Kawoomba

Karma: 5,157

Kawoomba 3 Jun 2012 16:52 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: This post is for sacrificing my credibility!
That makes sense from a simulationist perspective, you’re trying to diminish your impact within the simulation, getting away as far as possible from being a nexus.

Why?

So that resources are allocated away from you, if you take the simulation to be a dynamic—if mindless—process?

Or because you are afraid you’re otherwise going to … draw attention to yourself? From … your simulators? You might call them god, or maybe they might not like that.

You’d have to strike a careful balance, become too insignificant and you might just be demoted to NPC status, being down NICE’ed, so to speak.

Kawoomba 7 Jun 2012 20:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Open Problems Related to Solomonoff Induction
Maybe we should just work off of the assumption that there’s no relevant uncomputable physics, because if there were, we should probably give up our endeavors anyways, unless we knew how to model an uncomputable reality within a computable AGI-program. As Schmidhuber ever so aptly wrote on his homepage:

The distribution should at least be computable in the limit. That is, there should exist a program that takes as an input any beginning of the universe history as well as a next possible event, and produces an output converging on the conditional probability of the event. If there were no such program we could not even formally specify our universe, leave alone writing reasonable scientific papers about it.

Kawoomba 13 Jun 2012 17:53 UTC
7 points
on: Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers
Finally, a palpable sign of success! I’m so happy that you guys are finally getting your message across :o)

Kawoomba 24 Jun 2012 18:21 UTC
2 points
in reply to: tenlier’s comment on: [Link] RSA Animate: extremely entertaining LW-relevant cartoons

The other material is either empty (minus humor) or simply correction of these sorts of trivial errors.

You probably meant to say:

The other material is either empty (minus humor) or simply a correction of these sorts of trivial errors.

You’re welcome!

Kawoomba 28 Jun 2012 18:34 UTC
18 points
0
on: Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees

This method of alternating moves in a branching tree matches both our intuitive thought processes during a chess game (“Okay, if I do this, then Black’s going to do this, and then I’d do this, and then...”) and the foundation of the algorithms chess computers like Deep Blue use.

Could you include a reference to alpha-beta pruning, since that is precisely what you’re describing? Some readers may be more familiar with that subject domain and appreciate explicitly linking game theory to an established search algorithm.

game theorists call this a gnash equilibrium

Did you mean “Nash equilibrium”? If it was a deliberate pun, you might want to indicate it for those who are looking up new concepts, this being an introductory series.

Kawoomba 29 Jun 2012 10:06 UTC
15 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees

Holy crap… This must be the most shocking thing I’ve seen in a while.

opus bestiae.

How poetic. Well said.

Kawoomba 29 Jun 2012 10:16 UTC
31 points
on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
The actual equilibria can seem truly mind boggling at first glance. Consider this famous example:

There are 5 rational pirates, A, B, C, D and E. They find 100 gold coins. They must decide how to distribute them.

The pirates have a strict order of seniority: A is superior to B, who is superior to C, who is superior to D, who is superior to E.

The pirate world’s rules of distrubution are thus: that the most senior pirate should propose a distribution of coins. The pirates, including the proposer, then vote on whether to accept this distribution. If the proposed allocation is approved by a majority or a tie vote, it happens. If not, the proposer is thrown overboard from the pirate ship and dies, and the next most senior pirate makes a new proposal to begin the system again.

Pirates base their decisions on three factors.

1) Each pirate wants to survive.

2) Given survival, each pirate wants to maximize the number of gold coins he receives.

3) Each pirate would prefer to throw another overboard, if all other results would otherwise be equal.

The pirates do not trust each other, and will neither make nor honor any promises between pirates apart from the main proposal.

It might be expected intuitively that Pirate A will have to allocate little if any to himself for fear of being voted off so that there are fewer pirates to share between. However, this is quite far from the theoretical result.

Which is …

...

...

A: 98 coins

B: 0 coins

C: 1 coin

D: 0 coins

E: 1 coin

Proof is in the article linked. Amazing, isn’t it? :-)

Kawoomba 29 Jun 2012 11:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points

I see 1 rational pirate and 4 utter morons who have paid so much attention to math that they forgot to actually win. I mean, if they were “less rational”, they’d be inclined to get outraged over the unfairness, and throw A overboard, right? And A would expect it, so he’d give them a better deal. “Rational” is not “walking away with less money”.

Well if they chose to decline A’s proposal for whatever reason, that would put C and E in a worse position than if they didn’t.

Outrage over being treated unfairly doesn’t come into one time prisoner’s dilemmata. Each pirate wants to survive with the maximum amount of gold, and C and E would get nothing if they didn’t vote for A’s proposal.

Hence, if C and E were outraged as you suggest, and voted against A’s proposal, they would walk away with even less. One gold coin buys you infinitely more blackjack and hookers than zero gold coins.

Kawoomba 29 Jun 2012 12:08 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
Heh, if I can’t convince you with “any possible math and logic”, let me try with this great video (also that one) that shows the consequences of “reasoning via outrage”.

Kawoomba 29 Jun 2012 14:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Call for volunteers: Publishing the Sequences

we also have a regular publications

Pluralisation error, plz fix typograhpy.

Kawoomba 30 Jun 2012 18:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Alex Flint’s comment on: Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees
True that. I’m just not aware of many people using the original minimax version, while alpha-beta pruning might ring a bell and uses a similar—albeit, as you say, more complexity-cost optimized—methodology.

Kawoomba 2 Jul 2012 18:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Wisdom of the Crowd: not always so wise

Individual components of that estimation may be subject to bias in a given direction, but over enough sources, over enough people with many different estimation criteria, I wouldn’t trust there to necessarily be a demonstrable bias over repeated experiments without deliberate intervention on the part of the experimenter

This can be seen simply as a version of the central limit theorem: Any sum or average of samples from ANY distribution (with finite mean and standard deviation) will be approximately normally distributed (Gaussian) with the approximation better for larger samples. Neato!

Kawoomba 5 Jul 2012 22:08 UTC
2 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists—Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback]
Based mostly on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, it does delay verbal speech somewhat. Probably because it reduces the frustration associated with not communicating one’s needs, and thus the incentive of learning speech.

Interestingly, the kids probably switch to speech once they cannot express their wishes and desires using gestures and signing anymore—not because they are incapable of adapting more complex rules for signing, but because their parents typically wouldn’t understand them anymore. Those complex wishes that necessitate complex signing rules—or speech—develop at a later time, thus delaying speech if signing is available.

Kawoomba 8 Jul 2012 18:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists—Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback]
Not quite. The difference is that bilingualism (which also has a host of other cognitive advantages and has been associated with e.g. being a protective factor against dementia) will lead to both languages being delayed, while sign language will develop even earlier than spoken language, and then delay the appropriation of spoken language.

Also, not any sort of a communication should be categorized as “language” as far as our brains are concerned, we have specialized areas associated e.g. with coordinating spoken speech and mapping concepts to speech, as opposed to hand motions (i.e. Broca’s area).

Kawoomba 9 Jul 2012 20:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: private_messaging’s comment on: An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
Why are his comments in this thread getting downvoted? They show a quite nuanced understanding of S. I. and raise interesting points.

If there is no requirement for the observed data to be at the start of the string that is output, then the simplest program that explains absolutely everything that is computable is this:

Print random digits. (This was actually a tongue-in-cheek Schmidhuber result from the early 2000s, IIRC. The easiest program whose output will assuredly contain our universe somewhere along the line.)

Luckily there is such a requirement, and I don’t know how MWI could possibly fit into it. This unacknowledged tension has long bugged me, and I’m glad someone else is aware of it.
What links here?
- Kawoomba's comment on A cynical explanation for why rationalists worry about FAI by aaronsw (8 Aug 2012 10:02 UTC; 2 points)

Kawoomba 12 Jul 2012 22:19 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: Rational Ethics
I’d challenge that belief. Let the karma count on this comment be my evidence in my favor, or in yours!

Kawoomba 13 Jul 2012 19:54 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: private_messaging’s comment on: An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
As long as our best model of the laws of physics includes the concept of Planck time (Planck length), doesn’t that mean that time (space) is discrete and that any interval of time (length of space) can be viewed as an integer number of Planck times (Planck lengths)?

Kawoomba 22 Jul 2012 20:44 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Benedict’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)
Hi Benedict!

Bad news first: You will not be able to defend yourself. This is not because you’re 18, it’s not because you can’t present your arguments in a spectacular fashion.

It is because noone will care about your arguments, they will wait for the first chance to bring some generic counter-argument, probably centering on how they will be there for you in your time of implied juvenile struggle, further belittling you.

And—how aggravating—this is actually done in part to protect you, to protect the relationship with your dad. With the kind of social capital, pride and identity that’s on the line for your father, there is no way he could acknowledge you being right—he’d have to admit to himself that he’s a phony in his own eyes, and a failure as a parent and pastor in the eyes of his peers.

To him it may be like you telling him he wasted his life on an imaginary construct, while for you it’s about him respecting your intellectual reasoning.

Maybe the rational thing to do is not strive for something that’s practically unattainable—being respected as an atheist on the basis of your atheist arguments—but instead focus on keeping the relationship with your parent intact while you go do your own thing anyways. Mutual respect of one’s choices is great in a family, but it may not be a realistic goal given your situation, at least in respect to discussing god.

Good news: While this is such a defining issue for your father, is it a defining issue for you to tell your father publicly your new stance? How hard/easy would it be to let him continue with his shtick, retain the relationship, and still live your life as an open atheist for all intents and purposes—other than when with your family, where you can always act with mild disinterest?

Rational in this forum is mostly construed as “the stuff that works in optimising your terminal values”. It is possible for you to be the “bigger man” here, depending on which of the above you value higher. But make no mistake—I doubt that you’ll change anyone’s opinion on god regardless.

Kawoomba 26 Jul 2012 11:46 UTC
0 points
on: A Description of Entropy
Here’s a YouTube video of Roger Penrose explaining entropy in terms of phase space, in 9 minutes. Time well spent!

Kawoomba 26 Jul 2012 16:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: private_messaging’s comment on: [LINK] Nick Szabo: Beware Pascal’s Scams
Thank you for linking to Hutter’s talk, what an astounding mind. What a small world it is, I remember being impressed by him when I sat through his courses back at grad school, little knowing how much of my future perspective on map-building would eventually depend on his and his colleagues’ school of thought.

That presentation should be mandatory reading. In all Everett branches.