Being more interested in discovering the sort of sources Eliezer was writing against but did not give examples of
I don’t believe this is a useful endeavor. To put it simply, there is a ton of stupid stuff out there (most stuff that gets written is stupid), so picking a particular batch of bad statements to analyze gives very little evidence overall because they are unlikely to be representative of the entirety of writing or thinking on a matter. Particularly when your selection process is biased (through correlations between rhetoric and substance) towards finding precisely the stupidest of stuff among it.
Here are a few more hits I found notable on “the power of emergence”:
This is entirely unsurprising in light of the above. A lot of stuff is written, most of it is bad, so no wonder many of the leading hits are bad. It would be truly surprising if this didn’t happen.
Yes, you absolutely would! In a sufficiently large dataset of words written by humans, you are almost always able to stumble upon some examples of any other trait you’re interested in… regardless of the overall distribution or the value of the highest-quality examples.
Rich pickings, among which I found this
When Eliezer was rallying against the mysterianism of the past, he was using the example of the world’s leading authorities, thinkers, and scientists engaging in (supposedly) bad epistemology. As an illustrative example, he wasn’t picking out a random article entry or book, but rather the words of Lord Kelvin as he argued for “elan vital.”
But then, when commenters rightly accused him of hindsight bias and making light of the genuine epistemological conundrums humanity was facing in the past, Eliezer-2007 engaged with a weakman. He argued the futility of emergence as supposed microcosm for how the irrationality of today’s world results in grossly inadequate philosophy. But he didn’t engage with the philosophy itself, as presented by its leading proponents, but instead took shots at much shakier versions argued by confused and (frankly) stupider people.[1]
As I said above, the following exchange remains illustrative of this:
HI: Aren’t superconductivity and ferromagnetism perfect examples of emergent phenomena?
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Yes. So are non-superconductivity and non-ferromagnetism. That’s the problem.
Perplexed: Uh. No. Non-superconductivity is not usually considered as an example of emergence. Because the non-superconductive system is composed of smaller subsystems which are themselves non-superconductive. Same goes for non-ferromagnetism. Not “emergent” because nothing new is emerging from the collective that was not already present in the components.
As an aside, it’s reflective of what Eliezer does these days as well: almost exclusively arguing with know-nothing e/acc’s on Twitter where he can comfortably defeat their half-baked arguments, instead of engaging with more serious anti-doom arguments by more accomplished and reasonable proponents.
Particularly when your selection process is biased (through correlations between rhetoric and substance) towards finding precisely the stupidest of stuff among it.
I did not have to scrape any barrels to find those examples. They were all from the first page of Google hits. Steven Johnson’s book is not new-age woo. Of my First/Second/Third examples, the first is a respectable academic text, and only the third is outright woo. So I do not think that “the power of emergence” is optimised for finding nonsense (it was the only phrase I tried), nor am I depending on the vastness of the internet to find these. Certainly, my search was biased — or less tendentiously, intended — to find the sort of thing that might have been Eliezer’s target: not new-age woo, but the things respectable enough to be worth his noticing at all. Lacking the actual sources he had in mind, what I found does look like the right sort of thing. I notice that the Steven Johnson book predates his posting.
As I said above, the following exchange remains illustrative of this:
It’s worth quoting a little further:
anonymous: The apparent disagreement here, comes from different understandings of the word “non-superconductivity”.
By “non-superconductivity”, Yudkowsky means (non-super)conductivity, i.e. any sort of conductivity that is not superconductivity. This is indeed emergent, since conductivity does not exist at the level of quantum field.
By “non-superconductivity”, Perplexed means non-(superconductivity), i.e. anything that is not superconductivity. This is not emergent as Perplexed explained.
In your footnote you say:
As an aside, it’s reflective of what Eliezer does these days as well: almost exclusively arguing with know-nothing e/acc’s on Twitter where he can comfortably defeat their half-baked arguments, instead of engaging with more serious anti-doom arguments by more accomplished and reasonable proponents.
Selection effect again? I don’t look at Twitter, but I did notice that Eliezer recently gave a three-hour interview and wrote a book on the subject.
Consider the following two possible interpretations of the dialogue between Eliezer and Perplexed. First:
Alice: Aren’t superconductivity and ferromagnetism perfect examples of emergent phenomena?
Bob: Yes. So are “regular” conductivity and “regular” ferromagnetism. That’s the problem.
Alice: … what? Yeah, of course they are also examples of emergent phenomena; X being an emergent phenomenon obviously doesn’t prevent an unrelated Y from being an emergent phenomenon. What does that have to do with anything? There’s no problem here.
And second:
Alice: Aren’t superconductivity and ferromagnetism perfect examples of emergent phenomena?
Bob: Yes. So are “the lack of superconductivity” and “the lack of ferromagnetism”. That’s the problem.
Alice: Ah, I understand how those could be problematic: if both X and “the lack of X” are described the same way, then the descriptor becomes a meaningless semantic stopsign that muddies our thinking. However, on the object level in this case, the lack of superconductivity is clearly not an emergent phenomenon (and same for the other example).
I rejected the first interpretation because I trust Eliezer’s intelligence enough that I don’t think he would go for a random non sequitur that reflects nothing about the topic at hand. anonymous’s interpretation doesn’t seem to be likely to be what Eliezer intended (and even if it is the correct interpretation, it just means Eliezer was engaging in a different, yet simpler error).
Selection effect again? I don’t look at Twitter, but I did notice that Eliezer recently gave a three-hour interview and wrote a book on the subject.
Yeah, it’s probably a selection effect; the vast majority of Eliezer’s public communication comes on Twitter (unfortunate, but better than Facebook, I suppose...). Eliezer’s interview and podcast appearances, as well as (AFAIK) the book, also seem entirely geared towards a smart-but-not-technically-proficient-in-alignment audience as its primary target, in line with MIRI’s focus on public outreach to more mainstream audiences and institutions.
Nevertheless, having not read the book itself, I should suspend judgement on it for now.
I don’t believe this is a useful endeavor. To put it simply, there is a ton of stupid stuff out there (most stuff that gets written is stupid), so picking a particular batch of bad statements to analyze gives very little evidence overall because they are unlikely to be representative of the entirety of writing or thinking on a matter. Particularly when your selection process is biased (through correlations between rhetoric and substance) towards finding precisely the stupidest of stuff among it.
This is entirely unsurprising in light of the above. A lot of stuff is written, most of it is bad, so no wonder many of the leading hits are bad. It would be truly surprising if this didn’t happen.
Yes, you absolutely would! In a sufficiently large dataset of words written by humans, you are almost always able to stumble upon some examples of any other trait you’re interested in… regardless of the overall distribution or the value of the highest-quality examples.
When Eliezer was rallying against the mysterianism of the past, he was using the example of the world’s leading authorities, thinkers, and scientists engaging in (supposedly) bad epistemology. As an illustrative example, he wasn’t picking out a random article entry or book, but rather the words of Lord Kelvin as he argued for “elan vital.”
But then, when commenters rightly accused him of hindsight bias and making light of the genuine epistemological conundrums humanity was facing in the past, Eliezer-2007 engaged with a weakman. He argued the futility of emergence as supposed microcosm for how the irrationality of today’s world results in grossly inadequate philosophy. But he didn’t engage with the philosophy itself, as presented by its leading proponents, but instead took shots at much shakier versions argued by confused and (frankly) stupider people.[1]
As I said above, the following exchange remains illustrative of this:
As an aside, it’s reflective of what Eliezer does these days as well: almost exclusively arguing with know-nothing e/acc’s on Twitter where he can comfortably defeat their half-baked arguments, instead of engaging with more serious anti-doom arguments by more accomplished and reasonable proponents.
I did not have to scrape any barrels to find those examples. They were all from the first page of Google hits. Steven Johnson’s book is not new-age woo. Of my First/Second/Third examples, the first is a respectable academic text, and only the third is outright woo. So I do not think that “the power of emergence” is optimised for finding nonsense (it was the only phrase I tried), nor am I depending on the vastness of the internet to find these. Certainly, my search was biased — or less tendentiously, intended — to find the sort of thing that might have been Eliezer’s target: not new-age woo, but the things respectable enough to be worth his noticing at all. Lacking the actual sources he had in mind, what I found does look like the right sort of thing. I notice that the Steven Johnson book predates his posting.
It’s worth quoting a little further:
In your footnote you say:
Selection effect again? I don’t look at Twitter, but I did notice that Eliezer recently gave a three-hour interview and wrote a book on the subject.
Consider the following two possible interpretations of the dialogue between Eliezer and Perplexed. First:
And second:
I rejected the first interpretation because I trust Eliezer’s intelligence enough that I don’t think he would go for a random non sequitur that reflects nothing about the topic at hand. anonymous’s interpretation doesn’t seem to be likely to be what Eliezer intended (and even if it is the correct interpretation, it just means Eliezer was engaging in a different, yet simpler error).
They still do not represent an “example of the world’s leading authorities, thinkers, and scientists engaging in (supposedly) bad epistemology,” as in the example Eliezer picked out of Lord Kelvin committing a supposedly basic epistemological error. And as a result of this, the argument Eliezer was implicitly making also fails.
Yeah, it’s probably a selection effect; the vast majority of Eliezer’s public communication comes on Twitter (unfortunate, but better than Facebook, I suppose...). Eliezer’s interview and podcast appearances, as well as (AFAIK) the book, also seem entirely geared towards a smart-but-not-technically-proficient-in-alignment audience as its primary target, in line with MIRI’s focus on public outreach to more mainstream audiences and institutions.
Nevertheless, having not read the book itself, I should suspend judgement on it for now.
A lot of trouble could have been saved by distinguishing strong and weak emergence.