Kenoubi

Karma: 330

Kenoubi 12 Mar 2011 4:16 UTC
2 points
on: A Thought Experiment on Pain as a Moral Disvalue
All of these are analogous to the AI-Box experiment; I expect I’d just “lose” again, so I’d decline to play the second time. (I’m not sure it would even have to do anything fundamentally different the second time. I accept the intuition pump here, but it’s hard to imagine my epistemic state after finding out I had been so totally fooled.)

Kenoubi 18 Mar 2011 4:26 UTC
0 points
on: Admit your ignorance

if we want to impress a potential employer we shouldn’t admit ignorance (unless the alternative makes us look more ignorant)

Even in a job interview, admitting ignorance of a minor point shows a willingness to admit that one is fallible, which is the first step towards correcting a problem. (This actually happened, and I’m not sure it hurt at all—certainly not as much as trying to fake not being ignorant would have, in that particular situation.) Maybe this could be included under a very broad umbrella of “making oneself look even more ignorant”—ignorant of a metacognitive skill?

Kenoubi 30 Mar 2011 12:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Mental Metadata

More generally, (and this might be worth another post) people are pretty inflexible about how much detail they give, and have trouble going to a more detailed style or a more summarized style than their usual.

I naturally give way more detail (especially qualifiers) than most people want in most situations. I can correct it somewhat in email (by revising; I can’t omit unneeded detail without writing it out to see which parts are unneeded) although it takes much longer than just giving the detail. In a realtime conversation I’m not sure, although it’s probably less bad because of the tighter feedback loop.

It sounds like you’re saying this is a general phenomenon; do you have a cite, or is this based on personal experience?

Interestingly, I have to force myself to write out descriptive details when writing a narrative. Which means it’s the kind of information, not just the amount. So maybe it’s more linked to this article than you seem to be thinking?

Kenoubi 1 Apr 2011 16:11 UTC
1 point
on: An Anchoring Experiment
Err, I think I screwed this up. I thought if you were in group I for the first part, you’d also be in group I for the second part. I still think this would be more intuitive (just reverse the questions in part 2).

Kenoubi 1 Apr 2011 20:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: An Anchoring Experiment
Sure, I wasn’t suggesting you should. Given the current situation, I’d change

The second part is completely analogical to the first one, only with a different question. If you have participated in the first part within the group I, take part in the group II for the second part, and vice versa.

to

Use the opposite group in the second part, which is completely analogical to the first one, only with a different question.

I probably would have tried to use bulleted lists and/or bold to make the text more scannable overall. But maybe my error was atypical and all this isn’t necessary.

Kenoubi 4 Apr 2011 15:55 UTC
5 points
in reply to: beriukay’s comment on: Recent de-convert saturated by religious community; advice?

You might find that the sense of bother never quite goes away. In my experience, there are some (bad) arguments which will always feel right, and some great arguments which will always feel wrong.

I get this with money. “Money is just funny looking paper. Why will people accept it in exchange for anything in this vast cornucopia of real goods and services?” I know the reasons, and one argument for it is even intuitive: “Don’t I accept money as payment? Do I have any reason to think I’m unusual in this regard?” But every time I think about it anew, the “funny looking paper” argument seems convincing and I have to replay the counterarguments to get myself to disagree with it.

Kenoubi 5 Apr 2011 17:21 UTC
0 points
on: “How to Have a Rational Discussion”
The criterion “Can you envision anything that will change your mind on this topic?” bothers me. I was in a discussion with a religious person and he asked me this, and I admitted that I really couldn’t come up with any set of evidence that would make me accept the Judeochristian god, as opposed to alternate hypotheses like a trickster god making me think it’s the Judeochristian god for fun, I’m hallucinating, or I’m insane. This may mean it wasn’t a “rational discussion” for some definition thereof, but it’s hard for me to see how I did anything wrong.

Kenoubi 5 Apr 2011 22:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: “How to Have a Rational Discussion”
Okay, I guess that does fit the literal wording given. I was thinking that directly changing my mind wouldn’t really count as “evidence”.

This seems sort of like a general-purpose bypass for that step, though; if something like God exists, it could presumably reach into my brain and change any of my beliefs. It doesn’t seem like this is enough to support a rational discussion.

Kenoubi 5 Apr 2011 22:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: “How to Have a Rational Discussion”
Yes. “The Judeochristian God did it” is a ridiculously specific explanation. “Something weird that would be characteristic of the Judeochristian God happened” is not remotely close to enough evidence.

Kenoubi 7 Apr 2011 23:59 UTC
8 points
on: Failure Modes sometimes correspond to Game Mechanics
If you’re going to refer to Paul Graham’s essay, you should link to it.

Kenoubi 20 Apr 2011 15:31 UTC
0 points
on: Pittsburgh Less Wrong meet-up April 22 7pm
Damn, I’m moving (back) to Pittsburgh this week, but I won’t quite be there by then. Although my schedule is kind of insane for the next month, so maybe not worth accommodating. I probably could have made any weeknight April 25-29, though.

Kenoubi 25 Jan 2012 23:14 UTC
0 points
in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: Meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 3!
Thanks, fixed.

Kenoubi 19 Feb 2012 17:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Dmytry’s comment on: Brain structure and the halo effect
If the brain avoided collisions in the way you describe, it would utterly fail at its function. The brain must be able to access the information it has about similar situations to make judgments and decisions about the current one. Looking up that information must make use of some data in common between the current situation and whatever representation the brain has of other similar situations, or there would be no way to locate or identify that information.

So at the description level of “the brain is a computing device”, this seems plausible, but considering what the brain actually does, I don’t see how it could work. It could use a hybrid of hash functions and structural similarities at different levels, and maybe it does. But the fact that we can confuse two different people who have some attributes in common, or even whose names are similar but not the same, seems like evidence against that to me.

Kenoubi 20 Feb 2012 16:30 UTC
2 points
on: Brain structure and the halo effect

I think that ″evolved faulty thinking processes″ is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which ‘cannot’ be affected by evolution.

The structure can be affected by evolution, it’s just too hard (takes too many coordinated mutations) to get to a structure that actually works better. I think you recognize this by your use of scare quotes, but you would be better off stating it explicitly. This is the flip side of the arguments I think you’re alluding to, that the faulty thinking was actually beneficial in the EEA.

There must be an evolutionary explanation for the properties of the brain, but that doesn’t mean we need to actually figure out that evolutionary explanation to understand the current behavior. Just like there must be an explanation in terms of physics, but trying to analyze every particle will clearly get us nowhere.

In fact, if you can find an explanation of a phenomenon in terms of current brain structure, I think that screens off evolutionary explanations as mere history (as long as you’ve really verified that the structure exists and explains the phenomenon).

I do think we’re getting sidetracked by your halo effect example, though—it might be useful to give three or four examples to avoid this (although if each one has a different explanation, that might substantially increase the effort of presenting your idea).

Kenoubi 8 Mar 2012 19:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: Meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 4!
Leaving for what / where? Will you be back?

Kenoubi 24 Mar 2012 21:50 UTC
1 point
on: Decision Theories: A Semi-Formal Analysis, Part I
Your self-fulfilling prophecy example works for the iteration of the for loop (described in “For each xi, assume the output of X is xi, and try to deduce the expected value of U.”) in which the output is assumed to be a, but for the iteration in which the output is assumed to be b, proving that the output is a would be to prove a contradiction. “if (output X)=b then U=0″ is one possible outcome, but U could also equal anything else.

I don’t see how the NDT algorithm as given allows “(output X)=a” to be proved outside of the for loop at all. I would think it would take (output X)=whatever for each iteration through the for loop as a given before trying to prove anything, in which case in the run of the for loop in which (output X)=b is the given, proving (output X)=a is a clear contradiction, one which I would think our prover could avoid unless our axiomatic system is contradictory in the first place.

Or to rephrase, I don’t think “For each xi, assume the output of X is xi, and try to deduce the expected value of U.” and “(That is, try and deduce statements of the form “if (output X)=xi then U=ui” for some ui).” are actually equivalent at all, and I think the self-fulfilling prophecy example follows the second and ignores the first.

Kenoubi 24 Mar 2012 23:57 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Dmytry’s comment on: Decision Theories: A Semi-Formal Analysis, Part I
Here’s what I think you’re saying: there is one value that will actually be output, call it o. In every iteration of the for loop except the one where you assume the output is o, you have assumed a false statement. From this contradiction you should be able to derive anything, and in particular, derive U(this choice)=some large negative number, such that o will appear to be the best choice. Furthermore, this argument makes no reference to what o actually is, so the algorithm can output any choice this way.

That’s a very good argument, although I never would have figured it out from the article and it took some thinking to get it from your comment. I think it proves that the algorithm is underspecified though, not (necessarily) faulty; the description given is not enough to actually figure out what the algorithm will output.

As for the rest of your comment, I think by “in practice” you mean “in decision theories other than NDT which work better”?

Kenoubi 27 Feb 2013 18:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Need some psychology advice
I thought I made it clear in my post that I don’t think my concerns are rational, but if they are I would like to take whatever steps are available to mitigate them, and not feel so crappy about it either way.

I feel similar anxiety in some other situations, but not very many of them. I find it a bit hard to believe that this problem is so incredibly specific that there is no useful reference class from which to derive advice.

Kenoubi 27 Feb 2013 20:43 UTC
1 point
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Need some psychology advice
Yes, the possibility of coming off as clingy is exactly why I haven’t discussed this directly with her in person yet.

Kenoubi 27 Feb 2013 20:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jooyous’s comment on: Need some psychology advice
Weirdly I’ve been noticing myself having some of these “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world” thoughts spontaneously.