Don’t you think humans cross the street not because they’ve weighed the benefits versus the dangers, or some such, but because that’s what they’ve been taught to do, and probability calculations be damned?
When you live in a county where many people drive without seatbealts, you’re prone to emulate that behavior. It’s not like you’re collectively “betting” in a different manner, or evaluating the dangers differently. It’s more of a monkey-see, monkey-do heuristic.
Just because you don’t understand the game you’re playing doesn’t mean you’re not playing it. The street is offering you a bet, and if you don’t understand that, then… well, not much happens, but the bet is still there.
By the same token, fish in an aquarium—or Braitenberg vehicles—are constantly engaging in bets they don’t realize. Swim to this side, be first to the food but exert energy getting there.
Your perspective is valid, but if the agents refuse/are incapable of seeing the situation from a betting perspective, you have to ask how useful it is (not necessarily thinking in estimated utility, best case, worst case etcetera, but in the “betting” aspect of it). It may be a good intuition pump, as long as we keep in mind that people don’t work that way.
Do fish think in terms of expected value? Of course not. Evolutions make bets, and they can’t think at all. Refactored Agency is a valuable tool—anything that can be usefully as a goal-seeking process with uncertain knowledge can also be modeled usefully as making bets. How useful is it to view arbitrary things through different models? Well, Will Newsome makes a practice of it. So, it’s probably good for having insights, but caveat emptor.
The more complete the models describe the underlying phenomenon, the more isomorphic all models should be (in their Occamian formulation), until eventually we’re only exchanging variable names.
Yes; to check your visual acuity, you block off one eye, then open that one and block the other. To check (and improve) your conceptual acuity, you block off everything that isn’t an agent, then you block of everything that isn’t an algorithm, then you block of everything that isn’t an institution, etc.
Unless you can hypercompute, in which case that’s probably not a useful heuristic.
this is off topic but I’m really disappointed that braitenberg vehicles didn’t turn out to be wheeled fish tanks that allowed the fish to explore your house
Don’t you think humans cross the street not because they’ve weighed the benefits versus the dangers, or some such, but because that’s what they’ve been taught to do, and probability calculations be damned?
What they’ve been taught to do is weigh the benefits versus the dangers (although there are not necessarily any probability calculations gong on). The emphasis in teaching small children how to cross the road is mainly on the dangers, since those will invariably be of a vastly larger scale than the trifling benefit of saving a few seconds by not looking.
Does “Mommy told me to look for cars, or bad things happen” and “if I don’t look before I cross, Mommy will punish me” count as weighing the benefits versus the dangers? If so, we agree.
I just wonder if the bet analogy is the most natural way of carving up reality, as it were.
Why did the rationalist cross the road? - He made a bet. (Badum-tish!)
Does “Mommy told me to look for cars, or bad things happen” and “if I don’t look before I cross, Mommy will punish me” count as weighing the benefits versus the dangers?
Perhaps these things are done differently in different cultures. This is how it is done in the U.K. Notice the emphasis throughout on looking to see if it is safe, not on rules to obey because someone says so and punishment, which figures not at all.
The earlier “Kerb Drill” mentioned in that article was a set of rules: look right, look left, look right again, and if clear, cross. That is why it was superceded.
Don’t you think humans cross the street not because they’ve weighed the benefits versus the dangers, or some such, but because that’s what they’ve been taught to do, and probability calculations be damned?
When you live in a county where many people drive without seatbealts, you’re prone to emulate that behavior. It’s not like you’re collectively “betting” in a different manner, or evaluating the dangers differently. It’s more of a monkey-see, monkey-do heuristic.
Just because you don’t understand the game you’re playing doesn’t mean you’re not playing it. The street is offering you a bet, and if you don’t understand that, then… well, not much happens, but the bet is still there.
By the same token, fish in an aquarium—or Braitenberg vehicles—are constantly engaging in bets they don’t realize. Swim to this side, be first to the food but exert energy getting there.
Your perspective is valid, but if the agents refuse/are incapable of seeing the situation from a betting perspective, you have to ask how useful it is (not necessarily thinking in estimated utility, best case, worst case etcetera, but in the “betting” aspect of it). It may be a good intuition pump, as long as we keep in mind that people don’t work that way.
Do fish think in terms of expected value? Of course not. Evolutions make bets, and they can’t think at all. Refactored Agency is a valuable tool—anything that can be usefully as a goal-seeking process with uncertain knowledge can also be modeled usefully as making bets. How useful is it to view arbitrary things through different models? Well, Will Newsome makes a practice of it. So, it’s probably good for having insights, but caveat emptor.
The more complete the models describe the underlying phenomenon, the more isomorphic all models should be (in their Occamian formulation), until eventually we’re only exchanging variable names.
Yes; to check your visual acuity, you block off one eye, then open that one and block the other. To check (and improve) your conceptual acuity, you block off everything that isn’t an agent, then you block of everything that isn’t an algorithm, then you block of everything that isn’t an institution, etc.
Unless you can hypercompute, in which case that’s probably not a useful heuristic.
this is off topic but I’m really disappointed that braitenberg vehicles didn’t turn out to be wheeled fish tanks that allowed the fish to explore your house
What they’ve been taught to do is weigh the benefits versus the dangers (although there are not necessarily any probability calculations gong on). The emphasis in teaching small children how to cross the road is mainly on the dangers, since those will invariably be of a vastly larger scale than the trifling benefit of saving a few seconds by not looking.
Does “Mommy told me to look for cars, or bad things happen” and “if I don’t look before I cross, Mommy will punish me” count as weighing the benefits versus the dangers? If so, we agree.
I just wonder if the bet analogy is the most natural way of carving up reality, as it were.
Why did the rationalist cross the road? - He made a bet. (Badum-tish!)
Perhaps these things are done differently in different cultures. This is how it is done in the U.K. Notice the emphasis throughout on looking to see if it is safe, not on rules to obey because someone says so and punishment, which figures not at all.
The earlier “Kerb Drill” mentioned in that article was a set of rules: look right, look left, look right again, and if clear, cross. That is why it was superceded.