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A more charitable interpretation is that they are trying to assume less, going a little more meta and explaining the general problem, instead of focusing on specifics that they thing are important, but might not really be.
A failure mode when people don't try to do this is the user that asks a software developer to "just add a button that allows me to autofill this form", when maybe there's an automation that renders the form totally unnecessary.
Hi, I'm the organizer. If you're in São Paulo or nearby, please show up! We'll have an introduction to rationality for newcomers, and talk about Systems 1 and 2, Units of Exchange and Goal Factoring.
You can get more details on the Meetup.com event https://www.meetup.com/pt-BR/Racionalidade-em-Sao-Paulo/events/253667078/ or the Facebook event https://www.facebook.com/events/255536928394025/
There's this http://miegakure.com/ in development for several years now
What do you mean, in this context?
I follow several programming newsletters, and I don't have context to fully understand and appreciate most links they share (although I usually have a general idea about what they are talking about). It's still very valuable to me find out about new stuff in the field.
I'd patreon a few dollars for something like this.
Going!
Thanks! I'll look into adding tags and timeframes. I'm not sure how to do that without the layout getting too crowded.
Check the link below, v0.2. Should be working now!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/59redws46ncdiax/predict_v0.2.apk?dl=0
You mean, instead of programming an AI in a real life computer and showing it a "Game of Life" table to optimize, you could build a turing machine inside a Game of Life table, program the AI inside this machine, and let it optimize the table in which it is? Makes sense.
This is weird. I'll test to see if I can reproduce and report back (hopefully with a fix).
Thanks!
- I'm not getting the flickering here... are you on a low-end device? Which version of android are you on?
- No difference at all. I just thought it would make sense to phrase the predictions in the form of questions and answers - so you could e.g. pick a question from a pre-made list and just choose your answer.
- Good to know, I thought "long press to edit" was a common enough pattern that everybody would discover it.
I'm not sure I get what kind of roulette you mean... something like a ring pie chart?
I thought of using a target, but I'm not sure if that would be much more effective than the sliding bar.
Good point!
The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with. That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line - like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the "X is Y", but doesn't have the time to explain. You can then ask: "is this guy really an expert?" and "do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert's opinion?"
I'm sad the original FB posts were deleted. Now I can never show my kids the occasion where Eliezer endorsed a comment of mine =(
Brain dump of a quick idea:
A sufficiently complex bridge law might say that the agent is actually a rock which, through some bizarre arbitrary encoding, encodes a computation[1]. Meanwhile the actual agent is somewhere else. Hopefully the agent has some adequate Occamian prior and he never assigns this hypothesis any relevance because of the high complexity of the encoding code.
In idea-space, though, there is a computation which is encoded by a rock using a complex arbitrary encoding, which, by virtue of having a weird prior, concludes that it actually is that rock, and to whom them breaking of the rock would mean death. We usually regard this computation as irrelevant for moral purposes - only computations corresponding to "natural" interpretations of physical phenomena count. But this distinction between natural and arbitrary criterions of interpretation seems, well, arbitrary.
We regard a person's body as "executing" the computation that is a person that thinks she is in that body. But we do not regard the rock as actually "executing" the computation that is a weird agent that thinks it's the computation encoded by the rock (through some arbitrary encoding).
Why?
The pragmatic reason is obvious: you can't do anything to help the rock-computation in anyway, and whatever you do, you'd be lowering utility for some other ideal computation.
But maybe the kind of reasoning the rock-computation has to make to keep seeing itself as the rock is relevant.
A rock-as-computation hypothesis (I am this rock in this universe = my phenomenological experiences correspond to the states os atoms in several points of this rock as translated by this [insert very long bridge law, full of specifics] bridge law) is doomed to fail at the few next steps in the computation. Because the bridge law is so ad hoc, it won't correctly predict the next phenomena perceived by the computation (in the ideal or real world where it actually executes). So if the rock-computation does induction at all, it will have to change the bridge law, and give up on being that rock.
In other words, if we built a robot with a prior that privileges the bridge law hypothesis that it's a computation encoded in a rcok though some bizarre encoding, it would have to abandon that hypothesis very very soon. And, as phenomelogical data came in, it would approach the correct hypothesis that it's the robot. Unless it's doing some kind of privileged-hypothesis anti-induction where it keeps adopting increasingly complex bridge laws to keep believing it is that one rock.
So, proposal: a substrate is regarded to embody a computation-agent if that computation-agent is one that, by doing induction in the same sense we do to find out about ourselves, will eventually arrive at the correct bridge law that it is being executed in said substrate.
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[1] Rock example is from DRESCHER, Gary, Good and Real, 2006, p. 55.
The ULH suggests that most everything that defines the human mind is cognitive software rather than hardware: the adult mind (in terms of algorithmic information) is 99.999% a cultural/memetic construct.
I think a distinction worth tracing here is the diferrence between "learning" in the neural-net-sense and "learning" in the human pedagogical/psychological sense.
The "learning" done by a piece of cortex becoming a visual cortex after receiving neural impulses from the eye isn't something you can override by teaching a person (in the usual sense o the word "teaching") - you'd need to rewire their brain. I don't think you can call it cultural/memetic because this neural learning does not (seem to) occur through the mechanism(s) that deals with concepts, ideas and feelings, which is involved in learning a language or a social custom or a scientific theory.
In the same way, maybe the availability heuristic isn't genetically coded, but is learned through the type of data certain parts of the brain have to work with. That would mean you could fix it through some input rewiring during gestation, but doesn't mean you can change it through a new human education system - it may be too low level, like a generic part of the cortex becoming the visual cortex. If that's the case, I wouldn't say it's a cultural/memetic construct (although it is an environmental construct).
Well, you'd have to hardcode at least a learning algorithm for values if you expect to have any real chance that the AI behaves like a useful agent, and that falls within the category of important functionalities. But then I guess you'll agree with that.
You have to hardcode something, don't you?
You're a Brazilian studying Law who's been around LW since 2013 and I'd never heard of you? Wow. Please show up!
If you keep the project open source, I might be able help with the programming (although I don't know much about Rails, I could help with the client side). The math is a mystery to me, too, but can't you charge ahead with a simple geometric mean for the combination of estimates while you figure it out?
We're translating to Brazilian Protuguese only, since that's our native language.
Hi, and thanks for the awesome job! Will you keep a public record of changes you make to the book? I'm coordinating a translation effort, and that would be important to keep it in sync if you change the actual text, not just fix spelling and hyperlinking errors.
Edit: Our translation effort is for Portuguese only, and can be found at http://racionalidade.com.br/wiki .
Interesting idea. Brazilian law explicitly admits lottery as a form of settling, but I'm not sure if that example with a penalty for not winning a lawsuit would be admissible.
I guess I misunderstood what you meant by "There are many ways to tackle this question, but I mean this in a homo economicus, not biased perspective." then. See my reply to ShardPhoenix.
He specifically said he's talking about "homo economicus"-"rational"-like decision. An agent like that should have no need to punish itself - by having a negative emotion - since the potential loss of utility itself is a compelling reason to take action beforehand. So self-punishing is out. How do you think sadness would serve as a signalling device, in this case?
Not sure what you mean by "you SHOULD be sad when you miss an opportunity1"? What's the advantage of being sad instead of just shrugging and replanning?
I've read Kolak's Cognitive Science, which you recomended in that textbook list post. I've enjoyed it a lot and it didn't feel like I needed some previous introductory reading. Any reason why you left it out now?
Awesome project. I really liked the facebook discussion, and this post explains clearly and concretely a part that some people found confusing. Very well written. Congratulation, Robb.
This just feels really promising, although I can't say I've really followed it all (you've lost me a couple posts ago on the math, but that's my fault). I'm waiting eagerly for the re-post.
All the content in the post just fell in place after I read Giles summary. Still a great post, though.
Necessary entities, Moses ben Maimonides Anselm's ontological, Summa Theologica I think these are switched.
Although I think your point here is plausible, I don't think it fits in a post where you are talking about the logicalness of morality. This qualia problem is physical; whether your feeling changes when the structure of some part of your decision system changes depends on your implementation.
Maybe your background understanding of neurology is enough for you to be somewhat confident stating this feeling/logical-function relation for humans. But mine is not and, although I could separate your metaethical explanations from your physical claims when reading the post, I think it would be better off without the latter.
I guess you could still build a causal graph if the universe is defined by initial and end states - you'd just have two disconnected nodes at the top. But you'd have to give up the link between causality and what we call "time".
Great post as usual.
It brings to mind and fits in with some thoughts I have on simulations. Why isn't this two-layered system you described analogous to the relation between a simulated universe and its simulator? I mean: the simulator sees and, therefore, is affected by whatever happens in the simulation. But the simulation, if it is just the computation of a mathematical structure, cannot be affected by the simulator: indeed, if I, simulator, were to change the value of some bits during the simulation, the results I would see wouldn't be the results of the original mathematical structure I was computing. I would be observing a new object, instead of changin the object I was observing, I think. The simulator, then, is in an epiphenomenal lower level in relation to the simulation
The main problem is that is seems weird to give the simulated stuff (the mathemathical sub-pattern that behaves analogously to a kid kicking a ball and having fun) the same status as the simulator stuff (the electrons implementing the computer). This relates, I think, to the problem of the existence or truth of mathematical facts or statements, and of reality of interpretations of patterns.
Of course, if you think the existence of some universe depends on the fact that its mathematical structure is being computed somewhere (and that that universe has some spark of base-lavel existence), then this "epiphenomenalism" goes away.
Also, related to gwern's comment here.
Well, you really wouldn't be able to remember qualia, but you'd be able to recall brain states that evoke the same qualia as the original events they recorded. In that sense, "to remember" means your brain enters states that are in some way similar to those of the moments of experience (and, in a world where qualia exist, these remembering-brain-states evoke qualia accordingly). So, although I still agree with other arguments agains epiphenomenalism, I don't think this one refutes it.
I don't know if this insight is originally yours or not, but thank you for it. It's like you just gave me a piece of the puzzle I was missing (even if I still don't know where it fits).
I think you've taken EY's question too literally. The real question is about the status of statements and facts of formal systems ("systems of rules for symbol manipulation") in general, not arithmetic, specifically. If you define "mathematics" to include all formal systems, then you can say EY's meditation is about mathematics.
Actually, if you think of it as affecting us, but not being affected by us, it is, in EY's words, mathematics is higher. We would be "shadows" influenced by the higher tier, but unable to affect it.
But I don't really think this line of reasoning leads anywhere.
I see your point. Agreed.
It's 25% of the Doctors, not of the population of potential victims. If the Doctors at each group take victims at the same frequency and quantity, the number of victims will be the same. Actually, depending on what kind of social impact you think about, maybe the largest group suffers the least.
and we can help change them in the interest of rational adaptation
And why should you do that?
And the sum itself is a huge problem. There is no natural scale on which to compare utility functions. Divide one utility function by a billion, multiply the other by eπ, and they are still perfectly valid utility functions. In a study group at the FHI, we've been looking at various ways of combining utility functions - equivalently, of doing interpersonal utility comparisons (IUC). Turns out it's very hard, there seems no natural way of doing this, and a lot has also been written about this, concluding little. Unless your theory comes with a particular IUC method, the only way of summing these utilities is to do an essentially arbitrary choice for each individual before summing. Thus standard total utilitarianism is an arbitrary sum of ill defined, non-natural objects.
This interests me. Do you have any literature I should read on this topic?
I like the quote, but I don't see how it relates to rationality.
Man, even if you don't think so, you probably do have something to add to the group. Even if you don't have a lot of scientific/philosophical knowledge (I myself felt a little like this talking to the other guys, and i see that as a learning opportunity), you can add just by being a different person, with different experiences and background. Please show up if you can, even if you arrive late!
Ethics. Heads up: I'm going to ask you about some stuff about utilitarianism that I don't understand =P
Thank you, great post!
The meetup was great! Diegocaleiro, leo arruda, dyokomizo, anthony and I were there, and I think we had a great time. I hope we can do this again, and that the others will show up in the next one!