Trying to Try

Remember Morpheus, in The Matrix movie, saying to Neo :

"Come on! Stop trying to hit me, and hit me!"

That seemed pretty efficient.

There are many things worth just "trying your best". I try to understand many of Eliezer's posts and when I succeed (once in a long while) I find it very rewarding. I understood this one. And the one about the zebra. Son it's not a complete waste of my time. (Some would say: "your employer's time". Whatever) However, if I were to put enough effort into it to understand his posts always, I'd probably be fired for one of two reasons: wasting too much paper printing articles not related to work, or not doing any work. (Either that or I would have to have my own Internet connection, my own computer and so on, but I'd rather eat) So I'm quite happy with just trying.

I think Yoda's comment is more an user's guide to mental machinery than reflection on reality. To create something new, you first create a vision. Vision without failure is in many ways more powerful than vision with failure. (Obviously, in most other ways it is worse.) Creating new things is difficult even without you second-guessing yourself even before you begin.

I personally evaluate people saying they will try to do X, as if X is not always their highest priority, and other things might take precedence so the resources aren't always available to do X.

"I'm going to try to prove P != NP", means they might give up at some point and do something else when progress seems unlikely. With regards to FAI, I think the phrasing of your commitment to building it that would be most acceptable to the public without saying try would be "I'm going to figure out if building FAI is possible, and if it is build it".

I regard people saying, "I'm going to build a FAI that stably recursively self-improves," as somewhat similar to people saying, "I'm going to build a worm whole device".

sometimes, when you can not come up with a realistic plan to actually 'do' something, isn't it the best course of action to go brute-force and try to do whatever you can in the area in the hope that a path will eventually become available?

I heard a similar argument about our rush to cure cancer when we don't really understand DNA yet. Wouldn't it be more efficient to devote a lot of effort to understanding DNA, see what comes up and then go towards curing cancer? Arguably this top-down approach to medicine (what chemical can I throw at this disease?) is a source of a lot of negative side-effects of modern medicine. Maybe a bottom-up (how does this disease work? what does it effect? how does that work?) approach will take longer but give better results and produce more reusable knowledge.

Of course, this is easy to say, but when your relative is dying of cancer you have little time to ponder on the way information is encoded in DNA.

Perhaps there is a good analogy with forward-chaining and backward-chaining here? when backward-chaining is not giving you any solutions, maybe it would be beneficial to start examining the current situation and the alternative paths forward in the hope of one of them giving a path towards the goal?

of course none of this goes against the main point, that claiming to try is already making excuses for failure and therefore not really attacking the problem at full strength.

Hole, even. Damn homophones.

The quote still annoys me, despite your interpretation. Maybe for very important things, we must avoid "trying" and really do all we can.

But when giving up is a reasonable option, or when resources are scarce, trying is exactly what we need to do. When I was younger, I tried being an historian, and tried being a mathematician. I failed in the first one, and succeeded in the second. I could have done more for the first - I could have put in all possible efforts, forgone sleep and other distractions, etc... But it would have been dumb. If things are hard, and not that important, superficial trying is exactly what is called for.

Luke's response to Yoda should have been "I will try and lift it out using the force. If that fails, I will try and lever it out. If that fails, I will build a crane and try and lift it out. If that fails, I will try and find out if there's another way of getting off the planet..."

Apparently Luke didn't have to try for very long: http://www.cracked.com/article_16625_p2.html

We'll likely see how long someone can spend straining to lift the starship out of the swamp with no success before giving up. More zebras than jedi masters in this near,near galaxy.

To say that you will achieve anything worth achieving is to arrogantly imply that you believe yourself better than those around you who accept their exempting limitations. Thus it is necessary to say that you are 'trying', as a clear message that you understand that you won't actually succeed. The danger is of then forgetting not to merely 'try'.

To say that you will try instead of do just indicates to the receiver of the message that there is a relatively large probability of failure.

I wonder if a sinecure isn't a similar pitfall for someone who's out to save the world.

I wonder if nerdish literalism is a problem here. Saying "I will do X" when I can't rationally assign a high probability to success feels like dishonest overconfidence - and if I fail, it'll have been an outright lie.

When Yoda said "there is no try," I took it more literally. In the absence of human concepts there is no "try," there is only things that act or don't act. Let go of your mind and all that.

Just do it?

Git 'er done?

Let's get it done?

Will, I think a "worm whole" device would be pretty challenging too, and perhaps even worthwhile. You could use the basic techniques to create a "finger whole" device for victims of industrial (or kitchen) accidents.

Stuart: "Luke's response to Yoda should have been "I will try and lift it out using the force. If that fails, I will try and lever it out. If that fails ...""

Then Luke would have succeeded at rescuing his craft, but made no progress in learning The Force, and the Dark Side would have ruled the galaxy. :-)

Nick: "I wonder if nerdish literalism is a problem here. Saying "I will do X" when I can't rationally assign a high probability to success feels like dishonest overconfidence - and if I fail, it'll have been an outright lie."

No, that's the point exactly. Your body will adapt its own behavior to be in accord with your mind. (It's the old "Whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're right".) It's easy to demonstrate: run 10 miles saying "I'm a great runner, I'm strong, I'm fast, ...", and then next week run 10 miles saying "I hate running, I'm weak, I'm hungover, I'm slow, ...". Your body doesn't want to live the lie, so it makes your internal monologue true. When you commit completely to something, you can accomplish much more than you think you can. (Damn, I sound like a cheesy motivational speaker.)

Yoda's point was that the Force did not make distinctions such as 'size', and that it was Luke's preconceptions and biases that were preventing him from lifting the fighter.

Luke saw a difference between lifting small rocks and lifting the fighter, and his perceptions caused his attempts to fail. Yoda was trying to teach him that the only real obstacle was his disbelief and the failure to react correctly resulting from the disbelief.

For Jedi, there really isn't such a thing as 'trying'. There is only success, and not permitting yourself to succeed.

This would be a lot easier to explain if you people understood more about Taoism.

For Jedi, there really isn't such a thing as 'trying'. There is only success, and not permitting yourself to succeed.

I wonder how that works in a Jedi fight to the death.

Wearing my mechanical engineer's hat I say "Don't be heavy handed.". Set your over-force trips low. When the switch is hard to flip or the mechanism is reluctant to operate, fail and signal the default over-force exception.

You can always wiggle it, or lubricate it and try again, provided you haven't forced it and broken it. For me, trying is about running the compiler with the switches set to retain debugging information and running the code in verbose mode. It is about setting up a receiver down-range. Maybe the second rocket will blow up, just like the first did, but at least I will still be recording the telemetry.

I think that Plan A will be stymied by Problem Y, but I try it anyway, before I try to solve Problem Y. My optimistic side is hoping Problem Y might not actually matter, while my pessimistic side thinks Problem X is lurking in the shadows, ready to emerge and kill Plan A whether I solve Problem Y or not.

I try in order to gain information.

It is usually important to procede with confidence. When things go wrong they throw off fragments of broken machinery and fragments of information. Suprised, we fail to catch the flying fragments of information, and must try again, forewarned.

Two meanings of the word "try" fight for mind share.

To try: to position oneself in the right spot to catch the flying fragments of information flung out from failure.

To try: The psychological mechanism that lets us fail through faint-heartedness, again and again, but never quite understand why.

Two meanings sharing a word is a common problem with natural language. The particular danger I see for Eliezer is when the second meaning hides the first.

He says he isn't ready to write code. If you don't try to code up a general artificial intelligence you don't succeed, but you don't fail either. So you can't fail earlier and harder than you ever expected and cannot suspect that the singular is far. If you won't try, you'll never know.

I wonder how that works in a Jedi fight to the death.

He says he isn't ready to write code. If you don't try to code up a general artificial intelligence you don't succeed, but you don't fail either.

Would people stop saying that! It is highly irresponsible in the context of general AI! (Well, at least the self-improving form of general AI, a.k.a., seed AI. I'm not qualified to say whether a general AI not deliberately designed for self-improvement might self-improve anyways.)

Noodling around with general-AI designs is the most probable of the prospective causes of the extinction of Earth-originating intelligence and life. Global warming is positively benign in comparison.

Eliezer of course will not be influenced by taunts of, "Show us the code," but less responsible people might be.

"The very best you can possibly do is the point at which the real work begins."

It took you 28 years to realize this?

It seems you've missed the point here on a point common to Eastern Wisdom and to systems theory. The "deep wisdom" which you would mock refers to the deep sense there is no actual "self" separate from that which acts, thus thinking in terms of "trying" is an incoherent and thus irrelevant distraction. Other than its derivative implication that to squander attention is to reduce one's effectiveness, it says nothing about the probability of success, which in systems-theoretic terms is necessarily outside the agent's domain.

Reminds me of the frustratingly common incoherence of people thinking that they decide intentionally according to their innate values, in ignorance of the reality that they are nothing more nor less than the values expressed by their nature.

This seems a dumb semantic mistake, not a deep truth. You're confusing "going to" as a prediction and "going to" as a statement of intent. You might prefer the word "intend" if that's what you mean. And however you phrase it, there is uncertainty in both your chance of success, and limits to the amount of effort and risk you'll undertake to accomplish this particular mission.

You're confusing "going to" as a prediction and "going to" as a statement of intent.

Thanks for bringing this up. My comment above can be read as basically complaining about this double meaning.

Reminds me of the importance of overconfidence to business success, somehow....

"You have to enter a special mode, the quotation mode, to talk about your beliefs. By default, we just talk about reality."

This is a false dichotomization. Everything is reality! Speaking of thoughts as if the "mental" is separate from the "physical" indicates implicit dualism.

To facilitate an outcome it must first 'become' the facilitator.

This is a false dichotomization. Everything is reality!

"Quotation mode" is analogous to an escape character. There's no dualism here.

Initially, I also thought this blog entry was faulty. But there indeed seems to be an important difference between having the goal do-A, and succeeding only when A, and having the goal try-A, and succeeding when only a finger (or a hyperactuator in my case) was lifted toward A.

rw: Everything is reality! Speaking of thoughts as if the "mental" is separate from the "physical" indicates implicit dualism.

This is what i argue a lot about with my girlfriend. Am I really trying? What does it mean when I say, that I'll try to be better listener or whatever? She always calls my bluff. I'm only promising to try. But that is what i mean. I'll do what i can with the resources I have, I won't promise more than I can deliver.

But what about hypnosis? A hypnotist says to his subject, that try to lift your hand, and the subject can't do that. But when he says to lift your hand, the subject will do this. So in Suggestion, saying "try to do this" means "don't do it".

I hope to read a follow-up post about hypnotism, and trying to try. I've only seen abridged display of hypnosis in my medical studies, not the whole thing from start to finish. But the answer about what "trying" means lies there. When hypnotist says "forget the pain" some people really do when they wouldn't be able to it by themselves however much they tried. I guess hypnotist is only a specialist in making people believe that they have to do something, and there is no possibility of failure.

If you can answer 'yes' to every "is x possible?" question about the problem, like

Is intelligence possible? Yes. (I am a mind.) Can it be instantiated in a machine? Yes. (Minds are machines.) Is looking at your own mind's code, understanding it, and improving it possible? Yes. (I can understand code, but, alas, my brain is not available for me to hack. A mind made of code doesn't have this limitation.)

you can say "What's the use of trying? It's but a matter of doing it. I will simply do it. I will begin now. I will stop when I'm done." When you know that success is not forbidden by the laws of physics, trying ends and doing begins.

Right now I am doing and at one point in time I will say: "It worked." The only thing that is uncertain is when.

• If I ask the question "What needs to be done?" I will end up with a task that is incredibly difficult.
• If I am to refrain from asking "What can I do?" then I am unable to choose a goal that is more rational.
• Greater returns usually involve taking greater risks.
• If I set myself goals that are beyond my reasonable limits it will involve taking far greater risks.
• In some cases greater risks allow for greater potential reward at the expense of reducing expected utility. An example of this is a lottery.

Sure, I respect the value of intention. I can visualize success, I can aim high and I can give myself no quarter when it comes to making excuses. Nevertheless if I don't consider "what can I do?" rationality will lead me to gambling, in one way or another. Possibly gambling with my health with risk of burnout.

If you can answer 'yes' to every "is x possible?" question about the problem, like Is intelligence possible? Yes. (I am a mind.) Can it be instantiated in a machine? Yes. (Minds are machines.) Is looking at your own mind's code, understanding it, and improving it possible? Yes. (I can understand code, but, alas, my brain is not available for me to hack. A mind made of code doesn't have this limitation.) you can say "What's the use of trying? It's but a matter of doing it. I will simply do it. I will begin now. I will stop when I'm done." When you know that success is not forbidden by the laws of physics, trying ends and doing begins. Right now I am doing and at one point in time I will say: "It worked." The only thing that is uncertain is when.

There are questions I can't answer about the problem.

Does human-level intelligence require some sort of changing of the source code in itself, experimentally at a local level? Neurons have no smarts in them implicitly, we share the same type of neurons with babies. What makes us smart is how they are connected. Which changes on a daily basis, if not at shorter time scales. Is it possible to alter this kind of computer system from the outside, to make it "better" if it is changing itself. If you freeze a copy of your software brain, you will change during the time you investigate your own smarts, and any changes you then apply back to you may be incompatible or non-optimal with the changes your brain made to itself.

In short I think is plausible that there are computer systems I cannot understand and improve the software of on a high level rational level. And that my own mind might be one of them.

Before the project to actually build space flight capability (or nuclear explosives or computers or any other friggin' hard thing) was started, engineers had to have 'yes' to every "is x possible" question. If they had a 'dunno', they had to figure it out, experimentally or/and theoretically. If something was a 'no' - there was no point in trying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feasibility_study

There's a familiar story - maybe you’ve heard it - a story about a proud young man who came to Socrates asking for knowledge. He walked up to the muscular philosopher and said, "O great Socrates, I come to you for knowledge."

Socrates led the young man through the streets of the town - down to the sea - and chest deep into water. Then he asked, "What do you want?"

"Knowledge, O wise Socrates," said the young man with a smile.

Socrates put his strong hands on the man's shoulders and pushed him under. Thirty seconds later Socrates let him up. "What do you want?" he asked again.

"Knowledge," the young man sputtered, "O great and wise Socrates."

Socrates pushed him under again. Thirty seconds passed, thirty-five. Forty. Socrates let him up. The man was gasping. What do you want, young man?"

Between heavy, heaving breaths the fellow wheezed, "Knowledge, O wise and wonderful..."

Socrates jammed him under again. Forty seconds passed. Fifty. "What do you want?"

"Air!" he screeched. "I need air!"

"When you want knowledge as you have just wanted air, then you will have knowledge."

Can you choose to try harder than you actually are? Isn't that like choosing to believe? I always thought you either believe or you don't. We don't have a choice in the matter. Do we?

The usage of "try" was heavily addressed in the training I just did. The approach is to notice why a usage exists. What is the value of adding "try"?

Well, it demolishes the possibility of failure to realize the stated goal. After all, if I say, "I'm going to try to express myself coherently," I can't actually fail, as long as I do something, anything at all. I can give up at the first tiny obstacle, but, hey, I tried. How about "I tried to overcome my procrastination"?

We use "try" to avoid identifying "failure," because we have been trained that failure is Bad. It's not. Failure is inevitable if we undertake anything worth doing that isn't already so easy that we don't need to take any risks, we just do it. I don't "try" to turn on the light in the room, I just flip the switch. (Sure, sometimes a light is burned out or something. But we would never ask someone, "Try to turn on the light." We just ask them to turn it on.)

Failure is an essential part of the learning process, of the development of skill.

Yudkowsky's ability to see beyond his original incomplete vision, and to openly acknowledge the former shortcoming, is part of what identifies him as Yudkowsky. That is not necessarily a common ability, most people become increasingly entangled in what they said before.

I'd just like to say that this post was one of the most effortless for me to intuitively embrace thus far, seeing as I've read HPMoR and the idea of Doing v. Trying is a common theme. I'll be sure to tap into my mysterious dark side next time I need something actually... taken care of.

Failure is always possible. However there are two responses to failure. One is to be happy with having made the attempt. This does not make failure less likely in the future.

The other is to actually engage with and analyze your failure. If you didn't flip the switch, your failure is a failure. You figure out why you came up with a plan that didn't work. If the switch needs to be flipped again tomorrow, you will have a better chance of flipping the switch tomorrow. If some button needs to be pressed tomorrow, you won't likely fail at button pressing for the same reason you failed at switch flipping.

Doing rather than trying is a commitment to the second response to failure.

A quote I liked from "The Village":

Ivy Walker: How is it that you are so brave while the rest of us shake in our boots?
Lucius Hunt: I don't think of what might happen, only what must be done.

Do other people really work like that? I thought that the thing with the Yoda quote was that the Force only works if you 100% believe in it. Unlike the nature of our wold, Force do care about your state of mind, and not only about your actions. But we do not live in that word.

If there is something I don't want to do, for what ever emotional reason that I don't really want to admit, I would never trick my self in beveling that I have tried and failed. Instead, my inner clever arguer would try to convince me that the problem is too hard to even try, that the chance of success is to too small compared to the effort of trying. If my clever arguer wins this argument, then I would not try.

(Actually it usually goes like this: I spot what my inner clever arguer is doing. I then admit to my self, that I have a emotional preference for, what ever my inner clever arguer is trying to push for. I take this preference in to account, together with everything else that is relevant, and then I decide what to do. But that is besides the point here.)

Why would I even wont to pretend that I have tried and failed? True failure is painful. Does pretend failure feel different?

I can understand the concept of trying to appear to have tried, to pleas someone else. But that is a very different thing. I generally do not approve of lying to other, but it still conceptually different from lying to yourself.

I am rather offended by the the thought that when I say, "I am going to try", some one might interpret that as "I am going to try to try", or even "I am going to pretend to try". Because that was not what I said, and it was defiantly not what I meant. When I say "I am going to try", it means that I will put extra effort in to the task, just because I am aware of the risk of failure.

we call it trying until you don't miss it, when you miss it you call it a "lose" but when you end up at your plan it is a"WIN" so it is just words and all is trying until you win because until you abandon you did'nt lose.