Tom_McCabe2

Karma: 439

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 28, 2008, 3:35 PM
0 points
on: To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
“So I’m taking the time to write out full explanations, and the basics, and will eventually produce a book, and teenagers will read the book, go on to read other books, and then be hired by SIAI 7 years later.”

I would certainly enjoy reading your book, and I’m confident that thousands of other people would enjoy it as well. However, I’m not confident that a book on rationality alone will do much for recruiting- Hofstadter’s GEB was well-written and very widely read, and it didn’t help recruit people for any specific organization.

“I’m just explaining why it is that I won’t tell anyone the Secret of how the ineffable difference between blueness and redness arises from mere atoms for less than $100,000 -”

I’ll give you $100 for a reasonably detailed explanation of this, as long as you publish it under the GFDL or a similar license.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 24, 2008, 5:58 PM
4 points
on: The Beauty of Settled Science
“A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.”

I would recommend digging up the paper that generated the press release; if you can’t understand it, you don’t understand the controversy.

“Can you recommend a good textbook for QM or general relativity?”

Feynman Lectures vol. 3 for QM, and Gravitation for GR (be warned that the latter uses grad-school-level math).

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 23, 2008, 3:24 PM
9 points
on: If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help
“One of the fundamental differences between technology and magic is that two engineers do twice as much work as one would do”

This is demonstrably untrue; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month.

“Engineers can, so the things you create with technology aren’t comparable to the products of big companies,”

If this were true, startups wouldn’t exist.

“I wonder if anyone can come up with a good argument as to why it is actually better to live in a non-personal, non-caring universe than in a caring one.”

I think Eli’s argument is that a caring universe isn’t necessary for happiness. If he thought that the universe should stay uncaring, he wouldn’t be trying to develop FAI.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 23, 2008, 1:49 AM
3 points
on: If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help
“When you can sing things into existence, you’re deeply connected to the nature of existence.”

I think you’re reading too much into it. A medieval peasant would gawk at an electric light.

To clarify my earlier comment: The major disconnect is between things we’ve already studied and things we haven’t, not between reality and unreality. If, tomorrow, we discovered a new combination of EM fields that could remotely levitate random objects, it would qualify as amazing new magic- even though it’s based off of well-understood theories and nobody’s written a book about it. Telling people that reality is just as amazing as magic won’t work in the long-term, even if they are identical on some calibrated amazingness metric, because people quickly get bored with things they have too much experience with. The trick is to find things within reality that we haven’t heard about before, and there are certainly plenty of those.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 23, 2008, 12:57 AM
0 points
on: If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help
Beautifully written. Someone should submit this to Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.

I think that the human desire for magic is closely tied to the desire for something new. The things that we do with science would be just as impressive to medieval-tech magicians as their magic would be to us. But we already understand most of our technology- we know what it’s used for, what it can do and what it can’t, how much it costs on eBay, and so on. To steal a metaphor, human excitement is like a gas that expands to fill the available space. If you dumped a medieval knight into 21st-century America, they’d be in awe of our amazing ‘powers’. They’d want to explore the world, study our technology, understand the marvelous secrets behind modern civilization (at least if they’re anything like OB readers). But soon enough, they’d bump up against the limits of what we can already do with aluminium and silicon. And beyond that, you can only make further progress through tremendous effort, tremendous intelligence or tremendous luck. So magic, no matter how trivial, would be of tremendous interest to the world because it hasn’t been done before. It lies outside of the predefined boundaries most people live their lives in.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 21, 2008, 11:47 PM
0 points
on: Joy in Discovery
At least we’ll always have new mathematics to discover. To quote Erdos: “Mathematics is the only infinite human activity. It is conceivable that humanity could eventually learn everything in physics or biology. But humanity certainly won’t ever be able to find out everything in mathematics, because the subject is infinite. Numbers themselves are infinite.”

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 18, 2008, 8:35 PM
6 points
on: Savanna Poets
“The Great Stories are not timeless, because the human species is not timeless.”

Storytelling itself only goes back a few hundred thousand years, but many of the concepts in our stories (murder, lust, betrayal, adultery, etc.) have identifiable homologues in animals. Several appear to go all the way back to the dawn of the complex nervous system.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 18, 2008, 12:11 AM
4 points
on: Fake Reductionism
“but I’m somewhat bothered by the fact that it is an unflattering account of people who are not here to defend themselves.”

So is every history textbook. More usefully, there are still plenty of people around who see “science” as replacing the Earth’s beauty with “boring stuff”. If any of them are reading OB, they are quite welcome to comment.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 17, 2008, 2:36 AM
−3 points
−2
on: Explaining vs. Explaining Away
“My usual reply ends with the phrase: “If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed.” I shall expand on that tomorrow.”

How many times do we take joy in things that are, not only imaginary, but physically impossible? If our utility function values XYZ, and XYZ is currently imaginary, it seems rather silly to adjust the utility function to no longer value XYZ, rather than adjusting the universe so that XYZ exists. My utility function doesn’t value drugs (or drug-equivalents) that zero the human utility function for everything that doesn’t currently exist. Think of what would have happened to human civilization if such drugs were readily available, and people wanted to take them- we’d have remained in the Stone Age until the next asteroid or ice age killed us off.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 15, 2008, 10:19 PM
0 points
on: Qualitatively Confused
“Tom, your statement is true but completely irrelevant.”

There’s nothing in the AIXI math prohibiting it from understanding self-reference, or even taking drugs (so long as such drugs don’t affect the ultimate output). To steal your analogy, AIXI may be automagically immune to anvils, but that doesn’t stop it from understanding what an anvil is, or whacking itself on the head with said anvil (ie, spending ten thousand cycles looping through garbage before returning to its original calculations).

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 15, 2008, 5:52 PM
0 points
on: Qualitatively Confused
“because they are incapable of conceiving that any event whatsoever in the outside universe could change the computational structure of their own operations.”

Self-modifying systems are Turing-equivalent to non-self-modifying systems. Suppose you have a self-modifying TM, which can have transition functions A1,A2,...An. Take the first Turing machine, and append an additional ceil(log(n)) bits to the state Q. Then construct a new transition function by summing together the Ai: take A1 and append (0000… 0) to the Q, take A2 and append (0000… 1) to the Q, and so on and so forth (append different things to the domain and codomain Q when that particular state leads to self-modification). This non-self-modifying machine should replicate the behavior of the self-modifying machine exactly, as every computation is equivalent to the self-modifying machine.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 14, 2008, 7:06 PM
0 points
on: Penguicon & Blook
“I think it would be a waste, and very sad, if Eliezer had spent over a year writing enough high-quality material for a book and that material just stayed buried in Overcoming Bias’ archives, nearly forgotten in a matter of years. For a little more effort, he can produce books that more chances of making a difference.”

I agree, but Eli has already announced his intentions to rewrite most of the material, which will require a great deal of work.

“But I don’t believe that everybody who could be convinced, who could help is already on board.”

I certainly agree; it’s a question of which recruiting approach is the most viable. Publishing this kind of a book is essentially a shotgun approach; you hit a whole bunch of people with rational ideas and hope that a few of them stick. I was pointing out that 1), it is a shotgun approach, and 2), the spread of a dead-tree version is so wide that it’s unlikely to hit very many people.

“Imagine if back then you had seen an interesting review of Elizer’s book on Amazon and decided to check it out. I bet that would have been a great introduction.”

If Eli had published a book on rationalism back in 2003, it would currently be collecting dust on my bookshelf along with all the other books I’ve read several times over. It probably wouldn’t have drawn me into transhumanism.

“Many could learn from his book, I’m sure, and that could increase the quality of their contribution.”

The blog posts, so far as I can tell, are doing as well a job of teaching their readers as can reasonably be expected. We will need to prepare something for the next generation, but that’s caused by the nature of blogging, not some deficiency in Eli’s postings.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 14, 2008, 5:05 PM
0 points
on: Penguicon & Blook
“Way to dismiss the rest of the human species out of hand. It’s people like you ’wot cause evaporative cooling. Nice little ingroup vibe there, sure to P.O. everyone who isn’t already in the cult.”

Forgive me for having the audacity to state the obvious out loud. We know from a huge number of precedents that, even if SIAI is wildly successful, 99% of the human species isn’t going to help. 99% of America doesn’t involve itself in something as popular and easily understood as national politics; what chance does transhumanism have? This is true regardless of how many people it P.O.’s.

Consider a book series as popular and well-written as the Feynman Lectures on Physics. How many people became physicists because they read Feynman’s lectures? The books were certainly read by a large number of physicists, but I doubt you would have seen any major decrease in the number of professional physicists had Feynman never lived. A lot of people can point to one or two books they read that first got them involved in whatever field they studied, but so far as I know, there’s no one, single book that got a lot of young people into any specific career. The closest things I can think of are TV dramas like CSI and ER, and they have millions of viewers nationwide.

“I can hire researchers who read the popular book as grad students, went on to read the massive tome, and then read a few dozen technical math books while refining their practice of rationality until they became ready to think about FAI without their head exploding”

This is a legitimate strategy, but again, this demographic is going to be much smaller than the total number of people who buy the book. You must know this. People don’t read dozens of additional books or study rationality intensively unless they have some compelling reason to- you mention this yourself (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/). The two compelling reasons you mentioned, transhumanism and making millions, aren’t going to attract a lot of people (the first due to future shock and sparsity in the memepool, the second due to skepticism over get-rich-quick schemes).

“Most of SIAI’s human intake today is from people who read stuff I wrote ten years ago.”

Most of the stuff you wrote ten years ago is on transhumanism, which does give people a compelling reason to stay involved.

“Even if the book was just a re-hash of the blog posts that are readily available, I’d buy it anyway”

I was talking about the ratio of people who help save the world/people who read the book, not the absolute number of people who read the book (which will probably be rather large).

“Almost nobody (relatively) will be rediscovering them in a few years. That’s simply the nature of blogging. Who’s reading 3 years old BoingBoing posts right now?”

This is a very good point.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 14, 2008, 12:49 AM
1 point
on: Penguicon & Blook
What are your hopes for this book? Pretty much everyone involved with SIAI already knows about your Overcoming Bias posts. It seems like the primary purchasing demographic for your book will be 1), people who already read your OB posts, 2), people who know about OB but don’t take the time to understand it, and 3), people who aren’t that intelligent or interested in transhumanism (by sheer force of numbers). The first group, of course, will already have heard about most of your ideas. The second group isn’t likely to understand any more than they did the first time (it’s easier to read 200 three-page blog posts than one 600-page book). People in the third group, although they may improve their conception of rationality, aren’t likely to help save the world. What are your thoughts?

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 8, 2008, 4:39 AM
12 points
0
on: Dissolving the Question
I have no idea why or how someone first thought up this question. People ask each other silly questions all the time, and I don’t think very much effort has gone into discovering how people invent them.

However, note that most of the silly questions people ask have either quietly gone away, or have been printed in children’s books to quiet their curiosity. This type of question- along with many additional errors in rationality- seems to attract people. It gets asked over and over again, from generation unto generation, without any obvious, conclusive results.

The answer to most questions is either obvious, or obviously discoverable- some easy examples are “Does 2 + 2 = 4?”, or “Is there a tiger behind the bush?”. This question, however, creates a category error in the human linguistic system, by forcibly prying apart the concepts of “sound” and “mental experience of sound”. Few people will independently discover that a miscategorization error has occurred; at first, it just seems confusing. And so people start coming up with incorrect explanations, they confuse a debate about the definition of the word “sound” with a debate about some external fact (most questions are about external facts, so this occurs by default), they start dividing into “yes” and “no” tribes, etc.

At this point, the viral meme-spreading process begins. An ordinary question (“Is the sky green?”) makes reference to concepts we are already familiar with, and interrelates them using standard methodology. A nonsensical question either makes reference to nonexistent concepts (“Are rynithers a type of plawistre?”), or uses existing concepts in ways that are obviously incorrect (“Is up circular?”). Our mind can deal with these kinds of questions fairly effectively. However, notice the form of a question asked by the tribal chief/teacher/professor/boss: things like “Does electromagnetism affect objects with no net charge?”. Even at large inferential distances, the audience will probably pick up on some of the concepts. Most laymen have heard of “electromagnetism” before, and they have a vague idea of what a “charge” is. But they lack the underlying complexity- the stuff beneath the token “electromagnetism”- needed to give a correct answer.

From the inside, this sounds pretty much like the makes-a-sound question: familiar concepts (“tree”, “falling”, “sound”) are mixed together in ways which aren’t obviously nonsense, but don’t have a clearly defined answer. The brain assumes that it must lack the necessary “underlying knowledge” to get past the confusion, and goes on a quest to discover the nonexistent “knowledge”. At the same time, the question conveys an impression of intelligence, and so the new convert tells it to all of his friends and co-workers in an attempt to sound smarter. Many moons ago, this exact question even appeared in a cartoon I saw, as some sort of attempt to get kids to “think critically” or whatever the buzzword was.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 2, 2008, 5:23 PM
3 points
on: Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
“I defy the data. That doesn’t sound like it should be possible.”

I am also skeptical of this particular feat, but we know it’s possible for the brain to record huge amounts of data in reasonably good detail in realtime. My theory is that everyone without a neurological impairment stores this data, but only a few rare people (savants and such) can access the data on request. To name a simple example, in one of my middle school classes, we had to read Dumas’s The Count Of Monte Cristo. Very few people could read the book once or twice and recite the whole thing back in any kind of detail. Yet, when given a quotation from the book, most people were able to remember who said it, where they were at the time, who they were talking to, the surrounding context, etc.

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 2, 2008, 12:47 AM
4 points
on: Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
“What does a word point to?”

I’m not a neurologist, but I believe the classical answer is that words point to patterns in clusters of neurons. Everything filed under “apple” slightly rearranges neurons in the “apple” category, including pictures of apples, the taste of an apple, stories about apples, etc. Features which all apples have in common are amplified by the pattern-matching, while dissimilar features cancel each other out. Eventually, we get a mental pattern of the “archetypal” apple, describing the category in general, which can be drawn or described from scratch, without identifiable references to any specific apple. (If you haven’t personally experienced this with apples, try ideas. Relying on one or two authors for your information will cause you to include some of their identifiable little details in your own writings.)

Tom_McCabe2 Mar 1, 2008, 1:24 AM
2 points
on: Searching for Bayes-Structure
“That, of course, is a completely different statement. But then you are suggesting that Bayes-Language is incapable of representing a false statement—which is an obvious lie.”

Bayes-language can represent statements with very small probabilities, but then, of course, they will be assigned very small probabilities. You cannot assign a probability of .1% to the Sun rising without fudging the evidence (or fudging the priors, as Eli pointed out).

“—Yes, it is Bayes-language.”

So much for begging the question. Please do a calculation, using the theorems of Bayes (or theorems derived from Bayesian theorems), which gives an incorrect number given correct numbers as input.

“Mathematics does NOT describe the universe,”

Using mathematics to describe the universe goes all the way back to Ptolemy. It isn’t going away anytime soon.

“Mathematics is a modeling language no different from any other save in precision.”

Ah, here we have found one who does not comprehend the beauty of math. Alas, it is beyond my ability to impart such wisdom in a blog comment. Just drive down to your local university campus and start taking math classes- you’ll get it eventually.

“All variables are variables on some coordinate system or another, after all, if not a spacial one.”

Neither GR nor QED requires a coordinate system of any sort. This is, admittedly, hard to wrap your head around, especially without going into the math. To name a simple example, it is mathematically impossible to cover the surface of a sphere (or, by topological extension, any closed surface) with a single coordinate system without creating a singularity. Needless to say, this does not mean that there must be some point on Earth where numbers go to infinity.

“—You missed the point—we can’t predict what the next law of physics we’ll discover will be.”

We can predict that they won’t violate the earlier ones.

“You didn’t perform the appropriate transformations.”

You simply flip the sign on the gravitational constant G. No geometric transformations required.

“Okay. So evolutions don’t give organisms’ brains any knowledge.”

Evolution gives brains a system for acquiring knowledge, which is pseudo-Bayesian but operates under different surface rules. See Judgment Under Uncertainty or any other H&B textbook.

Tom_McCabe2 Feb 29, 2008, 8:57 PM
1 point
on: Searching for Bayes-Structure
“Yes you can. All it needs is the wrong prior.”

I included this under “input the right data”. Obviously, if you assign a prior of 10^-(10^(10^100)) to the Sun rising, you aren’t going to get a significant probability for it happening no matter how many times you watch it rise.

“Are there any links or references for this? That sounds like fascinating reading.”

See Feynman’s QED for a popular explanation of quantum math, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity for GR (I’m not aware of any good books on GR that don’t have a lot of fancy math).

“Evolutions would tend to give humans brains with beliefs that largely matched the world, else they would be weeded out.”

This is not really true; see http://www.singinst.org/upload/CFAI/anthro.html#observer.

Tom_McCabe2 Feb 29, 2008, 4:28 AM
1 point
on: Searching for Bayes-Structure
“Tom—you can’t write a C program that adds 2 and 2 and gets 5.”

Obviously, you can’t rewrite the laws of math with C. But a C program can produce obviously incorrect statements, such as “2 + 2 = 5”. There is, on average, one bug in every ten lines of C code.

“And you’re adding in an additional layer of model, besides—remember that 2 means absolutely nothing in the universe.”

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/ms/is_reality_ugly/.

“Bayes-language can describe a universe completely contradictory to the one we live in, simply by using different definitions.”

Then, of course, it is no longer Bayes-language. You cannot simply redefine math- every theorem is tangled up with every other theorem to produce a coherent system, which will give you exactly one correct answer to every question. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/nz/arguing_by_definition/.

“This is no different from what you do in C.”

It’s perfectly possible to write a C program that inputs all the right data and generates garbage. You cannot write a Bayes program that inputs all the right data and generates garbage.

“as we have no way to assign probability that we have a significant enough subset of those laws to be able to produce meaningful predictions of the laws of physics we don’t yet know.”

Every prediction that the laws of physics make has been tested over and over again (often to ten decimal places or more).

“And second, the laws of physics are equivalent to multiple contradictory coordinate systems.”

The laws of physics do not require a coordinate system of any sort to function, although this admittedly requires some pretty fancy math to get at (see Gravitation, by Meisner, Wheeler and Thorne).

“Any model can be, with the correct translations and transformations and definitions, accurate in describing the universe.”

If I wrote a version of GR that made gravity repulsive instead of attractive (a perfectly valid thing to do, mathematically), it would not be accurate in describing the universe, as this universe does not make things fall up.