The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words

Prisoner's Dilemma

You and I play a game.
We each want to get a big score.
But we do not care if the other person gets a big score.

On each turn, we can each choose to Give or Take.
If I Give, you get three points. If I Take, I get one point.
If you Give, I get three points. If you Take, you get one point.

If we both Give, we both will have three points.
If we both Take, we both will have one point.
If you Give and I Take, then I will have four points and you will have no points.
If you Take and I Give, then I will have no points and you have will four points.

We would both like it if the other person would Give, because then we get more points.
But we would both like to Take, because then we get more points.

I would like it better if we both Give than if we both Take.
But if I think you will Give, then I would like to Take so that I can get more points.
It is worst for me if I Give and you Take.
And you think just the same thing I do — except with "you" and "me" switched.

If we play over and over again, then each of us can think about what the other has done before.
We can choose whether to Give or Take by thinking about what the other person has done before.
If you always Give — no matter what I do — then I may as well Take.
But if you always Take, then I also may as well Take!
(And again, you think just the same that I do.)

Why would either of us ever Give? Taking always gets more points.
But we always want the other to Give!
And if we both Give, that is better for both of us than if we both Take.
Is there any way that we could both choose to Give, and not be scared that the other will just Take instead?

Effective Altruism

"Doing Good in the Most Helping Way"- It is good to try to help people. It is better to help people in the best way possible. You should look at what actually happens when you try to help people in order to find out how well your helping worked. If we look at lots of different ways of helping people, then we can find out which way is best. You should give your money to the people who are best at helping people.

Where we live, and in places like it, everyone has lots more money than most people who live in other places. That means we have lots that we can give away to the people in the other places. It might be a good idea to try to make lots of money so that you can give away even more!

There is a beautifully executed talk by Guy Steele where he only uses one-syllable words or words explicitly defined in the talk: Growing a Language.

I love this. Small words help me understand huge things.

I think this is good. I am happy about this.

Pascal's wager: If you don't do what God says, you will go to Hell where you will be in a lot of pain until the end of time. Now, maybe God is not real, but can you really take that chance? Doing what God says isn't even that much work.

Pascal's mugging: I tell you "if you don't do what I say, something very bad will happen to you." Very bad things are probably lies, but you can't be sure. And when they get a lot worse, they only sound a little bit more like lies. So whatever I asked you to do, I can always make up a story so bad that it's safer to give in.

Mr. Turing's Computer

Computers in the past could only do one kind of thing at a time. One computer could add some numbers together, but nothing else. Another could find the smallest of some numbers, but nothing else. You could give them different numbers to work with, but the computer would always do the same kind of thing with them.

To make the computer do something else, you had to open it up and put all its pieces back in a different way. This was very hard and slow!

So a man named Mr. Babbage thought: what if some of the numbers you gave the computer were what told it what to do? That way you could have just one computer, and you could quickly make it be a number-adding computer, or a smallest-number-finding computer, or any kind of computer you wanted, just by giving it different numbers. But although Mr. Babbage and his friend Ms. Lovelace tried very hard to make a computer like that, they could not do it.

But later a man named Mr. Turing thought up a way to make that computer. He imagined a long piece of paper with numbers written on it, and imagined a computer moving left and right that paper and reading the numbers on it, and sometimes changing the numbers. This computer could only see one number on the paper at a time, and also only remember one thing at a time, but that was enough for the computer to know what to do next. Everyone was amazed that such a simple computer could do anything that any other computer then could do; all you had to do was put the right numbers on the paper first, and then the computer could do something different! Mr. Turing's idea was enough to let people build computers that finally acted like Mr. Babbage's and Ms. Lovelace's dream computer.

Even though Mr. Turing's computer sounds way too simple when you think about our computers today, our computers can't do anything that Mr. Turing's imagined computer can't. Our computers can look at many many numbers and remember many many things at the same time, but this only makes them faster than Mr. Turing's computer, not actually different in any important way. (Though of course being fast is very important if you want to have any fun or do any real work on a computer!)

Happy   1   Happy   1    Right
Happy   2   Happy   1    Right
Happy   3   Sad     3    Right
Sad       1   Sad     2    Right
Sad       2   Sad     2    Right
Sad       3   Stop

1 2 1 1 2 1 3 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 2 3

1 1 1 1 1 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3

I spent the better part of November writing miniature essays in this. It's really quite addictive. My favourites:

• Parallax and cepheid variables (Dead stars that flash in space)

• Basic linear algebra (four-sided boxes of numbers that eat each other)

• The Gold Standard (Should a bit of money be the same as a bit of sun-colored stuff that comes out of the ground?)

• The Central Limit Theorem (The Middle Thing-It-Goes-To Idea-You-Can-Show-Is-True-With-Numbers - when you take lots of Middle Numbers of lots of groups, it looks like the Normal Line!)

• Complex numbers ("I have just found out I can use the word 'set'. This makes me very happy.")

• Utility, utilitarianism and the problems with interpersonal utility comparison ("If you can't put all your wants into this order, you have Not-Ordered Wants")

• The triumvirate brain hypothesis ("when you lie down on the Mind Doctor's couch, you are lying down next to a horse, and a green water animal with a big smile")

• Arrow's Impossibility Theorem ("If every person making their mark on a piece of paper wants the Cat Party more than the Dog Party, then the Dog Party can't come out higher in the order than the Cat Party.")

• The concept of "degenerate case" ("If your boyfriend or girlfriend has a different meaning for 'box' than you do, and you give them a line, not only will they be cross with you, but you will be wrong, and that is almost as bad")

• The word "sublimate" ("When Dry Ice goes into the air, it is beautiful, like white smoke. There is a word for this situation, and we also use that word to talk about things that are beautiful, because they are perfect, and become white smoke without being wet first")

Earlier attempts to do something like this: by us, by other people

CEV

Rogitate the nerterological psephograph in order to resarciate the hecatologue from its somandric latibule in the ipsographic odynometer, and thereby sophronize the isangelous omniregency.

Utilitarianism : Care the same whether everyone is happy; if they live near or if they live far, if you like them or if you not like them; everyone.

Recent trends in my field of research, syntactic parsing

We've been trying for a long time to make computers speak and listen. Here is what has been happening with the part I work on for the last few years, or at least the part I'm excited about.

What makes understanding hard is that what you are trying to understand can mean so many different things. SO many different things. More than you think!! In fact the number grows way out of line with the number of words.

Until a few years ago, the number one idea we had was to figure out how to put together just a few words at a time. The key was not to think about too many words at once. If you do that, you can make lots of little groups, and put them together. You start at the words. You put together a few words, and get a longer bit back. Then you put together two longer bits. You work your way up, making a tree. I'll draw you a little tree.

( ( The old ) (voice ( their troubles ) ) )

If the computer has that tree, you can ask it "Who were the troubles voiced by?", and it can tell you "the old". Course, it doesn't know what "the old" are. That's just some marks to it. But it gets how to put the words together, and give back other marks that are right.

Until the last few years, we thought it was a big deal to see the whole tree before you cut out any others for sure.

Now another way's shown up. And I think the facts are almost in. I'm definitely calling it early here, probably most don't agree!!

The other way is to work your way along, from left to right. The funny thing is, that's what we do! But it's taken a while for us to get our heads around how to make it work for a computer. But now, I think we've made it better than the other way. It makes the computer right when it guesses just as much, but it's much much faster.

The problem was, if you work your way along, left to right, it's hard to be sure your guess is the best guess for the words all put together, if you can't go back and change your mind. And the computer gets lots wrong. If you let it just run, it gets something wrong, but has to move forward, and the idea it's trying to build doesn't make sense. You get to "the old voice", and your tree is the one for "the voice that is old", not "voicing is what the old are doing". And then you're stuck.

People really thought that was it for that approach. If you couldn't sort your guesses about the whole thing, how could you know you didn't just close your mind too early? People found nice ways to promise that you would see every total idea at the end, so you could pick one then.

The problem is, you see every idea, but you can only ask questions about the way small groups of words were put together, when that idea was put together. You know how I said you'd build a tree? You could only ask questions about bits next to each other.

The other way, you're building this tree as you go along, left to right. As every word comes in, you add it to your tree. So yeah okay, we do have to make our guesses, and live with them. We don't see all the different possible trees at the end. We do get locked in. But all you have to do is not get locked in totally. Keep some other trees around. It turns out we need to keep thinking about 30-60 trees. Less if we're a bit bright about it.

We've been doing good stuff this way. I write this kind of thing. My one makes the computer guess where over 9 words in 10 are in the tree, and it can do ten hundred words in a blink. It's pretty cool. That's over a hundred times faster than we could do 3 to 5 years ago.

The AI Box Experiment:

The computer-mind box game is a way to see if a question is true. A computer-mind is not safe because it is very good at thinking. Things good at thinking have the power to change the world more than things not good at thinking, because it can find many more ways to do things. Many people ask: "Why not put this computer-mind in a box so that it can not change the world, but tell guarding-box people how to change it?"

But some other guy answers: "That is still not safe, because computer-mind can tell guarding-box people many bad words to make them let it out of the box." He then says: "Why not try a thing to see if it is true? Here is how it works. You and I go into a room, and I will pretend to be the computer-mind and tell you many bad words. Only you have the power to let me out of room, but you must try to not let me out. If my bad words are enough to make you want to let me out, then computer-mind in box is not safe."

Other people agree and try playing the computer-mind box-game. It happens that many people let the guy playing as the computer-mind out of room. People realize that computer-mind is not safe in the locked box-room.

Relativity in words of four letters or less

Complexity and Fragility of Value, My take: When people talk about the things they want, they usually don't say very many things. But when you check what things people actually want, they want a whole lot of different things. People also sometimes don't realize that they want things because they have always had those things and never worried that they might lose them.

If we were to write a book of all the things people want so a computer could figure out ways to give people the things they want, the book would probably be long and hard to write. If there were some small problems in the book, the computer wouldn't be able to see the problems and would give people the wrong things. That would probably be very, very, very bad.

Risks of Creative Super AIs: If we make computers, they will never know to do anything that people didn't tell them to do. We can tell computers to try to figure things out for themselves but even then we need to get them started on that. Computers will not know what people want except if people tell the computers exactly what they want. Very strong computers might get really stupid ideas about what they should do because they were wrong about what humans want. Also, very strong computers might do really bad things we don't want before we can turn them off.

The Prime Number Theorem

A group of four people can stand two by two, but a group of five people can only stand five in a line. The number of numbers like five, and not like four, between two numbers, is the number of times you take two times what you had, starting at one, to get between the two numbers if the two numbers are close.

Bayesianism (probabilism, conditioning, priors as mathematical objects):

Let a possible world be a way the world could be. To say something about the world is to say that the actual world (our world) is one of a set of possible worlds. Like, to say that the sky is blue is to say that the actual world is one of the set of possible worlds in which the sky is blue. Some possible worlds might be ours for all we know (maybe they look like ours, at least so far). For others we are pretty sure that they aren't ours (like all the possible worlds where the sky is pink). Let's put a number on each possible world that stands for how much we believe that our world is that possible world: 1 means we're sure it is, 0 means we're sure it's not, and everything between 0 and 1 means we're not sure (higher numbers mean we're more sure in some way).

Talking about each single possible world is hard and annoying. We want to have the same sort of numbers for sets of possible worlds too, to tell us how much we believe that our world is one of that set of possible worlds. Like, let's say we're sure that the sky is blue. This means that the numbers for all possible worlds where the sky is blue add up to 1. Let's say we're sure the sky is not pink. This means that the number for each possible world where the sky is pink is 0.

Each time we learn something with our senses, what we believe about the world changes. From what I see with my own eyes, I can definitely tell that the sky looks blue to me today. So I am now sure that the world is one of the set of possible worlds where the sky looks blue to me today. This means that I set my numbers for all the rest of the worlds, where the sky doesn't look blue to me today, to 0 (I have to take care at this step, since I can't take it back). Also, since I'm sure the sky looks blue, my new numbers for the possible worlds where the sky looks blue have add up to 1. What I do is I just add together all the old numbers that I just set to 0, and then give a little bit of what I get to each of the other possible worlds, so that worlds that had higher numbers before get more. (This last part is called normal-making. This way of changing our possible-world-numbers is called bringing them up to date.)

What's interesting is that learning by seeing things and bringing our numbers up to date can also end up changing our numbers for something we can't see. Let's say that I start out not sure about whether there is an animal way under my bed where I couldn't see it (that is, I'm not sure whether our world is one of the possible worlds where an animal is under my bed). I also believe some other things that bring together things I can and can't see. Like, I believe that if there is an animal under my bed there will probably be noise under the bed (that is, my added-together number for the set of possible worlds where there is noise and an animal under my bed is almost as large as my number for the set of possible worlds where an animal is under my bed). I also believe that if there isn't an animal under my bed, there will probably not be noise under the bed (my number for the set of worlds where there is noise and there isn't an animal under my bed is much smaller than my number for the set of worlds where there isn't an animal under my bed). These sorts of things I believe in part because it's just the way I am, and in part because of what I've seen in the past. Anyway, if I actually listen and hear noise coming from under the bed, and if I bring my numbers up to date, I will end up more sure than I was before that there is an animal under the bed. You can see this if you draw it out like so (ignore the words).

So, are we going to localize the LW wiki from English to Simple English?

Quantum Field Theory

Not me and only tangentially related, but someone on Reddit managed to describe the basics of Quantum Field Theory using four-letter words or less. I thought it was relevant to this thread, since many here may not have seen it.

The Tiny Yard Idea

Big grav make hard kind of pull. Hard to know. All fall down. Why? But then some kind of pull easy to know. Zap-pull, nuke-pull, time-pull all be easy to know kind of pull. We can see how they pull real good! All seem real cut up. So many kind of pull to have!

But what if all kind of pull were just one kind of pull? When we look at real tiny guys, we can see that most big rule are no go. We need new rule to make it good! Just one kind of pull but in all new ways! In all kind of ways! This what make it tiny yard idea.

Each kind of tiny guy have own move with each more kind of tiny guy. All guys here move so fast! No guys can move as fast! So then real, real tiny guys make this play of tiny guy to tiny guy. They make tiny guys move! When we see big guys get pull, we know its cuz tiny guys make tiny pull!

Reminds me of the E minmal language http://www.ebtx.com/lang/readme2.htm which uses only 300 words including prepositions and tenses, inflections etc. (all words at http://www.ebtx.com/lang/eminfrm.htm ). These 300 are meant to exhaustively decompose most language, physical and everyday concepts down to - well - a minimum.

The first paragraph of the prisoners dilemma (FREPOHU HAAPOZ) might be

VI DILO DU PLAEM PLAL. VIZ CHAAN KRAAN MO ROL. DIBRA VIZ NAA CHON DIER DEPO HUEV VEN MO ROL.

Cognitive Biases

In the world, things happen for reasons. When anything happens ever, there's a reason for it- even if you don't know what it is, or it seems strange. Start with that: nothing has ever happened without a cause. (Here we mean "reason" and "cause" like how a ball rolling into another ball will knock it over, not like good or bad. Think about it- it makes sense.)

If you're interested in knowing more about the world, often, you want to know the real reason things happen (or the reason other things DON'T happen, which can be just as important!) If you do that, you can learn about a lot of things: why the land looks the way it does, all about the different stars, tiny things much smaller than you can see, even all about other people!

But your brain isn't the very best at doing this. Remember that idea about how animals change over time? How parents, and the parents of parents, all make a kind of animal change a little all the time, because of who lives and who doesn't? You know, the idea from the old man who said humans used to be just animals? Well, think about that- our brains let us think about so much, but they used to be just animal brains. And an animal doesn't need to worry so much about true reasons- especially for things that are too tiny to see, or big things up in the sky. Say, when an animal sees something big and bad, it would be bad if it stopped and thought about all the reasons it happened. It's best to just run away!

Human brains aren't any different, really, except in two ways: We don't want to just always run away, and we can change how we think about things! But if we don't learn how to think about real reasons, then we use animal-brain thinking- and that can make a lot of problems, especially when it's about things that animals never thought about.

If you want to learn about the real world, and real reasons, it's important to know about animal-brains and how they can be wrong. Remember, animal-brain thinking is hard to spot- if you don't look for it, it just seems like normal clear thinking. But when you see it. you can fix how it works in your own brain, and see the world a little clearer.

My attempt at describing a black hole:

When a very big and very bright star runs out of stuff to burn, it can not stay big any longer and gets smaller and smaller, until it becomes nothing, but this nothing is just as heavy as before the star died. If you are close to it, you get sucked in and die. If light gets close to it, it dies, too. There is no escape. Since light can not escape, no one can see the place where the now dead star used to be. That is why this dead star is called black.

Words sorely missed: hole, curvature, density, vacuum, horizon.

Quantum Mechanics

When you try to understand how very small things work, you realize that you can't use the same kind of ideas which you used to explain how bigger things like cars and balls work. So one of the things you realize is that very small things care about how you look at them. Suppose you have a room with two doors. With big things, if you opened one door and saw a red ball inside and then you opened the other door, you would also see a red ball. But with small things, it could happen that you open one door, see a red ball, open the other door see a blue ball and then open the first door again and now see a blue ball! Also, two very small things that are far away can know much more about each other than two big things that are far away. This is what makes small things much weirder than big things, but also can be used to make better computers and phones. But big things are always made of small things; so why do big things also not work like small things? Well, this is one of the most important questions that people who think about small things are thinking about, but the answer seems to be that when you put a lot of small things together the weird things always seem to kill each other off.