ialdabaoth

• ialdabaoth 11 Oct 2012 0:13 UTC

  7 points

  on: Aban­don­ing Cached Selves to Re-Write My Source Code Par­tially, I’ve Be­come Unstable

  I performed a nearly identical set of operations for the first time when I was 23. I would recommend the following:

  1. Allow your new networks to re-stabilize. This can take up to a few weeks or even a few months if you haven’t recently experienced massive emotional trauma, or a few years if you have.

  2. Once you’ve re-stabilized, run some internal simulations of potential situations you’re likely to encounter in the real world, and how you think the “new you” will respond to those simulations. Do this for about a week, preferably choosing simulations that you could reliably replicate in the real world.

  3. Go out and put yourself in situations where you are likely to test the veracity of your simulations from step 2.

  Once you’ve shown at least a first-order predictive stability, give yourself about three to five years running the new software, and then do it again. Tear everything down and start over.

  After three iterations of this (approximately one decade), look at all three processes and see if you’re converging on a stable pattern of beliefs and behaviors, or if each iteration is effectively distinct from the others.

  What links here?

  • ryjm's comment on Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health by ialdabaoth (15 Oct 2012 18:49 UTC; 4 points)

• ialdabaoth 11 Oct 2012 8:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Pas­cal’s Mug­ging: Tiny Prob­a­bil­ities of Vast Utilities

  Nothing could possibly be that weak.

  Well, let’s think about this mathematically.

  In other articles, you have discussed the notion that, in an infinite universe, there exist with probability 1 identical copies of me some 10^(10^29) {span} away. You then (correctly, I think) demonstrate the absurdity of declaring that one of them in particular is ‘really you’ and another is a ‘mere copy’.

  When you say “3^^^^3 people”, you are presenting me two separate concepts:

  1. Individual entities which are each “people”.

  2. A set {S} of these entities, of which there are 3^^^^3 members.

  Now, at this point, I have to ask myself: “what is the probability that {S} exists?”

  By which I mean, what is the probability that there are 3^^^^3 unique configurations, each of which qualifies as a self-aware, experiencing entity with moral weight, without reducing to an “effective simulation” of another entity already counted in {S}?

  Vs. what is the probability that the total cardinality of unique configurations that each qualify as self-aware, experiencing entities with moral weight, is < 3^^^^3?

  Because if we’re going to juggle Bayesian probabilities here, at some point that has to get stuck in the pipe and smoked, too.

• ialdabaoth 13 Oct 2012 22:56 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: The Parable of the Dagger

  So then the actual correct solution, per the king’s description of events, would be to ignore the inscriptions and just open both boxes?

  Since the King didn’t say that he’d be killed if he found the dagger, only that the dagger would be employed if he failed to find the key. Opening both boxes means finding the key, therefore, open both boxes.

  (bonus points for chutzpah if he opens the box with the knife first, says “cool! this will make opening the other box MUCH easier!” and then uses that to get the key out of the second box)

Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 1:10 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Jabberslythe’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  This sounds pretty similar to a lot of my problems. Using this community’s terminology, I can have all the beliefs I want, but if I have sufficiently powerful overriding aliefs, I’m screwed—since the alief-guided motivational system is actually closer to the motor control subprocessors than the belief-guided motivational system (aka “Amygdala hijack”).

  Worse, the alief-driven submodule is operating on its own utility table, which often is a nearly antiparallel eigenvector to my belief-driven submodule’s utility table. So I have two submodules each with strong impetus vectors towards/​away from various attractors within the solution domain, and… well, thrashing happens.

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 6:06 UTC

  21 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  I will use this very post to illustrate!

  You just asked, “give three concrete examples from your life.”

  My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and “whiny” in front of the pack.

  According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have “called me out”—and by failing to respond, I will lose face.

  Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy—and will again lose face.

  My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak—and I will again lose face.

  As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my “lose face” utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons the [utility*probability] sort.

  Eventually, I just say “fuck it” and come clean to you that I’m having trouble answering your question due to an error. My instinct tells me that, in so doing, you will turn this around on me and I will again lose face. I start processing how I can explain to you that I’m having trouble answering your question, building different strategies for explanation and weighing their probable utility payoffs, but then the bug pops up again (or another, similar one) and pegs one or two of the outcome utilities to +ERR.OVERFLOW or -ERR.OVERFLOW (or sometimes even ERR.DIV0), and the whole [utility*probability] sort gets poisoned again.

  Am I making any sense?

  I guess what I’m trying to say is, your question scares me, and I’m not sure if it’s a legitimate query for information or an attempt to “trip me up” socially, and THAT RIGHT THERE is the problem itself.

  So here’s to honesty, or something.

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 6:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Nisan’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  I think I have, but how could I tell if I actually had tried or not, rather than merely deluded myself into thinking that I had tried but it was too hard?

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 6:21 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  While this post is appreciated, this feels more like tactical advice than strategic. You’re ultimately correct—the tactical details theoretically are between me and my psychiatrist or therapist (although you’re also tactically correct in that I am in the US and poor, and hence have no psychiatrist or therapist).

  But the question I’m trying to pose to the group is tailored more to the specific strengths of this group—which are less about “how do I be less crazy?” and more about “how should people who are crazy adjust the processes described on this site, so that they can attempt to work them around their crazy?”

  … do you understand the distinction? Put this more metaphorically, we get that the hardware’s toast, we’ve got a field repair ticket submitted, but in the meantime can we please get a software patch? Because this is kinda mission-critical.

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 7:39 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  Not sure why you consider it a challenge.

  Because my hardware is buggy. That’s… what I was trying to get at.

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 11:58 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Sabiola’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  I will attempt to take this advice at face-value until I accumulate sufficient evidence to the contrary, and follow it to the best of my ability given aforementioned hardware limitations.

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 12:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Risto_Saarelma’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  And hence a pack-identification ritual, which I did not respond to correctly? And also a bona-fide request for information?

  Shit, my recursion map just forked. N-dimensionally.

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 21:20 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  stop calling that algorithm

  That’s actually a BIG part of what’s broken—it’s got it’s own event-handler.

  I’m actually trying to point out a more generic problem than my own personal woes, with my original post:

  Sometimes, you have processes running that simply corrupt your utility tables or your probability tables, and you don’t have a good strategy to correct.

  In Game Theory, one of the things that can be modeled is “signaling errors”—errors that, when they occur, cause you to perform a move that is different than the move you would have chosen.

  What happens when your learning algorithm has “transcription errors”—errors that, when they occur, cause your utility tables or your probability tables to dangerously corrupt?

  Worse, how do you construct a strategy to correct this process, when your “construct a strategy” process is throwing errors?

• ialdabaoth 15 Oct 2012 22:41 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  On this site, there are discussions about believing-in-belief, and how to purge it when you are merely “aping the belief” in something wrong, like religion.

  I want to believe that there are packs that do not care about rituals, but I cannot formulate an actual belief that this is true; only a “belief-in-belief” that it is true.

  How does one modify the process of purging “belief-in-belief”s that happen to actually correspond to reality? Because it seems that getting the right answer for the wrong reason is just as bad as being wrong.

Us­ing ex­ist­ing Strong AIs as case studies

• ialdabaoth 16 Oct 2012 23:02 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  Follow-up: I’m trying to sort through my memories and experiences to provide three concrete examples, and am realizing the more I try that I don’t have a sufficiently concrete definition of “primate pack-bonding ritual” to actually discretize and present three examples.

  Thank you for providing me the opportunity to realize this.

  I’m going to need quite awhile to process the implications, but when I do, I will get back to you.

• ialdabaoth 16 Oct 2012 23:06 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  Quite! It is frustrating, however, that I know I mean SOMETHING by those words; the realization that what I mean is too fuzzy to quantitatively express is creating an uncomfortable level of emotional irritation.

• ialdabaoth 17 Oct 2012 1:07 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Us­ing ex­ist­ing Strong AIs as case studies

  I would expect a bureaucracy to be capable of self-reflection and self-identity that exists independent of its constituent (human) decision-making modules. I would expect it to have a kind of “team spirit” or “internal integrity” that defines how it goes about solving problems, and which artificially constrains its decision tree from “purely optimal”, towards “maintaining (my) personal identity”.

  In other words, I would expect the bureaucracy to have an identifiable “personality”.

• ialdabaoth 17 Oct 2012 1:20 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity, Tran­shu­man­ism, and Men­tal Health

  I am 38 years old. And I agree—American schools are severely broken; regrettably, so are most American corporations. All of my social experience has either been from American schools or American corporate jobs, which often seem like more a vicious extension of the American school social environment.

• ialdabaoth 17 Oct 2012 1:26 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Us­ing ex­ist­ing Strong AIs as case studies

  Bald assertion: the fact that “team spirit” might be a mere projection in the minds of members is as irrelevant to whether it causes self-reflection as the fact that “self-awareness” might be a mere consequence of synapse patterns.

  Just because we’re more intimately familiar with what “team spirit” feels like from the inside, than we are with what having your axons wired up to someone else’s dendrites, doesn’t mean that “team spirit” isn’t part of an actual consciousness-generating process.

• ialdabaoth 17 Oct 2012 1:42 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Us­ing ex­ist­ing Strong AIs as case studies

  No, I was presenting a potential counter to the idea that “I’m not sure whether ‘team spirit’ might be a projection in the minds of members or observers”.

  It might or might not be a projection in the minds of observers, but I don’t think that it’s relevant whether it is or not to the questions I’m asking, in the same sense that “are we conscious because we have a homunculus-soul inside of us, or because neurons give rise to consciousness?” isn’t relevant to the question of “are we conscious?”

  We know we are conscious as a bald fact, and we accept that other humans are conscious whenever we reject solipsism; we happen to be finding out the manner in which we are conscious as a result of our scientific curiosity.

  But accepting an entity as “conscious” /​ “self-aware” /​ “sapient” does not require that we understand the mechanisms that generate its behavior; only that we recognize that it has behavior that fits certain criteria.