A question about Eliezer

Posts and comments containing predictions by Eliezer:

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/7rc/particles_break_lightspeed_limit/4wmb
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/383/the_trolley_problem_dodging_moral_questions/32lt
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1p5/outside_view_as_conversationhalter/1o6n
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ss/babies_and_bunnies_a_caution_about_evopsych/1nwa
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lx/reference_class_of_the_unclassreferenceable/1f3w
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1la/new_years_predictions_thread/1dqf
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1la/new_years_predictions_thread/1dvx
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/7o/on_dollars_utility_and_crack_cocaine/582
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6b2x
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/b9/welcome_to_less_wrong/5iw6
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/7u2/edward_nelson_claims_proof_of_inconsistency_in/4xi5
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ir/you_be_the_jury_survey_on_a_current_event/1beu
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/wm/disjunctions_antipredictions_etc/piy
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/r/no_really_ive_deceived_myself/vrw
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ft/open_thread_july_2010_part_2/2a0x
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ud/rationality_quotes_march_2010/1p1p
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/4sr/rationalist_lord_of_the_rings_fanfiction_newly/3pmc
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/44n/convergence_theories_of_metaethics/3i10
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/169/the_sword_of_good/3b6e
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others/386m
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gg/room_for_rent_in_north_berkeley_house/2a8e
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/9c/mandatory_secret_identities/6d8
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l/closet_survey_1/1pp

Posts where Eliezer claims to have predicted something in advance:

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/a60/quantified_health_prize_results_announced/5wnd
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010/34pq
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/2mq/luminosity_twilight_fanfic_discussion_thread/2up1
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/20/the_apologist_and_the_revolutionary/15o

Not all of these are testable. Other people can sort them though, because I've been looking at his comments for about five hours and my brain has turned to mush.

best track record of any top pundit in the US

The study linked to meant next to nothing in my eyes. It studied political predictions in an election year by political hacks on tv. 2007-2008. Guess what? IN an election cycle that liberals beat conservatives, the liberal predictions more often came true than conservative predictions.

Reminds me of the reported models of mortgage securities, created using data from boom times only.

Krugman was competing with a bunch of other political hacks and columnists. I doubt that accuracy is the highest motivation for any of them. The political hacks want to curry support, and the columnists want to be invited on tv and have their articles read. I'd put at least 3 motivations above accuracy for that crowd: manipulate attitudes, throw red meat to their natural markets, and entertain. It's Dark Arts, all the way, all the time.

I suggest looking at his implicit beliefs, not just explicit predictions. For example, he must have thought that writing HPMoR was a good use of time, and therefore must have (correctly) predicted that it would be quite popular if he was to write it. On the other hand, his decision to delay publishing his TDT document seems to imply some rather wrong beliefs.

Relevant: Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info, Argument Screens Off Authority. Sequences are to a significant extent a presentation of a certain selection of standard ideas, which can be judged on their own merit.

I'm going through all of Eliezer's comments looking for predictions by using search terms like "predict" and "bet". Just letting people know so that we don't duplicate effort.

I think it is very important to keep in mind that it is not very relevant to judge if someone is good at predicting stuff simply by dividing all the predictions made by the ones that turned out to be correct.

I predict that tomorrow will by Friday. Given that today it is Thursday, that's not so impressive. So my point is that it is more important to look at how difficult to make was that prediction and what the reasoning behind it is.

And I would also look and see if I can find improvements in the predictions that are made, if the person making the predictions actually learns something from the mistakes that he/she made in the past and applies the things that are learned to the new predictions he/she makes from that point on.

Here's two recent bets he made, both successful: He made a prediction against the propagation of any information faster than c and in a nearby thread a similar bet against the so-called proof of inconsistency for Peano Arithmetic.

And here's a prediction against the discovery of Higgs Boson, as yet undetermined.

I, non-programmer, have a question my programmer friends asked me: why can't they find any of Eliezer's papers that have any hard math in them at all? According to them, it's all words words words. Excellent words, to be sure, but they'd like to see some hard equations, code, and the like, stuff that would qualify him as a researcher rather than a "mere" philosopher. What should I link them to?

Rather than talking about Eliezer as if he's not here and trying to make complicated inferences based on his writings, it would be much easier to come up with a list of topics we would like Eliezer to make predictions about, and then just ask him.

Or, alternatively: Eliezer, are there any particularly important predictions you got right/wrong in the past? And what important predictions of yours are still pending?

I know it's not much as far as verifiable evidence goes but this one is pretty interesting.

When Eliezer writes about QM he's not trying to do novel research or make new predictions. He's just explaining QM as it is currently understood with little to no math. Actual physicists have looked over his QM sequence and said that it's pretty good. Source, see the top comment in particular.

I'm pretty interested in the AI part of the question though.

On quantum mechanics: the many-worlds interpretation probably shouldn't be referred to as "his" interpretation (around before he was born, etc.), and there's been some experimental work defending it (for example, entangling 10^4 particles and not seeing a certain kind of collapse), bit it's not very strong evidence.

He also made a lot of super-wrong plans/predictions over a decade ago. But on the other hand, that was a while ago.

The cognitive bias stuff is pretty good popular science writing. That's worth quite a bit to the world.

"Has his interpretation of quantum physics predicted any subsequently-observed phenomena?"

Interpretations of quantum mechanics are untestable, including the MWI. MWI is also not "his," it's fairly old.

I think the test for EY's articles aren't predictions he makes, which I don't recall many of, but what you can do with the insight he offers. For example, does it allow you to deal with your own problems better? Has it improved your instrumental rationality, including your epistemic rationality?

My understanding is that for the most part SI prefers not to publish the results of their AI research, for reasons akin to those discussed here. However they have published on decision theory, presumably because it seems safer than publishing on other stuff and they're interested in attracting people with technical chops to work on FAI:

http://singinst.org/blog/2010/11/12/timeless-decision-theory-paper-released/

I would guess EY sees himself as more of a researcher than a forecaster, so you shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't make as many predictions as Paul Krugman.

Also, here's a quote from his paper on cognitive biases affecting judgment of global risks:

Once upon a time I made up overly detailed scenarios, without realizing that every additional detail was an extra burden. Once upon a time I really did think that I could say there was a ninety percent chance of Artificial Intelligence being developed between 2005 and 2025, with the peak in 2018. This statement now seems to me like complete gibberish. Why did I ever think I could generate a tight probability distribution over a problem like that? Where did I even get those numbers in the first place?

So he wasn't born a rationalist. (I've been critical of him in the past, but I give him a lot of credit for realizing the importance of cognitive biases for what he was doing and popularizing them for such a wide audience.) My understanding was that one of the primary purposes of the sequences was to get people to realize the importance of cognitive biases at a younger age than he did.

Obviously I don't speak for SI or Eliezer, so take this with a grain of salt.

I thought about it some more and the relevant question is - how do we guess what are his abilities? And what is his aptitude at those abilities? Is there statistical methods we can use? (e.g. SPR) What would the outcome be? How can we deduce his utility function?

Normally, when one has e.g. high mathematical aptitude, or programming aptitude, or the like, as a teenager one still has to work on it and train (the brain undergoes significant synaptic pruning at about 20 years of age, limiting your opportunity to improve afterwards), and regardless of the final goal, the intelligent people tend to have a lot of things to show from back when they were practising. I think most people see absence of such stuff as a very strong indicator of lack of ability, especially as seeing it so provides incentive to demonstrate the ability.

Meanwhile, I know that Thomas Friedman is an idiot.

It might well be that he's hopelessly biased and unreflexive on every significant issue, but this neither says a lot about his purely intellectual capabilities, nor does it make any claim that he makes automatically wrong; he might turn out to be biased in just the right way.

(I haven't ever heard of him before, just applying the general principles of evaluating authors.)

Threads like that make me want to apply Bayes theorem to something.

You start with probability 0.03 that Eliezer is sociopath - the baseline. Then you do Bayesian updates on answers to questions like: Does he imagine grandiose importance to him or is he generally modest/in line with actual accomplishments? Does he have grand plans out of the line with his qualifications and prior accomplishments, or are the plans grandiose? Is he talking people into giving him money as source of income? Is he known to do very expensive altruistic stuff that is larger than self interested payoff or not? Did he claim to be an ideally moral being? And so on. You do updates based on the likehood of such for sociopaths and normal people. Now, I'm not saying he is something, all I am saying is that I can't help it but do such updates - first via fast pattern matching by the neural network, then if I find the issue significant enough, explicitly with a calculator if i want to doublecheck.

edit: I think it will be better to change the wording here as different people understand that word differently. Let's say we are evaluating whenever the utility function includes other people to any significant extent, in presence of communication noise and misunderstandings. Considering that some people are prone to being pascal wagered and so the utility function that doesn't include other people leads to attempts to pascal-wager others, i.e. grandiose plans. On the AI work being charitable, I don't believe it, to be honest. One has to study and get into Google (or the like) if one wants the best shot at influencing morality of future AI. I think that's the direction into which everyone genuinely interested in saving the mankind and genuinely worried about the AI has gravitated. If one wants to make impact by talking - one needs to first gain some status among the cool guys, and that means making some really impressive working accomplishments.

First, please avoid even a well-intentioned discussion of politics here (Krugman is as political as it gets), as you will likely alienate a large chunk of your readers.

As for predictions, you are probably out of luck for anything convincing. Note that the AI and singularity research are not expected to provide any useful predictions for decades, the quantum sequence was meant as a background for other topics, and not as original research. Cognitive science and philosophy are the two areas where one can conceivable claim that EY made original contributions to. And the former is the only one of the two that can possibly come up with falsifiable predictions.

It would be awfully nice if someone did itemize EY's original research in cognitive science and suggested what testable predictions it can make, but I am not aware of anything like that having been attempted.

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But if I hadn't read Friedman's writing from 2002-2006, then I wouldn't know how terribly wrong he has been, and I would be too credulous about his claims.

I think this is a false premise: if you'd been reading Friedman's writing over that period with any attention to his subject matter and the claims he makes about it, then you would know how terribly wrong he has been. That's the only way anyone could know that. If you are reading him, and plan to read EY's writing, with no attention to their subject matter and the claims they make, then of what use would a reliability check be?

Just read his posts, look some of the stuff up on your own, and decide for yourself if they make sense. That's the best anyone can do. It would be a waste of EY's time, and/or yours, to go through a list of predictions.