Bunthut

Karma: 311

Bunthut 9 Sep 2024 20:49 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: FixDT
On reflection, I didn’t quite understand this exploration business, but I think I can save a lot of it.
>You can do exploration, but the problem is that (unless you explore into non-fixed-point regions, violating epistemic constraints) your exploration can never confirm the existence of a fixed point which you didn’t previously believe in.
I think the key here is in the word “confirm”. Its true that unless you believe p is a fixed point, you can’t just try out p and see the result. However, you can change your beliefs about p based on your results from exploring things other than p. (This is why I call the thing I’m objecting to humean trolling.) And there is good reason to think that the available fixed points are usually pretty dense in the space. For example, outside of the rule that binarizes our actions, there should usually be at least one fixed point for every possible action. Plus, as you explore, your beliefs change, creating new believed-fixed-points for you to explore.
>I think your idea for how to find repulsive fixed-points could work if there’s a trader who can guess the location of the repulsive point exactly rather than approximately
I don’t think thats needed. If my net beliefs have a closed surface in propability space on which they push outward, then necessarily those beliefs have a repulsive fixed point somewhere in that surface. I can then explore that believed fixed point. Then if its not a true fixed point, and I still believe in the closed surface, theres a new fixed point in that surface that I can again explore (generally more in the direction I just got pushed away from). This should converge on a true fixed point. The only thing that can go wrong is that I stop believing in the closed surface, and it seems like I should leave open that possibility—and even then, I might believe in it again after I do some checking along the outside.
>However, the wealth of that trader will act like a martingale; there’s no reliable profit to be made (even on average) by enforcing this fixed point.
This I don’t understand at all. If you’re in a certain fixed point, shouldn’t the traders that believe in it profit from the ones that don’t?

Bunthut 30 Aug 2024 18:24 UTC
LW: 1 AF: 1
0
AF
on: FixDT
I don’t think the learnability issues are really a problem. I mean, if doing a handstand with a burning 100 riyal bill between your toes under the full moon is an exception to all physical laws and actually creates utopia immediately, I’ll never find out either. Assuming you agree that that’s not a problem, why is the scenario you illustrate? In both cases, it’s not like you can’t find out, you just don’t, because you stick to what you believe is the optimal action.
I don’t think this would be a significant problem in practice any more than other kinds of humean trolling are. It always seems much more scary in these extremely barebones toy problems, where the connection between the causes and effects we create really are kind of arbitrary. I especially don’t think it will be possible to learn the couterfactuals of FDTish cooperation and such in these small settings, no matter the method.
Plus you can still do value-of-information exploration. The repulsive fixed points are not that hard to find if you’re looking for them. If you’ve encircled one and found repulsion all around the edge, you know there must be one in there, and can get there with a procedure that just reverses your usual steps. Combining this with simplicity priors over a larger setting into which the problem is integrated, I don’t think its any more worrying than the handstand thing.

Bunthut 22 Nov 2022 8:57 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: People care about each other even though they have imperfect motivational pointers?
That prediction may be true. My argument is that “I know this by introspection” (or, introspection-and-generalization-to-others) is insufficient. For a concrete example, consider your 5-year-old self. I remember some pretty definite beliefs I had about my future self that turned out wrong, and if I ask myself how aligned I am with it I don’t even know how to answer, he just seems way too confused and incoherent.
I think it’s also not absurd that you do have perfect caring in the sense relevant to the argument. This does not require that you don’t make mistakes currently. If you can, with increasing intelligence/information, correct yourself, then the pointer is perfect in the relevant sense. “Caring about the values of person X” is relatively simple and may come out of evolution whereas “those values directly” may not.

Bunthut 11 Nov 2022 10:50 UTC
LW: 2 AF: 2
−2
AF
on: People care about each other even though they have imperfect motivational pointers?
This prediction seems flatly wrong: I wouldn’t bring about an outcome like that. Why do I believe that? Because I have reasonably high-fidelity access to my own policy, via imagining myself in the relevant situations.
This seems like you’re confusing two things here, because the thing you would want is not knowable by introspection. What I think you’re introspecting is that if you’d noticed that the-thing-you-pursued-so-far was different from what your brother actually wants, you’d do what he actually wants. But the-thing-you-pursued-so-far doesn’t play the role of “your utility function” in the goodhart argument. All of you plays into that. If the goodharting were to play out, your detector for differences between the-thing-you-pursued-so-far and what-your-brother-actually-wants would simply fail to warn you that it was happening, because it too can only use a proxy measure for the real thing.

Bunthut 27 Oct 2022 9:37 UTC
1 point
0
on: Notes on “Can you control the past”
The idea is that we can break any decision problem down by cases (like “insofar as the predictor is accurate, …” and “insofar as the predictor is inaccurate, …”) and that all the competing decision theories (CDT, EDT, LDT) agree about how to aggregate cases.
Doesn’t this also require that all the decision theories agree that the conditioning fact is independent of your decision?
Otherwise you could break down the normal prisoners dilemma into “insofar as the opponent makes the same move as me” and “insofar as the opponent makes the opposite move” and conclude that defect isn’t the dominant strategy even there, not even under CDT.
And I imagine the within-CDT perspective would reject an independent probability for the predictors accuracy. After all, theres an independent probability it guessed 1-box, and if I 1-box it’s right with that probability, and if I 2-box it’s right with 1 minus that probability.

Bunthut 30 Mar 2022 9:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Impossibility results for unbounded utilities
Would a decision theory like this count as “giving up on probabilities” in the sense in which you mean it here?

Bunthut 15 Mar 2022 12:31 UTC
4 points
on: Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal
I think your assessments of whats psychologically realistic are off.
I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than “doesn’t look like an Oliver” is attached to something in your head.
I think before writing that, Yud imagined calling [unambiguously gendered friend] either pronoun, and asked himself if it felt wrong, and found that it didn’t. This seems realistic to me: I’ve experienced my emotional introspection becoming blank on topics I’ve put a lot of thinking into. This doesn’t prevent doing the same automatic actions you always did, or knowing what those would be in a given situation. If something like this happened to him for gender long enough ago, he may well not be able to imagine otherwise.
But the “everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk” characterization seems to agree that the motivation was joking/trolling. How did everyone present know? Because it’s absurd to infer a particular name from someone’s appearance.
It’s unreasonable, but it seems totally plausible that on one occasion you would feel like you know someone has a certain name, and continue feeling that way even after being rationally convinced you’re wrong. That there are many names only means that the odds of any particular name featuring in such a situation is low, not that the class as a whole has low odds, and I don’t see why the prior for that would be lower than for e.g. mistaken deja vu experiences.

Bunthut 22 Dec 2021 22:22 UTC
1 point
on: The Case for Radical Optimism about Interpretability
I don’t think the analogy to biological brains is quite as strong. For example, biological brains need to be “robust” not only to variations in the input, but also in a literal sense, to forceful impact or to parasites trying to control it. It intentionally has very bad suppressability, and this means there needs to be a lot of redundancy, which makes “just stick an electrode in that area” work. More generally, it is under many constraints that a ML system isn’t, probably too many for us to think of, and it generally prioritizes safety over performance. Both lead away from the sort of maximally efficient compression that makes ML systems hard to interpret.
Analogously: Imagine a programmer would write the shortest program that does a given task. That would be terrible. It would be impossible to change anything without essentially redesigning everything, and trying to understand what it does just from reading the code would be very hard, and giving a compressed explanation of how it does that would be impossible. In practice, we don’t write code like that, because we face constraints like those mentioned above—but its very easy to imagine that some optimization-based “automatic coder” would program like that. Indeed, on the occasion that we need to really optimize runtimes, we move in that direction ourselves.
So I don’t think brains tell us much about the interpretability of the standard, highly optimized neural nets.

Bunthut 21 Dec 2021 22:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
Probably way too old here, but I had multible experiences relevant to the thread.
Once I had a dream and then, in the dream, I remembered I had dreamt this exact thing before, and wondered if I was dreaming now, and everything looked so real and vivid that I concluded I was not.
I can create a kind of half-dream, where I see random images and moving sequences at most 3 seconds or so long, in succession. I am really dimmed but not sleeping, and I am aware in the back of my head that they are only schematic and vague.
I would say the backstories in dreams are different in that they can be clearly nonsensical. E.g. I hold and look at a glass relief, there is no movement at all, and I know it to be a movie. I know nothing of its content, and I dont believe the image of the relief to be in the movie.

Bunthut 25 May 2021 20:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
I think its still possible to have a scenario like this. Lets say each trader would buy or sell a certain amount when the price is below/above what they think it to be, but the transition being very steep instead of instant. Then you could still have long price intervalls where the amounts bought and sold remain constant, and then every point in there could be the market price.
I’m not sure if this is significant. I see no reason to set the traders up this way other than the result in the particular scenario that kicked this off, and adding traders who don’t follow this pattern breaks it. Still, its a bit worrying that trading strategies seem to matter in addition to beliefs, because what do they represent? A traders initial wealth is supposed to be our confidence in its heuristics—but if a trader is mathematical heuristics and trading strategy packaged, then what does confidence in the trading strategy mean epistemically? Two things to think about:
Is it possible to consistently define the set of traders with the same beliefs as trader X?
It seems that logical induction is using a trick, where it avoids inconsistent discrete traders, but includes an infinite sequence of continuous traders with ever steeper transitions to get some of the effects. This could lead to unexpected differences between behaviour “at all finite steps” vs “at the limit”. What can we say about logical induction if trading strategies need to be lipschitz-continuous with a shared upper limit on the lipschitz constant?

Bunthut 25 May 2021 20:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
So I’m not sure what’s going on with my mental sim. Maybe I just have a super-broad ‘crypto-moral detector’ that goes off way more often than yours (w/o explicitly labeling things as crypto-moral for me).
Maybe. How were your intuitions before you encountered LW? If you already had a hypocrisy intuition, then trying to internalize the rationalist perspective might have lead it to ignore the morality-distinction.

Bunthut 20 May 2021 20:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
My father playing golf with me today, telling me to lean down more to stop them going out left so much.

Bunthut 19 May 2021 14:16 UTC
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
I don’t strongly relate to any of these descriptions. I can say that I don’t feel like I have to pretend advice from equals is more helpful than it is, which I suppose means its not face. The most common way to reject advice is a comment like “eh, whatever” and ignoring it. Some nerds get really mad at this and seem to demand intellectual debate. This is not well received. Most people give advice with the expectation of intellectual debate only on crypto-moral topics (this is also not well received generally, but the speaker seems to accept that as an “identity cost”), or not at all.

Bunthut 19 May 2021 13:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
You mean advice to diet, or “technical” advice once its established that person wants to diet? I don’t have experience with either, but the first is definitely crypto-moral.

Bunthut 19 May 2021 13:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
This excludes worlds which the deductive process has ruled out, so for example if $A \lor B$ has been proved, all worlds will have either A or B. So if you had a bet which would pay $10 on A, and a bet which would pay $2 on B, you’re treated as if you have $2 to spend.
I agree you can arbitrage inconsistencies this way, but it seems very questionable. For one, it means the market maker needs to interpret the output of the deductive process semantically. And it makes him go bankrupt if that logic is inconsistent. And there could be a case where a proposition is undecidable, and a meta-proposition about it is undecidable, and a meta-meta-propopsition about it is undecidable, all the way up, and then something bad happens, though I’m not sure what concretely.

Bunthut 19 May 2021 13:08 UTC
LW: 1 AF: 1
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
Why is the price of the un-actualized bet constant? My argument in the OP was to suppose that PCH is the dominant hypothesis, so, mostly controls market prices.
Thinking about this in detail, it seems like what influence traders have on the market price depends on a lot more of their inner workings than just their beliefs. I was thinking in a way where each trader only had one price for the bet, below which they bought and above which they sold, no matter how many units they traded (this might contradict “continuous trading strategies” because of finite wealth), in which case there would be a range of prices that could be the “market” price, and it could stay constant even with one end of that range shifting. But there could also be an outcome like yours, if the agents demand better and better prices to trade one more unit of the bet.

Bunthut 19 May 2021 12:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
But now, you seem to be complaining that a method that explicitly avoids Troll Bridge would be too restrictive?
No, I think finding such a no-learning-needed method would be great. It just means your learning-based approach wouldn’t be needed.
You seem to be arguing that being susceptible to Troll Bridge should be judged as a necessary/positive trait of a decision theory.
No. I’m saying if our “good” reasoning can’t tell us where in Troll Bridge the mistake is, then something that learns to make “good” inferences would have to fall for it.
But there are decision theories which don’t have this property, such as regular CDT, or TDT (depending on the logical-causality graph). Are you saying that those are all necessarily wrong, due to this?
A CDT is only worth as much as its method of generating counterfactuals. We generally consider regular CDT (which I interpret as “getting its counterfactuals from something-like-epsilon-exploration”) to miss important logical connections. “TDT” doesn’t have such a method. There is a (logical) causality graph that makes you do the intuitively right thing on Troll Bridge, but how to find it formally?
A strong candidate from my perspective is the inference from $\neg (A \land B)$ to $C (A | B) = 0$
Isn’t this just a rephrasing of your idea that the agent should act based on C(A|B) instead of B->A? I don’t see any occurance of ~(A&B) in the troll bridge argument. Now, it is equivalent to B->~A, so perhaps you think one of the propositions that occur as implications in troll bridge should be parsed this way? My modified troll bridge parses them all as counterfactual implication.
For example, I could have a lot of prior mass on “crossing gives me +10, not crossing gives me 0”. Then my +10 hypothesis would only be confirmed by experience. I could reason using counterfactuals
I’ve said why I don’t think “using counterfactuals”, absent further specification, is a solution. For the simple “crossing is +10″ belief… you’re right its succeeds, and insofar as you just wanted to show that its rationally possible to cross, I suppose it does.
This… really didn’t fit into my intuitions about learning. Consider that there is also the alternative agent who believes that crossing is −10, and sticks to that. And the reason he sticks to that isn’t that hes to afraid and VOI isn’t worth it: while its true that he never empirically confirms it, he is right, and the bridge would blow up if he were to cross it. That method works because it ignores the information in the problem description, and has us insert the relevant takeaway without any of the confusing stuff directly into its prior. Are you really willing to say: Yup, thats basically the solution to counterfactuals, just a bit of formalism left to work out?

Bunthut 18 May 2021 8:03 UTC
1 point
AF
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: My Current Take on Counterfactuals
So I don’t see how we can be sure that PCH loses out overall. LCH has to exploit PCH—but if LCH tries it, then we’re seemingly in a situation where LCH has to sell for PCH’s prices, in which case it suffers the loss I described in the OP.
So I’ve reread the logical induction paper for this, and I’m not sure I understand exploitation. Under 3.5, it says:
On each day, the reasoner receives 50¢ from T, but after day t, the reasoner must pay $1 every day thereafter.
So this sounds like before day t, T buys a share every day, and those shares never pay out—otherwise T would receive $t on day t in addition to everything mentioned here. Why?
In the version that I have in my head, theres a market with PCH and LCH in it that assigns constant price to the unactualised bet, so neither of them gain or lose anything with their trades on it, and LCH exploits PCH on the actualised ones.
But the special bundled contract doesn’t go to zero like this, because the conditional contract only really pays out when the condition is satisfied or refuted.
So if I’m understanding this correctly: The conditional contract on (a|b) pays if a&b is proved, if a&~b is proved, and if ~a&~b is proved.
Now I have another question: how does logical induction arbitrage against contradiction? The bet on a pays $1 if a is proved. The bet on ~a pays $1 if not-a is proved. But the bet on ~a isn’t “settled” when a is proved—why can’t the market just go on believing its .7? (Likely this is related to my confusion with the paper).
My proposal is essentially similar to that, except I am trying to respect logic in most of the system, simply reducing its impact on action selection. But within my proposed system, I think the wrong ‘prior’ (ie distribution of wealth for traders) can make it susceptible again.
I’m not blocking Troll Bridge problems, I’m making the definition of rational agent broad enough that crossing is permissible. But if I think the Troll Bridge proof is actively irrational, I should be able to actually rule it out. IE, specify an X which is inconsistent with PA.
What makes you think that theres a “right” prior? You want a “good” learning mechanism for counterfactuals. To be good, such a mechanism would have to learn to make the inferences we consider good, at least with the “right” prior. But we can’t pinpoint any wrong inference in Troll Bridge. It doesn’t seem like whats stopping us from pinpointing the mistake in Troll Bridge is a lack of empirical data. So, a good mechanism would have to learn to be susceptible to Troll Bridge, especially with the “right” prior. I just don’t see what would be a good reason for thinking theres a “right” prior that avoids Troll Bridge (other than “there just has to be some way of avoiding it”), that wouldn’t also let us tell directly how to think about Troll Bridge, no learning needed.

Bunthut 18 May 2021 6:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
So your social experience is different in this respect?
I’ve never experienced this example in particular, but I would not expect such a backlash. Can you think of another scenario with non-moral advice that I have likely experienced?

Bunthut 17 May 2021 16:16 UTC
4 points
0
on: Hufflepuff Cynicism on Hypocrisy
It seems to me that this habit is universal in American culture, and I’d be surprised (and intrigued!) to hear about any culture where it isn’t.
I live in Austria. I would say we do have norms against hypocrisy, but your example with the drivers license seems absurd to me. I would be surprised (and intrigued!) if agreement with this one in particular is actually universal in American culture. In my experience, hypocrisy norms are for moral and crypto-moral topics.
For normies, morality is an imposition. Telling them of new moral requirements increases how much they have to do things that suck to stay a good person. From this perspective, the anti-hypocrisy norm is great. If people don’t follow the new requirement they suggest (or can be construed as not doing so), you get to ignore it without further litigation.
Now the classical LW position is that thats wrong, and that you ought to be glad someone informed you how much good you can do by giving away large fractions of your income, because this gave you the opportunity to do so. Because you ought to believe morality in your heart. From this perspective, the anti-hypocrisy norm is useless. It might also be why the drivers license example is a natural fit for you: its all “advice” to you. If you’ve failed to Chestertons fence, I think its this previous step where it happened.