anyone going to the AAAI ethics/safety conf?
IlyaShpitser
Karma: 4,723
One of my favorite examples of a smart person being confused about something is ET Jaynes being confused about Bell inequalities.
Smart people are confused all the time, even (perhaps especially) in their area.
You are really confused about statistics and learning, and possibly also about formal languages in theoretical CS. I neither want nor have time to get into this with you, just wanted to point this out for your potential benefit.
http://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html
(This is not “Yudkowskian Rationality” though.)
Dear Christian, please don’t pull rank on my behalf. I don’t think this is productive to do, and I don’t want to bring anyone else into this.
well, using philosophy i did that hard part and figured out which ones are good.
Who are you talking to? To the audience? To the fourth wall?
Surely not to me, I have no sway here.
Your sockpuppet: “There is a shortage of good philosophers.”
Me: “Here is a good philosophy book.”
You: “That’s not philosophy.”
Also you: “How is Ayn Rand so right about everything.”
Also you: “I don’t like mainstream stuff.”
Also you: “Have you heard that I exchanged some correspondence with DAVID DEUTSCH!?”
Also you: “What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong? What if you are, hypothetically, wrong?” x1000
Part of rationality is properly dealing with people-as-they-are. What your approach to spreading your good word among people-as-they-are led to is them laughing at you.
It is possible that they are laughing at you because they are some combination of stupid and insane. But then it’s on you to first issue a patch into their brain that will be accepted, such that they can parse your proselytizing, before proceeding to proselytize.
This is what Yudkowsky sort of tried to do.
How you read to me is a smart young adult who has the same problem Yudkowsky has (although Yudkowsky is not so young anymore) -- someone who has been the smartest person in the room for too long in their intellectual development, and lacks the sense of scale and context to see where he stands in the larger intellectual community.
Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines, for starters. They have a nice book. There are other folks in that department who are working on converting mathematical foundations into an axiomatic system where proofs can be checked by a computer.
I am not going to do leg work for you, and your minions, however. You are the ones claiming there are no good philosophers. It’s your responsibility to read, and keep your mouth shut if you are not sure about something.
It’s not my responsibility to teach you.
I know lots of folks at CMU who are good.
Jerzy Neyman gets credit for lots of things, but in particular in my neck of the woods for inventing the potential outcome notation. This is the notation for “if the first object had not been, the second never had existed” in Hume’s definition of causation.
Oof.
Hi, Hume’s constant conjunction stuff I think has nothing to do with free lunch theorems in ML (?please correct me if I am missing something?), and has to do with defining causation, an issue Hume was worried about all his life (and ultimately solved, imo, via his counterfactual definition of causality that we all use today, by way of Neyman, Rubin, Pearl, etc.).
Sorry, did you say weird/esoteric technology?
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
I guess the way I would slice disciplines is like this:
(a) Makes empirical claims (credences change with evidence, or falsifiable, or [however you want to define this]), or has universally agreed rules for telling good from bad (mathematics, theoretical parts of fields, etc.)
(b) Does not make empirical claims, and has no universally agreed rules for telling good from bad.
Some philosophy is in (a) and some in (b). Most statistics is in (a), for example.
Re: (a), most folks would need a lot of study to evaluate claims, typically at the graduate level. So the best thing to do is get the lay of the land by asking experts. Experts may disagree, of course, which is valuable information.
Re: (b), why are we talking about (b) at all?
Yeah, credentials are a poor way of judging things.
They are not, though. It’s standard “what LW calls ‘Bayes’ and what I call ‘reasoning under uncertainty’”—you condition on things associated with the outcome, since those things carry information. Outcome (O) -- having a clue, thing (C) -- credential. p(O | C) > p(O), so your credence in O should be computed after conditioning on C, on pain of irrationality. Specifically, the type of irrationality where you leave information on the table.
You might say “oh, I heard about how argument screens authority.” This is actually not true though, even by “LW Bayesian” lights, because you can never be certain you got the argument right (or the presumed authority got the argument right). It also assumes there are no other paths from C to O except through argument, which isn’t true.
It is a foundational thing you do when reasoning under uncertainty to condition on everything that carries information. The more informative the thing, the worse it is not to condition on it. This is not a novel crazy thing I am proposing, this is bog standard.
The way the treatment of credentialism seems to work in practice on LW is a reflexive rejection of “experts” writ large, except for an explicitly enumerated subset (perhaps ones EY or other “recognized community thought leaders” liked).
This is a part of community DNA, starting with EY’s stuff, and Luke’s “philosophy is a diseased discipline.”
That is crazy.
Throwing books at someone is generally known as “courtier’s reply”.
The issue here also is Brandolini’s law:
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
The problem with the “courtier’s reply” is you could always appeal to it, even if Scott Aaronson is trying to explain something about quantum mechanics to you, and you need some background (found in references 1, 2, and 3) to understand what he is saying.
There is a type 1 / type 2 error tradeoff here. Ignoring legit expert advice is bad, but being cowed by an idiot throwing references at you is also bad.
As usual with tradeoffs like these, one has to decide on a policy that is willing to tolerate some of one type of error to keep the error you care about to some desired level.
I think a good heuristic for deciding who is an expert and who is an idiot with references is credentialism. But credentialism has a bad brand here, due to a “love affair with amateurism” LW has. One of the consequences of this love affair is a lot of folks here make the above trade off badly (in particular they ignore legit advice to read way too frequently).
Everything you say in your post, about Popper issues, demonstrates huge ignorance.
Do you even know the name of Popper’s philosophy?
It seems that you’re completely out of your depth.
The reason you have trouble applying reason is b/c u understand reason badly.
I have a thought. Since you are a philosopher, would your valuable time not be better spent doing activities philosophers engage in, such as writing papers for philosophy journals?
Rather than arguing with people on the internet?
If you are here because you are fishing for people to go join your forum, may I suggest that this place is an inefficient use of your time? It’s mostly dead now, and will be fully dead soon.
I don’t think you and I have much to talk about.
Some references to lesswrong, and value alignment there.