Caledonian2

Karma: 553

Caledonian2 5 Dec 2007 0:34 UTC
22 points
on: Mere Messiahs
A more clear-cut fictional example of ‘expected damnation arising from a virtuous act’

See: Huckleberry Finn, in which the protagonist believes he’ll go to Hell for helping a slave escape.

Caledonian2 17 Jul 2008 12:25 UTC
21 points
on: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Fiction
When Spock says “Captain, we have a 94.92% chance of dying” when the chance of dying is 10%, I don’t believe the scriptwriter’s message is “probability is a crap science”, I believe it’s “Spock’s understanding of probability is crap, and he vastly overestimates it”.

Oh, Spock’s probabilities are probably quite accurate within the world of the story. The problem is that Spock doesn’t realize that he’s in a story, and by the power of plot, the ship and its primary crew are virtually never in real risk.

The other ships in the fleet aren’t so lucky—and indeed they are frequently lost, sometimes in facing the threats that the Enterprise deal with later.

The Enterprise-D was guaranteed to survive the first Borg cube, for example, even though virtually every ship that attempted to stop its course was destroyed. It’s the power of plot.

Caledonian2 22 May 2008 15:42 UTC
21 points
on: That Alien Message
Marcello, you’re presuming that it knows

that we’re on a planet that gravitational fields exist what minerals look like optics *our visual physiology

You’re taking a great deal for granted. It takes a very wide knowledge base to be able to derive additional information.

Caledonian2 11 Nov 2008 19:33 UTC
19 points
on: Worse Than Random
But it is an inherently odd proposition that you can get a better picture of the environment by adding noise to your sensory information—by deliberately throwing away your sensory acuity. This can only degrade the mutual information between yourself and the environment. It can only diminish what in principle can be extracted from the data.

It is certainly counterintuitive to think that, by adding noise, you can get more out of data. But it is nevertheless true.

Every detection system has a perceptual threshold, a level of stimulation needed for it to register a signal. If the system is mostly noise-free, this threshold is a ’sharp’ transition. If the system has a lot of noise, the theshold is ‘fuzzy’. The noise present at one moment might destructively interact with the signal, reducing its strength, or constructively interact, making it stronger. The result is that the threshold becomes an average; it is no longer possible to know whether the system will respond merely by considering the strength of the signal.

When dealing with a signal that is just below the threshold, a noiseless system won’t be able to perceive it at all. But a noisy system will pick out some of it—some of the time, the noise and the weak signal will add together in such a way that the result is strong enough for the system to react to it positively.

You can see this effect demonstrated at science museums. If an image is printed very, very faintly on white paper, just at the human threshold for visual detection, you can stare right at the paper and not see what’s there. But if the same image is printed onto paper on which a random pattern of grey dots has also been printed, we can suddenly perceive some of it—and extrapolate the whole from the random parts we can see. We are very good at extracting data from noisy systems, but only if we can perceive the data in the first place. The noise makes it possible to detect the data carried by weak signals.

When trying to make out faint signals, static can be beneficial. Which is why biological organisms introduce noise into their detection physiologies—a fact which surprised biologists when they first learned of it.

Caledonian2 27 Jun 2008 14:33 UTC
16 points
0
on: 2-Place and 1-Place Words
The magazine covers didn’t have aliens abducting beautiful women to convey the idea that the aliens valued ‘sexiness’. They had them to appeal to the people buying the magazines.

Similarly, the stories didn’t include thinly-veiled power fantasies because they were intended to convey insights about alien psychology. The aliens were a convenient facade. They were symbols of what the stories were actually about.

Caledonian2 23 Dec 2007 0:46 UTC
15 points
on: False Laughter
I give Bush some credit for doing what he feels is right

We have no end of fools who feel one way or another. How about giving people credit for doing what they think is right? Or even better, what they can demonstrate to be correct?

Caledonian2 22 Dec 2007 13:56 UTC
15 points
on: False Laughter
There are other considerations. Substituting a celebrity known for their zany improv humor and lack of personal dignity for Bill Gates would probably ruin the joke. You need someone who takes themselves seriously enough for the joke to work.

There’s also an element of schadenfreunde involved. As Mel Brooks once noted: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

Caledonian2 18 Feb 2008 17:45 UTC
14 points
on: Taboo Your Words
Who do you think invented Friendly AI?

You haven’t invented Friendly AI. You’ve created a name for a concept you can only vaguely describe and cannot define operationally.

Who do you think taught you the technique?

Isn’t just a bit presumptuous to conclude you’re the first to teach the technique?

Caledonian2 13 Dec 2007 0:31 UTC
14 points
on: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
every (modern) atheist knows his or her atheism is a product of scientific understanding

This is wrong.

Even presuming that you’re speaking very informally, and your statement shouldn’t be interpreted literally, it’s STILL wrong.

Caledonian2 18 Jul 2008 1:25 UTC
13 points
on: The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
As for the fugues, the reaction of the human brain to music is most puzzling and fascinating to me. It feels as if ‘some shadowy entity’ forgot to remove direct API for accessing our own emotional machinery.
Haven’t you ever noticed that the tones in human voices change, depending on the emotional states of the speakers?

Why do you think humans might perceive certain sound combinations as evoking different emotions?

Caledonian2 30 May 2008 12:27 UTC
13 points
0
on: Einstein’s Superpowers
What do you want to mean with this post, Eliezer?

Eliezer likely believes that he is capable of achieving results just as world-changing as Einstein’s new physics, and wishes to dispel the idea that Einstein’s results were the consequence of extraordinary talents so that when he presents his own results (or presents the idea that he can produce such results) people will not be able to say that he is asserting special genius and use this as a rhetorical weapon against him.

Caledonian2 28 Mar 2008 12:13 UTC
13 points
on: To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
Most people don’t know how light bulbs work because it doesn’t matter how light bulbs work. They can’t use that knowledge in their daily lives, so it really doesn’t matter how difficult it is to acquire that data—as long as it’s difficult enough, it’s not worthwhile to expend the effort.

Being a physicist doesn’t give you any nifty powers, and the phenomena they have the knowledge to predict don’t affect the everyday lives of human beings on a perceptible level.

Most people weren’t clamoring to learn the Pythagorean secrets, either.

Caledonian2 11 Nov 2008 18:55 UTC
12 points
on: Lawful Uncertainty
Foraging animals make the same ‘mistake’: given two territories in which to forage, one of which has a much more plentiful resource and is far more likely to reward an investment of effort and time with a payoff, the obvious strategy is to only forage in the richer territory; however, animals instead split their time between the two spaces as the relative probability of a successful return.

In other words, if one territory is twice as likely to produce food through foraging as the other, animals spend twice as much time there: 2/3rds of their time in the richer territory, 1/3rd of their time in the poorer. Similar patterns hold when there are more than two foraging territories involved.

Although this results in a short-term reduction in food acquisition, it’s been shown that this strategy minimizes the chances of exploiting the resource to local extinction, and ensures that the sudden loss of one territory for some reason (blight of the resource, natural diaster, predation threats, etc.) doesn’t result in a total inability to find food.

The strategy is highly adaptive in its original context. The problem with humans that we retain our evolved, adaptive behaviors long after the context changes to make them non- or even mal-adaptive.

Caledonian2 4 Oct 2008 15:50 UTC
12 points
on: Beyond the Reach of God
I don’t think that even Buddhism allows that.
Depends on the version of Buddhism and who you ask… but yes, even the utter destruction of the mind.

Of course, ‘utter destruction’ is not a well-defined term. Depending on who you ask, nothing in Buddhism is ever actually destroyed. Or in the Dust hypothesis, or the Library of Babel… the existence of the mind never ends, because we’ve never beaten our wives in the first place.

Caledonian2 1 Jan 2008 15:06 UTC
12 points
on: The Two-Party Swindle
Bryan Caplan argues persuasively that we roughly have the polices that the public wants.

And that is why it’s such a disaster!

The purpose of most systems of government is not to make quality decisions, but to prevent wasteful and destructive conflicts over who will wield power. But a system that ignores quality decisionmaking will eventually collapse under the weight of its own ineptitude...

Caledonian2 2 Aug 2008 22:31 UTC
11 points
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
I don’t have the exact quote at hand, but there’s a section in LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven that paraphrases something like this: “People say dreams aren’t real, but when you’ve seen as many EEG patterns as I have, you recognize that dreams are real events that have real effects. There’s nothing unreal about them.”

Psychology had no answer to Skinner’s criticisms until 1) behavioral studies were able to show that the time it took for people to answer a question about object identity and rotation was related to the degree of rotation (in a famous experiment Eliezer has previously referenced), establishing that observation of behavior was capable of illuminating interior process, and 2) more-advanced technologies were capable of permitting the observation of interior events not previously accessible.

The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.
No; I rather think that you don’t fully understand the implications of the propositions you’re discussing. The brain is a computer in the most literal sense of the word, and asserting this fact is neither controversial nor exceptional.

Caledonian2 18 May 2008 19:32 UTC
11 points
on: Changing the Definition of Science
Well thank the benevolence of the Friendly AI that this intelligence didn’t see a helium balloon first. Just imagine the kinds of theories it might produce then!

If you see one object falling in a particular way, you might infer that all objects fall that way—but it’s an extremely weak inference, as the strength of a single observation is spread over the entirety of “all things”. We were so confident in Newton’s formulation for such a long time because we had a vast store of observations, and were aware of confounding influences that masked the underlying pattern: things like air resistance and buoyancy. The understanding that all things fall at a given rate was a strong and reliable inference because we observed it to hold across many, many things. Once we knew that, we could show that such behavior was consistent with Newton’s hypothesized force. More importantly, we had already determined through observation that the objects in the Solar system moved in elliptical orbits, but we didn’t know why. We were able to show that Newton’s hypothesized forces would result in objects moving in such a way, and so concluded that his description was correct.

Eliezer is almost certainly wrong about what a hyper-rational AI could determine from a limited set of observations. It would probably notice the implications of Maxwell’s laws that require Relativity to fully explain—something real physicists missed for a generation—because the implications follow directly from the mathematics. Actually producing the laws in the first place requires a lot of data regarding electricity and magnetism.

His projected super-intelligence would very quickly outleap its data and rush to all sorts of unsupportable inferences. If it confused those inferences with conclusions, it would fall into error faster than we could possibly correct it, and if it lacked the long, slow, tedious process of checking and re-checking data that science uses, it would be unlikely to ever correct those errors.

Caledonian2 8 Dec 2007 4:31 UTC
11 points
on: Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
I would make a rule: any discipline against a troll will be matched by identical discipline against anyone who engages that troll, even in attack.

In practice, such rules create echo chambers where any discussion that the moderators don’t agree with is silenced. It’s theoretically possible for a human being to be utterly impartial when deciding whether conversations are useful, but it requires near-superhuman patience and tolerance.

Quite a lot of the problem is that the category of ‘troll’ quickly expanded beyond its original meaning; in everyday Netspeak, it generally refers to “a person who persists in saying things I don’t wish to tolerate”.

Caledonian2 22 Jan 2009 19:42 UTC
10 points
on: Failed Utopia #4-2
Because I’m curious:

How much evidence, and what kind, would be necessary before suspicions of contrarianism are rejected in favor of the conclusion that the belief was wrong?

Surely this is a relevant question for a Bayesian.

Caledonian2 2 Oct 2008 16:24 UTC
10 points
on: Use the Try Harder, Luke
I’d have more sympathy with Luke (and thus more forgiveness for Lucas) if instead of the whole X-Wing moving when he tries it, we see a much less dramatic effect; perhaps aerials that were drooping stand up, or the flaps lift gently, or some such.
Ever see someone walk on a tightrope, or cross a narrow bridge far above the ground? Ever see those people do fine, until they look down and realize what they’re doing, and then be unable to go forward, because they cannot let go of their awareness of where they are? I have. I’ve even been one of those people.

That is why Luke manages to shift the ship, then gives up. His partial success causes him to examine again his belief that the ship cannot be moved, and his awareness of that belief makes it impossible to move the ship.