards are happy, sometimes, and it’s not surprising—those minds are related algorithms). I cannot say where every atom is in the case of a human being happy, but some atom configurations are happy humans, and some are not.
So: at the very least, happiness and solar systems are part of the causal network of things. They describe patterns that influence other patterns.
Mercy is easier than justice and duty. Mercy is a specific configuration of atoms behaving a human in a specific way—even though the human feels they are entitled to cause another human hurt (“feeling entitled” is a set of specific human-mind-configurations, regardless of whether “entitlement” actually exists), but does not do so (for specific reasons, etc. etc.). In short, mercy describes specific patterns of atoms, and is part of causal networks.
Duty and justice—I admit that I’m not sure what my reductionist metaethics are, and so it’s not obvious what they mean in the causal network.
You can assume that O will make sure to intervene just little enough that two people who are not right for each other will figure it out before they are 18.
I tried the exercise, and came up with an interesting werdtopia. http://moshez.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/going-outside/
Yes, clearly, a bit after I asked, I learned how to use intuition, and at some point, it became rote. But the bigger point is that this is a special case—in logic, and in math, there are a lot of truth-preserving transformations, and choosing a sequence of transformations is what doing math is. That interesting interface between logic-as-rigid and math-as-something-exploratory is a big part of the fun in math, and what led me to do enough math that led to a published paper. Of course, after that, I went into software engineering, but I never forgot that initial sensation of “oh my god that is awesome” the first time Moshe_1992 learned that there is no such thing as “moving the 1 from one side of the equation to the other” except as a high-level abstraction.
“I will remark, in some horror and exasperation with the modern educational system, that I do not recall any math-book of my youth ever once explaining that the reason why you are always allowed to add 1 to both sides of an equation is that it is a kind of step which always produces true equations from true equations.”
I can now say that my K-12 education was, at least in this one way, better than yours. I must have been 14 at the time, and the realization that you can do that hit me like a ton of bricks, followed closely by another ton of bricks—choosing what to add is not governed by the laws of math—you really can add anything, but not everything is equally useful.
E.g., “solve for x, x+1=5”
You can choose to add −1 to the equation, getting “x+1+-1=5+-1”, simplify both sides and get “x=4“ and yell “yay”, but you can also choose to add, say, 37, and get (after simplification) “x+38=42” which is still true, just not useful. My immediate question after that was “how do you know what to choose” and, long story short, 15 years later I published a math paper… :)
- “By definition” argument detected in a discussion not about math.
The software was using “untranslatable” as a short hand for “the current version of the software cannot translate a term and so is giving it a numeric designation so you will be able to see if we use it again”, probably not even saying “no future version of the software will be able to translate it”, not to mention a human who spent non-trivial amount of thought on the topic (in TWC future, there’s no AI, which means human thought will do some things no software can do).
Meditation 3: [Hardest of the meditations, for me.] Let us observe the difference between [post-utopian]-->[colonial alienation] and a connected thing (say [I see you picked Ace]-->[You see you picked Ace] from a deck of cards): In the first case, there is no way to settle an argument about whether Ellie is post-utopian or not. We would predict that it would cause arguments between people that are not settled. Anything connected to the causal web is more likely to lead to settlable arguments, at least among people behaving more-or-less rationally. It is not a perfect test, but it does suggest that I expect to see different things from connected networks and unconnected networks, like people changing their minds.
[Cheating, since I already read some Zombie sequences, but have not read any replies in this thread] The consciousness causes you to speak of consciousness, which is the result of neurons in your brain firing your jaw muscles (and other muscles, and so on). If it was epiphenomenal enough that none would talk about it, we wouldn’t have this question in the first place.
[Has consciousness] --> [Writes books/blogs on consciousness]
Causually connects consciousness to the universe.
Replying without reading any of the other answers. Apologies in advance for redundancy:
Meditation 1: The psychic cousin is indeed connected to the network of things. Let’s assume that it works, for simplicity, on decks of two cards: an Ace and a King.
Probabilities: Moshe picked Ace/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.4 Moshe picked King/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.1 Moshe picked Ace/Cousin says Moshe picked King -- 0.1 Moshe picked King/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.4
The True Love/Communing is more complicated: Does True Love have any discernible effect? If we assume True Love, say, changes the probability of having a fight (or some property of the fight—for example, a fight without reconciliation inside of 24 hours), then we should have a diagram:
True Love --> Communing says True Love | | \/ No fight
and resulting joint probability distributions. Since “fighting” is something observable (by a trained psychologist, say, who puts them in the “Love Lab” http://www.gottman.com/49847/The-Love-Lab.html) we have connectedness.
Dunno about Russian, but Hebrew has them for sure—“T’khelet” means “Light blue”, “Kakhol” means “blue”. I know quite a few bilingual ~5yo kids, who, if they’re wearing a light blue T-shirt, will scream at you if you say “you have a Kakhol T-shirt” in Hebrew, but will happily agree they are wearing a “blue” T-shirt—thus showing that sufficient lack of reflectivity can have two conflicting vision systems in the same individual. (BTW—“light blue” is just an approximation, it’s a specific shade of light blue).
“Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense”
Hrm, I’m not sure what evidence there is that highly intelligent people worse fashion sense than equivalent people [let’s stick to the category of males, with which I’m most familiar]. It seems to me like “fashion” for males comes down to a few simple rules, that a monkey (or, for that matter any programmer or mathematician) can master. The problem seems to be that (1) one does need to master these rules (2) sometimes, it means one does not dress comfortably.
I would like to offer a competing hypothesis: nerds have just as much “innate” fashion sense as non-nerds, but they feel that fashion is beneath them, that dressing comfortably is more important than following fashion, or that they would prefer to dress to impress nerds (with T-shirts that say “P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)” for example) than to impress non-nerds. In other words, the much simpler hypothesis “dress is usually worn to self-identify as a member of a tribe” is enough to explain nerds’ perceived lack of fashion sense.
[For the record, here is how a nerd male can “simulate” a reasonable facsimile of fashion sense: for semi-formal occasions, get a couple of nice suits and wear them. If nobody else would wear a tie, wear a suit without the tie (if your ability to predict whether people will wear a tie is that bad, improve it with explicit Bayesian approximation). For all other occasions, wear dark colored slacks and a button down shirt with a compatible color (ask a person you trust about which colors go with which, and keep a table glued to the inside of your closet. Any “nerd” has mastered skills tremendously more complicated than that (hell, correctly writing HTML is more complicated). One can only assume it is lack of motivation, not of ability.]
For myself as an example of nerd, I can definitely say the reason I dress “with a horrible fashion sense” is as a tribal identification scheme. In situations where my utility function would actually suffer because of that, I do the rational thing, and wear the disguise of a different tribe… (For example, when going on sales pitches to customers, I let the sales rep in charge of the sale to tell me what to dress down to the socks, on my wedding I let my wife pick out my clothes, etc.)
I’m not really sure how you can claim “techniques are value-neutral” without assuming what values are. For example, if my values contain a term for someone else’s self-esteem, a technique that lowers their self-esteem is not value-neutral. If my values contain a term for “respecting someone else’s requests”, techniques for overcoming LMR are not value-neutral. Since I’ve only limited knowledge of the seduction techniques advanced by the community, I did not offer more—after seeing some of the techniques, I decided that they are decidedly not value neutral, and therefore chose to not engage in them.
I cannot answer for Eliezer, but I can (perhaps) explain why the belief is “visibly insane”.
There is footage of the airplanes flying into the building.
In hindsight, several engineering organizations that investigated the phenomena, decided that a collapse from the fires started was likely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center )
In order to be a conspiracy, there would have had to be 3a. Someone who planted the explosives in a way to cause an organized collapse. 3b. People who shipped the explosives. 3c. People on the inside of FEMA and the other investigating organizations who looked into it. 3d. People on the inside of the FBI who swept under the rug the evidence for explosives. 3e. Nobody in the group of 3a-3d who had a change of heart and decided to come clean.
For 3 to be true, too many things to be true. For the non-conspiracy explanation, all that’s needed is the (perhaps slightly surprising) fact that the fire caused a specific kind of collapse. Most “truthers” know about as much about physics as me (highschool mechanics, some basics in college). So for a given truther to believe that, the truther needs to assume a high degree of certainty for his or her intuitive physics estimation in the fairly subtle area of civil engineering. In fact, they’d have to have a degree of certainty so high that all the elements in 3 are not enough to sway them the other way. That degree of certainty should be reserved for actual trained civil engineered, and perhaps not even then...
It’s not that costly if you do with university students: Get two groups of 4 university students. One group is told “test early and often”. One group is told “test after the code is integrated”. For every bug they fix, measure the effort it is to fix it (by having them “sign a clock” for every task they do). Then, do analysis on when the bug was introduced (this seems easy post-fixing the bug, which is easy if they use something like Trac and SVN). All it takes is a month-long project that a group of 4 software engineering students can do. It seems like any university with a software engineering department can do it for the course-worth of one course. Seems to me it’s under $50K to fund?
Did anything come of the discussion? I would like to know, since there’s a school in San Bruno I would love to give a talk at.
Just one thing that bothered me right off the bat when I read the book—PLEASE PLEASE attribute songs to the original creators. Otherwise, it looks like you’re claiming you wrote the song. That’s just unfair… :(
My initial reaction was “I wish I wouldn’t have known about this”, because it made me physically shuddered. After the shock and disgust, I forced myself to accept the proposition “There is a company selling bleach as medicine, and people are ingesting it”. I am now happy I have seen this, because my model of the world is more accurate, and if I act on my values in accordance with more accurate beliefs, I will be able to do more good.