johnsonmx

Karma: 84

johnsonmx 8 Sep 2012 20:23 UTC
14 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I’m Mike Johnson. I’d estimate I come across a reference to LW from trustworthy sources every couple of weeks, and after working my way through the sequences it feels like the good outweighs the bad and it’s worth investing time into.

My background is in philosophy, evolution, and neural nets for market prediction; I presently write, consult, and am in an early-stage tech startup. Perhaps my highwater mark in community exposure has been a critique of the word Transhumanist at Accelerating Future. In the following years, my experience has been more mixed, but I appreciate the topics and tools being developed even if the community seems a tad insular. If I had to wear some established thinkers on my sleeve I’d choose Paul Graham, Lawrence Lessig, Steve Sailer, Gregory Cochran, Roy Baumeister, and Peter Thiel. (I originally had a comment here about having an irrational attraction toward humility, but on second thought, that might rule out Gregory “If I have seen farther than others, it’s because I’m knee-deep in dwarves” Cochran… Hmm.)

Cards-on-the-table, it’s my impression that

(1) Lesswrong and SIAI are doing cool things that aren’t being done anywhere else (this is not faint praise);

(2) The basic problem of FAI as stated by SIAI is genuine;

(3) SIAI is a lightning rod for trolls and cranks, which is really detrimental to the organization (the metaphor of autoimmune disease comes to mind) and seems partly its own fault;

(4) Much of the work being done by SIAI and LW will turn out to be a dead-end. Granted, this is true everywhere, but in particular I’m worried that axiomatic approaches to verifiable friendliness will prove brittle and inapplicable (I do not currently have an alternative);

(5) SIAI has an insufficient appreciation for realpolitik;

(6) SIAI and LW seem to have a certain distaste for research on biologically-inspired AGI, due in parts to safety concerns, an organizational lack of expertise in the area, and (in my view) ontological/metaphysical preference. I believe this distaste is overly limiting and also leads to incorrect conclusions.

Many of these impressions may be wrong. I aim to explore the site, learn, change my mind if I’m wrong, and hopefully contribute. I appreciate the opportunity, and I hope my unvarnished thoughts here haven’t soured my welcome. Hello!

johnsonmx 9 Sep 2012 7:14 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
Thank you.

I’d frame why I think biology matters in FAI research in terms of research applicability and toolbox dividends.

On the first reason—applicability—I think more research focus on biologically-inspired AGI would make a great deal of sense is because the first AGI might be a biologically-inspired black box, and axiom-based FAI approaches may not particularly apply to such. I realize I’m (probably annoyingly) retreading old ground here with regard to which method will/should win the AGI race, but SIAI’s assumptions seem to run counter to the assumptions of the greater community of AGI researchers, and it’s not obvious to me the focus on math and axiology isn’t a simple case of SIAI’s personnel backgrounds being stacked that way. ‘If all you have is a hammer,’ etc. (I should reiterate that I don’t have any alternatives to offer here and am grateful for all FAI research.)

The second reason I think biology matters in FAI research—toolbox dividends—might take a little bit more unpacking. (Forgive me some imprecision, this is a complex topic.)

I think it’s probable that anything complex enough to deserve the term AGI would have something akin to qualia/emotions, unless it was specifically designed not to. (Corollary: we don’t know enough about what Chalmers calls “psychophysical laws” to design something that lacks qualia/emotions.) I think it’s quite possible that an AGI’s emotions, if we did not control for their effects, could produce complex feedback which would influence its behavior in unplanned ways (though perfectly consistent with / determined by its programming/circuitry). I’m not arguing for a ghost in the machine, just that the assumptions which allow us to ignore what an AGI ‘feels’ when modeling its behavior may prove to be leaky abstractions in the face of the complexity of real AGI.

Axiological approaches to FAI don’t seem to concern themselves with psychophysical laws (modeling what an AGI ‘feels’), whereas such modeling seems a core tool for biological approaches to FAI. I find myself thinking being able to model what an AGI ‘feels’ will be critically important for FAI research, even if it’s axiom/math-based, because we’ll be operating at levels of complexity where the abstractions we use to ignore this stuff can’t help but leak. (There are other toolbox-based arguments for bringing biology into FAI research which are a lot simpler than this one, but this is on the top of my list.)

johnsonmx 9 Sep 2012 18:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I definitely agree with your first paragraph (and thanks for the tip on SIAI vs SI). The only caveat is if evolved/brain-based/black-box AGI is several orders of magnitude easier to create than an AGI with a more modular architecture where SI’s safety research can apply, that’s a big problem.

On the second point, what you say makes sense. Particularly, AGI feelings haven’t been completely ignored at LW; if they prove important, SI doesn’t have anything against incorporating them into safety research; and AGI feelings may not be material to AGI behavior anyway.

However, I still do think that an ability to tell what feelings an AGI is experiencing—or more generally, being able to look at any physical process and being able to derive what emotions/qualia are associated with it—will be critical. I call this a “qualia translation function”.

Leaving aside the ethical imperatives to create such a function (which I do find significant—the suffering of not-quite-good-enough-to-be-sane AGI prototypes will probably be massive as we move forward, and it behooves us to know when we’re causing pain), I’m quite concerned about leaky reward signal abstractions.

I imagine a hugely-complex AGI executing some hugely-complex decision process. The decision code has been checked by Very Smart People and it looks solid. However, it just so happens that whenever it creates a cat it (internally, privately) feels the equivalent of an orgasm. Will that influence/leak into its behavior? Not if it’s coded perfectly. However, if something of its complexity was created by humans, I think the chance of it being coded perfectly is Vanishingly small. We might end up with more cats than we bargained for. Our models of the safety and stability dynamic of an AGI should probably take its emotions/qualia into account. So I think all FAI programmes really would benefit from such a “qualia translation function”.

johnsonmx 9 Sep 2012 20:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I don’t think an AGI failing to behave in the anticipated manner due to its qualia* (orgasms during cat creation, in this case) is a special or mysterious problem, one that must be treated differently than errors in its reasoning, prediction ability, perception, or any aspect of its cognition. On second thought, I do think it’s different: it actually seems less important than errors in any of those systems. (And if an AGI is Provably Safe, it’s safe—we need only worry about its qualia from an ethical perspective.) My original comment here is (I believe) fairly mild: I do think the issue of qualia will involve a practical class of problems for FAI, and knowing how to frame and address them could benefit from more cross-pollination from more biology-focused theorists such as Chalmers and Tononi. And somewhat more boldly, a “qualia translation function” would be of use to all FAI projects.

*I share your qualms about the word, but there really are few alternatives with less baggage, unfortunately.

johnsonmx 9 Sep 2012 20:40 UTC
0 points
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I’d say nobody does! But a little less glibly, I personally think the most productive strategy in biologically-inspired AGI would be to focus on tools that help quantify the unquantified. There are substantial side-benefits to such a focus on tools: what you make can be of shorter-term practical significance, and you can test your assumptions.

Chalmers and Tononi have done some interesting work, and Tononi’s work has also had real-world uses. I don’t see Tononi’s work as immediately applicable to FAI research but I think it’ll evolve into something that will apply.

It’s my hope that the (hypothetical, but clearly possible) “qualia translation function” I mention above could be a tool that FAI researchers could use and benefit from regardless of their particular architecture.

johnsonmx 9 Sep 2012 21:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I think it’s possible that any leaky abstraction used in designing FAI might doom the enterprise. But if that’s not true, we can use this “qualia translation function” to make a leaky abstractions in a FAI context a tiny bit safer(?).

E.g., if we’re designing an AGI with a reward signal, my intuition is we should either (1) align our reward signal with actual pleasurable qualia (so if our abstractions leak it matters less, since the AGI is drawn to maximize what we want it to maximize anyway); (2) implement the AGI in an architecture/substrate which produces as little emotional qualia as possible, so there’s little incentive for behavior to drift.

My thoughts here are terribly laden with assumptions and could be complete crap. Just thinking out loud.

johnsonmx 24 Sep 2012 2:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: The Apocalypse Bet
I would suggest that a breakdown in social order (without a singularity occurring) is another scenario that might be roughly as probable as the others you mentioned. In such case, it would seem the manner by which you invest in equities would matter. I.e.., the value of most abstract investments may vanish, and the value of equities held in trust by various institutions (or counterparties) may also vanish.

johnsonmx 30 Sep 2012 22:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Awww, a Zebra
I think the first 3/4ths are very well stated. I couldn’t agree more.

On the last bit, my personal intuition is there are plenty of things people can do for FAI research beyond raising money. Moreover, such intangibles are likely often more important to the cause of FAI than cash.

(Also, the argument that “some of those willing and able able to do FAI research are spending their time raising money, right now, for lack of other ways to get money” may be undermined by the paragraph above it; e.g., I’d rather be thinking about FAI than raising money for others to think about FAI.)

johnsonmx 30 Sep 2012 22:20 UTC
5 points
in reply to: rkyeun’s comment on: Awww, a Zebra
You probably get a much richer sensation of zebra-ness under some conditions (being there, touching the zebra, smelling the zebra, seeing it move) than just seeing a picture of one on flickr. Experiencing zebra-ness isn’t a binary value, and some types of exposures will tend to commandeer many more neurons than others.

johnsonmx 24 Oct 2012 22:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: joaolkf’s comment on: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn’t a strong argument against Dennett’s hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.

I think this argument could be analogously phrased: “The reason why exercise makes us feel good can’t be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise.” Seems wrong when we put it that way.

johnsonmx 28 Oct 2012 19:59 UTC
0 points
on: Causal Reference
We can speak of different tiers of stuff, interacting (or not) through unknown causal mechanisms, but Occam’s Razor would suggest these different tiers of stuff might actually be fundamentally the same ‘stuff’, just somehow viewed from different angles. (This would in turn suggest some form of panpsychism.)

In short, I have trouble seeing how we make these metaphysical hierarchizations pay rent. Perhaps that’s your point also.

johnsonmx 6 Dec 2012 23:35 UTC
6 points
on: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
Another view of Philosophy, which I believe Russell also subscribed to (but I can’t seem to find a reference for presently) is that philosophy was the ‘mother discipline’. It was generative. You developed your branch of Philosophy until you got your ontology and methodology sorted out, and then you stopped calling what you were doing philosophy. (This has the amusing side-effect of making anything philosophers say wrong by definition—sometimes useful, but always wrong.)

The Natural Sciences, Psychology, Logic, Mathematics, Linguistics—they all got their start this way.

That’s how Philosophy used to work. Nowadays, I think the people who can do that type of “mucking around with complex questions of ontology and methodology” thinking have largely moved on to other disciplines. If we define Philosophy as this messily complex discipline-generating process, it no longer happens in the discipline we call “Philosophy”.[1]

That said—while I would personally enjoy the “intro to philosophy” syllabus Luke proposes, I think it’s a stretch to label the course a philosophy course, much less [The One And True] Intro To Philosophy. It’s cool and a great idea, but the continuity with many models (be they aspirational or descriptive) of Philosophy is fairly tenuous, and without a lot of continuity I think it’d be hard to push into established departments.[2]

If we’re speaking more modestly, that philosophers should be steeped in modern science and logic and that when they’re not, what they do is often worse than useless, I can certainly agree with that.

[1] E.g., Axiology.

[2] Why not call it “introduction to scientific epistemology”?

johnsonmx 15 Jan 2013 7:30 UTC
0 points
on: How to Be Happy
I’d just like to say thanks for posting this. Cogent, researched, cheerful, and helpful.

johnsonmx 11 May 2013 4:16 UTC
9 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
Tononi’s Phi theory seems somewhat relevant, though it only addresses consciousness and explicitly avoids valence. It does seem like something that could be adapted toward answering questions like this (somehow).

Current models of emotion based on brain architecture and neurochemicals (e.g., EMOCON) are relevant, though ultimately correlative and thus not applicable outside of the human brain.

There’s also a great deal of quality literature about specific correlates of pain and happiness- e.g., Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being and An fMRI-Based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain.

In short, I’ve found plenty of plenty of research around the topic but nothing that’s particularly predictive outside of very constrained contexts. No generalized theories. There’s some interesting stuff happening around panpsychism (e.g., see these two pieces by Chalmers) but they focus on consciousness, not valence.

My intuition is valence will be encoded within frequency dynamics in a way that will be very amiable to mathematical analysis, but right now I’m seeking clarity about how to speak about the problem.

Edit: I’ll add this to the bottom of the post

johnsonmx 11 May 2013 5:46 UTC
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
We seem to be talking past each other, to some degree. To clarify, my six questions were chosen to illustrate how much we don’t know about the mathematics and science behind psychological valence. I tried to have all of them point at this concept, each from a slightly different angle. Perhaps you interpret them as ‘disguised queries’ because you thought my intent was other than to seek clarity about how to speak about this general topic of valence, particularly outside the narrow context of the human brain?

I am not trying to “Learn how to manipulate people? Learn how to torture? Become a pleasure delivery professional?”—my focus is entirely on speaking about psychological valence in clear terms, illustrating that there’s much we don’t know, and make the case that there are empirical questions about the topic that don’t seem to have empirical answers. Also, in very tentative terms, to express the personal belief that a clear theory on exactly what states of affairs are necessary and sufficient for creating pain and pleasure may have some applicability to FAI/AGI topics (e.g., under what conditions can simulated people feel pain?).

I did not find ‘necessary and sufficient’, or any permutation thereof, in the human’s guide to words. Perhaps you’d care to explicate why you didn’t care for my usage?

Re: (3) and (4), I’m certain we’re not speaking of the same things. I recall Eliezer writing about how creating pleasure isn’t as simple as defining a ‘pleasure variable’ and incrementing it:

int pleasure = 5; pleasure++

I can do that on my macbook pro; it does not create pleasure.

There exist AGIs in design space that have the capacity to (viscerally) feel pleasure, much like humans do. There exist AGIs in design space with a well-defined reward channel. I’m asking: what principles can we use to construct an AGI which feels visceral pleasure when (and only when) its reward channel is activated? If you believe this is trivial, we are not communicating successfully.

I’m afraid we may not share common understandings (or vocabulary) on many important concepts, and I’m picking up a rather aggressive and patronizing vibe, but a genuine thanks for taking the time to type out your comment, and especially the intent in linking that which you linked. I will try not to violate too many community norms here.

johnsonmx 11 May 2013 19:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
It does, and thank you for the reply.

How should we define “pleasure”? -- A difficult question. As you mention, it is a cloud of concepts, not a single one. It’s even more difficult because there appears to be precious little driving the standardization of the word—e.g., if I use the word ‘chair’ differently than others, it’s obvious, people will correct me, and our usages will converge. If I use the word ‘pleasure’ differently than others, that won’t be as obvious because it’s a subjective experience, and there’ll be much less convergence toward a common usage.

But I’d say that in practice, these problems tend to work themselves out, at least enough for my purposes. E.g., if I say “think of pure, unadulterated agony” to a room of 10000 people, I think the vast majority would arrive at fairly similar thoughts. Likewise, if I asked 10000 people to think of “pure, unadulterated bliss… the happiest moment in your life”, I think most would arrive at thoughts which share certain attributes, and none (<.01%) would invert answers to these two questions.

I find this “we know it when we see it” definitional approach completely philosophically unsatisfying, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes, which is to find mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘pleasurable’, and different mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘painful’.

I see what you mean by “the meaning of a word is hardly ever accurately given by any necessary-and-sufficient conditions that can be stated explicitly in a reasonable amount of space, because that just isn’t the way human minds work.” On the other hand, all words are imperfect and we need to talk about this somehow. How about this: (1) what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?

johnsonmx 12 May 2013 2:06 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
I understand the type of criticism generally, but could you say more about this specific case?

I’m curious if the objection stems from some mismatch of abstraction layers, or just the habit of not speaking about certain topics in certain terms.

johnsonmx 12 May 2013 7:19 UTC
4 points
in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
On the first point—what you say is clearly right, but is also consistent with the notion that there are certain mathematical commonalities which hold across the various ‘flavors’ of pleasure, and different mathematical commonalities in pain states.

Squashing the richness of human emotion into a continuum of positive and negative valence sounds like a horribly lossy transform, but I’m okay with that in this context. I expect that experiences at the ‘pleasure’ end of the continuum will have important commonalities ‘under the hood’ with others at that same end. And those commonalities will vanish, and very possibly invert, when we look at the ‘agony’ end.

On the second point, the evidence points to physical and emotional pain sharing many of the same circuits, and indeed, drugs which reduce physical pain also reduce emotional pain. On the other hand, as you might expect, there are some differences in the precise circuitry each type of pain activates. But by and large, the differences are subtle.

johnsonmx 27 Feb 2014 17:44 UTC
3 points
on: Innovation’s low-hanging fruits: on the demand or supply sides?
Very interesting. No objections to your main points, but a few comments on side points and conclusions:
- You say “it’s not like we know of a specific technological innovation that would solve poverty, if only someone would develop it.” I would identify Greg Cochran’s ‘genetic spellcheck’ as such a tech, along with what other people are suggesting. http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/
- “We might have exhausted the low-hanging fruits in our desires.” I think this is right, but it’s complicated. I think the Robin Hanson way to frame this could be the following: innovation has been this rising technological tide that has made it a lot easier to meet most of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But now most of the ‘gains’ from innovation are made in positional goods and services, which aren’t the same sort of gains as, say, flush toilets, so they don’t feel “real”.

johnsonmx 17 Feb 2015 23:41 UTC
0 points
in reply to: David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet)’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
Thank you- that paper is extremely relevant and I appreciate the link.

To reiterate, mostly for my own benefit: As Tegmark says- whether we’re talking about a foundation to ethics, or a “final goal”, or we simply want to not be confused about what’s worth wanting, we need to figure out what makes one brain-state innately preferable to another, and ultimately this boils down to arrangements of particles. But what makes one arrangement of particles superior to another? (This is not to give credence to moral relativism- I do believe this has a crisp answer).