habryka
Karma: 7,488
NewTop
Hey, welcome to LessWrong.
I think it would be useful for me to understand why you are interested in this question, and why you asked it on this forum. It feels like a relatively general technology question, and the answer seems pretty obviously “Yes” in a way that I don’t know how to really expand on.
Oh, I think if a user enter that text into a text editor, they would prefer it to show up in the ToC rather than not. Or at the very least have the option to add it to a ToC (though I think if they had to choose, most users would prefer to add it).
Oops, sorry. Wrong link. I mean this one, together with this screenshot:
I think the last paragraph was the most clarifying to me in the exchange so far. If you would be up for it, I think it would be great if you could edit your top-level comment to include that paragraph and maybe also some of the other things said in this thread (though obviously no obligation, just seems better for future people who might have a similar question, to have everything in one top-level place).
We just serve the historical HTML for practical all posts, and all new HTML is really as straightforward HTML as you can imagine (with some exception for blockquotes, which we currently split into block-level elements, though that will be fixed soon). Happy to hear about any other problems you have with the HTML, but I am not aware of any.
Just because markdown has a heading syntax, doesn’t mean that everyone follows it, and depending on context you might not want to follow it. I literally googled “Markdown bold” and among the first few results this tutorial uses bolded headers as an example.
Oh, yeah. That’s what I meant to say above. Adding that behavior to our editor seems relatively low-cost.
Oh, yeah. I think I was a bit confused in what I said. I wanted to highlight the difference between a short binary string, and a really complicated video feed, which probably requires a pretty decent model of the environment and which would probably benefit a lot from the knowledge that a human brain has.
I think the crux for me is less whether a specific human brain is a good choice for the UTM, and more that for any given input-history I have, I can construct a UTM such that the description length of that input-history is arbitrarily short, and so the choice of UTM is really really important in any “practical” scenario.
Given that, there must be some other argument for what we should choose as the UTM, probably so that short inputs into that UTM roughly correspond with our intuitions for simplicity. The two choices here that I feel tend to result in things that roughly match my natural intuition for elegance is either a programming-language interpreter, or a human brain, though the later one feels weirdly circular. Hence the question of whether that’s even a valid construction.
(Note: This has already been helpful in helping me think through this, so thank you! :) )
Hmm, so I agree that if your message is a short binary string, then obviously the description length of that binary string will be much shorter in Python than it is on a brain.
But if (as is usual in my daily experience) the message is a bunch of human visual sensory input, then I expect a human brain to have a much shorter description length of that input than a Python script. A python script would probably have to include a simulation of a human brain in order to produce the sensory input, which is likely going to be extremely complex.
What does MDL stand for?
Edit: Figured it out. It’s Minimum Description Length.
I have a bunch of thoughts, but don’t currently have the time to write them down. Just letting you know that I am planning to write a comment about this sometime in the next few days (and feel free to ping me if I don’t).
Converting a bold-only paragraph to an HTML heading in the editor seems like a decent improvement to me. I do think that there are some constraints that we have that make stuff like that difficult, and which cause me to think that we do want to have the “interpret bold paragraph as heading” feature activated (while the HTLM we save in our editor would be semantically different):
Most of the content on LW is historical content, where editor features like that weren’t available. I want to make sure the ToC works well for that content, but I feel hesitant to edit all the HTML of those posts, in case that does change the semantic meaning of the text in some cases (obviously we introduced some of that confusion already with the ToC, but I think editing the old content feels a bit more violating than that).
I think users that are used to Markdown will often use single bold words as heading, and I feel hesitant to deviate too much from the standard Markdown conventions of how you should parse Markdown into HTML.
Some content is submitted to us via RSS feeds from people’s blogs, where we obviously have no control over their HTML, and I would also prefer to not modify it.
[Question] Is the human brain a valid choice for the Universal Turing Machine in Solomonoff Induction?
(Just got around to reading this. As a point of reference, it seems that at least Open Phil seems to have decided that tax-deductability is not more important than being able to give to things freely, which is why the Open Philanthropy Project is an LLC. I think this is at least slight evidence towards that tradeoff being worth it.)
Yep we also noticed that yesterday and it’s on the Todo list to fix.
Oops, forgot to press the curate button. Now actually curated.
(Sorry, we are still working on calibrating the spam system, and this got somehow marked as spam. I fixed it, and we have a larger fix coming later today that should overall stop the spam problems).
Nah, just this post never got posted to LW, and we were sad that it wasn’t (it’s only been available on Yudkowsky.net).
Promoted to curated: It’s been a month since this was written, but I still think it’s an excellent post, and I generally think that methodological analyses of this kind are quite valuable.
I can imagine some people finding the tone and expressiveness a bit off-putting, but I enjoyed it, and generally think most methodological analyses like this are too dry and don’t expose the author’s beliefs enough.
I do think there are some improvements to structure you could make. Some basic headings I think would have helped me a lot in not feeling a bit lost around the latter third of the post, but overall I found it enjoyable to read and the structure wasn’t too big of a problem.
(Sorry, the new spam detection seems to have been overly aggressive and marked this as spam. I undeleted it, and apologize for the inconvenience)
I am quite confused on whether this is meant as a joke or not.