Sideways

Karma: 408

Sideways Jun 4, 2010, 5:19 PM
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Bayes’ Theorem Illustrated (My Way)
I use entities outside human experience in thought experiments for the sake of preventing Clever Humans from trying to game the analogy with their inferences.

“If Monty ‘replaced’ a grain of sand with a diamond then the diamond might be near the top, so I choose the first bucket.”

“Monty wants to keep the diamond for himself, so if he’s offering to trade with me, he probably thinks I have it and wants to get it back.”

It might seem paradoxical, but using ‘transmute at random’ instead of ‘replace’, or ‘Omega’ instead of ‘Monty Hall’, actually simplifies the problem for me by establishing that all relevant facts to the problem have already been included. That never seems to happen in the real world, so the world of the analogy is usefully unreal.

Sideways Jun 4, 2010, 5:02 PM
3 points
in reply to: logical’s comment on: Bayes’ Theorem Illustrated (My Way)
Your analogy doesn’t hold, because each spin of the roulette wheel is a separate trial, while choosing a door and then having the option to choose another are causally linked.

If you’ve really thought about XiXiDu’s analogies and they haven’t helped, here’s another; this is the one that made it obvious to me.

Omega transmutes a single grain of sand in a sandbag into a diamond, then pours the sand equally into three buckets. You choose one bucket for yourself. Omega then pours the sand from one of his two buckets into the other one, throws away the empty bucket, and offers to let you trade buckets.

Each bucket analogizes to a door that you may choose; the sand analogizes to probability mass. Seen this way, it’s clear that what you want is to get as much sand (probability mass) as possible, and Omega’s bucket has more sand in it. Monty’s unopened door doesn’t inherit anything tangible from the opened door, but it does inherit the opened door’s probability mass.

Sideways Apr 8, 2010, 5:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Pain and gain motivation
As a tentative rephrasing, something that’s “emotionally implausible” is something that “I would never do” or that “could never happen to me.” Like you, I can visualize myself falling with a high degree of accuracy; but I can’t imagine throwing myself off the bridge in the first place. Suicide? I would never do that.

It occurs to me that “can’t imagine” implies a binary division when ability to imagine is more of a continuum: the quality of imagination drops steadily between trying to imagine brushing my teeth (everyday), calling 911 (very rare, but I’ve done it before), punching through a wall (never done it, but maybe if I was mad enough), and jumping off a bridge (I would never do that).

For all four, I can imagine the physical events as bare facts; but for the first two I can easily place myself in the simulation, complete with cognitive and emotional states. That’s much harder in the third case; in the fourth, I’m about as confident in my imagination as I am in trying to imagine a world where 1+1=3.

Sideways Apr 7, 2010, 9:46 PM
2 points
in reply to: gregconen’s comment on: Pain and gain motivation
If you’ve exercised before, you can probably remember the feeling in your body when you’re finished—the ‘afterglow’ of muscle fatigue, endorphins, and heightened metabolism—and you can visualize that. If you haven’t, or can’t remember, you can imagine feelings in your mind like confidence and self-satisfaction that you’ll have at the end of the exercise.

As for studying, the goal isn’t to study, per se; it’s to do well on the test. Visualizing the emotional rewards of success on the test itself can motivate you to study, as well as get enough sleep the night before, eat appropriately the day of, take performance enhancing drugs, etc.

Imagination is a funny thing. You can imagine things that could physically never happen—but if you try to imagine something that’s emotionally implausible to you, you’ll likely fail. Just now I imagined moving objects with my mind, with no trouble at all; then I tried to imagine smacking my mother in the face and failed utterly. If you actually try to imagine having something—not just think about trying—and fail, it’s probably because deep down you don’t believe you could ever have it.

Sideways Feb 16, 2010, 10:29 PM
0 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”: Prelude

The human experience of colour is not really about recognizing a specific wavelength of light.

True, but irrelevant to the subject at hand.

the qualia of colour are associated more with the invariant surface properties of objects than they are with invariant wavelengths of light.

No, the qualia of color have nothing to do with the observed object. This is the pons asinorum of qualia. The experience of color is a product of the invariant surface properties of objects; the qualia of color is a product of the relationship between that experience and other similar experiences.

A human looking at an optical illusion might say, “That looks red, but it’s really white,” acknowledging that spectral color is objective, but psychophysical color is more malleable. But compare that sentence to “that sounds good, but it’s really bad.” Statements about color aren’t entirely subjective—to some extent they’re about fact, not opinion.

Statements about qualia are about the subjective aspect of an experience: e.g., red is the color of rage; of love; the color that means ‘stop.’

Sideways Feb 16, 2010, 7:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: Tiiba’s comment on: Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”: Prelude
Your eyes do detect the frequency of light, your nose does detect the chemical composition of smells, and your tongue does detect the chemical composition of food. That’s exactly what the senses of sight, smell, and taste do.

Our brains then interpret the data from our eyes, noses, and tongues as color, scent, and flavor. It’s possible to ‘decode’, e.g., color into a number (the frequency of light), and vice versa; you can find charts on the internet that match frequency/wavelength numbers to color. Decoding taste and scent data into the molecules that produce them is more difficult, but people find ways to do it—that’s how artificial flavorings are made.

There are lots of different ways to encode data, and some of them are more useful in some situations, but none of them are strictly privileged. A non-human brain could experience the ‘color’ of light as a number that just happens to correspond to its frequency in oscillations/second, but that wouldn’t prevent it from having qualia, any more than encoding numbers into hexadecimal prevents you from doing addition.

So it’s not the ‘redness’ of light that’s a quale; ‘red’ is just a code word for ‘wavelength 635-700 nanometers.’ The qualia of redness are the associations, connections, emotional responses that your brain attaches to the plain sensory experience.

Sideways Feb 10, 2010, 9:28 PM
1 point
in reply to: MrHen’s comment on: My Fundamental Question About Omega
When a human brain makes a decision, certain computations take place within it and produce the result. Those computations can be perfectly simulated by a sufficiently-more-powerful brain, e.g. Omega. Once Omega has perfectly simulated you for the relevant time, he can make perfect predictions concerning you.

Perfectly simulating any computation requires at least as many resources as the computation itself (1), so AFAICT it’s impossible for anything, even Omega, to simulate itself perfectly. So a general “perfect predictor” may be impossible. But in this scenario, Omega doesn’t have to be a general perfect predictor; it only has to be a perfect predictor of you.

From Omega’s perspective, after running the simulation, your actions are determined. But you don’t have access to Omega’s simulation, nor could you understand it even if you did. There’s no way for you to know what the results of the computations in your brain will be, without actually running them.

If I recall the Sequences correctly, something like the previous sentence would be a fair definition of Eliezer’s concept of free will.

(1) ETA: On second thought this need not be the case. For example, f(x) = ( (x *10) / 10 ) +1 is accurately modeled by f(x) = x+1. Presumably Omega is a “well-formed” mind without any such rent-shirking spandrels.

Sideways Sep 8, 2009, 9:36 PM
−3 points
on: Outlawing Anthropics: An Updateless Dilemma
The more I think about this, the more I suspect that the problem lies in the distinction between quantum and logical coin-flips.

Suppose this experiment is carried out with a quantum coin-flip. Then, under many-worlds, both outcomes are realized in different branches. There are 40 future selves--2 red and 18 green in one world, 18 red and 2 green in the other world—and your duty is clear:

(50% ((18 +$1) + (2 -$3))) + (50% ((18 -$3) + (2 +$1))) = -$20.

Don’t take the bet.

So why Eliezer’s insistence on using a logical coin-flip? Because, I suspect, it prevents many-worlds from being relevant. Logical coin-flips don’t create possible worlds the way quantum coin-flips do.

But what is a logical coin-flip, anyway?

Using the example given at the top of this post, an agent that was not only rational but clever would sit down and calculate the 256th binary digit of pi before answering. Picking a more difficult logical coin-flip just makes the calculation more difficult; a more intelligent agent could solve it, even if you can’t.

So there are two different kinds of logical coin-flips: the sort that are indistinguishable from quantum coin-flips even in principle, in which case they ought to cause the same sort of branching events under many-worlds—and the sort that are solvable, but only by someone smarter than you.

If you’re not smart enough to solve the logical coin-flip, you may as well treat it as a quantum coin-flip, because it’s already been established that you can’t possibly do better. That doesn’t mean your decision algorithm is flawed; just that if you were more powerful, it would be more powerful too.

Sideways Sep 7, 2009, 11:47 PM
1 point
on: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains
ISTM the problem of Boltzmann brains is irrelevant to the 50%-ers. Presumably, the 50%-ers are rational—e.g., willing to update on statistical studies significant at p=0.05. So they don’t object to the statistics of the situation; they’re objecting to the concept of “creating a billion of you”, such that you don’t know which one you are. If you had offered to roll a billion-sided die to determine their fate (check your local tabletop-gaming store), there would be no disagreement.

Of course, this problem of identity and continuity has been hashed out on OB/LW before. But the Boltzmann-brain hypothesis doesn’t require more than one of you—just a lot of other people, something the 50%-ers have no philosophical problem with. It’s a challenge for a solipsist, not a 50%-er.

Sideways Sep 7, 2009, 11:33 PM
5 points
on: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains

[Rosencrantz has been flipping coins, and all of them are coming down heads]

Guildenstern: Consider: One, probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three, we are now held within un-, sub- or super-natural forces. Discuss.

Rosencrantz: What?

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

Sideways Aug 27, 2009, 8:23 PM
2 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: How does an infovore manage information overload?
Newcomb’s problem is applicable to the general class of game-type problems where the other players try to guess your actions. As far as I can tell, the only reason to introduce Omega is to avoid having to deal with messy, complicated probability estimates from the other players.

Unfortunately, in a forum where the idea that Omega could actually exist is widely accepted, people get caught up in trying to predict Omega’s actions instead of focusing on the problem of decision-making under prediction.

Sideways Aug 8, 2009, 12:58 AM
0 points
in reply to: Psychohistorian’s comment on: A note on hypotheticals
IAWY and this also applies to hypotheticals testing non-mathematical models. For instance, there isn’t much isomorphism between Newcomblike problems involving perfectly honest game players who can predict your every move, and any gamelike interaction you’re ever likely to have.

Sideways Jul 21, 2009, 6:30 PM
1 point
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
Thanks for the heads-up. Fixed.

Sideways Jul 21, 2009, 5:50 PM
14 points
on: Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
I may be in the minority in this respect, but I like it when Less Wrong is in crisis. The LW community is sophisticated enough to (mostly) avoid affective spirals, which means it produces more and better thought in response to a crisis. I believe that, e.g., the practice of going to the profile of a user you don’t like and downvoting every comment, regardless of content, undermines Less Wrong more than any crisis has or will.

Furthermore, I think the crisis paradigm is what a community of developing rationalists ought to look like. The conceit of students passively absorbing wisdom at the feet of an enlightened teacher is far from the mark. How many people can you think of, who mastered any subject by learning in this way?

That said… both “sides” of the gender crisis are repeating themselves, which strongly suggests they have nothing new to say. So I say Eliezer is right. If you can’t understand the other side’s perspective by now—if you still have no basis for agreement after all this discussion—you need to acknowledge that you have a blind spot here and either re-read with the intent to understand rather than refute, or just avoid talking about it.

Sideways Jul 14, 2009, 9:00 AM
5 points
in reply to: spuckblase’s comment on: Causation as Bias (sort of)

Inhabitants of a Hume world are right to explain their world with this Hume-world theory. They just happen to live in a world where no prediction is possible.

Just because what you believe happens to be true, doesn’t mean you’re right to believe it. If I walk up to a roulette wheel, certain that the ball will land on black, and it does—then I still wasn’t right to believe it would.

Hypothetical Hume-worlders, like us, do not have the luxury of access to reality’s “source code”: they have not been informed that they exist in a hypothetical Hume-world, any more than we can know the “true nature” of our world. Their Hume-world theory, like yours, cannot be based on reading reality’s source code; the only way to justify Hume-world theory is by demonstrating that it makes accurate predictions.

Arguably, it does make at least one prediction: that any causal model of reality will eventually break down. This prediction, to put it mildly, does not hold up well to our investigation of our universe.

Alternatively, you could assert that if all possibilities are randomly realized, we might (with infinitesimal probability) be living in a world that just happened to exactly resemble a causal world. But without evidence to support such a belief, you would not be right to believe it, even if it turns out to be true. Not to mention that, as others have mentioned in this thread, unfalsifiable theories are a waste of valuable mental real estate.

Sideways Jul 5, 2009, 6:47 PM
1 point
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: The enemy within
I agree. My comment was meant as a clarification, not a correction, because the paragraph I quoted and the subsequent one could be misinterpreted to suggest that humans and animals use entirely different methods of cognition—”excecut[ing] certain adaptions without really understanding how or why they worked” versus an “explicit goal-driven propositional system with a dumb pattern recognition algorithm.” I expect we both agree that human cognition is a subsequent modification of animal cognition rather than a different system evolved in parallel.

I’m not sure I agree that humans are closer to pure consequentialism than animals; if anything, the imperfect match between prediction and decision faculties makes us less consequentialist. Eating or not eating one strip of bacon won’t have an appreciable impact on your social status! Rather, I would say that future-prediction allows us to have more complicated and (to us) interesting goals, and to form more complicated action paths.

Sideways Jul 5, 2009, 3:47 PM
2 points
on: The enemy within

All animals except for humans had no explicit notion of maximizing the number of children they had, or looking after their own long-term health. In humans, it seems evolution got close to building a consequentialist agent...

Clarification: evolution did not build human brains from scratch. Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers. The key difference is that thanks to highly developed frontal lobes, humans can predict the future more powerfully than other animals. Those predictions are handled by adaptation-executing parts of the brain in the same way as immediate sense input.

For example, consider the act of eating bacon. A human can extrapolate from the bacon to a pattern of bacon-eating to a future of obesity, health risks, and reduced social status (including greater difficulty finding a mate). This explains why humans can dither over whether to eat bacon, while a dog just scarfs it down—dogs can’t predict the future that way. (The frontal lobes also distinguish between bad/good/better/best actions—hence the vegetarian’s decision to abstain from bacon on moral grounds.)

Eliezer’s body of writing on evolutionary psychology and P.J. Eby’s writing on PCT and personal effectiveness seem to be regarded as incompatible by some commenters here (and I don’t want to hijack this thread into yet another PCT debate), but they both support the proposition that akrasia and other “sub-optimal” mental states result from a brain processing future-predictions with systems that evolved to handle data from proximate environmental inputs and memory.

Sideways Jul 4, 2009, 8:13 PM
2 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Rationality Quotes—July 2009
I think the point of the quote is not that young folks are more able to unlearn falsehoods; it’s that they haven’t learned as many falsehoods as old people, just by virtue of not having been around as long. If you can unlearn falsehoods, you can keep a “young” (falsehood-free) mind.

Sideways Jul 2, 2009, 10:21 PM
2 points
in reply to: byrnema’s comment on: Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism
You wrote:

My belief in science (trustworthy observation, logic, epistemology, etc.) is equivalent with my belief in God, which is why I find belief in God to be necessary.

Suppose, indeed, I were a rationalist of an Untheist society… Would it be very long before I asked if there was some kind of meta-organization?

The meta-organization is a property of the natural world.

It sounds like you’re saying that your “God” is not supernatural. This isn’t just a problem of proper usage. A theist who believes in a deity (which, given proper usage, is redundant) is at least being internally consistent when using ineffable language like “God,” “belief,” and “faith,” because she’s imagining something ineffable. Using ineffable language to describe natural phenomena just generates mysterious answers to mysterious questions.

The God you are talking about in ~A—the one causing the miraculous violations—sounds like some kind of creature.

The argument, “your puny God is a creature and mine isn’t” sounds like one more retreat to mystery. A God that causes miracles is only required to be a creature insofar as a God that causes patterns to be “consistent and dovetail with one another” (in other words, prevents miracles) is also required to be a creature.

Sideways Jul 2, 2009, 9:04 PM
7 points
in reply to: byrnema’s comment on: Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism
Is there anything supernatural about meta-organization?

Take your hypothetical a step further: suppose that not only were you born into an Untheist society, but also a universe where physical reality, evolution, and mathematics did not “work.” In universe-prime, the laws of physics do not permit stars to form, yet the Earth orbits the Sun; evolution cannot produce life, but humans exist; physicists and mathematicians prove that math can’t describe reality, yet people know where the outfielder should stand to catch the fly ball.

byrnema-prime would have an open-and-shut case that some supernatural agency was tampering with the forces of nature. The “miraculous” violations of its meta-organization would be powerful evidence for the existence of God.

“Imagine,” byrnema-prime might argue to an untheist, “a universe very different from ours, where every known phenomenon arose predictably from other known phenomena. In such a universe, your rejection of the supernatural would be proper; supernatural causes would not be required to produce what people observe. But in our universe, where miracles occur, atheism just can’t be justified.”

Which byrnema has the stronger argument? Which is evidence for God’s existence, A or ~A?