Donald Hobson

• Donald Hobson11 Dec 2018 23:10 UTC

  2 points

  on: Quan­tum im­mor­tal­ity: Is de­cline of mea­sure com­pen­sated by merg­ing timelines?

  One way to avoid the ab­surd con­clu­sion is to say that it doesn’t mat­ter if an­other mind is you.

  Sup­pose I have a util­ity func­tion over the en­tire quan­tum wave func­tion. This util­ity func­tion is mostly fo­cused on be­ings that are similar to my­self. So I con­sider the al­ter­nate me, that differs only in phone num­ber, get­ting £100, about equal to the origi­nal me get­ting £100. As far as my util­ity func­tion goes, both the ver­sions of me would just be made worse off by for­get­ting the num­ber.

• Donald Hobson11 Dec 2018 14:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Why should EA care about ra­tio­nal­ity (and vice-versa)?

  I agree that not all ra­tio­nal­ists would want wire­headed chick­ens, maybe they don’t care about chicken suffer­ing at all. I also agree that you some­times see bad logic and non-se­quiters in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity. The non ra­tio­nal­ist, mo­ti­vated, emo­tion driven think­ing, is the way that hu­mans think by de­fault. The ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity is try­ing to think a differ­ent way, some­times suc­cess­fully. Illus­trat­ing a ju­nior ra­tio­nal­ist hav­ing an off day and do­ing some­thing stupid doesn’t illu­mi­nate the con­cept of ra­tio­nal­ity, the way that see­ing a be­gin­ner jug­gler drop balls doesn’t show you what jug­gling is.

• Donald Hobson10 Dec 2018 16:51 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sherrinford's comment on: Why should EA care about ra­tio­nal­ity (and vice-versa)?

  I’ve not seen a char­ity try­ing to do it, but wouldn’t be sur­prised if there was one. I’m try­ing to illus­trate the differ­ent thought pro­cesses.

• Donald Hobson9 Dec 2018 23:38 UTC

  4 points

  on: Measly Med­i­ta­tion Measurements

  What is the way you were med­i­tat­ing? Re­laxed or fo­cused? Com­fortable or cross legged? Fo­cus­ing on a mean­ingless sym­bol, or let­ting your mind wan­der, or fo­cus­ing on some­thing mean­ingful?

  I have found that I can pro­duce a sig­nifi­cant amount of emo­tion, of a cho­sen type, eg anx­ious, mis­er­able, laugh­ing, fouc­ss­edly happy, ect in sec­onds. I seem to do this just by fo­cus­ing on the emo­tion with lit­tle con­scious think­ing of a con­cept that would cause the emo­tion. Is this med­i­ta­tion? (In­tro­spec­tion, highly un­re­li­able)

  Can you de­scribe the med­i­ta­tion as at­tempt­ing to mod­ify your thought pat­tern in some way?

• Donald Hobson9 Dec 2018 23:23 UTC

  4 points

  on: Why should EA care about ra­tio­nal­ity (and vice-versa)?

  The whole idea of effec­tive al­tru­ism is in get­ting the biggest bang for your char­i­ta­ble buck. If the ev­i­dence about how to do this was sim­ple and in­con­tro­vert­ible, we wouldn’t need ad­vanced ra­tio­nal­ity skills to do so. In the real world, choos­ing the best cause re­quires weigh­ing up sub­tle bal­ances of ev­i­dence on ev­ery­thing from if an­i­mals are suffer­ing in ways we would care about, to how likely a su­per in­tel­li­gent AI is.

  On the other side, effec­tive al­tru­ism is only per­sua­sive if you have var­i­ous skills and pat­terns of thought. Th­ese in­clude the abil­ity to think quan­ti­ta­tively, avoid­ing scope in­sen­si­tivity, the ideas of ex­pected util­ity max­i­miza­tion and the re­jec­tion of the ab­sur­dity heuris­tic. It is con­cep­tu­ally pos­si­ble for a mind to be a brilli­ant ra­tio­nal­ist with the sole goal of pa­per­clip max­i­miza­tion, how­ever all hu­mans have the same ba­sic emo­tional ar­chi­tec­ture, with emo­tions like em­pa­thy and car­ing. When this is com­bined with rigor­ous struc­tured thought, the end re­sult of­ten looks at least some­what util­i­tar­i­an­ish.

  Here are the kinds of thought pat­terns that a stereo­typ­i­cal ra­tio­nal­ist, and a stereo­typ­i­cal non ra­tio­nal­ist would en­gage in, when eval­u­at­ing two char­i­ties. One char­ity is a don­key sanc­tu­ary, the other is try­ing to ge­net­i­cally mod­ify chick­ens that don’t feel pain.

  The leaflet has a beau­tiful pic­ture of a cute fluffy don­key in a field of sun­sh­ine and flow­ers. Aww Don’t you just want to stroke him. Don­keys in medows seem an un­am­bigu­ous pure good. Who could ar­gue with don­keys. Think­ing about don­keys makes me feel happy. Look, this one with the brown ears is called but­ter­cup. I’ll put this nice poster up and send them some money.

  Ge­net­i­cally mod­ify­ing? Don’t like the sound of that. To not feel pain? Weird? Why would you want to do that? Imag­ines the chicken crushed into a tiny cage, look­ing mis­er­able, “its not re­ally suffer­ing” doesn’t cut it. Wouldn’t that en­courage peo­ple to abuse them? We should be let­ting them live in the wild as na­ture in­tended.

  The main com­po­nent of this de­ci­sion comes from adding up the lit­tle “good” or “bad” la­bels that they at­tach to each word. There is also a sense in which a don­key sanc­tu­ary is a typ­i­cal char­ity (the robin of birds), while GM chick­ens is an atyp­i­cal char­ity (the os­trich).

  The ra­tio­nal­ist starts off with ques­tions like “How much do I value a year of happy don­key life, vs a year of happy chicken life?“. How much money is needed to mod­ify chick­ens, and get them used in farms. Whats the rel­a­tive util­ity gain from a “non suffer­ing” chicken in a tiny cage, vs a chicken in chicken par­adise, rel­a­tive to a fac­tory farm chicken that is suffer­ing? What is the size of the world chicken in­dus­try?

  The ra­tio­nal­ist ends up find­ing that the world chicken in­dus­try is huge, and so most sen­si­ble val­ues for the other pa­ram­e­ters lead to the GM chicken char­ity be­ing bet­ter. They trust util­i­tar­ian logic more than any in­tu­itions they might have.

• Donald Hobson4 Dec 2018 23:58 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong's comment on: For­mal Open Prob­lem in De­ci­sion Theory

  I’ve figured out the differ­ence, I was us­ing the box topol­ogy https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Box_topol­ogy , while you were us­ing the https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Product_topol­ogy.

  You are cor­rect. I knew about finite topolog­i­cal prod­ucts and made a nat­u­ral gen­er­al­iza­tion, but it turns out not to be the stan­dard mean­ing of $I^w$.

• Donald Hobson1 Dec 2018 0:37 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong's comment on: For­mal Open Prob­lem in De­ci­sion Theory

  I think you made a mis­take here

  The Hahn–Mazurk­iewicz the­o­rem states that

  A non-empty Haus­dorff topolog­i­cal space is a con­tin­u­ous image of the unit in­ter­val if and only if it is a com­pact, con­nected, lo­cally con­nected sec­ond-countable space.

  I will agree that $I^w$is con­nected and lo­cally con­nected. I’m not sure if its sec­ond countable. It is not com­pact.

  Just to be clear $I^w=\left\{\right(x_1,x_2,\cdots )\forall i:x_i\in [0,1\left]\right]\}$ Now let $H_i=\{\text{x}\in I^w|x_i<0.6\}$ . Clearly each $H_i$ is open. Let $G=\{\text{x}\in I^w|\forall i:x_i>0.4\}$ And $F=\{G,H_1,H_2,\cdots \}$. Now clearly this fam­ily cov­ers all of $I^w$. How­ever, re­move any $H_i$ from $F$ and $\text{x}=(\stackrel{i}{\stackrel{}{0.9,0.9,\cdots 0.9,0.1}},0.9,0.9,\cdots )$ is no longer cov­ered. So $F$ is a fam­ily of open sets, which cover $I^w$ and don’t have any finite sub­cover.

• Donald Hobson27 Nov 2018 9:48 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Volodymyr Frolov's comment on: Quan­tum Me­chan­ics, Noth­ing to do with Consciousness

  Im not say­ing that you can’t have a neu­ral net­work that de­tects liter­a­ture. I see no rea­son for what liter­a­ture is to be in­com­puta­ple, I was aiming more for the idea of a com­plex vague in­tu­itive bound­ary. De­tect liter­a­ture is not nearly enough to spec­ify a par­tic­u­lar pro­gram. As op­posed to de­tect primes.

  And no, con­scious­ness is not a fun­da­men­tal prop­erty of the uni­verse.

• Donald Hobson27 Nov 2018 9:40 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: rosyatrandom's comment on: Boltz­mann Brains, Si­mu­la­tions and self re­fut­ing hy­poth­e­sis

  Alright, if you want to for­mal­ize that in the con­text of a big uni­verse, which one has the su­per ma­jor­ity of mea­sure or magic re­al­ity fluid. Which should we act as if we are.

• Donald Hobson27 Nov 2018 0:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sapient Coccolithophore's comment on: Boltz­mann Brains, Si­mu­la­tions and self re­fut­ing hy­poth­e­sis

  Fixed. Thanks.

• Donald Hobson27 Nov 2018 0:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Volodymyr Frolov's comment on: Quan­tum Me­chan­ics, Noth­ing to do with Consciousness

  Ex­actly, and we can point our finger and say, “this is liter­a­ture”, we can’t write a com­puter pro­gram to de­tect ei­ther. And con­scious­ness, like liter­a­ture, is a mo­ti­vated bound­ary. And al­most any dis­pute about a bor­der­line case be­comes a “if a tree falls in a for­est …” ar­gu­ment.

Boltz­mann Brains, Si­mu­la­tions and self re­fut­ing hy­poth­e­sis

Quan­tum Me­chan­ics, Noth­ing to do with Consciousness

• Donald Hobson24 Nov 2018 18:52 UTC

  3 points

  on: Up­com­ing: Open Questions

  I think the ideal sys­tem would be a sub­ques­tion Tree. Some­one asks a big root ques­tion, and peo­ple post splits, that di­vide the ques­tion into sev­eral smaller ones. Peo­ple can an­swer splits of sub­di­vide them. Splits can have a sug­gested de­pen­dence of one split on oth­ers. Ques­tions can have many differ­ent splits, as peo­ple can come up with many differ­ent ways of solv­ing the prob­lem.

  Ex­am­ple of 5 differ­ent users work­ing to­gether to solve a prob­lem. Lines la­beled with the same user let­ter are ex­pected to be pro­vided by the same user.

  Root Ques­tion: What is (2+3)*(4+5)+6*7 (User Z)

  Split 1: I know that 2+3=5 (User A)

  SubQ 1: What is 4+5 (User A)

  An­swer: 9 (User B)

  SubQ 2: What is 6*7 (User A)

  An­swer: 42 (User F)

  SubQ 3: What is 5*(SubQ 1) (User A)

  An­swer: 45 (User G)

  SubQ 4: What is (SubQ 3)+(SubQ 2) (User A)

  Split 2: I know 6*7=42 (User C)

  SubQ 1: What is (2+3)*(4+5) (User C)

  Sub­split 1: Ex­pand brack­ets (2+3)*(4+5)=2*4+2*5+3*4+3*5 (User D)

  SubSubQ 1: What are 2*4, 2*5, 3*4, 3*5? (User D)

  An­swer: 2*4=8, 2*5=10, 3*4=12, 3*5=15 (User E)

  SubSubQ 2: Whats the sum of the An­swers to SubSubQ 1: (User D)

  SubQ 2: What is (SubQ 1)+42 (User C)

• Donald Hobson23 Nov 2018 22:27 UTC

  2 points

  on: What if peo­ple sim­ply fore­casted your fu­ture choices?

  Ob­vi­ously this strat­egy would be wholly un­suit­able to al­ign ASI. When con­sid­er­ing hu­mans, re­mem­ber that the pre­dic­tors have other tricks for con­trol­ing the de­ci­sion, as well as the com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel . If there is enough money in the pre­dic­tion mar­ket, some­one might be in­cen­tivized to offer you dis­counts on the mack­book.

• Donald Hobson23 Nov 2018 17:32 UTC

  7 points

  on: On MIRI’s new re­search directions

  One group that isn’t con­sid­ered in the anal­y­sis is new trainees. It seems that AGI is prob­a­bly suffi­ciently far off, that many of the peo­ple who will make the break­throughs are not yet re­searchers or ex­perts. If you are a bright young per­son who might work at MIRI or some­where similar in 5 years time, you would want to get fa­mil­iar with the area. You are prob­a­bly read­ing MIRI’s ex­ist­ing work, to see if you have the ca­pa­bil­ity to work in the field. This means that if you do join MIRI, you have already been think­ing along the right lines for years.

  Ob­vi­ously you don’t want your dis­cus­sions live streamed to the world, you might come up with dan­ger­ous ideas. But I would sug­gest stick­ing things on­line once you un­der­stand the area suffi­ciently well to be con­fi­dent its safe. If writ­ing it up into a fully for­mal pa­per is too time in­ten­sive, any rough scraps will still be read by the ded­i­cated.

• Donald Hobson23 Nov 2018 0:16 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ap­proval-di­rected agents: overview

  Sup­pose you have a hy­per-com­puter, and an atom pre­cise scan of Hugh. One naive method of mak­ing this ap­proval agent is by simu­lat­ing Hugh in a box. For ev­ery ac­tion Arthur could take, a copy of vir­tual Hugh is given a de­tailed de­scrip­tion of the ac­tion and a dial to in­di­cate his ap­proval. The most ap­proved ac­tion is taken. This of course will find an ac­tion se­quence which will brain­wash Hugh into ap­prov­ing.

  I can’t see how “in­ter­nal ap­proval di­rec­tion” would avoid er­rors in Hugh’s rat­ing, rather than mov­ing them one level down, if you speci­fied what you mean by this term at all.

• Donald Hobson22 Nov 2018 21:43 UTC

  10 points

  on: Iter­a­tion Fixed Point Exercises

  An­swer to ques­tion 1.

  Let $x_{i+1}=f\left(x_i\right)$ for ar­bi­trary $x_0$. Call $c=d(x_0,x_1)$. Then by in­duc­tion ($i<j$)$d(x_i,x_j)\le {\sum }_{k=i}^{k=j-1}d(x_k,x_{k+1})\le {\sum }_{k=i}^{k=j-1}c{q}^k\le \frac{c{q}^i}{1-q}$ (power se­ries sim­plifi­ca­tion)

  There­fore $\forall \delta >0:\exists n\in N\forall i>n,j>i:d(i,j)<\frac{c{q}^n}{1-q}<\delta$ ie $x_i$ is a cauchy se­quence. How­ever $(X,d)$ is said to be com­plete, which by defi­ni­tion means any cauchy se­quence is con­ver­gent. So $x_n\to y$ and $d(x_i,y)\le {sup}_{j=i}^{\infty }d(x_i,x_j)\le \frac{c{q}^i}{1-q}$ So $x_n$ con­verges ex­po­nen­tially quickly

  An­swer to ques­tion 2.

  From part 1, as $f$ is con­tin­u­ous, $y={lim}_{n\to \infty }\left(f\right(x_{n+1}\left)\right)={lim}_{n\to \infty }\left(f\right(x_n\left)\right)=f\left({lim}_{n\to \infty }\right(x_n\left)\right)=f\left(y\right)$ So $y$ is a fixed point. Sup­pose $x$ and $y$ are both fixed points of $f\left(x\right)$ a con­trac­tion map. Then $f\left(x\right)=x$ and $f\left(y\right)=y$ so $d\left(f\right(x),f(y\left)\right)\le qd(x,y)=qd\left(f\right(x),f(y\left)\right)$ there­fore $d(x,y)=0$ so $x=y$. Thus $f$ has a unique fixed point.

  An­swer to ques­tion 3.

  $(R,d(x,y)=|x-y|)$ is a met­ric space. Its the real line with nor­mal dis­tance. Let $f\left(x\right)=\sqrt{1+x^2}$ . Then $f$ is a con­trac­tion map be­cause $f$ is differ­en­tiable and $f^{\prime }\left(x\right)=\frac{x}{\sqrt{1+x^2}}$has the prop­erty $\forall x:|f^{\prime }\left(x\right)|<1$. How­ever no fixed point ex­ists as $\forall x:f\left(x\right)>x$. This works be­cause the se­quence $x_i$ gen­er­ated from re­peated ap­pli­ca­tions of $f$ will tend to in­finity, de­spite suc­ces­sive terms be­com­ing ever closer.

• Donald Hobson19 Nov 2018 23:55 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Motasaurus's comment on: Click­bait might not be de­stroy­ing our gen­eral Intelligence

  My point was that the epistemic cor­re­la­tion be­tween com­mu­ni­ca­tors is in­creas­ing. Be­fore ev­ery­one was talk­ing to ev­ery­one else more. Now ex­perts can talk to ex­perts, and cre­ation­ists talk to other cre­ation­ists. Homeopaths talk to other home­opaths.

  Are you say­ing this is good, is bad, or is hap­pen­ing?

Click­bait might not be de­stroy­ing our gen­eral Intelligence