The "Outside the Box" Box

Eliezer is right, as usual. But it raises the question: when should you be flattered and when should you be insulted to be called "creative" or "revolutionary"?

One bad algorithm I can think of is to be flattered when you're called such by other people you think are currently "creative" or "revolutionary", as opposed to people who were previously revolutionary and now mainstream. The former is how cliques form.

This as a second thought to my first reaction, which was, "Well, if Robin Hanson calls you "revolutionary" you must practically be insane."

Trying to be original may be justifiable if people will buy a NEW!! product even if it's inferior.

I appreciated your choice of examples. Conformist-nonconformism is about the most annoying thing in the world to me, in addition to making a lot of smart people useless (or worse).

Eliezer is certainly correct that our real goal is to make optimal decisions and perform optimal actions, regardless of how different they are from those of the herd. But that doesn't mean we should ignore information about our conformity or non-conformity. It's often important.

Consider the hawk-dove game. If you're in a group of animals who randomly bump into each other and compete for territory, the minority strategy is the optimal strategy. If all your peers are cowards, you can completely dominate them by showing some fang. Or if your peers follow the "never back down, always fight to the death" strategy, you should be a coward until they've killed each other off. Non-conformity is a valid goal (or subgoal, at least).

On the other hand, in situations with networks effects, you want to be a conformist. If you're selling your widget on Bob's Auction Site, which has 20 users, instead of eBay, your originality is simply stupid.

Eliezer, your first and second thoughts illustrate my question; they are not clearly positive or negative descriptors. :)

Confession: I watched the Monty Python clip before reading the whole post.

Much of what Eliezer talked about in the beginning is discussed in The Rebel Sell. I am actually not as disturbed by those of the "radical counterculture" as the authors, who discuss how to accomplish change as opposed to receiving recognition, because they know enough to be dangerous.

Boxes are always patterns completed by brains, along with ready made outsides of them. Thinking is necessary because to find the outside of a box you have to notice the box is there, which you don't if your brain fills it in automatically. Things are less noticable if you can't concieve of the possibility of an alternative to them.

I probably think this because my brain fills in this pattern. And I only think that (and this) because the idea of recursion is another pattern my brain enjoys filling in. An effective way to simulate originality though: actively fill in the wrong patterns. Choose an automatic response from another set of ideas. Babies are being sold on the black market? don't automatically intone 'the police should stop that', say 'how inefficient - it should be a legal market'. If someone says we will all be dead one day, instead of reflecting on the meaning this gives to your life, politely point out that they have their statistics wrong; about 5% of people have never died, and it correlates well with those born recently. Depending on your comparative preferences for perceived originality and truth, this can be done to convince most people you are insane and possibly completely immoral: nice socially recognisable signals that you are being original without having to conform to current originality.

Actually thinking, like satori, is a wordless act of mind.

Is such an act possible?

Wittgenstein said that 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.'. I guess 'thinking' can take the place of 'philosophy' in what he said. If seen this way, the act involves a lot of struggle. Even if we do away with words it seems like something else should take its place against which we would have to battle. Or maybe, I'm thinking a lot inside the box :)

The video at the end makes such nice closure to such a great post. Great taste. I am reminded of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Eliezer's post here, if I am correct, is meant to make her readers question themselves if they are truly being original or if they are simply following the "other" masses. But a question, here: how many people think, actually think in their daily lives? And by "think", I mean produce truly original thought--impossible without some sort of muse. That's my current hypothesis. Going by that line of reasoning, therefore perhaps truly original thought can only be realized/ created through a true expression of the self through one's ideal (or at least some very synergetic) medium. Perhaps it is only people who reach their true potential/ at the last stage of Maslow's hierarchy who achieve original thought.

We can see from history this amounts to approximately 1% of the population: Da Vinci etc. As individuals then, perhaps the only way we can truly see more original thought from the people around us is to become an original thinker ourselves, to bring ourselves up to that level of so called "genius", which is simply produced by a persistent focus of purpose and passion to get up to that level. Then by changing ourselves, we naturally inspiring others--simply by being ourselves. A wonderful thing.

Of course, this is simply speculation as I'm not at a Da Vinci/Freud/Nietzsche/Krishnamurti (prolific original output) like level--though that is my major life purpose.

I would guess that it is not a state a person has to be in to come up with an original thought but a situation in which unoriginal thoughts seem obviously inapplicable to them. You can't assume because someone produced some great thought they are a separate class of person and will continue to do so. A lot of the things Lord Kelvin said about science near the end of his life seem downright silly today.

Also, Eliezer is not a "her". His wikipedia page has a picture of him, beard and all.

"Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located. Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same..."

They do? Can you give an example? I can't recall anybody ever pointing out a location.

And NNs are independent of "general intelligence". NNs are being used to great success in many fields today. The fact that we don't have hard AI is no condemnation of NNs, nor a problem with the phrase "think outside the box". That's quite a leap you made, and I've only read 2 paragraphs so far!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb said at one point that his next book will be about tinkering - how many discoveries were made while the researcher was seeking something else. So directed research is good because it provides an excuse to "tinker", to spot the unexpected and go off on a tangent.

Have you spoken to Taleb? Seems there's lots of common ground. He likes to learn directly from people what's happening.

P.S. The YouTube video embedded in the post has been removed. One place where the same excerpt appears is here.

Edit: Possibly better, from the Monty Python channel.

The way I would word this: The box exists in the map, not the territory. Looking "outside of the box" is still looking at the map.

This cached thought has been around for three decades. Still no general intelligence. But, somehow, everyone outside the field knows that neural networks are the Dominant-Paradigm-Overthrowing New Idea, ever since backpropagation was invented in the 1970s.

It's been going strong in one form or another since the late nineteenth century. William James was a notable supporter of the notion that the human brain had emergent behavior based on the interaction of many simple units, and from this culture came the term "connectionism" that was popular amongst AI speculators Before the War.

"And if all the partners agree that something sounds like a good idea, they won't do it. If only grant committees were this sane."

but then you say:

"Properties like truth or good design are independent of novelty: 2 + 2 = 4, yes, really, even though this is what everyone else thinks too."

In venture capital it may pay off to avoid doing what every one else does. But in funding grants, it seems there's no advantage to that. It's not like the science get devalued if it's discovered twice. If everyone thinks it's a good grant, then maybe it just is?

The eminent philosophers of Monty Python said it best of all:

This video is no longer available because the uploader has closed their YouTube account.

Deep, man.

The monty python link is stale

I like how these serious logical and moral discussions are juxtaposed with Monty Python.

And now I have the urge to build a mousetrap out of as many lasers and rocket launchers as I can get my hands on...which is not, of course, the least bit optimal for the purpose of catching mice.

Lucifer's version

I remember the late 90's, when I first gained access to the Internet. Here were my people, people who enjoy thinking, minds communicating at a bare-metal level about interesting and smart things.

It was around that time I ran across the concept of a "free-thinker" and started mulling over that label in my mind. It sounded like a compliment, something I'd like if people started calling me that. After all, I don't think the way other people do (thanks, autism!), and I had always felt like a mind trapped in a body. But the first time I brought up being a free-thinker was in a discussion about religion with an Internet Atheist. I was promptly and patronizingly informed that I couldn't possibly be a free-thinker because I believe in God.

Oh.

Free-thinker = atheist, apparently. A one-to-one correspondence, a synonym, and a hope for esteem from my peers crushed.

Never mind that I treat the Bible and young-Earth creationism as seriously and geekily as I treat the canons of the various Star Trek series. Never mind that I try to get past the rah-rah-our-team side of religion to follow Jesus' commands to love each other with radical, boundary-breaking see-from-their-eyes empathy. Never mind that I'd been hurt by church hypocrisy as any former-Catholic or raised-Baptist Internet Atheist among my circle of friends.

No, this badge of uniqueness was not for me. I was too unique for it.

So, essentially, the way forward is to attempt to make something 'good' rather than something 'original'. Because of cached thoughts leading all forced 'original' thoughts into truly unoriginal thoughts, the only way to make something truly 'original' is to make something new, not through the attempt of making something new (which would lead you in circles), but to make something better than the rest. By trying to make something better than the rest, it has to be markedly different from everything else.

This intro aged very very poorly. I suspect that the core point of this article may be much weaker than originally claimed because of it. simply constraining your thinking to think outside the box, but then reaching immediately outside the box and not reaching further, is likely a reasoning error. but constraining your thinking to outside the box, then reaching for what is immediately outside it, made Eliezer pick up neural networks. which he then immediately dismissed as not likely to work because so many people had done this. he managed to not see AlphaGo coming, and I have always suspected it was as a result of this article's point in particular that the AI safety crowd were blindsided by neural networks. I think this is a pretty severe prediction error and that this post is likely an incorrect point because of it. interesting disagreement about how to interpret this historical information would be quite welcome.