Bayes’ Theorem? More like Based Theorem.
dkirmani
Karma: 116
This is what psychedelics do, especially high doses.
This is one of the main themes of Nassim Taleb’s books. You can’t really predict the future and you especially can’t predict improbable things, so minimize left-tail risk, maximize your exposure to right-tail events, and hope for the best.
No, I just thought about it some more, and I realized that increasing the learning rate of a model (assuming the optimizer is something like SGD) would inject more randomness, just like increasing the temperature of simulated annealing would.
I really cannot say what that means, but I am also told “learning rate” is itself something of a misnomer and involves as much forgetting as learning.
Maybe temperature is a better word.
I used to be very driven. I’m talking “wake up at 4 AM, go run with my dog, take a cold shower, study for two hours, go work, meditate, cook, go to MMA practice, read a book before bed” driven.
That sounds sick. Also, potentially very useful, since akrasia is a bottleneck. Any tips on getting yourself in the state where you do that regularly, besides watching DragonBall Z?
It’s probably because it’s much easier to steal from somebody you don’t know. When everyone knows everyone, little theft occurs.
From Antifragile by Nassim Taleb:
Or, if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours with sleep deprivation. Main course and dessert are separate.
Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent “doing nothing.” He published more than two hundred novels.
One thing is that it’s much harder to blatantly steal from the commons in sub-Dunbar groups, because everyone knows everyone else, so formal norm-enforcement (police, RAs) is unnecessary. Social sanctions suffice. Despite students having high variance in family income, property theft was a non-issue. In high school, I could save myself one of the good seats in the library by leaving my laptop there, but if I did the same thing here in the engineering library (I go to UIUC, a large state college), my laptop would likely be taken within minutes. There is an asabiyyah in small groups that does not exist for larger ones.
e.g. imagining a society of only ten people
Societies significantly above Dunbar’s number have fundamentally different dynamics than those below it. I have lived in both, having attended a boarding high school in a remote location with a population of 120. I think a lot of suffering and inefficiency in modern society is caused by trying to apply sub-Dunbar logic to super-Dunbar groups.
Newton’s theories give you a good way to predict what you’ll see when you throw a ball in the air, but it feels incorrect to me to say that Newton’s goal was to find order in our sensory experience of ball throwing.
I like this framing! The entire point of having a theory is to predict experimental data, and the only way I can collect data is through my senses.
Do you think that there are in fact ordered moral laws that we’re subject to, which our impulses respond to, and which we’re trying to hone in on?
You could construct predictive models of people’s moral impulses. I wouldn’t call these models laws, though.
Clearly our moral standards are informed by our society, and in no small part those standards emerge from discussions about what we collectively would like those standards to be, and not just a genetically hardwired disloyalty sensor.
Yes, these discussions set / update group norms. Perceived defection from group norms triggers the genetically hardwired disloyalty sensor.
In pressured environments we act on instinct, but those instincts don’t exist in a vacuum
Right, System 1 contains adaptations optimized to signal adherence to group norms.
the societal project of working out what [people’s instincts] ought to be is quite important and pretty hard
The societal project of working out what norms other people should adhere to is known as “politics”, and lots of people would agree that it’s important.
At once, they all cease their arguing and leap in to save the child. But why?
Because all three of their System 1s executed adaptations that made a decision to save the child. They all have these adaptations because System 1s without this kind of adaptation would have lower fitness, because other members of the tribe would see them as untrustworthy potential allies and disloyal potential mates.
Their System 2s then make three different post-hoc rationalizations for their decision, and pretend like these rationalizations are the reasons that led them to jump in the pond.
Wait, so can you can raise your testosterone (and get the associated health / anti-akrasia benefits) by cheating on online FPSs? What about playing ultraviolent games on easy mode, like one of the newer DOOM games?
This is great! I’ve had a recurring daydream (mostly during boring classes, ha) about how I would want my kids to be educated if I ever get to be a father. It’s pretty much identical to the system you describe on your homeworld.
In the same vein, I made a post on Hacker News a few days ago in order to gather information on the prospects I would face if I dropped out of college. I’m probably not going to (yet), but I’m still reminded of the corrosive effects of compulsory education on a daily basis.
If anything, humanity is an excellent example of alignment failure considering we have discovered the true utility function of our creator and decided to ignore it anyway and side with proxy values such as love/empathy/curiosity etc.
Or we are waiting to be outbred by those who didn’t. A few centuries ago, the vast majority of people were herders or farmers who had as many kids as they could feed. Their actions were aligned with maximization of their inclusive genetic fitness. We are the exception, not the rule.
Yeah. On the off chance that the CIA actually does run the government from the shadows, I really hope some of them lurk on LessWrong.
I think we may have different terminal values. I would much rather live out my life in a technologically stagnant world than to be eaten by a machine that comes up with interesting mathematical proofs all day.
If I was convinced that any AI built would destroy the world, I would advocate for a preemptive Butlerian Jihad. I would want coordinated dismantling of all supercomputing facilities (à la nuclear disarmament), which I would define as any system currently capable of training GPT-3. I would want global (NATO/China) coordination to shut down all major semiconductor fabrication plants. Despite my dislike for tyrannical policies, I would support government efforts to confiscate and destroy every Xbox, Playstation, and every GPU over 2 TFlops.
Since we are one or more key insights away from AGI, a small guerilla group with a Beowulf cluster would not be too much of a risk. Even a smallish rogue nation would not be too bad, as AI talent is highly concentrated in Europe, the USA, and China.
I very much relate to the cycle of adopting productivity systems and then developing antibodies to them. I’m glad you found a self-hack that works! However, I’m pretty disagreeable by nature, and loathe being told what to do. Maybe I should get a planner that tells me not to do the laundry, or else.