Tyrrell_McAllister2

Karma: 58

Tyrrell_McAllister2 25 Feb 2009 16:43 UTC
3 points
on: Formative Youth
michael vassar:
[Nerds] perceive abstractions handed to them explicitly by other people more easily than patterns that show up around them. Oddly, this seems to me to be a respect in which nerds are more feminine rather than being more masculine as they are in many other ways.
Would you elaborate on this? What is the generally-feminine behavior of which the first sentence describes an instance?

My first inclination would be to think that your first sentence describes something stereotypically masculine. It’s an example of wanting things to come in pre-structured formats, which is part of wanting to operate in a domain that is governed by explicit pre-established rules. That is often seen as a stereotypically-masculine desire that manifests in such non-nerdy pursuits as professional sports and military hierarchies.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 17 Feb 2009 19:41 UTC
2 points
on: An African Folktale
George Weinberg:

Does it occur to anyone else that the fable is not a warning against doing favors in general but of siding with “outsiders” against “insiders”?
Wow; now that you mention it, that is a blatant recurring theme in the story. I now can’t help but think that that is a major part, if not the whole, of the message. Each victim betrays an in-group to perform a kindness for a stranger. It’s pretty easy to see why storytellers would want to remind listeners that their first duty is to the tribe. Whatever pity they might feel for a stranger, they must never let that pity lead them to betray the interests of their tribe.

Can’t believe I missed that :).

Tyrrell_McAllister2 16 Feb 2009 16:51 UTC
4 points
on: An African Folktale
Some here seem to think it significant that the good-doers in the story are not naive fools over whom the audience can feel superior. It is argued that that sense of superiority explains stories like the Frog and the Scorpion in the West. The inference seems to be that since this sense of superiority is lacking in this African tale, the intent could only have been to inform the audience that this is how the world works.

However, I don’t think that the “superiority” explanation can be so quickly dismissed. To me, this story works because the audience keeps having their expectations of gratitude violated. Hence, the storyteller gets to feel superior to the audience by proving him or herself to be wiser in the ways of the world. The closing lines ---

That’s all. For so it always has been—if you see the dust of a fight rising, you will know that a kindness is being repaid! That’s all. The story’s finished.
--- read to me like a self-satisfied expression of condescension towards an audience so naive as to expect some justice in this world.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 11 Feb 2009 19:00 UTC
0 points
on: Informers and Persuaders
Paul Crowley:

One trivial example of signalling here is the way everyone still uses the Computer Modern font. This is a terrible font, and it’s trivial to improve the readability of your paper by using, say, Times New Roman instead, but Computer Modern says that you’re a serious academic in a formal field.
I don’t think that these people are signaling. Computer Modern is the default font for LaTeX. Learning how to change a default setting in LaTeX is always non-trivial.

You might argue that people are signaling by using LaTeX instead of Word or whatever, but switching from LaTeX to some other writing system is also not a trivial matter.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 11 Feb 2009 17:26 UTC
0 points
on: Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ?)
Eliezer, the link in your reply to nazgulnarsil links to this very post. I’m assuming that you intended to link to that recent post of yours on SJG, but I’ll leave it to you to find it :).

Tyrrell_McAllister2 9 Feb 2009 19:12 UTC
3 points
on: (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
I think that you make good points about how fiction can be part of a valid moral argument, perhaps even an indispensable part for those who haven’t had some morally-relevant experience first-hand.

But I’m having a hard time seeing how your last story helped you in this way. Although I enjoyed the story very much, I don’t think that your didactic purposes are well-served by it.

My first concern is that your story will actually serve as a counter-argument for rationality to many readers. Since I’m one of those who disagreed with the characters’ choice to destroy Huygens, I’m pre-disposed to worry that your methods could be discredited by that conclusion. A reader who has not already been convinced that your methods are valid could take this as a reductio ad absurdum proof that they are invalid. I don’t think that your methods inexorably imply your conclusion, but another reader might take your word for it, and one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. Of course, all methods of persuasion carry this risk. But it’s especially risky when you are actively trying to make the “right answer” as difficult as possible to ascertain for dramatic purposes.

Another danger of fictional evidence is that it can obscure what exactly is the structure and conclusion of the argument. For example, why were we supposed to conclude that evading the Super-Happies was worth killing 15 billion at Huygens but was not worth destroying Earth and fragmenting the colonies? Or were we necessarily supposed to conclude that? Were you trying to persuade the reader that the Supper-Happies’ modifications fell between those two choices? As far as I could tell, there was no argument in the story to support this. Nor did I see anything in your preceding “rigorous” posts to establish that being modified fell in this range It appeared to be a moral assertion for which no argument was given. Or perhaps it was just supposed to be a thought-provoking possibility, to which you didn’t mean to commit yourself. You subsequent comments don’t lead me to think that, though. This uncertainty about your intended conclusion would be less likely if you were relying on precise arguments.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 5 Feb 2009 19:58 UTC
0 points
on: True Ending: Sacrificial Fire (7/8)
Psy-Kosh: Yeah, I meant to have a “as Psy-Kosh has pointed out” line in there somewhere, but it got deleted accidentally while editing.

ad:

How many humans are there not on Huygens?

I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t matter to me. I generally find on reflection that, with respect to my values, doing bad act A to two people is less than twice as bad as doing A to one person. Moreover, I suspect that, in many cases, the badness of doing A to n people converges to a finite value as n goes to infinity. Thus, it is possible that doing some other act B is worse than doing A to arbitrarily many people. At this time, I believe that this is the case when A = “allow the Super-Happies to re-shape a human” and B = “kill fifteen billion people”.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 5 Feb 2009 18:38 UTC
3 points
0
on: True Ending: Sacrificial Fire (7/8)
If the Super-Happies were going to turn us into orgasmium, I could see blowing up Huygens. Nor would it necessarily take such an extreme case to convince me to take that extreme measure. But this . . . ?

“Our own two species,” the Lady 3rd said, “which desire this change of the Babyeaters, will compensate them by adopting Babyeater values, making our own civilization of greater utility in their sight: we will both change to spawn additional infants, and eat most of them at almost the last stage before they become sentient.” … “It is nonetheless probable,” continued the Lady 3rd, “that the Babyeaters will not accept this change as it stands; it will be necessary to impose these changes by force. As for you, humankind, we hope you will be more reasonable. But both your species, and the Babyeaters, must relinquish bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles. In exchange, we will change our own values in the direction of yours. We are willing to change to desire pleasure obtained in more complex ways, so long as the total amount of our pleasure does not significantly decrease. We will learn to create art you find pleasing. We will acquire a sense of humor, though we will not lie. From the perspective of humankind and the Babyeaters, our civilization will obtain much utility in your sight, which it did not previously possess. This is the compensation we offer you. We furthermore request that you accept from us the gift of untranslatable 2, which we believe will enhance, on its own terms, the value that you name ‘love’. This will also enable our kinds to have sex using mechanical aids, which we greatly desire. At the end of this procedure, all three species will satisfice each other’s values and possess great common ground, upon which we may create a civilization together.”

Sure, I would turn this down if it were simply offered as a gift. But I really, really, cannot see preferring the death of fifteen billion people over it. Although I value the things that the Super-Happies would take away, and I even value valuing them, I don’t value valuing them all that much. Or, if I do, it is very far from intuitively obvious to me. And the more I think about it, the less likely it seems.

I hope that Part 8 somehow makes this ending seem more like the “right” one. Maybe it will be made clear that the Super-Happies couldn’t deliver on their offer without imposing significant hidden downsides. It wouldn’t stretch plausibility too much if such downsides were hidden even from them. They are portrayed as not really getting how we work. As I said in this comment to Part 3, we might expect that they would screw us up in ways that they don’t anticipate.

But unless some argument is made that their offer was much worse than it seemed at first, I can’t help but conclude that the crew made a colossal mistake by destroying Huygens, to understate the matter.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 31 Jan 2009 2:05 UTC
0 points
on: Value is Fragile
Wei Dai: Consider a program which when given the choices (A,B) outputs A. If you reset it and give it choices (B,C) it outputs B. If you reset it again and give it choices (C,A) it outputs C. The behavior of this program cannot be reproduced by a utility function.

I don’t know the proper rational-choice-theory terminology, but wouldn’t modeling this program just be a matter of describing the “space” of choices correctly? That is, rather than making the space of choices {A, B, C}, make it the set containing

(1) = taking A when offered A and B, (2) = taking B when offered A and B,

(3) = taking B when offered B and C, (4) = taking C when offered B and C,

(5) = taking C when offered C and A, (6) = taking A when offered C and A.

Then the revealed preferences (if that’s the way to put it) from your experiment would be (1) > (2), (3) > (4), and (5) > (6). Viewed this way, there is no violation of transitivity by the relation >, or at least none revealed so far. I would expect that you could always “smooth over” any transitivity-violation by making an appropriate description of the space of options. In fact, I would guess that there’s a standard theory about how to do this while still keeping the description-method as useful as possible for purposes such as prediction.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 30 Jan 2009 16:27 UTC
4 points
on: The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)
It’s good. Not baby-eatin’ good, but good enough ;).

Tyrrell_McAllister2 23 Jan 2009 15:17 UTC
1 point
on: Higher Purpose
Daniel Dennett’s standard response to the question “What’s the secret of happiness” is “The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

I think that this avoids Eliezer’s criticism that “you can’t deliberately pursue ‘a purpose that takes you outside yourself’, in order to take yourself outside yourself. That’s still all about you.” Something can be more important than you and yet include you. Depending on your values, the future of the human race itself could serve as an example. It would seem also to be still an available “hedonic accessory” in any eutopia that includes humanity in some form.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 4 Dec 2008 16:07 UTC
2 points
on: Underconstrained Abstractions
But has that been disproved? I don’t really know. But I would imagine that Moravec could always append, ”. . . provided that we found the right 10 trillion calculations.” Or am I missing the point?

Tyrrell_McAllister2 28 Nov 2008 17:37 UTC
9 points
on: Thanksgiving Prayer
Here’s a Daniel Dennett essay that seems appropriate:

THANK GOODNESS!

Tyrrell_McAllister2 28 Nov 2008 10:13 UTC
0 points
on: Thanksgiving Prayer
Maybe it was the categorical nature of “no danger whatsoever” that led to the comparisons to religion. Given the difficulty of predicting anyone’s psychological development, and given that you yourself say that you’ve seen multiple lapses before, what rational reason could you have for such complete confidence? Of course, it’s true that there are things besides religion that cause people to make predictions with probability 1 (which, you must concede, is a plausible reading of “no danger whatsoever”). But, in human affairs, with our present state of knowledge, can such predictions ever be entirely reasonable?

Tyrrell_McAllister2 24 Nov 2008 18:17 UTC
0 points
on: Cascades, Cycles, Insight...
anon and Chris Hibbert, I definitely didn’t mean to say that Robin is claiming to be working with as much certainty as Fermi could claim. I didn’t mean to be making any claim about the strength or content of Robin’s argument at all, other than that he’s assigning low probability to something to which Eliezer assigns high probability.

Like I said, the analogy with the Fermi story isn’t very good. My point was just that a critique of Fermi should have addressed his calculations, pointing out where exactly he went wrong (if such a point could be found). Eliezer, in contrast, isn’t really grappling with Robin’s theorizing in a direct way at all. I know that the analogy isn’t great for many reasons. One is that Robin’s argument is in a more informal language than mathematical physics. But still, I’d like to see Eliezer address it with more directness.

As it is, this exchange doesn’t really read like a conversation. Or, it reads like Robin wants to engage in a conversation. Eliezer, on the other hand, seems to think that he has identified flaws in Robin’s thinking, but the only way he can see to address them is by writing about how to think in general, or at least how to think about a very broad class of questions, of which this issue is only a very special case.

I gather that, in Eliezer’s view, Robin’s argument is so flawed that there’s no way for Eliezer to address it on its own terms. Rather, he needs to build a solid foundation for reasoning about these things from the ground up. The Proper Way to answer this question will then be manifest, and Robin’s arguments will fall by the wayside, clearly wrong simply by virtue of not being the Proper Way.

Eliezer may be right about that. Indeed, I think it’s a real possibility. Maybe that’s really the only way that these kinds of things can be settled. But it’s not a conversation. And maybe that will be the lesson that comes out of this. Maybe conversation is overrated.

None of this is supposed to be a criticism of either Eliezer’s or Robin’s side of this specific issue. It’s a criticism of how the conversation is being carried out. Or maybe just an expression of impatience.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 24 Nov 2008 11:35 UTC
5 points
on: Cascades, Cycles, Insight...
I’ve been following along and enjoying the exchange so far, but it doesn’t seem to be getting past the “talking past each other” phase.

For example, the Fermi story works as an example of a cycle as a source of discontinuity. But I don’t see how it establishes anything that Robin would have disputed. I guess that Eliezer would say that Robin has been inattentive to its lessons. But he should then point out where exactly Robin’s reasoning fails to take those lessons into account. Right now, he just seems to be pointing to an example of cycles and say, “Look, a cycle causing discontinuity. Does that maybe remind you of something that perhaps your theorizing has ignored?” I imagine that Robin’s response will just be to say, “No,” and no progress will have been made.

And, of course, once the Fermi story is told, I can’t help but think of how else it might be analogous to the current discussion. When I look at the Fermi story, what I see is this: Fermi took a powerful model of reality and made the precise prediction that something huge would happen between layers 56 and 57, whereas someone without that model would have just thought, “I don’t see how 57 is so different from 56.” What I see happening in this conversation is that Robin says, “Using a powerful model of reality, I predict that an event, which Eliezer thinks is very likely, will actually happen only with probability <10%.” (I haven’t yet seen a completely explicit consensus account of Robin and Eliezer’s disagreement, but I gather that it’s something like that.) And Eliezer’s replies seem to me to be of the form “You shouldn’t be so confident in your model. Previous black swans show how easily predictions based on past performance can be completely wrong.”

I concede that the analogy between the Fermi story and the current conversation is not the best fit. But if I pursue it, what I get is this: Robin is in a sense claiming to be the Fermi in this conversation. He says that he has a well-established body of theory that makes a certain prediction: that Eliezer’s scenario has very low probability of happening.

Eliezer, on the other hand, is more like someone who, when presented with Fermi’s predictions (before they’d been verified) might have said, “How can you be so confident in your theory? Don’t you realize that a black swan could come and upset it all? For example, maybe a game-changing event could happen between layers 32 and 33, preventing layer 57 from even occurring. Have you taken that possibility into account? In fact, I expect that something will happen at some point to totally upset your neat little calculations”

Such criticisms should be backed up with an account of where, exactly, Fermi is making a mistake by being so confident in his prediction about layer 57. Similarly, Eliezer should say where exactly he sees the flaws in Robin’s specific arguments. Instead, we get these general exhortations to be wary of black swans. Although such warnings are important, I don’t see how they cash out in this particular case as evidence that Robin is the one who is being too confident in his predictions.

In other words, Robin and Eliezer have a disagreement that (I hope) ultimately cashes out as a disagreement about how to distribute probability over the possible futures. But Eliezer’s criticisms of Robin’s methods are all very general; they point to how hard it is to make such predictions. He argues, in a vague and inexact way, that predictions based on similar methods would have gone wrong in the past. But Eliezer seems to dodge laying out exactly where Robin’s methods go wrong in this particular case and why Eliezer’s succeed.

Again, the kinds of general warnings that Eliezer gives are very important, and I enjoy reading them. It’s valuable to point out all the various quarters from which a black swan could arrive. But, for the purposes of this argument, he should point out how exactly Robin is failing to heed these warnings sufficiently. Of course, maybe Eliezer is getting to that, but some assurance of that would be nice. I have a large appetite for Eliezer’s posts, construed as general advice on how to think. But when I read them as part of this argument with Robin, I keep waiting for him to get to the point.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 20 Nov 2008 7:48 UTC
2 points
on: The First World Takeover
Tim Tyler,

I don’t yet see why exactly Eliezer is dwelling on the origin of replicators.

Check with the title: if you are considering the possibility of a world takeover, it obviously pays to examine the previous historical genetic takeovers.

Right. I get the surface analogy. But it seems to break down when I look at its deeper structure.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 19 Nov 2008 17:59 UTC
0 points
on: The First World Takeover
Oops; I should have noted that I added emphasis to those quotes of Eliezer. Sorry.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 19 Nov 2008 17:57 UTC
4 points
on: The First World Takeover
I don’t yet see why exactly Eliezer is dwelling on the origin of replicators. As Robin said, it would have been very surprising if Robin had disagreed with any of it.

I guess that Eliezer’s main points were these: (1) The origin of life was an event where things changed abruptly in a way that wouldn’t have been predicted by extrapolating from the previous 9 billion years. Moreover, (2) pretty much the entire mass of the universe, minus a small tidal pool, was basically irrelevant to how this abrupt change played out and continues to play out. That is, the rest of the universe only mattered in regards to its gross features. It was only in that tidal pool that the precise arrangement of molecules had and will have far-reaching causal implications for the fate of the universe.

Eliezer seems to want to argue that we should expect something like this when the singularity comes. His conclusion seems to be that it is futile to survey the universe as it is now to try to predict detailed features of the singularity. For, if the origin of life is any guide, practically all detailed features of the present universe will prove irrelevant. Their causal implications will be swept aside by the consequences of some localized event that is hidden in some obscure corner of the world, below our awareness. Since we know practically nothing about this event, our present models can’t take it into account, so they are useless for predicting the details of its consequences. That, at any rate, is what I take his argument to be.

There seems to me to be a crucial problem with this line of attack on Robin’s position. As Eliezer writes of the origin of life,

The first replicator was the first great break in History—the first Black Swan that would have been unimaginable by any surface analogy. No extrapolation of previous trends could have spotted it—you’d have had to dive down into causal modeling, in enough detail to visualize the unprecedented search. Not that I’m saying I would have guessed, without benefit of hindsight—if somehow I’d been there as a disembodied and unreflective spirit, knowing only the previous universe as my guide—having no highfalutin’ concepts of “intelligence” or “natural selection” because those things didn’t exist in my environment, and I had no mental mirror in which to see myself—and indeed, who should have guessed it with short of godlike intelligence? When all the previous history of the universe contained no break in History that sharp? The replicator was the first Black Swan.

The difference with Robin’s current position, if I understand it, is that he doesn’t see our present situation as one in which such a momentous development is inconceivable. On the contrary, he conceives of it as happening through brain-emulation.

Eliezer seems to me to establish this much. If our present models did not predict an abrupt change on the order of the singularity, and if such a change nonetheless happens, then it will probably spring out of some very local event that wipes out the causal implications of all but the grossest features of the rest of the universe. However, Robin believes that our current models already predict a singularity-type event. If he’s right (a big if!), then a crucial hypothesis of Eliezer’s argument fails to obtain. The analogy with the origin of life that Eliezer makes in this post breaks down.

So the root of the difference between Eliezer and Robin seems to be this: Do our current models already give some significant probability to the singularity arising out of processes that we already know something about, e.g., the development of brain emulation? If so, then the origin of life was a crucially different situation, and we can’t draw the lessons from it that Eliezer wants to.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 23 Oct 2008 17:28 UTC
0 points
on: Which Parts Are “Me”?
gaffa: A heavy obstacle for me is that I have a hard time thinking in terms of math, numbers and logic. I can understand concepts on the superficial level and kind of intuitively “feel” their meaning in the back of my mind, but I have a hard time bringing the concepts into the frond of my mind and visualize them in detail using mathematical reasoning. I tend to end up in a sort of “I know that you can calculate X with this information, and knowing this is good enough for me”-state, but I’d like to be in the state where I am using the information to actually calculate the value of X in my head.

I’ve found that the only to get past this is to practice solving problems a whole bunch. If your brain doesn’t already have the skill of looking at a problem and slicing it up into all the right pieces with the right labels so that a solution falls out, then the only way to get it to do that is to practice a lot.

I recommend getting an introductory undergraduate text in whatever field you want to understand mathematically, one with lots of exercises and a solutions manual. Read a chapter and then just start grinding through one exercise after another. On each exercise, give yourself a certain allotted time to try to solve it on your own, maybe 20 or 30 minutes or so. If you haven’t solved it before the clock runs out, read the solutions manual and then work through it yourself. Then move on to the next problem, again trying to solve it within an allotted time.

Don’t worry too much if the solutions manual whips out some crazy trick that seems totally unmotivated to you. Just make sure that you understand why the trick works, and then move on. Once you see the “trick” enough times, it will start to seem like the obvious thing to try, not a trick at all.