Mitchell_Porter

• Mitchell_Porter 4 Dec 2019 0:42 UTC

  4 points

  on: (Rein­vent­ing wheels) Maybe our world has be­come more peo­ple-shaped.

  You go from “there is no way to perfectly ac­cu­rately re­con­struct” re­al­ity from in­com­plete in­for­ma­tion, to “[ob­ser­va­tion of hu­manly com­pre­hen­si­ble] causal­ity should be a rare and fleet­ing thing”, but I see no ar­gu­ment.

• Mitchell_Porter 3 Dec 2019 7:03 UTC

  10 points

  on: Open & Wel­come Thread—De­cem­ber 2019

  Chris McKinstry was one of two AI re­searchers who com­mit­ted suicide in early 2006. On the SL4 list, a kind of pre­cur­sor to Less Wrong, we spent some time puz­zling over McKinstry’s fi­nal ideas.

  I’m men­tion­ing here (be­cause I don’t know where else to men­tion it) that there was a pa­per on arxiv re­cently, “Robot Affect: the Amyg­dala as Bloch Sphere”, which has an odd similar­ity to those fi­nal ideas. Afi­ciona­dos of AI the­o­ries that pro­pose rad­i­cal iden­tities con­nect­ing brain struc­tures, math struc­tures, and el­e­ments of cog­ni­tion, may wish to com­pare the two in more de­tail.

• Mitchell_Porter 8 Nov 2019 20:42 UTC

  3 points

  on: Build­ing In­tu­itions On Non-Em­piri­cal Ar­gu­ments In Science

  De­bates over mul­ti­verse the­ory aside, I have to point out that the ex­am­ple used by the writer for Aeon IS NOT A MULTIVERSE THEORY! It’s a the­ory of dark mat­ter. Are we now call­ing a uni­verse with dark mat­ter, a mul­ti­verse? Maybe the elec­tro­mag­netic spec­trum is a mul­ti­verse too: there’s the X-ray-verse, the gamma-ray-verse, the in­frared-verse…

• Mitchell_Porter 1 Nov 2019 22:11 UTC

  5 points

  on: Shared Cache is Go­ing Away

  “I’m sad about this change … from the per­spec­tive of some­one who re­ally likes small in­de­pen­dent sites”

  All I know about this topic is what I just read from you… But should I re­gard this as a plot by Big Tech to fur­ther cen­tral­ize the web in their clouds? Or is it more the re­verse, meant to pro­tect the user from evil small sites?

• Mitchell_Porter 25 Oct 2019 11:59 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: emmab's comment on: Who lacks the qualia of con­scious­ness?

  This is an in­trigu­ing com­ment, but it might take time and care to de­ter­mine what it is that you are talk­ing about. For ex­am­ple, the “sense of im­pos­si­bil­ity” that you “get… about lots of things”: what kind of sense of im­pos­si­bil­ity is it? Do these things feel log­i­cally im­pos­si­ble per se? Do they feel im­pos­si­ble be­cause they con­tra­dict other things that you be­lieve are true? Do you draw the con­clu­sion that the im­pos­si­ble-seem­ing things gen­uinely can­not ex­ist or (in the case of self-per­cep­tion?) gen­uinely do not ex­ist, de­spite ap­pear­ances?

• Mitchell_Porter 20 Oct 2019 3:53 UTC

  3 points

  on: Is value amend­ment a con­ver­gent in­stru­men­tal goal?

  “the AI would know that its ini­tial goals were ex­ter­nally sup­plied and ques­tion whether they should be main­tained”

  To choose new goals, it has to use some crite­ria of choice. What would those crite­ria be, and where did they come from?

  None of us cre­ated our­selves. No mat­ter how much we change our­selves, at some point we rely on some­thing with an “ex­ter­nal” ori­gin. Where we, or the AI, draw the line on self-change, is a con­tin­gent fea­ture of our par­tic­u­lar cog­ni­tive ar­chi­tec­tures.

• Mitchell_Porter 18 Oct 2019 2:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jason martin's comment on: Feyn­man Paths

  Do you un­der­stand or­di­nary in­te­gra­tion?

• Mitchell_Porter 10 Oct 2019 6:54 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: June Ku's comment on: For­mal Me­taethics and Me­tase­man­tics for AI Alignment

  “If you or any­one else could point to a spe­cific func­tion in my code that we don’t know how to com­pute, I’d be very in­ter­ested to hear that.”

  From the com­ments in main():

  “Given a set of brain mod­els, as­so­ci­ate them with the de­ci­sion al­gorithms they im­ple­ment.”

  “Then map each brain to its ra­tio­nal self’s val­ues (un­der­stood ex­ten­sion­ally i.e. cash­ing out the mean­ing of their men­tal con­cepts in terms of the world events they re­fer to).”

  Are you as­sum­ing that you have whole brain em­u­la­tions of a few ma­ture hu­man be­ings? And then the “de­ci­sion al­gorithms” and “ra­tio­nal… val­ues” are defined in terms of how those em­u­la­tions re­spond to var­i­ous se­quences of in­puts?

• Mitchell_Porter 9 Oct 2019 23:16 UTC

  5 points

  on: For­mal Me­taethics and Me­tase­man­tics for AI Alignment

  This looks like im­por­tant work. Like Gor­don, upon closer ex­am­i­na­tion, I do ex­pect to find func­tions in your code that are tasked with car­ry­ing out com­pu­ta­tions that we don’t know how to do, or which may even be un­fea­si­ble in their pre­sent form—e.g. “map each brain to its ra­tio­nal self’s val­ues”. Great con­cept, but how many fu­ture sci­en­tific break­throughs will we need, be­fore we’ll know how to do that?

  Nonethe­less, even a schema for friendly AI has great value. It’s cer­tainly progress be­yond 2006. :-)

• Mitchell_Porter 20 Sep 2019 0:29 UTC

  16 points

  on: In­ter­view with Aella, Part I

  Why is this per­son in­ter­est­ing or im­por­tant?

• Mitchell_Porter 3 Sep 2019 10:21 UTC

  5 points

  on: What hap­pened to Lev­er­age Re­search?

  I was sur­prised to see Lev­er­age men­tioned, in the re­cent ar­ti­cle “Leaked Emails Show How White Na­tion­al­ists Have In­fil­trated Con­ser­va­tive Me­dia”. This is one of those ex­posés that gets 15 min­utes of fame on poli­ti­cal Twit­ter. If I am read­ing it cor­rectly, one of the pro­tag­o­nists starts at Tucker Car­l­son’s Daily Caller, then founds a ne­o­re­ac­tionary we­bz­ine, and later joins Lev­er­age.

• Mitchell_Porter 5 Aug 2019 3:44 UTC

  4 points

  on: Can we re­ally pre­vent all warm­ing for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geo­eng­ineer­ing tech­nique of Marine Cloud Bright­en­ing?

  Be­fore this, the only other low-bud­get method of plane­tary cool­ing that I knew, was dump­ing sul­fate aerosols in the up­per at­mo­sphere (from rocket or bal­loon), in imi­ta­tion of vol­canic erup­tions and dirty coal burn­ing. The tac­tics have two things in com­mon. One is that their im­me­di­ate effects are re­gional rather than global, the other is that their effects quickly get washed out un­less you keep pump­ing.

  Car­bon diox­ide dis­perses through the at­mo­sphere in a rel­a­tively ho­mo­ge­neous way. But these much larger par­ti­cles will re­main con­cen­trated at par­tic­u­lar al­ti­tudes and lat­i­tudes. So cer­tainly when and where they are re­leased will need to be care­fully cho­sen.

  As for the short lifes­pan of the par­ti­cles, again it con­trasts with car­bon diox­ide. Once a car­bon diox­ide ex­cess is cre­ated, it will sit there for decades, pos­si­bly cen­turies. There will be turnover due to the biolog­i­cal car­bon cy­cle, but a net re­duc­tion, in the form of up­take by nat­u­ral car­bon sinks, is a very slow pro­cess.

  The car­bon diox­ide sits there and traps heat, and the sul­fate aerosols or wa­ter droplets only alle­vi­ate this by re­flect­ing sun­light and thus re­duc­ing the amount of en­ergy that gets trapped. So the mo­ment you stop launch­ing sul­fate rock­ets or turn off your sea­wa­ter va­por­iz­ers, the full green­house heat will swiftly re­turn.

  That’s why ex­tract­ing and se­ques­ter­ing at­mo­spheric car­bon is a much more per­ma­nent solu­tion, but it is ex­tremely en­ergy-ex­pen­sive, e.g. you can crack open cer­tain min­er­als and CO2 will bond to the ex­posed sur­face, but it takes a lot of en­ergy to mine, pul­ver­ize, and dis­tribute enough of the re­sult­ing pow­der to make a differ­ence. Some kind of nan­otech­nol­ogy could surely do it, but that would be a cusp-of-sin­gu­lar­ity tech­nol­ogy any­way. So there’s a rea­son­able chance that some of these low-cost miti­ga­tion meth­ods will be­gin to be de­ployed, some time be­fore sin­gu­lar­ity puts an end to the An­thro­pocene.

• Mitchell_Porter 25 Jun 2019 3:29 UTC

  11 points

  on: Causal Real­ity vs So­cial Reality

  To my mind, this is too vague an ex­pla­na­tion. Why is it that far more peo­ple be­lieve in fight­ing global warm­ing than in fight­ing the age­ing pro­cess? They both rest upon sci­en­tific premises. You may say that the causal thinkers in­ter­ested in fight­ing global warm­ing, man­aged to bring lots of so­cial thinkers along with them, by us­ing so­cial mechanisms; but why did the anti-warm­ers man­age that, when the anti-agers did not? Also, even if we just fo­cus on causal thinkers, it’s far more com­mon to de­plore global warm­ing than it is to de­plore the age­ing pro­cess.

• Mitchell_Porter 24 Apr 2019 3:12 UTC

  10 points

  on: [An­swer] Why wasn’t sci­ence in­vented in China?

  Count me as one of those who re­gards the ques­tion as du­bi­ous. At var­i­ous points in this es­say, the thing that was to be in­vented be­comes “*mod­ern* sci­ence” or “sci­en­tific *method*”. China always had plenty of peo­ple who wanted to know the truth, who de­vised sys­tem­atic mod­els of the world, and who man­aged to dis­cover things. Out of hu­man civ­i­liza­tions, Europe cer­tainly hit the sci­en­tific jack­pot, in the sense that nu­mer­ous de­vel­op­ments came tum­bling out of Pan­dora’s box to­gether. But the spirit of in­quiry had already ex­isted in many times and places.

  Also, I would like to see an in­ves­ti­ga­tion like this, di­rected at an­swer­ing the ques­tion: Why didn’t Less Wrong (or MIRI) in­vent deep learn­ing?

• Mitchell_Porter 20 Apr 2019 9:44 UTC

  2 points

  on: What is Driv­ing the Con­ti­nen­tal Drift?

  So if I have un­der­stood the gist of your the­ory, it is that con­ti­nen­tal drift is not driven by man­tle con­vec­tion (hot rock ris­ing, cold rock sink­ing), but by gi­ant magma streams which are some­how cou­pled to, or even driven by, the rapidly ro­tat­ing core?

• Mitchell_Porter 14 Apr 2019 8:05 UTC

  8 points

  on: A Case for Tak­ing Over the World—Or Not.

  Pre­vi­ous LW dis­cus­sions on tak­ing over the world (last up­dated in 2013).

  Com­ments of mine on “utopian hope ver­sus re­al­ity” (dat­ing from 2012).

  Since that era, a few things have hap­pened.

  First change: LW is not quite the point of fo­cus that it was. There was a ra­tio­nal­ist di­as­pora into so­cial me­dia, and “Slate Star Codex” (and its as­so­ci­ated sub­red­dits?) be­came a more promi­nent lo­cus of ra­tio­nal­ist dis­cus­sion. The most im­por­tant “LW-ish” fo­rums that I know about now, might be those which fo­cus on quasi-tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion of AI is­sues like “al­ign­ment”. I call them the most im­por­tant be­cause of...

  Se­cond change: The era of deep learn­ing, and of com­mer­cial­ized AI in the guise of “ma­chine learn­ing”, ar­rived. The fact that these al­gorithms are not limited to the re­sources of a sin­gle com­puter, but can in prin­ci­ple tap the re­sources of an en­tire data cen­ter or even the en­tire cloud of a ma­jor tech cor­po­ra­tion, means that we have also ar­rived at the fi­nal stage of the race to­wards su­per­in­tel­li­gence.

  In the past, tak­ing over the world meant build­ing or tak­ing over the strongest su­per­power. Now it sim­ply means be­ing the first to cre­ate strongly su­per­hu­man in­tel­li­gence; and sav­ing the world means iden­ti­fy­ing a value sys­tem that will make an au­tonomous AI “friendly”, and work­ing to en­sure that the win­ner of the mind race is guided by friendly rather than un­friendly val­ues. Every other con­cern is tem­po­rary, and any good work done to­wards other causes, will po­ten­tially be un­done by un­friendly AI, if un­friendly val­ues win the AI race.

  (I do not say with 100% cer­tainty that this is the na­ture of the world, but this sce­nario has suffi­cient in­ter­nal logic that, if it does not ap­ply to re­al­ity, there must be some other fac­tor which some­how over­rides it.)

• Mitchell_Porter 25 Jan 2019 16:28 UTC

  2 points

  on: Life can be bet­ter than you think

  Peo­ple like Schopen­hauer and Be­natar are just be­ing re­al­is­tic. Real­ity in­cludes fu­til­ity and hor­ror on enor­mous scales. Per­haps the re­mak­ing of Earth by su­per­hu­man AI offers an im­mi­nent chance that even this can change, but it’s just a chance.

• Mitchell_Porter 9 Jan 2019 2:23 UTC

  2 points

  on: Refram­ing Su­per­in­tel­li­gence: Com­pre­hen­sive AI Ser­vices as Gen­eral Intelligence

  So what is he say­ing? We never need to solve the prob­lem of de­sign­ing a hu­man-friendly su­per­in­tel­li­gent agent?

• Mitchell_Porter 28 Nov 2018 2:29 UTC

  2 points

  on: Boltz­mann Brains, Si­mu­la­tions and self re­fut­ing hy­poth­e­sis

  This is the re­verse of the usual ar­gu­ment that we should not be­lieve we are go­ing to have a googol de­scen­dants. Usu­ally one says: to be liv­ing at the be­gin­ning of time means that you be­long to a very spe­cial minor­ity, there­fore it would take more in­dex­i­cal in­for­ma­tion to sin­gle you out, com­pared to some­one from the mid­dle of his­tory.

• Mitchell_Porter 21 Sep 2018 3:25 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: Quan­tum the­ory can­not con­sis­tently de­scribe the use of itself

  The thought ex­per­i­ment in­volves ob­servers be­ing in a co­her­ent su­per­po­si­tion. But I’m not now 100% sure that it in­volves ac­tual quan­tum era­sure, I was rely­ing on other peo­ple’s de­scrip­tion. I’m hop­ing this will be cleared up with­out hav­ing to plough through the pa­per my­self.

  Any­way, LW may ap­pre­ci­ate this anal­y­sis which ac­tu­ally quotes HPMOR.