Wes_W

Karma: 619

Wes_W Jul 7, 2015, 12:39 AM
3 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: There is no such thing as strength: a parody
Some subcomponents aren’t skills—or at least, it seems odd to label e.g. “unusually long arms” as a skill—but this is a nitpick.

Wes_W Jul 6, 2015, 6:30 AM
18 points
on: There is no such thing as strength: a parody
It is interesting, though, how non-general strength is.

There is indeed a widely (unwittingly) held idea that “strength” is a one-dimensional thing: consider, say, superhero comics where the Hulk is stronger than anybody else, which means he’s stronger at everything. You never read a comic where the Hulk is stronger at lifting things but Thor is stronger at throwing; that would feel really weird to most people. If the Marvel universe had a comic about strength sports, the Hulk would be the best at every sport.

But this isn’t at all how strength works in the real world: there is a pretty large component of specificity. Very, very few athletes are competitive at high levels in even two strength sports, never mind all of them. Giant male powerlifters frequently have a snatch weaker than tiny female weightlifters, despite having dramatically more lean body mass, and naturally higher testosterone, and (usually) the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs. And if you put a powerlifter in the Highland Games—a contest of strength via various throwing events—well, they’d be hopeless!

To a strength athlete, this is obvious. Of course powerlifters have a lousy snatch! Most powerlifters don’t even train the snatch! Strength isn’t just about raw muscle mass; there is a very large component of skill, technique, and even neural adaptation to specific movement patterns.

But under the folk one-dimensional model of strength, this is a strange and surprising fact.

Wes_W Jun 30, 2015, 11:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Top 9+2 myths about AI risk
If we could build a working AGI that required a billion dollars of hardware for world-changing results, why would Google not throw a billion dollars of hardware at it?

Wes_W Jun 12, 2015, 9:41 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Joy of Bias

Given that I am wrong, I would prefer being proven wrong to not being proven wrong.

Yours is probably the central case, but “prove me wrong” and “I hope I’m wrong” aren’t unheard-of sentiments. For example, a doctor giving a grim diagnosis. I think this can only (?) happen when the (perceived) value on the object level outweighs concerns about ego.

Wes_W May 11, 2015, 4:34 AM
0 points
in reply to: AshwinV’s comment on: Debunking Fallacies in the Theory of AI Motivation
It appears to me that ChristianKI just listed four. Did you have something specific in mind?

Wes_W May 9, 2015, 4:30 AM
1 point
in reply to: VeltonGoodenJr’s comment on: A sense of logic

In the above explained situations I would say that in that case simply put their are multiple answers each of which can in the eyes of a different person he true or false.

Yes, except often it really is important to nail down which question we’re asking, rather than just accepting that different interpretations yield different answers.

Like he killed a man so its bad BUT that man who was killed had also killed a man so it was good. Choose one it cant be both and the judge of any court knows that.

In logic, we have the law of excluded middle, which states that truth and falsehood are the only possibilities, and they are mutually exclusive.

There is no such law for “good” and “bad”. There is no reason whatsoever that a single action can’t have two (or more) consequences which, in isolation, would be unmitigated good or bad. I once took a medication which successfully treated a medical problem (good), but gave me constant nausea (bad), which incidentally made me lose weight (good), but caused me to develop dysregulated eating habits (bad), which eventually prompted me to eat healthier (good), which sometimes causes me stress in social situations (bad), which...

Now you can, in principle, sum up and compare the goodness and the badness and reach an overall verdict (assuming you subscribe to something like utilitarianism), and then you can say that on balance a certain thing was good or bad. But in practice, this is very often prohibitively difficult. Sometimes, the best answer is to just admit that you don’t know, that there are points in both columns but you can’t be sure which outweighs the other.

There are also lots of ways to get this wrong, and I certainly agree that dealing with sloppy reasoning is frustrating.

Wes_W May 9, 2015, 3:23 AM
1 point
in reply to: VeltonGoodenJr’s comment on: A sense of logic
Not all statements are precise enough to be nailed down as definitely true or false. If there’s any leeway or ambiguity in exactly what is being stated, there might also be ambiguity in whether it’s true or false.

As a trivial example, consider this statement: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound”. Is the statement true or false? Well, it depends on what you mean by “sound”: if you mean acoustic vibrations in the air, the tree does make a sound and the statement is false; if you mean auditory experiences induced in a brain, the tree does not make a sound and the statement is true.

Much more complicated cases are possible, and come up pretty regularly. Politics and the sciences very frequently have debates where nobody has quite nailed down precisely what proposition is being debated. For example, Slate Star Codex has an ongoing series of posts about disagreements over what “growth mindset” even is, which is very relevant to whether or not claims about growth mindset are true.

You might enjoy the sequence on 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong, from which I have shamelessly stolen the above example.

Wes_W May 6, 2015, 9:40 PM
−1 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Is there a list of cognitive illusions?
I don’t think this is carving reality at the joints.

The free will illusion, at least as presented by Yudkowsky, is that we don’t know our own planning algorithm, and understanding how it (probably) works dissolves the illusion, so that “do I have free will” stops even seeming like a question to ask. The illusion is that there was a question at all. The relevant category to watch for is when lots of people want an answer even though nobody can nail down exactly what the question is, or how to tell when you have an answer.

This is a much more specific phenomenon than “elaborate structures”, which includes pretty much everything except fundamental particles or the like.

Wes_W May 6, 2015, 8:06 AM
0 points
on: Is there a list of cognitive illusions?
Can you clarify what you mean by “cognitive illusion”? I don’t see why your other three examples should be grouped in that category with free will.

Wes_W Apr 11, 2015, 5:46 AM
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
Yes, this is a failure mode of (some forms of?) utilitarianism, but not the specific weirdness I was trying to get at, which was that if you aggregate by min(), then it’s completely morally OK to do very bad things to huge numbers of people—in fact, it’s no worse than radically improving huge numbers of lives—as long as you avoid affecting the one person who is worst-off. This is a very silly property for a moral system to have.

You can attempt to mitigate this property with too-clever objections, like “aha, but if you kill a happy person, then in the moment of their death they are temporarily the most unhappy person, so you have affected the metric after all”. I don’t think that actually works, but didn’t want it to obscure the point, so I picked “kill their dog” as an example, because it’s a clearly bad thing which definitely doesn’t bump anyone to the bottom.

Wes_W Apr 10, 2015, 9:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Torture vs. Dust Specks

I think that’s what my intuition wants to do anyway: care about how badly off the worst-off person is, and try to improve that.

I find it hard to believe that you believe that. Under that metric, for example, “pick a thousand happy people and kill their dogs” is a completely neutral act, along with lots of other extremely strange results.

Wes_W Apr 9, 2015, 7:18 AM
2 points
in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points
As long as it’s a god with a Big Divine Plan in which humans play a role, sure.

If the gods created the universe so they could watch the big shiny hydrogen balls, and don’t care about the emergent properties of complex proteins on that one planet in that one galaxy, we wouldn’t necessarily know about it.

Wes_W Apr 7, 2015, 2:11 AM
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points
I don’t know if this will feel relevant to you, but a big one for me in retrospect is that the concept of “faith” is really suspicious. When someone says “no, trust me unconditionally on this, I know you have doubts but just ignore them even though I will never address them in any concrete way,” that person is lying to you.

I always thought of God as truth-loving. If faith is a virtue, then God’s own commands undermine and obscure the truth, while making all sorts of lies equally defensible. The whole structure of the need for faith is just really weird if Christianity is true—but perfectly logical if Christianity is false.

Wes_W Apr 3, 2015, 9:51 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable

Will this article convince any non-abrahamic religious believer?

Does any non-Abrahamic religious believer need to be convinced that religious claims are still subject to ordinary principles of reasoning?

The claim that religion is nondisprovable is not usually used to defend, say, Buddhism. But when e.g. Catholics talk about it, they don’t usually say “Catholicism cannot be proven or disproven”, they say that religions in general, or spiritual matters, or the existence of god(s), or etc cannot be proven or disproven.

We could respond by pointing out reasons that their faith specifically ought to be falsifiable, but this makes it seem like that one faith is an exception to the general rule of religious unprovability, that it fails to qualify for the religious immunity by some technicality. Really, the whole rule is wrong to begin with.

So on the one hand, I agree that it’s kind of dishonest to present this as a mistake of religions in general. But on the other hand, the claim being argued against is a claim about religions in general, even though most proponents of the claim belong to a specific handful of religions.

Wes_W Mar 28, 2015, 2:06 AM
2 points
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Boxing an AI?
Hm. That does sound more workable than I had thought.

Wes_W Mar 27, 2015, 9:08 PM
0 points
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Boxing an AI?

and you can’t figure out it exists if it’s hidden in the laws of physics.

Respectfully, I think you’re just shoving all your complexity under the rug here. Unless you have a concrete proposal on how to actually do this, just asserting that your box won’t be figure-out-able is dodging the question.

Wes_W Mar 27, 2015, 8:30 PM
1 point
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Boxing an AI?
Yeah, but the AI can use empiricism within its simulated world. If it’s smarter than us, in a probably-less-convincing-than-reality world, I would not want to bet at strong odds against the AI figuring things out.

Boxing is potentially a useful component of real safety design, in the same way that seatbelts are a useful component of car design: it might save you, but it also has ways to fail.

The problem with AI safety proposals is that they usually take the form of “Instead of figuring out Friendliness, why don’t we just do X?” where X is something handwavey that has some obvious ways to fail. The usual response, here, is to point out the obvious ways that it can fail, hopefully so that the proposer notices they haven’t obviated solving the actual problem.

If you’re just looking at ways to make the least-imperfect box you can, rather than claiming your box is perfect, I don’t think I’m actually disagreeing with you here.

Wes_W 27 Mar 2015 18:56 UTC
11 points
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Boxing an AI?
By thinking. It’s really smart, after all.

How would humans find out that nuclear fusion (which they have never even seen) occurs on the interior of stars, trillions of miles away from them, hidden behind billions of billions of billions of tons of opaque matter?

How would you find out that you’re in a box, if you aren’t told about it? Mere humans, exploring the space of possible hypotheses in a dramatically suboptimal way, have nevertheless hit upon the idea that we live in a simulation, and have ideas about how to confirm or disprove it.

A safety proposal should generally not assume the AI will do worse than humans.

Wes_W 21 Mar 2015 13:23 UTC
10 points
on: Error margins
Probabilities do not necessarily need confidence intervals. A probability is already an assessment of uncertainty.

Qualitatively Confused seems relevant. If you assign probability 0.8 that Jamie is at the club, it doesn’t make sense to attach an error margin to this number. An error margin would mean something like “I think there is probability 0.8 that Jamie is at the club, but the real probability might be 0.2-0.9.” But this is an error. Probability is map, not territory: there is no “real probability” that Jamie is at the club. He’s either there or he’s not, but you don’t know which, and your degree of uncertainty is quantified as a probability.

Wes_W 16 Feb 2015 22:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Uncategories and empty categories
The traits of evolved organisms are usually a reasonable approximation of fitness-maximizing, because they’re the output of billions of years of a fitness-maximizing process; I’m with you on not being willing to call it “coincidence”. But this seems silly:

Your cognitive algorithms, executed in a human body, maximize its inclusive genetic fitness.

My cognitive algorithms are the results of a process which maximizes inclusive genetic fitness. This does not mean these algorithms themselves maximize that.

On the margin, a large fraction of the outputs of this process definitely don’t maximize fitness. Otherwise, there would be nothing for selection to eventually weed out!