Looking at the description of that Pavlov algorithm, it bears more than a passing resemblance to REINFORCE or evolutionary methods of training NNs, except with the neurons relabeled ‘agents’.
gwern
Karma: 42,080 (LW), 4 (AF)
One can’t link to sections within a PDF,
Yes you can.
#page=N. That’s how I linked to the papers I liked.
Which part? There have cumulatively been a lot of changes.
I am excited and terrified of eyetracking for foveated rendering in VR for precisely those reasons: it will be both awesome & awful and I don’t know how it’ll net out. (All the more reason to keep paying for VR games, I guess, to help ensure that the user is the customer rather than the product...)
March 2019 gwern.net newsletter
At first from the title I thought this was hilariously funny, but after looking at user GPT2′s comments, it appears the username is a doggone dirty lie and these are not in fact GPT-2-small samples but merely human-written, which comes as a great disappointment to me.
Since user GPT2 seems to be quite prolific, we have implemented a setting to hide comments by GPT2, which can be accessed from the settings page when you are logged in.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to implement a generic blacklist for which GPT2 could be a special case?
Some recent kerfluffles over CO2 (prompted by people rediscovering Allen et al 2016 on Twitter etc) lead me to one I missed: “Breathing Carbon Dioxide (4% for 1-Hour) Slows Response Selection, Not Stimulus Encoding”, Vercruyssen 2014. 4% is a ton but the results remain subtle, at best.
And now a full guide to using StyleGAN: https://www.gwern.net/Faces
One day, for instance, she was waiting in the car as her daughter ran an errand, and realised that she was trapped inside. What might once have been a frustrating inconvenience sent her into a panic attack. “I started screaming. I was flailing my arms, I was crying,” she says. “It just left me so shaken.” Even the wrong clothing can make her anxiety worse. “Anything that’s tight around my neck is out of the question because it makes me feel like I’m suffocating,” says Donna, a 55-year-old from Altona in Manitoba, Canada.
...The lingering trauma can resurface with the slightest trigger, and still causes her to have “two or three nightmares each night”. Having been put on medical leave from her job, she has lost her independence. She suspects that she will never fully escape the effects of that day more than a decade ago. “It’s a life sentence.”
...When she woke up, she could hear the nurses buzzing around the table, and she felt someone scrubbing at her abdomen – but she assumed that the operation was over and they were just clearing up. “I was thinking, ‘Oh boy, you were anxious for no reason.’” It was only once she heard the surgeon asking the nurse for a scalpel that the truth suddenly dawned on her: the operation wasn’t over. It hadn’t even begun. The next thing she knew, she felt the blade of his knife against her belly as he made his first incision, leading to excruciating pain. She tried to sit up and to speak – but thanks to a neuromuscular blocker, her body was paralysed. “I felt so… so powerless. There was just nothing I could do. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t open my eyes,” she says. “I tried to cry just to get tears rolling down my cheeks, thinking that they would notice that and notice that something was going on. But I couldn’t make tears.”
...Various projects around the world have attempted to document experiences like Donna’s, but the Anesthesia Awareness Registry at the University of Washington, Seattle, offers some of the most detailed analyses. Founded in 2007, it has now collected more than 340 reports – most from North America – and although these reports are confidential, some details have been published, and they make illuminating reading.
As you might expect, a large majority of the accounts – more than 70 per cent – also contain reports of pain. “I felt the sting and burning sensation of four incisions being made, like a sharp knife cutting a finger,” wrote one. “Then searing, unbearable pain.” “There were two parts I remember quite clearly,” wrote a patient who had had a wide hole made in his femur. “I heard the drill, felt the pain, and felt the vibration all the way up to my hip. The next part was the movement of my leg and the pounding of the ‘nail’.” The pain, he said, was “unlike anything I thought possible”. It is the paralysing effects of the muscle blockers that many find most distressing, however. For one thing, it produces the sensations that you are not breathing – which one patient described as “too horrible to endure”. Then there’s the helplessness. Another patient noted: “I was screaming in my head things like ‘don’t they know I’m awake, open your eyes to signal them’.” To make matters worse, all of this panic can be compounded by a lack of understanding of why they are awake but unable to move. “They have no reference point to say why is this happening,” says Christopher Kent at the University of Washington, who co-authored the paper about these accounts. The result, he says, is that many patients come to fear that they are dying. “Those are the worst of the anaesthesia experiences.”
...
The result is that many more people might be conscious during surgery, but they simply can’t remember it afterwards.
To investigate this phenomenon, researchers are using what they call the isolated forearm technique. During the induction of the anaesthesia, the staff place a cuff around the patient’s upper arm that delays the passage of the neuromuscular agent through the arm. This means that, for a brief period, the patient is still able to move their hand. So a member of staff could ask them to squeeze their hand in response to two questions: whether they were still aware, and, if so, whether they felt any pain. (Read more in this short on how doctors are trying to detect anaesthesia awareness.) In the largest study of this kind to date, Robert Sanders at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recently collaborated with colleagues at six hospitals in the US, Europe and New Zealand. Of the 260 patients studied, 4.6 per cent responded to the experimenters’ first question, about awareness. That is hundreds of times greater than the rate of remembered awareness events that had been noted in the National Audit Project. And around four in ten of those patients who did respond with the hand squeeze – 1.9 per cent across the whole group – also reported feeling pain in the experimenters’ second question.
These results raise some ethical quandaries. “Whenever I talk to the trainees I talk about the philosophical element to this,” says Sanders. “If the patient doesn’t remember, is it concerning?” Sanders says that there’s no evidence that the patients who respond during the isolated forearm experiments, but fail to remember the experience later, do go on to develop PTSD or other psychological issues like Donna. And without those long-term consequences, you might conclude that the momentary awareness is unfortunate, but unalarming. Yet the study does make him uneasy, and so he conducted a survey to gather the public’s views on the matter. Opinions were mixed. “Most people didn’t think that amnesia alone is sufficient – but a surprisingly large minority thought that as long as you didn’t remember the event, it’s OK,” Sanders says.
...
The fifth National Audit Project report (2014) on anaesthsia awareness in hospitals in the UK and Ireland: https://www.nationalauditprojects.org.uk/NAP5report
Kate Cole-Adams’s 2017 book Anesthesia: The gift of oblivion and the mystery of consciousness: https://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/anesthesia/
A 2015 paper from the Anesthesia Awareness Registry at the University of Washington: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007091217310176
Robert Sanders and colleagues’ 2018 exploration of what the anaesthetic drug propofol does to the brain: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30336853
A 2017 study by Sanders and colleagues exploring the isolated forearm technique to detect awareness in patients: http://anesthesiology.pubs.asahq.org/article.aspx?articleid=2593911
A 2016 meta-analysis of studies exploring medical hypnosis during anaesthesia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178078/
The survey is https://academic.oup.com/bja/article/118/4/486/3574495 (Given the described wording and the remarkably blase acceptance claimed, I’m left wondering a little if the respondents really appreciated the scenario being described—being gutted like a fish and feeling every last bit of it, so to speak.)
“Patient perspectives on intraoperative awareness with explicit recall: report from a North American anaesthesia awareness registry”, Kent et al 2015:
Background: Awareness during general anaesthesia is a source of concern for patients and anaesthetists, with potential for psychological and medicolegal sequelae. We used a registry to evaluate unintended awareness from the patient’s perspective with an emphasis on their experiences and healthcare provider responses.
Methods: English-speaking subjects self-reported explicit recall of events during anaesthesia to the Anesthesia Awareness Registry of the ASA, completed a survey, and submitted copies of medical records. Anaesthesia awareness was defined as explicit recall of events during induction or maintenance of general anaesthesia. Patient experiences, satisfaction, and desired practitioner responses to explicit recall were based on survey responses.
Results: Most of the 68 respondents meeting inclusion criteria (75%) were dissatisfied with the manner in which their concerns were addressed by their healthcare providers, and many reported long-term harm. Half (51%) of respondents reported that neither the anaesthesia provider nor surgeon expressed concern about their experience. Few were offered an apology (10%) or referral for counseling (15%). Patient preferences for responses after an awareness episode included validation of their experience (37%), an explanation (28%), and discussion or follow-up to the episode (26%).
Conclusions: Data from this registry confirm the serious impact of anaesthesia awareness for some patients, and suggest that patients need more systematic responses and follow-up by healthcare providers.
“Incidence of Connected Consciousness after Tracheal Intubation: A Prospective, International, Multicenter Cohort Study of the Isolated Forearm Technique”, Sanders et al 2017:
Background: The isolated forearm technique allows assessment of consciousness of the external world (connected consciousness) through a verbal command to move the hand (of a tourniquet-isolated arm) during intended general anesthesia. Previous isolated forearm technique data suggest that the incidence of connected consciousness may approach 37% after a noxious stimulus. The authors conducted an international, multicenter, pragmatic study to establish the incidence of isolated forearm technique responsiveness after intubation in routine practice.
Methods: Two hundred sixty adult patients were recruited at six sites into a prospective cohort study of the isolated forearm technique after intubation. Demographic, anesthetic, and intubation data, plus postoperative questionnaires, were collected. Univariate statistics, followed by bivariate logistic regression models for age plus variable, were conducted.
Results: The incidence of isolated forearm technique responsiveness after intubation was 4.6% (12/260); 5 of 12 responders reported pain through a second hand squeeze. Responders were younger than nonresponders (39 ± 17 vs. 51 ± 16 yr old; P = 0.01) with more frequent signs of sympathetic activation (50% vs. 2.4%; P = 0.03). No participant had explicit recall of intraoperative events when questioned after surgery (n = 253). Across groups, depth of anesthesia monitoring values showed a wide range; however, values were higher for responders before (54 ± 20 vs. 42 ± 14; P = 0.02) and after (52 ± 16 vs. 43 ± 16; P = 0.02) intubation. In patients not receiving total intravenous anesthesia, exposure to volatile anesthetics before intubation reduced the odds of responding (odds ratio, 0.2 [0.1 to 0.8]; P = 0.02) after adjustment for age.
Conclusions: Intraoperative connected consciousness occurred frequently, although the rate is up to 10-times lower than anticipated. This should be considered a conservative estimate of intraoperative connected consciousness.
Daniel Dennett turns out to discuss precisely this problem in the context of curare/analgesics/anesthetics/amnestics in Dennett 1978, “Why You Can’t Make A Computer That Feels Pain”.
He also discusses an interesting detail of pain, “reactive dissociation”. In my pain taxonomy, I split the various kinds of pain disorders into useful/motivating/qualia; the only combination I was missing was a kind of pain which is experienced as painful and yet was not motivating/aversive/unpleasant. “reactive dissociation” turns out to be just that—if morphine is administered after pain starts happening, people apparently frequently will report that the pain is excruciatingly painful, and yet they don’t mind it.
Aspirin by antagonizing bradykinin thus prevents pain at the earliest opportunity. This is interesting because aspirin is also unique among analgesics in lacking the ‘reactive disassociation’ effect. All other analgesics (e.g., the morphine group and nitrous oxide in sub-anesthetic doses) have a common ‘phenomenology.’ After receiving the analgesic subjects commonly report not that the pain has disappeared or diminished (as with aspirin) but that the pain is as intense as ever though they no longer mind it. To many philosophers this may sound like some sort of conceptual incoherency or contradiction, or at least indicate a failure on the part of the subjects to draw enough distinctions, but such philosophical suspicions, which we will examine more closely later, must be voiced in the face of the normality of such first-person reports and the fact that they are expressed in the widest variety of language by subjects of every degree of sophistication. A further curiosity about morphine is that if it is administered before the onset of pain (for instance, as a pre-surgical medication) the subjects claim not to feel any pain subsequently (though they are not numb or anesthetized—they have sensation in the relevant parts of their bodies); while if the morphine is administered after the pain has commenced, the subjects report that the pain continues (and continues to be pain), though they no longer mind it.
...Lobotomized subjects similarly report feeling intense pain but not minding it, and in other ways the manifestations of lobotomy and morphine are similar enough to lead some researchers to describe the action of morphine (and some barbiturates) as “reversible pharmacological leucotomy [lobotomy]“.^23^
23: A. S. Keats and H. K. Beecher, “Pain Relief with Hypnotic Doses of Barbiturates, and a Hypothesis”, J. Pharmacol, 1950. Lobotomy, though discredited as a behavior-improving psychosurgical procedure, is still a last resort tactic in cases of utterly intractable central pain, where the only other alternative to unrelenting agony is escalating morphine dosages, with inevitable addiction, habituation and early death. Lobotomy does not excise any of the old low path (as one might expect from its effect on pain perception), but it does cut off the old low path from a rich input source in the frontal lobes of the cortex.
Dennett throws in this disturbing anecdote in footnote 27:
Scopolamine and other amnestics are often prescribed by anesthesiologists for the purpose of creating amnesia. “Sometimes”, I was told by a prominent anesthesiologist, “when we think a patient may have been awake during surgery, we give scopolamine to get us off the hook. Sometimes it works and sometimes not.”
I now have poetry samples up using a retrained/finetuned version of GPT-2-small: https://www.gwern.net/RNN-metadata#finetuning-the-gpt-2-small-transformer-for-english-poetry-generation
February gwern.net newsletter
Nothing makes sense when Google Translates tries Japanese. Although the fact that that is still better than pre-RNN shows you how much of an upgrade that was.
Implementation details: https://www.gwern.net/TWDNE
‘This Waifu Does Not Exist’: 100,000 StyleGAN & GPT-2 samples
OP’s rebuttal the first time I asked him to enlarge on his first paragraph:
[...They all 3 killed themselves like a chain reaction.] It seems like the only time that is possible by which a person is able to choose to live without anyone getting involved in this and the only possible way to keep his name from being forgotten. What if in a sense, for it is in the best interest of humanity for everyone else to live without anyone knowing about the other, it comes to people in need of life? Who would really argue that not everyone is the same? Who would argue that if a person can only choose the way, then not everyone may take some responsibility for their death? People who make the decisions should take responsibility for their own lives. In contrast, they should make a living only with the goal that they make a living for themselves, and not some other person. Are we being overly simplistic and the people who make them feel inadequate (i.e., just lazy) only make more like us even though they will be better than everyone else if they have a better life but are unable to earn income for it that would be of benefit, or would we be able to increase our income and get more as a team instead of just having two or a few more people around to take care of it? The answer is: No. I think the world needs not only the people with the power to make decisions but also the people to decide on, and that will be the greatest force for change in the whole of human experience. And we all need to join together in a great struggle in coming weeks and not one day go to war. The whole world needs this revolution.
I don’t know why you would think that would be such a barrier. You don’t need Transformers at all to do analogical reasoning, and both the CoQA and SQUAD results suggests at least some ‘modest logic-related stuff’ is going on. If you put your exact sample into the public/small GPT-2 model, it’ll even generate syntactically correct list completions and additional lists which are somewhat more sorted than not.
It’s a cool language model but can it do even modest logic-related stuff without similar examples in the training data?
Have you looked at the NLP tasks they evaluated it on?
Is there a reason to not just email & ask (other than depression)?