Incidentally, for a community whose most important goal is solving a math problem, why is there no MathJax or other built-in Latex support?
robertzk
Karma: 665
The thing that eventually leapt out when comparing the two behaviours is that behaviour 2 is far more informative about what the restriction was, than behaviour 1 was.
It sounds to me like the agent overfit to the restriction R. I wonder if you can draw some parallels to the Vapnik-style classical problem of empirical risk minimization, where you are not merely fitting your behavior to the training set, but instead achieve the optimal trade-off between generalization ability and adherence to R.
In your example, an agent that inferred the boundaries of our restriction could generate a family of restrictions R_i that derive from slightly modifying its postulates. For example, if it knows you check in usually at midnight, it should consider the counterfactual scenario of you usually checking in at 11:59, 11:58, etc. and come up with the union of (R_i = play quietly only around time i), i.e., play quietly the whole time, since this achieves maximum generalization.
Unfortunately, things are complicated by the fact you said “I’ll be checking up on you!” instead of “I’ll be checking up on you at midnight!” The agent needs to go one step farther than the machine teaching problem and first know how many counterfactual training points it should generate to infer your intention (the R_i’s above), and then infer it.
A high-level conjecture is whether human CEV, if it can be modeled as a region within some natural high-dimensional real-valued space (e.g., R^n for high n where each dimension is a utility function?), admits minimal or near minimal curvature as a Riemannian manifold assuming we could populate the space with the maximum available set of training data as mined from all human literature.
A positive answer to the above question would be philosophically satisfying as it would imply a potential AI would not have to set up corner cases and thus have the appearance of overfitting to the restrictions.
EDIT: Framed in this way, could we use cross-validation on the above mentioned training set to test our CEV region?
However, UFFire does not uncontrollably exponentially reproduce or improve its functioning. Certainly a conflagration on a planet covered entirely by dry forest would be an unmitigatable problem rather quickly.
In fact, in such a scenario, we should dedicate a huge amount of resources to prevent it and never use fire until we have proved it will not turn “unfriendly”.
I down-voted this comment because it is a clever ploy for karma that rests on exploiting LessWrongers’ sometimes unnecessary enthusiasm for increasingly abstract and self-referential forms of reasoning but otherwise adds nothing to the conversation.
Twist: By “this comment” I actually mean my comment, thereby making this a paraprosdokian.
I am an active github R contributor and stackoverflow R contributor and I would be willing to coordinate. Send me an email: rkrzyz at gmail
So you are saying that explaining something is equivalent to constructing a map that bridges an inferential distance, whereas explaining something away is refactoring thought-space to remove an unnecessary gerrymandering?
It feels good knowing you changed your mind in response to my rebuttal.
I disagree with your preconceptions about the “anti” prefix. For example, an anti-hero is certainly a hero. I think it is reasonable to consider “anti” a contextually overloaded semantic negater whose scope does not have to be the naive interpretation: anti-X can refer to “opposite of X” or “opposite or lacking of a trait highly correlated with X” with the exact choice clear from context.
I got a frequent LessWrong contributor a programming internship this summer.
It is as if you’re buying / shorting an index fund on opinions.
Strong AI could fail if there are limits to computational integrity on sufficiently complex systems, similar to heating and QM problems limiting transistor sizes. For example, perhaps we rarely see these limits in humans because their frequency is one in a thousand human-thought-years, and when they do manifest it is mistaken as a diagnosis of mental illness.
The possibility of an “adaptation” being in fact an exaptatation or even a spandrel is yet another reason to be incredibly careful about purposing teleology into a discussion about evolutionarily-derived mechanisms.
The question of the subject is too dense and should be partitioned. Some ideas for auxiliary questions:
Do there exists attempts at classifications of parenting styles? (So that we may not re-invent tread tracks)
Is parenting or childrearing an activity that supports the existence of relevant goals? Do there exist relevant values? Or is parenting better approached as a passive activity sans evaluation with no winners or losers? (So that we may affirm this question is worth answering)
Given affirmative answers to the above questions (and having achieved some epistemic rationality in this domain), and assuming a choice of parenting style(s) and/or values, what specific steps can be taken to activate those values in meatspace (so that we may gain instrumental rationality in this domain)?
The above kind of direct onslaught will likely lead to overzealous suggestion, so we can also consider stepping back and asking: what are some strategies for generating candidate actions without concurrently assuming premature preferences? [1]
Potential answers to the above queries will always be accompanied with degrees of uncertainty. How do we determine when to stop researching and move towards implementation? How does the domain of parenting differ here from the general solution (productivity / to-do systems like GTD or strategical thinking )?
Are there tangible contributions that can be made in the general case? If we went through this much work and make significant progress in answering some of these questions, and we have been surprised by some of the answers, is it our duty to make an attempt to inform other parents? What are the best ways of doing so? Joining a local club or school district assembly? A blog? Submitting to an editorial? Your lullaby above is wonderful and could make some serious universe-changing modifications to reality (e.g., a child grows up to assume a mathematical or scientific vocation) but we do not feel the wailing alarm in our head that assigns it the appropriate significance. Effective parenting is one of the most accessible optimization processes Joe Schmoe has access to, so how can we make meta-improvements on a large scale?
If you are serious in your attempt to answer the original query, I recommend selecting one of the above questions or something even finer-grained and re-submitting to Discussion. (By the way, I am interested.)
[1] Say that a naive answer is the banal “brainstorm,” to make a list of relevant large-scale projects to relevant values (e.g., figure out a consistent system of reminding my kids to be compassionate to those around them (name 3 examples of specific compassionate actions) if we value empathy and mindfulness). Then a follow-up question is to locate where your candidate actions are in behaviorspace for this domain: collate several “brainstorm” lists by independent parents who seem to have similar values and styles. Are there academic resources? Potential analytics to be done? Are there quantitive variables that correlate to success? Can we data-mine historical sources over these variables? (e.g., if we are determining whether to raise kids vegetarian or omnivore, what do long-term studies in the literature say about follow-up health?)
In other words, productivity need not be confused with busywork, and I suspect this is primarily an artifact of linguistic heuristics (similar brain procedures get lightly activated when you hear “productivity” as when you hear “workout” or “haste” or even “forward march”).
If productivity were a currency, you could say “have I acquired more productons this week than last week with respect to my current goal?” If making your family well off can be achieved by lounging around in the pool splashing each other, then that is high family welfare productivity.
I spend time worrying about whether random thermal fluctuation in (for example) suns produces sporadic conscious moments simply due to random causal structure alignments. Since I also believe most potential conscious moments are bizarre and painful, that worries me. This worry is not useful when embedded in systems one, a worry which the latter was not created to cope with, so I only worry in the system two philosophical curiosity sense.
Seeing as how classical mechanics is an effective theory for physically restructuring significant portions of reality to one’s goals, you are promising something tantamount to a full theory of knowledge acquisition, something linguists and psychologists smarter than you have worked on for centuries.
Calm down with promises that will disappoint you and make an MVP.
I do not understand why no one is interested.
Do you have an Amazon wish list? You are awesome.
I am interested. What software did you use? I am trying to learn NEURON but it feels like Fortran and I have trouble navigating around the cobwebs.
Did you remove the vilification of proving arcane theorems in algebraic number theory because the LessWrong audience is more likely to fall within this demographic? (I used to be very excited about proving arcane theorems in algebraic number theory, and fully agree with you.)