If you want to discuss or debate an issue to resolution/conclusion with me, explicitly ask for that. I’m open, by request, to putting major effort into resolving disagreements.
Elliot Temple
Karma: −980
Critical Fallibilism and Theory of Constraints in One Analyzed Paragraph
[Question] Why would code/English or low-abstraction/high-abstraction simplicity or brevity correspond?
Anecdote time: after a long discussion about the existence of any form of induction , on a CR forum, someone eventually popped up who had asked KRP the very question, after bumping into him at a conference many years ago , and his reply was that it existed , but wasn’t suitable for science.
Source?
What anyone else thinks? I am very familiar with popular CR since I used to hang out in the same forums as Curi. I’ve also read some if the great man’s works.
Which forums? Under what name?
Li and Vitanyi write:
Can a thing be simple under one definition of simplicity and not simple under another? The contemporary philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902– 1994) has said that Occam’s razor is without sense, since there is no objective criterion for simplicity. Popper states that every such proposed criterion will necessarily be biased and subjective.
There’s no citation. There’s one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn’t contain the string “occam” (case insensitive search).
I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and found nothing mentioning Occam (except it’s mentioned by other people, not Popper, in the Schlipp volumes).
If Popper actually said something about Occam’s razor, I’d like to read it. Any idea what’s going on? This seems like a scholarship problem from Li and Vitanyi. They also dismiss Popper’s solution to the problem of induction as unsatisfactory, with no explanation, argument, cite, etc.
Which section of the 850 page book contains a clear explanation of this? On initial review they seem to talk about hypotheses, for hundreds of pages, without trying to define them or explain what sorts of things do and do not qualify or how Solomonoff hypotheses do and do not match the common sense meaning of a hypothesis.
Thanks. So “There are no black swans.” is not a valid Solomonoff hypothesis? A hypothesis can’t exclude things, only make positive predictions?
Is a hypothesis allowed to make partial predictions? E.g. predict some pixels or frames and leave others unspecified. If so, then you could “and” together two partial hypotheses and run into a similar math consistency problem, right? But the way you said it sounds like a valid hypothesis may be required to predict absolutely everything, which would prevent conjoining two hypotheses since they’re already both complete and nothing more could be added.
Mathematical Inconsistency in Solomonoff Induction?
I have never sock puppeted at LW and I have never been banned at the LW website. You’re just wrong and smearing me.
Please leave me alone.
We’re discussing social dynamics and rational conversations at http://curi.us/2363-discussion-with-gigahurt-from-less-wrong
past misbehaviors with sock puppets
What sock puppets?
A place to start is considering what problems we’re trying to solve.
Epistemology has problems like:
What is knowledge? How can new knowledge be created? What is an error? How can errors be corrected? How can disagreements between ideas be resolved? How do we learn? How can we use knowledge when making decisions? What should we do about incomplete information? Can we achieve infallible certainty (how?)? What is intelligence? How can observation be connected to thinking? Are all (good) ideas connected to observation or just some?
Are those the sorts of problems you’re trying to solve when you talk about Solomonoff induction? If so, what’s the best literature you know of that outlines (gives high level explanations rather than a bunch of details) how Solomonoff induction plus some other stuff (it should specify what stuff) solves those problems? (And says which remain currently unsolved problems?)
(My questions are open to anyone else, too.)
Hi, Deutsch was my mentor. I run the discussion forums where we’ve been continuously open to debate and questions since before LW existed. I’m also familiar with Solomonoff induction, Bayes, RAZ and HPMOR. Despite several attempts, I’ve been broadly unable to get (useful, clear) answers from the LW crowd about our questions and criticisms related to induction. But I remain interested in trying to resolve these disagreements and to sort out epistemological issues.
Are you interested in extended discussion about this, with a goal of reaching some conclusions about CR/LW differences, or do you know anyone who is? And if you’re interested, have you read FoR and BoI?
I’ll begin with one comment now:
I am getting the sense that critrats frequently engage in a terrible Strong Opinionatedness where they let themselves wholely believe probably wrong theories
~All open, public groups have lots of low quality self-proclaimed members. You may be right about some critrats you’ve talked with or read.
But that is not a CR position. CR says we only ever believe theories tentatively. We always know they may be wrong and that we may need to reconsider. We can’t 100% count on ideas. Wholely believing things is not a part of CR.
If by “wholely” you mean with a 100% probability, that is also not a CR position, since CR doesn’t assign probabilities of truth to beliefs. If you insist on a probability, a CRist might say “0% or infinitesimal” (Popper made some comments similar to that) for all his beliefs, never 100%, while reiterating that probability applies to physical events so the question is misconceived.
Sometimes we act, judge, decide or (tentatively) conclude. When we do this, we have to choose something and not some other things. E.g. it may have been a close call between getting sushi or pizza, but then I chose only pizza and no sushi, not 51% pizza and 49% sushi. (Sometimes meta/mixed/compromise views are appropriate, which combine elements of rival views. E.g. I could go to a food court and get 2 slices of pizza and 2 maki rolls. But then I’m acting 100% on that plan and not following either original plan. So I’m still picking a single plan to wholely act on.)
More discussion of this post is available at https://curi.us/2366-analyzing-blackmail-being-illegal#comments
many motives … mostly commonly to get money
If I threaten to do X unless you pay me, then the motive for making that threat is getting money. However, I don’t get money for doing X. There are separate things involved (threat and action) with different motives.
I wrote a reply at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5ffPhqaLdrSajFe37/analyzing-blackmail-being-illegal-hanson-and-mowshowitz
I read only the initial overview at the top, did my own analysis, then read the rest to see if it’d change my mind.
Here are summaries of IMO the two most notable ideas from my analysis:
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Compare blackmail to this scenario: My neighbor is having a party this weekend. I threaten to play loud music (at whatever the max loudness is that’s normally within my rights) to disrupt it unless he pays me $100. Compare to: I often play loud music and my neighbor comes and offers me $100 to be quiet all weekend. In one, I’m threatening to do something for the express purpose of harming someone, not to pursue my own values. In the other, I just enjoy music as part of my life. I think blackmail compares to the first scenario, but not the second.
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We (should) prohibit initiation of force as a means to an end. The real underlying thing is enabling people to pursue their values in their life and resolve conflicts. If blackmail doesn’t initiate force, that doesn’t automatically make it OK, b/c non-initiation of force isn’t the primary.
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Analyzing Blackmail Being Illegal (Hanson and Mowshowitz related)
I read the older, now-renamed book that I linked. The newer one has different authors. I saw it when searching and confirmed the right author for the one I read by searching old emails.
People also reject ideas before they’ve been explored in depth. I’ve tried to discuss similar issues with LW before but the basic response was roughly “we like chaos where no one pays attention to whether an argument has ever been answered by anyone; we all just do our own thing with no attempt at comprehensiveness or organizing who does what; having organized leadership of any sort, or anyone who is responsible for anything, would be irrational” (plus some suggestions that I’m low social status and that therefore I personally deserve to be ignored. there were also suggestions – phrased rather differently but amounting to this – that LW will listen more if published ideas are rewritten, not to improve on any flaws, but so that the new versions can be published at LW before anywhere else, because the LW community’s attention allocation is highly biased towards that).