Noah Walton

• Noah Walton 2 Dec 2018 17:55 UTC

  15 points

  on: Over­con­fi­dent talk­ing down, hum­ble or hos­tile talk­ing up

  When you’re communicating with people who know more than you, you have two options. You can accept their greater state of knowledge, causing you to speak more honestly about the pertinent topics. Or, you could reject their credibility, claiming that they really don’t know more than you. Many people who know less than you both may believe you over them.

  A third option is to claim epistemic learned helplessness. You can believe someone knows more than you, but reject their claims because there are incentives to deceive. It’s even possible to openly coordinate based on this. This seems like something I’ve seen people do, maybe even frequently. I can’t think of anything specific, but one method would be to portray the more knowledgeable person as “using their power [in the form of knowledge] for evil”.

Wor­ld­wide “Port­land” Slate Star Codex Meetup

• Noah Walton 1 Nov 2017 18:16 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: An Equil­ibrium of No Free Energy

  1) Though there is probably someone suitable and willing living within 5 minutes of Jesse, many more of the people within 5 minutes of em are not. It’s hard to filter these people, and risky to get it wrong. At best, the other person is unwilling, rude or annoying. Worse, they could be unhealthy, violent, or untrustworthy.

  2) Dating sites don’t optimize for efficiently starting romantic relationships. If they were really successful at this, people would spend less time on the sites, getting the sites less attention and thus ad /​ member revenue.

  3) A selection effect (?) Many people are already in satisfying romantic situations. People searching right now are more likely to have some sort of character flaw or bad strategy which has keeps them in this situation.

  How would we test these? Maybe there’s research already out there that (dis)confirms them?

• Noah Walton 3 Jan 2018 0:07 UTC

  LW: 7 AF: 2

  AF

  in reply to: Scott Garrabrant’s comment on: Good­hart Taxonomy

  Causal: An early 1900s college basketball team gets all of their players high-heeled shoes, because tallness causes people to be better at basketball. Instead, the players are slowed and get more foot injuries.

  Adversarial: The New York Knicks’ coach, while studying the history of basketball, finds the story about the college team with high heels. He gets marketers to go to other league teams and convince them to wear high heels. A few weeks later, half of the star players in the league are out, and the Knicks easily win the championship.

The One-Chan­nel Paradigm

• Noah Walton 20 Jun 2021 22:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: So­cial be­hav­ior curves, equil­ibria, and radicalism

  Something triggered in me by this response—and maybe similar to part of what you were saying in the later part: sometimes preferences aren’t affected much by the social context, within a given space of social contexts. People may just want to use chopsticks because they are fun, rather than caring about what other people think about them.

  Also, societal preferences for a given thing might actually decrease when more and more people are interested in them. For example, demand for a thing might cause the price to rise. With orchestras: if lots of people are already playing violin, that increases the relative incentive for others to learn viola.

• Noah Walton 29 Dec 2017 6:49 UTC

  3 points

  on: Why did ev­ery­thing take so long?

  I’m curious about your item three.

  Nobody told early humans to invent things. They just had to end up doing it. That’s also true for crows and other primates. If you were a crow, how would you find and use a tool? (Warning: I’m trying to work toward a plausible story in the following. There are probably lots of wrong implications about animals.)

  Clavicus the crow flew straight over the field to a new tree. It had seen the setting sun and knew that meant it was time to return home. Every time clavicus went to a tree, it thought for a moment about where it had bee n last, so it would find the place with the tastiest and newest worms. All of this happened in a flash of its mind, which no faculty of its own was aware of.

  Clavicus thought about little when it slept, and when it woke up, it thought about worms in the ground. Each day, it went down to the ground and picked at it. It had learned to identify many promising signs of worms, even above the obvious little burrows. Parts of the field covered in grass were more promising than barren patches of dirt. The latter were easier to look at, but could be scanned quickly during flight for burrows, saving time to look in denser areas.

  Clavicus went flying out on Yellow-Grass Prairie With Triangle Of Trees In The Center the next morning. As it searched below Tree In The Triangle Closest To The Place Where It Made Its Nest, Clavicus’s beak bumped against a stick, which upset the dirt below it, leading to a large upset of the dirt, a sign that Clavicus at this point recognized as being great indeed.

  It was bound to happen, once every million crows.

  Clavicus tried the movement again and soon was able to do it pretty quickly and with little error, as inefficient ways of moving the stick got pruned away from its thinking.

  This was only bound to happen once every billion.

  The next day, Clavicus got eaten by a cat. Some other crows eventually used tools, and their relatives saw them and imitated them. Soon, tool use was common enough among crows that it persisted.

  Animals that couldn’t imitate each other weren’t so lucky as the crows.

Wor­ld­wide “Port­land” SSC Meetup 11/​15/​20

• Noah Walton 11 Apr 2018 5:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Me­taphilo­soph­i­cal com­pe­tence can’t be dis­en­tan­gled from alignment

  If “empathy” means “ability to understand the feelings of others” or “ability to predict what others will do”, then it seems straightforward that empathy is learnable. And learnability and teachability seem basically the same to me. Examples indicating that empathy is learnable:

  • As you get to know someone, things go more smoothly when you’re with them

  • Socializing is easier when you’ve been doing a lot of it (at least, I think so)

  • Managers are regularly trained for their job

• Noah Walton 17 Nov 2021 8:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Kenoubi’s comment on: Vi­su­al­iz­ing in 5 dimensions

  What’s meta-film?

• Noah Walton 16 Nov 2021 20:59 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Col­lid­ing Ex­po­nen­tials of AI

  “AlphaZero took 8x less compute to get to AlphaGoZero level performance 1 year later.”

  This looks like a typo—the second algorithm should be AlphaGo?

  ETA 12/​19/​21: Looks like I was wrong here.

• Noah Walton 1 Aug 2021 19:07 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Power dy­nam­ics as a blind spot or blurry spot in our col­lec­tive world-mod­el­ing, es­pe­cially around AI

  I read you as saying Stag Hunt is a multi/​multi game. If I’m right, why?

• Noah Walton 20 Jun 2021 22:16 UTC

  1 point

  on: So­cial be­hav­ior curves, equil­ibria, and radicalism

  I was excited to be reminded by this post of Louis Sachar’s classic Wayside School series: in one section of the first puzzle book installment, Sideways Math from Wayside School, you read about students at various places on the social behavior curve for participating in a game of basketball, and are asked to determine who will play under the changing circumstances of that day’s recess.

• Noah Walton 12 Apr 2021 15:19 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Pre­dic­tive Cod­ing has been Unified with Backpropagation

  Once you add this condition, are current state-of-the-art Starcraft-learning ANNs still getting more training data than humans?

• Noah Walton 11 Apr 2021 21:29 UTC

  1 point

  on: Jaan Tal­linn at the Slate Star Codex On­line Meetup

  Are there public links to natural language and /​ or computer code descriptions of the funding pipeline (with donors, recommenders, and donees) that Jaan described in the conversation? I don’t think I got the full structure from his description.

• Noah Walton 8 Mar 2021 19:22 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Noah Walton’s comment on: The feel­ing of break­ing an Over­ton window

  I can feel a pressure to try to guess the other person’s worldview and conform to it. Recently I have been I think better at just trying to debate things out with others. Possibly I may get uncomfortable if consensus isn’t reached. I’m getting maybe a little bit more comfortable with this possibility though. Something interesting that can come up is a strong indignant feeling: “how the hell could anyone NOT believe X!!”, which can cause me to change those exclamation points into a question mark and start wondering, which could potentially take a long time (currently I am confused about God beliefs/​unbeliefs, after realizing that I sort of identify as an atheist but have a hard time identifying clear reasons that I should).

  Another thing that I have noticed is the possibility to give silent responses rather than essentially lying. This can be very uncomfortable and sad, but may have benefits as well. I think it can feel pretty awful if I end up having to give a lot of silent responses over a period where I ALSO am not able to give myself much space to think (e.g. in a situation where I am constantly around people for a substantial period of time and not able to find a way to give myself “sufficient seclusion”).

• Noah Walton 8 Mar 2021 19:09 UTC

  1 point

  on: The feel­ing of break­ing an Over­ton window

  I did identify with this. Nothing concrete to share right now.

• Noah Walton 15 Oct 2019 4:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The Truth About Math­e­mat­i­cal Ability

  Maybe his translator, but not him.

• Noah Walton 21 Mar 2019 4:11 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ac­tive Cu­ri­os­ity vs Open Curiosity

  Tentatively:

  Getting stuck solving a problem should ideally trigger open curiosity. I was thinking about this in the context of solving a Project Euler problem (math problems that usually require some programming). There seem to often be alternating phases in solving where you find some low-hanging fruit, and then get stuck. Stuckness can be for example conceptual (you need to speed up your algorithm; you haven’t found an algorithm that works at all; you don’t understand the problem) or related to code (you have a natural-language framework for your problem but not code; the only code you can think to write is really ugly; there is a bug).

  The thing I call “stuckness” perhaps often indicates there is no clear path to go on—if there is, I would be going on it. Sometimes this should trigger taking a break to rest. Other times it should trigger open curiosity about the problem. Even if I am remaining openly curious about the problem, it seems more likely that I will do something like get up from where I am sitting at the trigger point.

  A common failure mode is to continue being actively curious when stuck; this is associated with treating the situation like something it’s not.

• Noah Walton 16 Sep 2018 13:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: An On­tol­ogy of Sys­temic Failures: Dragons, Bul­lshit Moun­tain, and the Cloud of Doom

  “Scientists with notable discoveries” might be an example of Gryffindors.