PeterisP

Karma: 268

PeterisP 21 Sep 2017 9:27 UTC
6 points
on: Beta—First Impressions
A RSS feed for new posts is highly desirable—I don’t generally go to websites “polling” for new information that may or may not be there unless e.g. I’m returning to a discussion that I had yesterday, so a “push mechanism” e.g. RSS is essential to me.

PeterisP 29 Nov 2016 23:54 UTC
8 points
on: Double Crux — A Strategy for Resolving Disagreement
I’m going to go out and state that the chosen example of “middle school students should wear uniforms” fails the prerequisite of “Confidence in the existence of objective truth”, as do many (most?) “should” statements.

I strongly believe that there is no objectively true answer to the question “middle school students should wear uniforms”, as the truth of that statement depends mostly not on the understanding of the world or the opinion about student uniforms, but on the interpretation of what the “should” means.

For example, “A policy requiring middle school students to wear uniforms is beneficial to the students” is a valid topic of discussion that can uncover some truth, and “A policy requiring middle school students to wear uniforms is mostly beneficial to [my definition of] society” is a completely different topic of discussion that likely can result in a different or even opposite answer.

Talking about unqualified “should” statements are a common trap that prevents reaching a common understanding and exploring the truth. At the very least, you should clearly distinguish between “should” as good, informed advice from “should” as a categorical moral imperative. If you want to discuss if “X should to Y” in the sense of discussing what are the advantages of doing Y (or not), then you should (see what I’m doing here?) convert them to statements in the form “X should do Y because that’s a dominant/better/optimal choice that benefits them”, because otherwise you won’t get what you want but just an argument between a camp arguing this question versus a camp arguing about why we should/shouldn’t force X to do Y because everyone else wants it.

PeterisP 3 Mar 2015 9:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: fortyeridania’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015
The most important decisions are before starting a war, and there the mistakes have very different costs. Overestimating your enemy results in peace (or cold war) which basically means that you just lose out on some opportunistic conquests but underestimating your enemy results in a bloody, unexpectedly long war that can disrupt you for a decade or more—there are many nice examples of that in 20th century history.

PeterisP 3 Mar 2015 9:48 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015
“Are we political allies, or enemies?” is rather orthogonal to that—your political allies are those whose actions support your goals and your political enemies are those whose actions hurt your goals.

For example, a powerful and popular extreme radical member of the “opposite” camp that has conclusions that you disagree with, uses methods you disagree with, and is generally toxic and spewing hate—that’s often a prime example of your political ally whose actions incite the moderate members of society to start supporting you and focusing on your important issues instead of something else. The existance of such a pundit is important to you, you want them to keep doing what their do and have their propaganda actions be successful up to a point. I won’t go into examples of particular politicians/parties of various countries, that gets dirty quickly, but many strictly opposed radical groups are actually allies in this sense against the majority of moderates; and sometimes they actively coordinate and cooperate despite the ideological differences.

On the other hand, a public speaker that targets the same audience as you do, shares the same goals/conslusions that you do, and the intended methods to achieve it, but simply does it consistently poorly—by using sloppy arguments that alienate part of the target audience, or by disgusting personal behavior that hurts the image of your organization. That’s a good example of a political enemy, one that you must work to silence, to get them ignored and not heard; despite being “aligned” with your conclusions.

And of course, a political competitor that does everything that you want to do but holds a chair/position that you want for yourself, is also a political enemy. Infighting inside powerful political groups is a normal situation, and when (and if) it goes to public, very interesting political arguments appear to distinguish one from their political enemy despite sharing most of the platform.

PeterisP 15 Oct 2014 16:07 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: On Caring
The difference is that there are many actions that help other people but don’t give an appropriate altruistic high (because your brain doesn’t see or relate to those people much) and there are actions that produce a net zero or net negative effect but do produce an altruistic high.

The built-in care-o-meter of your body has known faults and biases, and it measures something often related (at least in classic hunter-gatherer society model) but generally different from actually caring about other people.

PeterisP 15 Oct 2014 16:01 UTC
2 points
on: On Caring
An interesting followup to your example of an oiled bird deserving 3 minutes of care that came to mind:

Let’s assume that there are 150 million suffering people right now, which is a completely wrong random number but a somewhat reasonable order-of-magnitude assumption. A quick calculation estimates that if I dedicate every single waking moment of my remaining life to caring about them and fixing the situation, then I’ve got a total of about 15 million care-minutes.

According to even the best possible care-o-meter that I could have, all the problems in the world cannot be totally worth more than 15 million care-minutes—simply because there aren’t any more of them to allocate. And in a fair allocation, the average suffering person ‘deserves’ 0.1 care-minutes of my time, assuming that I don’t leave anything at all for the oiled birds. This is a very different meaning of ‘deserve’ than the one used in the post—but I’m afraid that this is the more meaningful one.

PeterisP 4 Sep 2014 21:50 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale
I’d read it as an acknowledgement that any intelligence has a cost, and if your food is passive instead of antagonistic, then it’s inefficient (and thus very unlikely) to put such resources into outsmarting it.

PeterisP 4 Sep 2014 21:46 UTC
2 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale
If animal-complexity CNS is your criteria, then humans + octopuses would be a counterexample, as urbilaterals wouldn’t be expected to have such a system, and the octopus intelligence has formed separately.

PeterisP 4 Sep 2014 21:38 UTC
6 points
in reply to: pinyaka’s comment on: The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale
A gold-ingot-manufacturing-maximizer can easily manufacture more gold than exists in their star system by using arbitrary amounts of energy to create gold, starting with simple nuclear reactions to transmute bismuth or lead into gold and ending with direct energy to matter to gold ingots process.

Furthermore, if you plan to send copies-of-you to N other systems to manufacture gold ingots there, as long as there is free energy, you can send N+1 copies-of-you. A gold ingot manufacturing rate that grows proportionally to time^(n+1) is much faster than time^n, so sending N copies wouldn’t be maximizing.

And a third point is that if it’s possible that somewhere in the universe there are some ugly bags of mostly water that prefer to use their atoms and energy for not manufacturing gold ingots but their survival; then it’s very important to ensure that they don’t grow strong enough to prevent you from maximizing gold ingot manufacturing. Speed is of the essence, you must reach them before it’s too late, or gold ingot manufacture won’t get maximized.

PeterisP 4 Sep 2014 20:53 UTC
7 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale
Dolphins are able to herd schools of fish, cooperating to keep a ‘ball’ of fish together for a long time while feeding from it.

However, taming and sustained breeding is a long way from herding behavior—it requires long term planning for multi-year time periods, and I’m not sure if that has been observed in dolphins.

PeterisP 23 Nov 2013 7:12 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Zubon’s comment on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Income question needs to be explicit about if it’s pre-tax or post-tax, since it’s a huge difference, and the “default measurement” differs between cultures, in some places “I earn X” means pre-tax and in some places it means post-tax.

PeterisP 23 Nov 2013 6:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: The dangers of zero and one
Actually “could he, in principle, have made place for such possibilities in advance?” is very, very excellent question.

We can allocate for such possibilities in advance. For example, we can use a simple statistical model for limitations of our own understanding of reality—I have a certain number of years experience in making judgements and assumptions about reality; I know that I don’t consider all possible explanations, and I can estimate that in x% cases the ‘true’ explanation was one that I hadn’t considered. So I can make a ‘belief budget’ for the ‘other’ category. For example, any question like ‘will the coin fall heads or tails’ has to include ‘other’ option. It may fall on it’s side.

A great example is the quotation “One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”

If you want to handle reality, you have to model the probability of ‘jack of spades jumping out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirting cider in your ear’ as non-zero. 10^-99 might be ok, but not 0.

PeterisP 23 Nov 2013 6:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: dankane’s comment on: The dangers of zero and one
Well, but you can (a) preform moderately extensive testing, and (b) do redundancy.

If you write 3 programs for verifying primeness (using different algorithms and possibly programming languages/approaches); and if all their results match, then you can assume a much higher confidence in correctness than for a single such program.

PeterisP 10 Oct 2013 16:32 UTC
64 points
on: A Voting Puzzle, Some Political Science, and a Nerd Failure Mode
There’s the classic economic textbook example of two hot-dog vendors on a beach that need to choose their location—assuming an even distribution of customers, and that customers always choose the closest vendor; the equilibrium location is them standing right next to each other in the middle; while the “optimal” (from customer view, minimizing distance) locations would be at 25% and 75% marks.
This matches the median voter principle—the optimal behavior of candidates is to be as close as possible to the median but on the “right side” to capture “their half” of the voters; even if most voters in a specific party would prefer their candidate to cater for, say, the median Republican/Democrat instead, it’s against the candidates interests to do so.

PeterisP 6 Sep 2013 9:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care
“Tell the AI in English” is in essence an utility function “Maximize the value of X, where X is my current opinion of what some english text Y means”.

The ‘understanding English’ module, the mapping function between X and “what you told in English” is completely arbitrary, but is very important to the AI—so any self-modifying AI will want to modify and improve that. Also, we don’t have a good “understanding English” module so yes, we also want the AI to be able to modify and improve that. But, it can be wildly different from reality or opinions of humans—there are trivial ways of how well-meaning dialogue systems can misunderstand statements.

However, for the AI “improve the module” means “change the module so that my utility grows”—so in your example it has strong motivation to intentionally misunderstand English. The best case scenario is to misunderstand “Make everyone happy” as “Set your utility function to MAXINT”. The worst case scenario is, well, everything else.

There’s the classic quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”—if the AI doesn’t care in the first place, then “Tell AI what to do in English” won’t make it care.

PeterisP 27 Aug 2013 14:28 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: To what degree do you model people as agents?
If you model X as “rude person”, then you expect him to be rude with a high[er than average] probability cases, period.

However, if you model X as an agent that believes that rudeness is appropriate in common situations A,B,C, then you expect that he might behave less rudely (a) if he would percieve that this instance of a common ‘rude’ situation is nuanced and that rudeness is not appropriate there; or (b) if he could be convinced that rudeness in situations like that is contrary to his goals, whatever those may be.

In essence, it’s simpler and faster to evaluate expected reactions for people that you model as just complex systems, you can usually do that right away. But if you model goal-oriented behavior, “walk a mile in his shoes” and try to understand the intent of every [non]action and the causes of that, then it tends to be tricky but allows you more depth in both accurate expectations, and ability to affect the behavior.

However, if you do it poorly, or simply lack data neccessary to properly understand the reasons/motivations of that person then you’ll tend to get gross misunderstandings.

PeterisP 26 Jul 2013 1:07 UTC
10 points
in reply to: dspeyer’s comment on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
My [unverified] intuition on AI properties is that the delta between current status and ‘IQ60AI’ is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the delta between ‘IQ60AI’ and ‘IQ180AI’. In essence, there is not that much “mental horsepower” difference between the stereotypical Einstein and a below-average person; it doesn’t require a much larger brain or completely different neuronal wiring or a million years of evolutionary tuning.

We don’t know how to get to IQ60AI; but getting from IQ60AI to IQ180AI could (IMHO) be done with currently known methods in many labs around the world by the current (non IQ180) researchers rapidly (ballpark of 6 months maybe?). We know from history that a 0 IQ process can optimize from monkey-level intelligence to an Einstein by bruteforcing; So in essence, if you’ve got IQ70 minds that can be rapidly run and simulted, then just apply more hardware (for more time-compression) and optimization, as that gap seems to require exactly 0 significant breakthroughs to get to IQ180.

PeterisP 7 Jun 2013 13:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Prisoner’s Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament
It’s quite likely that the optimal behaviour should be different in case the program is functionally equal but not exactly equal.

If you’re playing yourself, then you want to cooperate.

If you’re playing someone else, then you’d want to cooperate if and only if that someone else is smart enough to check if you’ll cooperate; but if it’s decision doesn’t depend on yours, then you should defect.

PeterisP 27 May 2013 21:42 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective
I see MOOC’s as a big educaational improvement because of this—sure, I could get the same educational info without the MOOC structure; just by reading the field best textbooks and academic papers; but having a specific “course” with the quizzes/homework makes me actually do the excercises, which I wouldn’t have done otherwise; and the course schedule forces me to do them now, instead of postponing them for weeks/months/forever.

PeterisP 1 Feb 2013 9:45 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Pinpointing Utility
I feel confused. “a space I can measure distances in” is a strong property of a value, and it does not follow from your initial 5 axioms, and seems contrary to the 5th axiom.

In fact, your own examples given further seem to provide a counterexample—i.e., if someone prefers being a whale to 400 actual orgasms, but prefers ¹⁄₄₀₀ of being a whale to 1 orgasm, then both “being a whale” and “orgasm” have some utility value, but they cannot be used as units to measure distance.

If you’re in a reality where a>b and 2a<2b, then you’re not allowed to use classic arithmetic simply because some of your items look like numbers, since they don’t behave like numbers.