PhilosophyTutor

Karma: 141

PhilosophyTutor Apr 28, 2014, 3:07 AM
1 point
in reply to: Anders_H’s comment on: Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search
It’s a proposition with a truth value in a sense, but if we are disagreeing about the topic then it seems most likely that the term “one of the world’s foremost intellectuals” is ambiguous enough that elucidating what we mean by the term is necessary before we can worry about the truth value.

Obviously I think that the truth value is false, and so obviously so that it needs little further argument to establish the implied claim that it is rational to think that calling Eliezer “one of the world’s foremost intellectuals” is cult-like and that is is rational to place a low value on a rationalist forum if it is cult-like.

So the question is how you are defining “one of the world’s foremost intellectuals”? I tend to define it as a very small group of very elite thinkers, typically people in their fifties or later with outstanding careers who have made major contributions to human knowledge or ethics.

PhilosophyTutor Apr 28, 2014, 12:48 AM
1 point
in reply to: Anders_H’s comment on: Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search
In a world where Eliezer is by objective standards X, then in that world it is correct to say he is X, for any X. That X could be “one of the world’s foremost intellectuals” or “a moose” and the argument still stands.

To establish whether it is objectively true that “his basic world view is fundamentally correct in important ways where the mainstream of intellectuals are wrong” would be beyond the scope of the thread, I think, but I think the mainstream has good grounds to question both those sub-claims. Worrying about steep-curve AI development might well be fundamentally incorrect as opposed to fundamentally correct, for example, and if the former is true then Eliezer is fundamentally wrong. You might also be wrong about what mainstream intellectuals think. For example the bitter struggle between frequentism and Bayesianism is almost totally imaginary, so endorsing Bayesianism is not going against the mainstream.

Perhaps more fundamentally, literally anything published in the applied analytic philosophy literature is just as much at the cutting edge of current intellectual discourse as Yudkowsky’s work. So your proposed definition fails to pick him out as being special, unless every published applied analytic philosopher is also one of the world’s foremost intellectuals.

PhilosophyTutor Apr 28, 2014, 12:13 AM
2 points
on: Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search
It seems based on your later comments that the premise of marketing worlds existing relies on there being trade-offs between our specified wants and our unspecified wants, so that the world optimised for our specified wants must necessarily be highly likely to be lacking in our unspecified ones (“A world with maximal bananas will likely have no apples at all”).

I don’t think this is necessarily the case. If I only specify that I want low rates of abortion, for example, then I think it highly likely that ’d get a world that also has low rates of STD transmission, unwanted pregnancy, poverty, sexism and religiousity because they all go together, I think you could specify any one of those variables and almost all of the time you would get all the rest as a package deal without specifying them.

Of course a malevolent AI could probably deliberately construct a siren world to maximise one of those values and tank the rest but such worlds seem highly unlikely to arise organically. The rising tide of education, enlightenment, wealth and egalitarianism lifts most of the important boats all at once, or at least that is how it seems to me.

PhilosophyTutor Apr 28, 2014, 12:01 AM
5 points
in reply to: Guocamole’s comment on: Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search
Calling Eliezer Yudkowsky one of the world’s foremost intellects is the kind of cult-like behaviour that gives LW a bad reputation in some rationalist circles. He’s one of the foremost Harry Potter fanfiction authors and a prolific blogger, who has also authored a very few minor papers. He’s a smart guy but there are a lot of smart guys in the world.

He articulates very important ideas, but so do very many teachers of economics, ethics, philosophy and so on. That does not make them very important people (although the halo effect makes some students think so).

(Edited to spell Eliezer’s name correctly, with thanks for the correction).

PhilosophyTutor Oct 31, 2012, 7:19 AM
2 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: The Landmark Forum — a rationalist’s first impression
“Cult” might not be a very useful term given the existing LW knowledge base, but it’s a very useful term. I personally recommend Steve Hassan’s book “Combating Cult Mind Control” as an excellent introduction to how some of the nastiest memetic viruses propagate and what little we can do about them.

He lists a lengthy set of characteristics which cults tend to have in common which go beyond the mind-controlling tactics of mainstream religions. My fuzzy recollection is that est/Landmark was considered a cult by the people who make it their area of interest to keep track of currently active cults.

In a sense these organisations are the polar opposite of LW. LW attempts to maximise rationality, although not always successfully, and cults attempt to create maximum dependence and control.

PhilosophyTutor Sep 26, 2012, 2:22 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
A possible interpretation is that the “strength” of a belief reflects the importance one attaches to acting upon that belief. Two people might both believe with 99% confidence that a new nuclear power plant is a bad idea, yet one of the two might go to a protest about the power plant and the other might not, and you might try to express what is going on there by saying that one holds that belief strongly and the other weakly.

You could of course also try to express it in terms of the two people’s confidence in related propositions like “protests are effective” or “I am the sort of person who goes to protests”. In that case strength would be referring to the existence or nonexistence of related beliefs which together are likely to be action-driving.

PhilosophyTutor Jul 11, 2012, 4:19 AM
−4 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Real World Solutions to Prisoners’ Dilemmas
It seems from my perspective that we are talking past each other and that your responses are no longer tracking the original point. I don’t personally think that deserves upvotes, but others obviously differ.

Your original claim was that:

Said literature gives advice, reasoning and conclusions that is epistemically, instrumentally and normatively bad.

Now given that game theory is not making any normative claims, it can’t be saying things which are normatively bad. Similarly since game theory does not say that you should either go out and act like a game-theory-rational agent or that you should act as if others will do so, it can’t be saying anything instrumentally bad either.

I just don’t see how it could even be possible for game theory to do what you claim it does. That would be like stating that a document describing the rules of poker was instrumentally and normatively bad because it encouraged wasteful, zero-sum gaming. It would be mistaking description for prescription.

We have already agreed, I think, that there is nothing epistemically bad about game theory taken as it is.

Everything below responds to the off-track discussion above and can be safely ignored by posters not specifically interested in that digression.

In game theory each player’s payoff matrix is their own. Notice that Codependent Romeo does not care where Codependent Juliet ends up in her payoff matrix. If Codependent Romeo was altruistic in the sense of wanting to maximise Juliet’s satisfaction with her payoff, he’d be keeping silent. Because Codependent Romeo is game-theory-rational, he’s indifferent to Codependent Juliet’s satisfaction with her outcome and only cares about maximising his personal payoff.

The standard assumption in a game-theoretic analysis is that a poker player wants money, a chess player wants to win chess games and so on, and that they are indifferent to their opponent(s) opinion about the outcome, just as Codependent Romeo is maximising his own payoff matrix and is indifferent to Codependent Juliet’s.

That is what we attempt to convey when we tell people that game-theory-rational players are neither benevolent nor malevolent. Even if you incorporate something you want to call “altruism” into their preference order, they still don’t care directly about where anyone else ends up in those other peoples’ preference orders.

PhilosophyTutor Jul 9, 2012, 11:47 AM
−5 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Real World Solutions to Prisoners’ Dilemmas

This isn’t about the agents having selfish desires (in fact, they don’t even have to “not care at all about other entities”—altruism determines what the utility function is, not how to maximise it.)

This is wrong. The standard assumption is that game-theory-rational entities are neither altruistic nor malevolent. Otherwise the Prisoner’s Dilemma wouldn’t be a dilemma in game theory. It’s only a dilemma as long as both players are solely interested in their own outcomes. As soon as you allow players to have altruistic interests in other players’ outcomes it ceases to be a dilemma.

You can do similar mathematical analyses with altruistic agents, but at that point speaking strictly you’re doing decision-theoretic calculations or possibly utilitarian calculations not game-theoretic calculations.

Utilitarian ethics, game theory and decision theory are three different things, and it seems to me your criticism assumes that statements about game theory should be taken as statements about utilitarian ethics or statements about decision theory. I think that is an instance of the fallacy of composition and we’re better served to stay very aware of the distinctions between those three frameworks.

PhilosophyTutor Jul 9, 2012, 8:15 AM
−2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Real World Solutions to Prisoners’ Dilemmas
I would be interested in reading about the bases for your disagreement. Game theory is essentially the exploration of what happens if you postulate entities who are perfectly informed, personal utility-maximisers who do not care at all either way about other entities. There’s no explicit or implicit claim that people ought to behave like those entities, thus no normative content whatsoever. So I can’t see how the game theory literature could be said to give normatively bad advice, unless the speaker misunderstood the definition of rationality being used, and thought that some definition of rationality was being used in which rationality is normative.

I’m not sure what negative epistemic or instrumental outcomes you foresee either, but I’m open to the possibility that there are some.

Is there a term you prefer to “game-theory-rational” that captures the same meaning? As stated above, game theory is the exploration of what happens when entities that are “rational” by that specific definition interact with the world or each other, so it seems like the ideal term to me.

PhilosophyTutor Jul 9, 2012, 6:41 AM
−2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Real World Solutions to Prisoners’ Dilemmas

Said literature gives advice, reasoning and conclusions that is epistemically, instrumentally and normatively bad.

Said literature makes statements about what is game-theory-rational. Those statements are only epistemically, instrumentally or normatively bad if you take them to be statements about what is LW-rational or “rational” in the layperson’s sense.

Ideally we’d use different terms for game-theory-rational and LW-rational, but in the meantime we just need to keep the distinction clear in our heads so that we don’t accidentally equivocate between the two.

PhilosophyTutor Jun 28, 2012, 12:26 AM
−2 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum

The effort required may be much larger than you think. Eliezer finds it very difficult to do that kind of work, for example. (Which is why his papers still read like long blog posts, and include very few citations. CEV even contains zero citations, despite re-treading ground that has been discussed by philosophers for centuries, as “The Singularity and Machine Ethics” shows.)

If this is the case, then a significant benefit to Eliezer of trying to get papers published would be that it would be excellent discipline for Eliezer, and would make him an even better scholar.

A benefit that would follow on is that it would establish by example that nobody is above showing their work, acknowledging their debts and being current on the relevant literature. Conceivably Eliezer is such a talented guy that it is of no benefit to him to do these things, but if everyone who thought they were that talented were excused from showing their work and keeping current then progress would slow significantly.

It also avoids reinventing the wheel. No matter how smart Eliezer is, it’s always conceivable that someone else thought of something first and expressed it in rigorous detail with proper citations. A proper literature review avoids this waste of valuable research time.

PhilosophyTutor May 14, 2012, 1:35 AM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions
I think you’re probably right in general, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that, for example, a rumour could get around the ALS community that lithium was bad, and be believed by enough people for the lack of blinding to have an effect. There was plenty of paranoia in the gay community about AZT, for example, despite the fact that they had a real and life-threatening disease, so it just doesn’t always follow that people with real and life-threatening diseases are universally reliable as personal judges of effective interventions.

Similarly if the wi-fi “allergy” crowd claimed that anti-allergy meds from a big, evil pharmaceutical company did not help them that could be a finding that would hold up to blinding but then again it might not.

I do worry that some naive Bayesians take personal anecdotes to be evidence far too quickly, without properly thinking through the odds that they would hear such anecdotes in worlds where the anecdotes were false. People are such terrible judges of medical effectiveness that in many cases I don’t think the odds get far off 50% either way.

PhilosophyTutor May 13, 2012, 9:02 PM
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions
What is your evidence for the claim that the main thing powering the superior statistical strength of PatientsLikeMe is the fact that medical researchers have learned to game the system and use complicated ad-hoc frequentist statistics to get whatever answer they want or think they ought to get? What observations have you made that are more likely to be true given that hypothesis?

PhilosophyTutor May 13, 2012, 8:45 PM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions
No. Lack of double-blinding will increase the false negative rate too, if the patients, doctors or examiners think that something shouldn’t work or should be actively harmful. If you test a bunch of people who believe that aspartame gives them headaches or that wifi gives them nausea without blinding them you’ll get garbage out as surely as if you test homeopathic remedies unblinded on a bunch of people who think homeopathic remedies cure all ills.

In this particular case I think it’s likely the system worked because it’s relatively hard to kid yourself about progressing ALS symptoms, and even with a hole in the blinding sometimes more data is just better. This is about as easy as medical problems get.

Generalising from this to the management of chronic problems seems like a major mistake. There’s far, far more scope to fool oneself with placebo effects, wishful thinking, failure to compensate for regression to the mean, attachment to a hypothesis and other cognitive errors with a chronic problem.

PhilosophyTutor May 11, 2012, 6:25 AM
−1 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
If this is a problem for Rawls, then Bentham has exactly the same problem given that you can hypothesise the existence of a gizmo that creates 3^^^3 units of positive utility which is hidden in a different part of the multiverse. Or for that matter a gizmo which will inflict 3^^^3 dust specks on the eyes of the multiverse if we don’t find it and stop it. Tell me that you think that’s an unlikely hypothesis and I’ll just raise the relevant utility or disutility to the power of 3^^^3 again as often as it takes to overcome the degree of improbability you place on the hypothesis.

However I think it takes a mischievous reading of Rawls to make this a problem. Given that the risk of the trans-multiverse travel project being hopeless (as you stipulate) is substantial and these hypothetical choosers are meant to be risk-averse, not altruistic, I think you could consistently argue that the genuinely risk-averse choice is not to pursue the project since they don’t know this worse-off person exists nor that they could do anything about it if that person did exist.

That said, diachronous (cross-time) moral obligations are a very deep philosophical problem. Given that the number of potential future people is unboundedly large, and those people are at least potentially very badly off, if you try to use moral philosophies developed to handle current-time problems and apply them to far-future diachronous problems it’s very hard to avoid the conclusion that we should dedicate 100% of the world’s surplus resources and all our free time to doing all sorts of strange and potentially contradictory things to benefit far-future people or protect them from possible harms.

This isn’t a problem that Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism, nor Eliezer’s gloss on it, handles any more satisfactorily than any other theory as far as I can tell.

PhilosophyTutor May 11, 2012, 6:08 AM
−1 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2012
It already is in Bayesian language, really, but to make it more explicit you could rephrase it as “Unless P(B|A) is 1, there’s always some possibility that hypothesis A is true but you don’t get to see observation B.”

PhilosophyTutor May 10, 2012, 11:49 PM
1 point
on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
This “moral dilemma” only has force if you accept strict Bentham-style utilitarianism, which treats all benefits and harms as vectors on a one-dimensional line, and cares about nothing except the net total of benefits and harms. That was the state of the art of moral philosophy in the year 1800, but it’s 2012 now.

There are published moral philosophies which handle the speck/torture scenario without undue problems. For example if you accepted Rawls-style, risk-averse choice from a position where you are unaware whether you will be one of the speck-victims or the torture victim, you would immediately choose the specks. Choosing the specks maximises the welfare of the least well off (they are subject to a speck, not torture) and, if you don’t know which role you will play, eliminates the risk you might be the torture victim.

(Bentham-style utility calculations are completely risk-neutral and care only about expected return on investment. However nothing about the universe I’m aware of requires you to be this way, as opposed to being risk-averse).

Or for that matter if you held a modified version of utilitarianism that subscribed to some notion of “justice” or “what people deserve”, and cared about how utility was distributed between persons instead of being solely concerned with the strict mathematical sum of all utility and disutility, you could just say that you don’t care how many dust specks you pile up, the degree of unfairness in a distribution where 3^^^3 people get out of a dust speck and one person gets tortured makes the torture scenario a less preferable distribution.

I know Eliezer’s on record as advising people not to read philosophy, but I think this is a case where that advice is misguided.

PhilosophyTutor 10 May 2012 3:37 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2012
If you have a result with a p value of p<0.05, the universe could be kidding you up to 5% of the time. You can reduce the probability that the universe is kidding you with bigger samples, but you never get it to 0%.

PhilosophyTutor 18 Apr 2012 0:42 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Anubhav’s comment on: HPMOR: What could’ve been done better?
We probably shouldn’t leap to the assumption that Transfiguration Weekly is a peer-reviewed journal with a large staff publishing results from multiple large laboratories. For all we know it’s churned out in a basement by an amateur enthusiast, is only eight pages long on a good week and mostly consists of photographs of people’s cats transfigured into household objects.

PhilosophyTutor 16 Mar 2012 4:46 UTC
2 points
0
on: Beautiful Probability
In the real world, Eliezer’s example simply doesn’t work.

In the real world you only hear about the results when they are published. The prior probability of the biased researcher publishing a positive result is higher than the prior probability of the unbiased researcher publishing a positive result.

The example only works if you are an omniscient spy who spies on absolutely all treatments. It’s true that an omniscient spy should just collate all the data regardless of the motivations of the researcher spied upon. However unless you are an omniscient spy you do need to take into account how an agent showing you new data went about gathering the data that they are showing you. Otherwise you are vulnerable to being “mushroomed” and updating yourself into beliefs that will cause you to lose.