Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

What circles do you run in Eliezer? I meet a fair number of people who work in AI, (you can say I "work in AI" myself) and so far I can't think of a single person who was sure of a way to build general intelligence. Is this attitude you observe a common one among people who aren't actually doing AI research, but who think about AI?

Oh, I'm not talking about the mainstream AI field. Most of them know better. I mean, say, a random middle or upper-class individual in Silicon Valley, or a random user on an IRC channel.

However, the rule about instantly solving Friendly AI may apply even within the AI field, since it's a more difficult problem.

It's obvious how to build AI. You just add complexity. AIs need complexity. :-)

And a randomness-adder :)

I've just finished a 3-day training course on TRIZ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ) a problem solving technique, one of the recurring themes throughout the course was what to do about all the solutions that come out even before you've figured out what the true problem is you're trying to solve. The advice was to write the solutions down (rather than be diverted by them or try to bat them away), use them to help examine the problem a bit more and then carry on until you have enough information to make useful judgements about all the solutions you've generated; this was very helpful advice. You need to have a sound way of formulating and exploring the problem space, as well as generating solutions, otherwise you'll become too distracted by all the great solutions your brain is generating.

I just want to remark that it is far from obvious on apriori grounds that there is no elegant general AI algorithm that will solve all the other problems quite nicely. We've only learned this by the continued failure to find such an algorithm or anything like it by the AI community and the continued small successes of more specific less elegant approaches.

AI's need Emergence too. Make sure to add some of that to the soup ;^)

X3J13, the ANSI committee that standarised Common Lisp, had many problems to solve. Kent Pitman credits Larry Masinter with imposing the disciple of seperating problem descriptions from proposed solutions and gives insights into what that meant in practise in a post to comp.lang.lisp

http://tinyurl.com/2hppgs

The general interest lies in that fact that the X3J13 Issues were all written up and are available on line.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/X3J13Iss.htm

or

http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/X3J13-Issues.html

so if you wish to study how this works there is a resource you can analyse.

I should confess that my interest has been in content not process. I have been reading these issues to learn Common Lisp. Are these pages really a useful resource for scholars wishing to study the separation of problem descriptions from proposed solutions? I don't know.

I think this argument is flawed with respect to the more technology-oriented questions. Most people do not seriously claim to solve AI problems. What most people (like myself) who are slightly educated in the field (I did an undergrad minor in AI, just very simple stuff) will do is they will suggest an approach that they would try if they had to start working on it. Technical questions also usually yield to evidence very quickly whenever it matters, i.e., when someone would start burning money on an implementation. That is not to say some time and resources are not to be saved by using the maxim outlined here.

OTOH, the part about economists is valid, since most people have very strong ideas (usually wrong ones) about what will work, e.g., as a policy. But then again, most people have no way of wasting (other peoples') resources based on these faulty ideas.

No, wait...

The latest of a number of really good posts from you that directly address the concern of this blog. You seem to be really starting to "grok" the terrifying reality of just how biased we are by the very nature of our thought processes, and coming up with good and useful steps to reduce those biases. Nicely done.

This post makes me wonder how much time passed for Eliezer between concluding that a technological singularity was a probable part of the future and deciding that creating an AGI was the best response, and likewise how much time passed between concluding that AGI Friendlyness would be a difficult problem and concluding that working on a theory of AGI Friendlyness was the best response.

Eliezer, I get the impression that your recent blog entries will make me a better rationalist or if not that a better inventor of software, organizational innovations and social arrangements that will help people become better rationalists.

Good stuff, I say.

A surprising number of people I meet seem to know exactly how to build an Artificial General Intelligence, without, say, knowing how to play the guitar or juggle (much easier problems).

My AI will play the guitar and juggle so I won't have to.

This advice seems the opposite of, "avoid analysis paralysis." These may be bounding two extremes, neither of which is healthy. Or I may simply be wrong about the relationship.

Playing the guitar has human-aesthetic components so it's a subproblem of Friendly AI, not just AGI. Building an AI that juggles is a valid challenge. As for trying to do it yourself, that quite misses the point. A mathematician may not be able to do high-speed mental arithmetic, but ought to know how to build a calculator.

I remember reading something much like this in I am right and you are wrong by Edward de Bono, who as I recall wrote that we should try to hold on to the "I haven't made my mind up" state much longer than we do, and be prepared to say "I don't know" much more often than we do (I think he even proposed a new word we could use to answer questions with that meant we don't have a reason to think either way yet). This was about 15 years ago so I've probably mis-remembered.

I was a philosophy undergrad at the time, and when I asked my tutors about de Bono, they told me he was a vacuous 'self-help' nitwit I should ignore.

"My Ap distribution is rather flat."

Hm, MADIRF? :)

Completely useless methods for building a general intelligence:

Method 1: Put some bacteria on a lifeless planet with liquid water. Wait until one evolves.

Method 2: Find a fertile human of each gender and induce them to mate. Wait nine months.

Luis Enrique, See above about "We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think"; my interpretation is that the people are trying to believe that they haven't made up their minds, but they are wrong. That is, they seem to be implementing the (first) advice you mention. Maybe one can come up with more practical advice, but these are very difficult problems to fix, even if you understand the errors. On the other hand, the main part of the post is about a successful intervention.

Constant, regarding "analysis paralysis," keep in mind there are often two separate questions:

1. How much time should I spend thinking about X?

2. Given I'm allocating T time to think about X, how should I divide up T among different thought subtasks?

Analysis Paralysis would generally be a problem with (1).

The current blog post applies more to (2). In the Maier example, the participants presumably know they have a sizable chunk of time blocked out, and the experimental group presumably gets better results not by spending more time overall, but because they reserved a good chunk of T to spend learning the problem, without committing right away to a solution.

The notion of delaying proposition of 'solutions' as long as possible seems an excellent technique for group work where stated propositions not only appear prematurely but become entangled with other, perhaps unproductive interpersonal dynamics, and where the energy of the deliberately 'unmade up' group mind can possibly assist the individual to internally change position. The thorny bit for me however, is the individual trying to 'hold that non-thought' - a challenge that is more or less equivalent to stopping, or even slowing the thought process deliberately, which is meditation after all - something we mere mortals haven't found all that easy so far. Indeed, some argue that many of us aren't even aware there is an 'internal dialogue', let alone knowing how to stop it. In other words, it's easy to say don't make up your mind, but not so easy to enact.

"...human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When o­ne sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next o­ne can't get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort."

Charlie Munger

http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.html

I agree. I really hate our notion that "you shouldn't bring up a problem unless you have a solution".

It is obvious to anyone that solves problems that we should analyze the problem before letting our minds move on to a solution.

That's like arguing food doesn't taste good because I can't prove it.

Are you sure of that citation? I just looked for it in a copy of Dawes's "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World" and again with the full text search in Google books

http://books.google.com/books/about/Rational_choice_in_an_uncertain_world.html?id=rcU1BsfrM2kC

and did not find any mention of Maier's work. Also, though Maier does frequently use the "Changing Work Procedures" problem, I haven't turned up any publication by him that matches this description. (Note that this failure is quite possibly mine; I haven't done an exhaustive search).

-- MarkusQ

"why, that problem is so incredibly difficult that an actual majority resolve the whole issue within 15 seconds.", "We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think" and "Cached Thoughts"...

Right. We don't do a lot of "our" thinking ourselves. We aren't individually sentient, not really. We don't notice it, but the actual thinking is going on in our subcultures. The sad and funny thing is, we don't even try to understand the cognition of our subcultures, when we research cognition.

This is one of the techniques I've always thought sounded really useful, but never had a clear enough picture of to implement for myself. Does anyone have an example (a transcript, or something of the like) of groups and/or individuals successfully discussing a problem for 5 or 10 minutes without proposing any solutions? I have trouble imagining what that would look like.

I have attempted using this in more casual decision making situations, and the response I get is nearly always something along the lines of "Okay, just let me propose this one solution, we won't get attached to it or anything, just hear me out..."

There's a comment already asking for more modern articles/citations/research on this topic but in case someone wants to run with this idea in real life, you can find a summary of Norman Maier's research at http://www.iaf-world.org/Libraries/IAF_Journals/Assets_and_Liabilities_in_Group_Problem_Solving.sflb.ashx

The article was written by Norman Maier in 1967 and reprinted in Psychological Review in 1999. For those of you with access to well-funded libraries, the citations are:

• Psychological Review, Volume 74, Number 4, Pages 239-249.
• Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal — Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1999, Pages 45-51

And, to be on really solid ground, you'd want the actual source article(s) that the above review refers to. They are:

• Hoffman, L. R., & Maier, N. R. F. The use of group decision to resolve a problem of fairness. Personnel Psychology, 1959, 12, 545-559
• Maier, N. R. F. Screening solutions to upgrade quality: A new approach to problem solving under conditions of uncertainty. Journal of Psychology, 1960, 49, 217-231.
• Maier, N. R. F. Problem solving discussions and conferences: Leadership methods and skills. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
• Maier, N. R. F., & Hayes, J. J. Creative management. New York: Wiley, 1962.
• Solem, A. R. 1965: Almost anything I can do, we can do better. Personnel Administration, 1965, 28, 6-16.

sd

From which edition of the book does the reference originate? At first glance it does not seem to be included in the second edition and I'm curious to read more about it.

https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf 

is the missing citations

I think the main important lesson is to not get attached to early ideas. Instead of banning early ideas, if anything comes up, you can just write tit down, and set it aside. I find this easier than a full ban, because it's just an easier move to make for my brain. 

(I have a similar problem with rationalist taboo [? · GW]. Don't ban words, instead require people to locally define their terms for the duration of the conversation. It solves the same problem, and it isn't a ban on though or speech.)

The other important lesson of the post, is that, in the early discussion, focus on increasing your shared understanding of the problem, rather than generating ideas. I.e. it's ok for ideas to come up (and when they do you save them for later). But generating ideas is not the goal in the beginning. 

Hm, thinking about it, I think the mechanism of classical brainstorming (where you up front think of as many ideas as you can) is to exhaust all the trivial, easy to think of, ideas, as fast as you can, and then you're forced to think deeper to come up with new ideas. I guess that's another way to do it. But I think this is method is both ineffective and unreliable, since it only works though a secondary effect.

. . .

It is interesting to comparing the advise in this post with the Game Tree of Aliment [LW · GW] or Builder/Breaker Methodology also here [LW · GW]. I've seen variants of this exercise popping lots of places in the AI Safety community. Some of them pare probably inspired by each other, but I'm pretty sure (80%) that this method have been invented several times independently.

I think that GTA/BBM works for the same reason the advice in the post works. It also solves the problem of not getting attached, and also as you keep breaking your ideas and explore new territory, you expand your understanding or the problem. I think an active ingrediens in this method is that the people playing this game knows that alignment is hard, and go in expecting their first several ideas to be terrible. You know the exercise is about noticing the flaws in your plans, and learn from your mistakes. Without this attitude, I don't think it would work very well.