PhilGoetz

• PhilGoetz 15 May 2019 23:35 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: djc's comment on: How SIAI could pub­lish in main­stream cog­ni­tive sci­ence journals

  Thanks!

  I have great difficulty find­ing any philos­o­phy pub­lished af­ter 1960 other than post-mod­ern philos­o­phy, prob­a­bly be­cause my start­ing point is liter­ary the­ory, which is com­pletely con­fined to—the words “dom­i­nated” and even “con­trol­led” are too weak—Marx­ian post-mod­ern iden­tity poli­tics, which views liter­a­ture only as a poli­ti­cal barom­e­ter and tool.

• PhilGoetz 15 May 2019 20:29 UTC

  9 points

  on: Pas­cal’s Mug­ging: Tiny Prob­a­bil­ities of Vast Utilities

  I think you’re as­sum­ing that to give in to the mug­ging is the wrong an­swer in a one-shot game for a be­ing that val­ues all hu­mans in ex­is­tence equally, be­cause it feels wrong to you, a be­ing with a moral com­pass evolved in iter­ated multi-gen­er­a­tional games.

  Con­sider these pos­si­bil­ities, any one of which would cre­ate challenges for your rea­son­ing:

  1. Giv­ing in is the right an­swer in a one-shot game, but the wrong an­swer in an iter­ated game. If you give in to the mug­ging, the out­sider will keep mug­ging you and other ra­tio­nal­ists un­til you’re all broke, leav­ing the uni­verse’s fu­ture in the hands of “Marx­i­ans” and post-mod­ernists.

  2. Giv­ing in is the right an­swer for a ra­tio­nal AI God, but evolved be­ings (un­der the Dar­wi­nian defi­ni­tion of “evolved”) can’t value all mem­ber of their species equally. They must value kin more than strangers. You would need a the­ory to ex­plain why any be­ing that evolved due to re­source com­pe­ti­tion wouldn’t con­sider kil­ling a large num­ber of very dis­tantly-re­lated mem­bers of its species to be a good thing.

  3. You should in­ter­pret the con­flict be­tween your in­tu­ition, and your de­sire for a ra­tio­nal God, not as show­ing that you’re rea­son­ing badly be­cause you’re evolved, but that you’re rea­son­ing badly by de­siring a ra­tio­nal God bound by a static util­ity func­tion. This is com­pli­cated, so I’m gonna need more than one para­graph:

  In­tu­itively, my ar­gu­ment boils down to ap­ply­ing the logic be­hind free mar­kets, free­dom of speech, and es­pe­cially evolu­tion, to the ques­tion of how to con­struct God’s util­ity func­tion. This will be vague, but I think you can fill in the blanks.

  Free-mar­ket eco­nomic the­ory de­vel­oped only af­ter mil­le­nia dur­ing which ev­ery­one be­lieved that top-down con­trol was the best way of al­lo­cat­ing re­sources. Free­dom of speech de­vel­oped only af­ter mil­le­nia dur­ing which ev­ery­one be­lieved that it was ra­tio­nal for ev­ery­one to try to sup­press any speech they dis­agreed with. Poli­ti­cal liber­al­ism de­vel­oped only af­ter mil­le­nia dur­ing which ev­ery­body be­lieved that the best way to re­form so­ciety was to figure out what the best so­ciety would be like, then force that on ev­ery­one. Evolu­tion was con­ceived of—well, origi­nally about 2500 years ago, prob­a­bly by Dem­ocri­tus, but it be­came pop­u­lar only af­ter mil­le­nia dur­ing which ev­ery­one be­lieved that life could be cre­ated only by de­sign.

  All of these de­vel­op­ments came from em­piri­cists. Em­piri­cism is one of the two op­pos­ing philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions of Western thought. It origi­nated, as far as we know, with Dem­ocri­tus (about whom Plato re­port­edly said that he wished all his works to be burned—which they even­tu­ally were). It went through the Skep­tics, the Sto­ics, Lu­cretius, nom­i­nal­ism, the use of nu­meric mea­sure­ments (re-in­tro­duced to the West circa 1300), the Re­nais­sance and En­light­en­ment, and even­tu­ally (with the ad­di­tion of evolu­tion, prob­a­bil­ity, statis­tics, and op­er­a­tional­ized terms) cre­ated mod­ern sci­ence.

  A key prin­ci­ple of em­piri­cism, on which John Stu­art Mill ex­plic­itly based his defense of free speech, is that we can never be cer­tain. If you read about the skep­tics and sto­ics to­day, you’ll read that they “be­lieved noth­ing”, but that was be­cause, to their op­po­nents, “be­lieve” meant “know some­thing with 100% cer­tainty”.

  (The most-fa­mous skep­tic, Sex­tus Em­piri­cus, was called “Em­piri­cus” be­cause he was of the em­piri­cal school of medicine, which taught learn­ing from ex­pe­rience. Its op­po­nent was the ra­tio­nal school of medicine, which used logic to in­ter­pret the dic­tums of the an­cient au­thor­i­ties.)

  The op­pos­ing philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, founded by Plato—is ra­tio­nal­ism. “Ra­tional” does not mean “good think­ing”. It has a very spe­cific mean­ing, and it is not a good way of think­ing. It means rea­son­ing about the phys­i­cal world the same way Eu­clid con­structed ge­o­met­ric proofs. No mea­sure­ments, no ir­ra­tional num­bers, no ob­ser­va­tion of the world, no op­er­a­tional­ized nom­i­nal­ist defi­ni­tions, no calcu­lus or differ­en­tial equa­tions, no test­ing of hy­pothe­ses—just arm­chair a pri­ori logic about uni­ver­sal cat­e­gories, based on a set of un­ques­tion­able ax­ioms, done in your fa­vorite hu­man lan­guage. Ra­tion­al­ism is the op­po­site of sci­ence, which is em­piri­cal. The pre­tense that “ra­tio­nal” means “right rea­son­ing” is the great­est lie foisted on hu­man­ity by philoso­phers.

  Dual­ist ra­tio­nal­ism is in­her­ently re­li­gious, as it re­lies on some con­cept of “spirit”, such as Plato’s Forms, Au­gus­tine’s God, Hegel’s World Spirit, or an almighty pro­gram­mer con­vert­ing sense data into LISP sym­bols, to con­nect the in­ex­act, am­bigu­ous, change­able things of this world to the pre­cise, un­am­bigu­ous, un­chang­ing, and usu­ally un­quan­tified terms in its logic.

  (Mon­ist ra­tio­nal­ists, like Bud­dha, Par­menides, and post-mod­ernists, be­lieve sense data can’t be di­vided un­am­bigu­ously into cat­e­gories, and thus we may not use cat­e­gories. Modern em­piri­cists cat­e­go­rize sense data us­ing statis­tics.)

  Ra­tion­al­ists sup­port strict, rigid, top-down plan­ning and con­trol. This in­cludes their op­po­si­tion to free mar­kets, free speech, grad­ual re­form, and op­ti­miza­tion and evolu­tion in gen­eral. This is be­cause ra­tio­nal­ists be­lieve they can prove things about the real world, and hence their con­clu­sions are re­li­able, and they don’t need to mess around with slow, grad­ual im­prove­ments or with test­ing. (Of course each ra­tio­nal­ist be­lieves that ev­ery other ra­tio­nal­ist was wrong, and should prob­a­bly be burned at the stake.)

  They op­pose all ran­dom­ness and di­s­or­der, be­cause it makes strict top-down con­trol difficult, and threat­ens to in­tro­duce change, which can only be bad once you’ve found the truth.

  They have to clas­sify ev­ery phys­i­cal thing in the world into a dis­crete, struc­ture­less, atomic cat­e­gory, for use in their logic. That has led in­evitably to the­o­ries which re­quire all hu­mans to ul­ti­mately have, at re­flec­tive equil­ibrium, the same val­ues—as Plato, Au­gus­tine, Marx, and CEV all do.

  You have, I think, picked up some of these bad in­cli­na­tions from ra­tio­nal­ism. When you say you want to find the “right” set of val­ues (via CEV) and en­code them into an AI God, that’s ex­actly like the ra­tio­nal­ists who spent their lives try­ing to find the “right” way to live, and then sup­press all other thoughts and en­force that “right way” on ev­ery­one, for all time. Whereas an em­piri­cist would never claim to have found fi­nal truth, and would always leave room for new un­der­stand­ings and new de­vel­op­ments.

  Your ob­jec­tion to ran­dom­ness is also typ­i­cally ra­tio­nal­ist. Ran­dom­ness en­ables you to sam­ple with­out bias. A ra­tio­nal­ist be­lieves he can achieve com­plete lack of bias; an em­piri­cist be­lieves that nei­ther com­plete lack of bias nor com­plete ran­dom­ness can be achieved, but that for a given amount of effort, you might achieve lower bias by work­ing on your ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tor and us­ing it to sam­ple, than by hack­ing away at your bi­ases.

  So I don’t think we should build an FAI God who has a static set of val­ues. We should build, if any­thing, an AI referee, who tries only to keep con­di­tions in the uni­verse that will en­able evolu­tion to keep on pro­duc­ing be­hav­iors, con­cepts, and crea­tures of greater and greater com­plex­ity. Ran­dom­ness must not be elimi­nated, for with­out ran­dom­ness we can have no true ex­plo­ra­tion, and must be ruled for­ever by the be­liefs and bi­ases of the past.

• PhilGoetz 15 May 2019 17:32 UTC

  3 points

  on: Res­cu­ing the Ex­tropy Magaz­ine archives

  I scanned in Ex­tropy 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 16, and 17, which leaves only #2 miss­ing. How can I send these to you? Con­tact me at [my user name] at gmail.

• PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 18:26 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ike's comment on: Why Bayesi­ans should two-box in a one-shot

  I just now read that one post. It isn’t clear how you think it’s rele­vant. I’m guess­ing you think that it im­plies that posit­ing free will is in­valid.

  You don’t have to be­lieve in free will to in­cor­po­rate it into a model of how hu­mans act. We’re all nom­i­nal­ists here; we don’t be­lieve that the con­cepts in our the­o­ries ac­tu­ally ex­ist some­where in Form-space.

  When some­one asks the ques­tion, “Should you one-box?”, they’re us­ing a model which uses the con­cept of free will. You can’t ob­ject to that by say­ing “You don’t re­ally have free will.” You can ob­ject that it is the wrong model to use for this prob­lem, but then you have to spell out why, and what model you want to use in­stead, and what ques­tion you ac­tu­ally want to ask, since it can’t be that one.

  Peo­ple in the LW com­mu­nity don’t usu­ally do that. I see sloppy state­ments claiming that hu­mans “should” one-box, based on a pre­sump­tion that they have no free will. That’s mak­ing a claim within a paradigm while re­ject­ing the paradigm. It makes no sense.

  Con­sider what Eliezer says about coin flips:

  We’ve pre­vi­ously dis­cussed how prob­a­bil­ity is in the mind. If you are un­cer­tain about whether a clas­si­cal coin has landed heads or tails, that is a fact about your state of mind, not a prop­erty of the coin. The coin it­self is ei­ther heads or tails. But peo­ple for­get this, and think that coin.prob­a­bil­ity == 0.5, which is the Mind Pro­jec­tion Fal­lacy: treat­ing prop­er­ties of the mind as if they were prop­er­ties of the ex­ter­nal world.

  The mind pro­jec­tion fal­lacy is treat­ing the word “prob­a­bil­ity” not in a nom­i­nal­ist way, but in a philo­soph­i­cal re­al­ist way, as if they were things ex­ist­ing in the world. Prob­a­bil­ities are sub­jec­tive. You don’t pro­ject them onto the ex­ter­nal world. That doesn’t make “coin.prob­a­bil­ity == 0.5″ a “false” state­ment. It cor­rectly speci­fies the dis­tri­bu­tion of pos­si­bil­ities given the in­for­ma­tion available within the mind mak­ing the prob­a­bil­ity as­sess­ment. I think that is what Eliezer is try­ing to say there.

  “Free will” is a use­ful the­o­ret­i­cal con­struct in a similar way. It may not be a thing in the world, but it is a model for talk­ing about how we make de­ci­sions. We can only model our own brains; you can’t fully simu­late your own brain within your own brain; you can’t de­mand that we use the ter­ri­tory as our map.

• PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 16:28 UTC

  1 point

  on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

  Yep, nice list. One I didn’t see: Defin­ing a word in a way that is less use­ful (that con­veys less in­for­ma­tion) and re­ject­ing a defi­ni­tion that is more use­ful (that con­veys more in­for­ma­tion). Always choose the defi­ni­tion that con­veys more in­for­ma­tion; elimi­nate words that con­vey zero in­for­ma­tion. It’s com­mon for peo­ple to define words that con­vey zero in­for­ma­tion. But if ev­ery­thing has the Bud­dha na­ture, noth­ing em­piri­cal can be said about what it means and it con­veys no in­for­ma­tion.

  Along similar lines, always define words so that no other word con­veys too much mu­tual in­for­ma­tion about them. For in­stance, many peo­ple have ar­gued with me that I should use the word “to­tal­i­tar­ian” to mean “the fas­cist na­tions of the 20th cen­tury”. Well, we already have a word for that, which is “fas­cist”, so to define “to­tal­i­tar­ian” as a syn­onym makes it a use­less word.

  The word “fas­cist” raises the ques­tion of when to use ex­ten­sional vs. in­ten­sional defi­ni­tions. It’s con­ven­tion­ally defined ex­ten­sion­ally, to mean the Axis pow­ers in World War 2. This is not a use­ful defi­ni­tion, as we already have a la­bel for that. Worse, peo­ple define it ex­ten­sion­ally but pre­tend they’ve defined it in­ten­sion­ally. They call peo­ple to­day “fas­cist”, con­vey­ing con­no­ta­tions in a way that can’t be eas­ily dis­puted, be­cause there is no in­ten­sional defi­ni­tion to eval­u­ate the claim.

  Some­times you want to switch back and forth be­tween ex­ten­sional and in­ten­sional defi­ni­tions. In art his­tory, we have a term for each pe­riod or “move­ment”, like “neo-clas­si­cal” and “Ro­man­tic”. The ex­em­plars of the cat­e­gory are defined both in­ten­sion­ally and ex­ten­sion­ally, as those art­works hav­ing cer­tain prop­er­ties and pro­duced in cer­tain ge­o­graphic lo­ca­tions dur­ing a cer­tain time pe­riod. It is ap­pro­pri­ate to use the in­ten­sional defi­ni­tion alone if de­scribing a con­tem­po­rary work of art (you can call it “Ro­man­tic” if it looks Ro­man­tic), but in­ap­pro­pri­ate to use ex­am­ples that fit the in­ten­sion but not the ex­ten­sion as ex­em­plars, or to de­duce things about the cat­e­gory from them. This keeps the cat­e­gories sta­ble.

  A lit­tle ways back I talked about defin­ing the phrase “Bud­dha na­ture”. Phrases also have defi­ni­tions—words are not atoms of mean­ing. An­a­lyz­ing a phrase as if our the­o­ries of gram­mar worked, ig­nor­ing knowl­edge about idioms, is an er­ror ra­tio­nal­ists some­times com­mit.

  Pre­tend­ing words don’t have con­no­ta­tions is an­other er­ror ra­tio­nal­ists com­mit reg­u­larly—of­ten in sneaky ways, de­liber­ately us­ing the con­no­ta­tions, while pre­tend­ing they’re be­ing ob­jec­tive. Marx­ist liter­ary crit­i­cism, for in­stance, loads a lot into the word “bour­geois”.

  Another cat­e­gory miss­ing here is gos­toks and doshes. This is when a word’s con­no­ta­tions and tribal af­fili­a­tion-sig­nal­ling dis­place its se­man­tic con­tent en­tirely, and no one no­tices it has no mean­ing. Ex­tremely com­mon in Marx­ism and in “the­ory”; “cap­i­tal­ism” and “bour­geois” be­ing the most-com­mon ex­am­ples. “Bour­geoisie” origi­nally meant peo­ple like Rock­efel­ler and the Borges, but as soon as artists be­gan us­ing the word, they used it to mean “peo­ple who don’t like my scrib­bles,” and now it has no mean­ing at all, but de­monic con­no­ta­tions. “Cap­i­tal­ism” has no mean­ing that can sin­gle out post-feu­dal so­cieties in the way Marx­ists pre­tend it does; any defi­ni­tion of it that I’ve seen in­cludes things that Marx­ists don’t want it to, like the Soviet Union, ab­solute monar­chies, or even hunter-gath­erer tribes. It should be called sim­ply “free mar­kets”, which is what they re­ally ob­ject to and much more ac­cu­rate at iden­ti­fy­ing the eco­nomic sys­tems that they op­pose, but they don’t want to ad­mit that the essence of their ide­ol­ogy is op­po­si­tion to free­dom.

  Avoid words with con­no­ta­tions that you haven’t jus­tified. Don’t say “cheap” if you mean “in­ex­pen­sive” or “shoddy”. Espe­cially avoid words which have a syn­onym with the op­po­site con­no­ta­tion: “fru­gal” and “miserly”. Be aware of your et­y­molog­i­cal pay­loads: “awe­some” and “awful” (full of awe), “in­cred­ible” (not cred­ible), “won­der­ful” (thought-pro­vok­ing).

  Another cat­e­gory is when 2 sub­cul­tures have differ­ent sets of defi­ni­tions for the same words, and don’t re­al­ize it. For in­stance, in the hu­man­i­ties, “ra­tio­nal” liter­ally means ra­tio-based rea­son­ing, which re­jects the use of real num­bers, con­tin­u­ous equa­tions, em­piri­cal mea­sure­ments, or con­tin­u­ous changes over time. This is the ba­sis of the Ro­man­tic/​Modernist ha­tred of “sci­ence” (by which they mean Aris­totelian ra­tio­nal­ity), and of many post-mod­ern ar­gu­ments that ra­tio­nal­ity doesn’t work. Many peo­ple in the hu­man­i­ties are gen­uinely un­aware that sci­ence is differ­ent than it was 2400 years ago, and most were 100% ig­no­rant of sci­ence un­til per­haps the mid-20th cen­tury. A “clas­si­cal ed­u­ca­tion” ex­cludes all em­piri­cism.

  Another prob­lem is mean­ing drift. When you use writ­ings from differ­ent cen­turies, you need to be aware of how the mean­ings of words and phrases have changed over time. For in­stance, the offi­cial aca­demic line nowa­days is that alchemy and as­trol­ogy are le­gi­t­i­mate sci­ences; this is jus­tified in part by us­ing the word “sci­ence” as if it meant the same as the Latin “sci­en­tia”.

  A prob­lem in trans­la­tion is decol­laps­ing defi­ni­tions. Medieval Latin con­flated some im­por­tant con­cepts be­cause their neo-Pla­ton­ist meta­physics said that all good things sort of went to­gether. So for in­stance they had a sin­gle word, “pul­chrum”, which meant “beau­tiful”, “sexy”, “ap­pro­pri­ate to its pur­pose”, “good”, and “no­ble”. Trans­la­tors will trans­late that into English based on the con­text, but that’s not con­vey­ing the origi­nal mind­set. This comes up most fre­quently when an­cient writ­ers made puns, like Plato’s puns in the Crito, or “Je­sus’” (Greek) puns in the open­ing chap­ters of John, which are de­stroyed in trans­la­tion, leav­ing the reader with a false im­pres­sion of the speaker’s in­tent.

  I dis­agree that say­ing “X is Y by defi­ni­tion” Is usu­ally wrong, but I should prob­a­bly leave my com­ment on that post in­stead of here.

• PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 16:17 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Psychohistorian2's comment on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

  [moved to top level of replies]

• PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 16:02 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: MugaSofer's comment on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

  But you’re ar­gu­ing against Eliezer, as “God” and “mir­a­cle” were (and still are) com­monly-used words, and so Eliezer is say­ing those are good, short words for them.

• PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 2:10 UTC

  0 points

  on: Fal­la­cies of Compression

  Great post! There is also the non-dis­crete as­pect of com­pres­sion: in­for­ma­tion loss. English has, ac­cord­ing to some dic­tio­nar­ies, over a mil­lion words. It’s un­likely we store most of our in­for­ma­tion in English. Prob­a­bly there is some sort of di­men­sion re­duc­tion, like PCA. There is in any case prob­a­bly lossy com­pres­sion. This means peo­ple with differ­ent his­to­ries will use differ­ent fre­quency ta­bles for their com­pres­sion, and will throw out differ­ent in­for­ma­tion when en­cod­ing a ver­bal state­ment. I think you would al­most cer­tainly find that if you mea­sure word use fre­quency for differ­ent peo­ple, then cluster the word use dis­tri­bu­tions, some clusters would cor­re­spond to ide­olo­gies. The in­ter­est­ing ques­tion is which comes first, the ide­ol­ogy, or the word us­age fre­quency (caused by differ­ent life ex­pe­riences).

• PhilGoetz 16 Dec 2017 14:44 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Vaniver's comment on: Why Bayesi­ans should two-box in a one-shot

  I don’t think that what you need has any bear­ing on what re­al­ity has ac­tu­ally given you. Nor can we talk about differ­ent de­ci­sion the­o­ries here—as long as we are talk­ing about max­i­miz­ing ex­pected util­ity, we have our de­ci­sion the­ory; that is enough speci­fi­ca­tion to an­swer the New­comb one-shot ques­tion. We can only ar­rive at a differ­ent out­come by stat­ing the prob­lem differ­ently, or by sneak­ing in differ­ent meta­physics, or by just do­ing bad logic (in this case, usu­ally al­low­ing con­tra­dic­tory be­liefs about free will in differ­ent parts of the anal­y­sis.)

  Your com­ment im­plies you’re talk­ing about policy, which must be mod­el­led as an iter­ated game. I don’t deny that one-box­ing is good in the iter­ated game.

  My con­cern in this post is that there’s been a lack of dis­tinc­tion in the com­mu­nity be­tween “one-box­ing is the best policy” and “one-box­ing is the best de­ci­sion at one point in time in a de­ci­sion-the­o­retic anal­y­sis, which as­sumes com­plete free­dom of choice at that mo­ment.” This lack of dis­tinc­tion has led many peo­ple into wish­ful or mag­i­cal rather than ra­tio­nal think­ing.

• PhilGoetz 16 Dec 2017 1:03 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Vaniver's comment on: Why Bayesi­ans should two-box in a one-shot

  I can be­lieve that it would make sense to com­mit ahead of time to one-box at such an event. Do­ing so would af­fect your be­hav­ior in a way that the pre­dic­tor might pick up on.

  Hmm. Think­ing about this con­vinces me that there’s a big prob­lem here in how we talk about the prob­lem, be­cause if we al­low peo­ple who already knew about New­comb’s Prob­lem to play, there are re­ally 4 pos­si­ble ac­tions, not 2:

  • in­tended to one-box, one-boxed

  • in­tended to one-box, two-boxed

  • in­tended to two-box, one-boxed

  • in­tended to two-box, two-boxed

  I don’t know if the usual state­ment of New­comb’s prob­lem speci­fies whether the sub­jects learns the rules of the game be­fore or af­ter the pre­dic­tor makes a pre­dic­tion. It seems to me that’s a crit­i­cal fac­tor. If the sub­ject is told the rules of the game be­fore the pre­dic­tor ob­serves the sub­ject and makes a pre­dic­tion, then we’re just say­ing Omega is a very good lie de­tec­tor, and the prob­lem is not even about de­ci­sion the­ory, but about psy­chol­ogy: Do you have a good enough poker face to lie to Omega? If not, pre-com­mit to one-box.

  We shouldn’t ask, “Should you two-box?”, but, “Should you two-box now, given how you would have acted ear­lier?” The var­i­ous prob­a­bil­ities in the pre­sent de­pend on what you thought in the past. Un­der the propo­si­tion that Omega is perfect at pre­dict­ing, the per­son in­clined to 2-box should still 2-box, ’coz that $1M prob­a­bly ain’t there.

  So New­comb’s prob­lem isn’t a para­dox. If we’re talk­ing just about the fi­nal de­ci­sion, the one made by a sub­ject af­ter Omega’s pre­dic­tion, then the sub­ject should prob­a­bly two-box (as ar­gued in the post). If we’re talk­ing about two de­ci­sions, one be­fore and one af­ter the box-open­ing, then all we’re ask­ing is whether you can con­vince Omega that you’re go­ing to one-box if you aren’t. Then it would not be ter­ribly hard to say that a pre­dic­tor might be so good (say, an Amaz­ing Kreskin-level cold-reader of hu­mans, or that you are an AI) that your only hope is to pre­com­mit to one-box.

• PhilGoetz 15 Dec 2017 19:48 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ike's comment on: Why Bayesi­ans should two-box in a one-shot

  This was ar­gued against in the Se­quences and in gen­eral, doesn’t seem to be a strong ar­gu­ment. It seems perfectly com­pat­i­ble to be­lieve your ac­tions fol­low de­ter­minis­ti­cally and still talk about de­ci­sion the­ory—all the func­tional de­ci­sion the­ory stuff is as­sum­ing a de­ter­minis­tic de­ci­sion pro­cess, I think.

  It is com­pat­i­ble to be­lieve your ac­tions fol­low de­ter­minis­ti­cally and still talk about de­ci­sion the­ory. It is not com­pat­i­ble to be­lieve your ac­tions fol­low de­ter­minis­ti­cally, and still talk about de­ci­sion the­ory from a first-per­son point of view, as if you could by force of will vi­o­late your pro­gram­ming.

  To ask what choice a de­ter­minis­tic en­tity should make pre­sup­poses both that it does, and does not, have choice. Pre­sup­pos­ing a con­tra­dic­tion means STOP, your rea­son­ing has crashed and you can prove any con­clu­sion if you con­tinue.

• PhilGoetz 15 Dec 2017 19:41 UTC

  1 point

  on: An­nounc­ing the AI Align­ment Prize

  I think that first you should elab­o­rate on what you mean by “the goals of hu­man­ity”. Do you mean ma­jor­ity opinion? In that case, one goal of hu­man­ity is to have a sin­gle world re­li­gious State, al­though there is dis­agree­ment on what that re­li­gion should be. Other goals of hu­man­ity in­clude elimi­nat­ing ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity and en­forc­ing tra­di­tional pa­tri­ar­chal fam­ily struc­tures.

  Okay, I ad­mit it—what I re­ally think is that “goals of hu­man­ity” is a non­sen­si­cal phrase, es­pe­cially when spo­ken by an Amer­i­can aca­demic. It would be a lit­tle bet­ter to talk about val­ues in­stead of goals, but not much bet­ter. The phrase still im­plies the un­spo­ken be­lief that ev­ery­one would think like the per­son who speaks it, if only they were smarter.

• PhilGoetz 15 Dec 2017 19:12 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ike's comment on: Why Bayesi­ans should two-box in a one-shot

  The part of physics that im­plies some­one can­not scan your brain and simu­late in­puts so as to perfectly pre­dict your ac­tions is quan­tum me­chan­ics. But I don’t think in­vok­ing it is the best re­sponse to your ques­tion. Though it does make me won­der how Eliezer rec­on­ciles his thoughts on one-box­ing with his many-wor­lds in­ter­pre­ta­tion of QM. Doesn’t many-wor­lds im­ply that ev­ery game with Omega cre­ates wor­lds in which Omega is wrong?

  If they can perfectly pre­dict your ac­tions, then you have no choice, so talk­ing about which choice to make is mean­ingless. If you be­lieve you should one-box based if Omega can perfectly pre­dict your ac­tions, but two-box oth­er­wise, then you are bet­ter off try­ing to two-box: In that case, you’ve already agreed that you should two=box if Omega can’t perfectly pre­dict your ac­tions. If Omega can, you won’t be able to two-box un­less Omega already pre­dicted that you would, so it won’t hurt to try to 2-box.

Why Bayesi­ans should two-box in a one-shot

• PhilGoetz 13 Apr 2017 1:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: lifelonglearner's comment on: The An­cient God Who Rules High School

  Sorry. I’ve been read­ing English liter­ary jour­nals and lit the­ory books for the past year, and the de­fault as­sump­tion is always that the reader is a Marx­ist.

• PhilGoetz 13 Apr 2017 1:32 UTC

  0 points

  on: Belief in Belief

  The ra­tio­nal­ist virtue of em­piri­cism...

  I’m not dis­agree­ing with any of the con­tent above, but a note about ter­minol­ogy--

  LessWrong keeps us­ing the word “ra­tio­nal­ism” to mean some­thing like “rea­son” or pos­si­bly even “sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy”. In philos­o­phy, how­ever, “ra­tio­nal­ism” is not al­lied to “em­piri­cism”, but di­a­met­ri­cally op­posed to it. What we call sci­ence was a grad­ual de­vel­op­ment, over a few cen­turies, of method­olo­gies that har­nessed the pow­ers both of ra­tio­nal­ism and em­piri­cism, which had pre­vi­ously been thought to be in­com­pat­i­ble.

  But if you talk to a mod­ernist or post-mod­ernist to­day, when they use the term “ra­tio­nal”, they mean old-school Greek, Pla­tonic-Aris­totelian ra­tio­nal­ism. They, like us, think so much in this old Greek way that they may use the term “rea­son” when they mean “Aris­totelian logic”. All post-mod­ernism is based on the as­sump­tion that sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy is es­sen­tially the com­bi­na­tion of Pla­tonic essences, Aris­totelian physics, and Aris­totelian logic, which is ra­tio­nal­ism. They are com­pletely ig­no­rant of what sci­ence is and how it works. But this is partly our fault, be­cause they hear us talk­ing about sci­ence and us­ing the term “ra­tio­nal­ity” as if sci­ence were ra­tio­nal­ism!

  (Inb4 some­body says Plato was a ra­tio­nal­ist and Aris­to­tle was an em­piri­cist: Really, re­ally not. Aris­to­tle couldn’t mea­sure things, and very likely couldn’t do ar­ith­metic. In any case the most im­por­tant Aris­totelian writ­ings to post-mod­ernists are the Physics, which aren’t em­piri­cal in the slight­est. No time to go into it here, though.)

• PhilGoetz 9 Apr 2017 23:55 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: entirelyuseless's comment on: What con­ser­va­tives and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists agree on

  I was un­fairly in­sert­ing in the paren­the­ses my own pre­sump­tion about why Chris­ti­ans saw the world as hav­ing been cre­ated perfect. The pas­sage I was talk­ing about from Aquinas did not talk about perfec­tion of the en­vi­ron­ment.

  I’d like to see what Aquinas did say. Have you got a cita­tion? I’m pretty sure that the no­tion that the world was cre­ated im­perfect has never been tol­er­ated by the Catholic Church. Assert­ing that cre­ation was im­perfect might even be con­demned as Man­icheeism. Opinions vary on what hap­pened af­ter the Fall, but I find it un­likely that Aquinas could have said God’s origi­nal cre­ation was im­perfect. (If he did, he was prob­a­bly copy­ing Aris­to­tle, and mak­ing some fine defi­ni­tional dis­tinc­tion not ex­plained here, to avoid heresy.)

• PhilGoetz 9 Apr 2017 15:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: PhilGoetz's comment on: What con­ser­va­tives and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists agree on

  Yep, the ar­gu­ment to jus­tify the im­perfec­tion of chil­dren, and thus the ne­ces­sity of growth, is based on Aris­to­tle’s no­tion of perfect and im­perfect ac­tu­al­ities. Aquinas wrote:

  Every­thing is perfect inas­much as it is in ac­tu­al­ity; im­perfect, inas­much as it is in po­ten­tial­ity, with pri­va­tion of ac­tu­al­ity. … It is im­pos­si­ble there­fore for any effect that is brought into be­ing by ac­tion to be of a no­bler ac­tu­al­ity than is the ac­tu­al­ity of the agent. It is pos­si­ble though for the ac­tu­al­ity of the effect to be less perfect than the ac­tu­al­ity of the act­ing cause, inas­much as ac­tion may be weak­ened on the part of the ob­ject to which it is ter­mi­nated, or upon which it is spent.

  The rea­son God cre­ated hu­mans so that they have to grow from im­perfect child­hood (lack­ing the ma­tu­rity of a com­plete hu­man) to­wards a perfect adult state, rather than be­ing adult, is thus so that they may learn virtue, which is the pro­cess of striv­ing for perfec­tion. (The en­vi­ron­ment does not need to learn virtue; there­fore it was cre­ated perfect.)

  I don’t know whether hu­mans would have born offspring that were ba­bies if not for the Fall, nor why an­i­mals bear ba­bies, if not for the sake of their spiritual growth.

• PhilGoetz 9 Apr 2017 15:44 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ike's comment on: What con­ser­va­tives and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists agree on

  I didn’t mean to re­tract this, but to delete it and move the com­ment down be­low.

• PhilGoetz 9 Apr 2017 15:31 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ike's comment on: What con­ser­va­tives and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists agree on

  His­tor­i­cally, Chris­ti­ans ob­jected strongly to fos­sil ev­i­dence that some species had gone ex­tinct. They said God would not have cre­ated species and then let them go ex­tinct.

  Perfec­tion is a cru­cial part of Chris­tian on­tol­ogy. God’s cre­ation was perfect. That means, in the Chris­tian way of think­ing, it is un­chang­ing. Read Chris­tian de­scrip­tions of God (who is perfect), and “un­chang­ing” is always one of the ad­jec­tives. “Un­chang­ing” is a nec­es­sary at­tribute of perfec­tion in Chris­tian the­ol­ogy, and God’s cre­ation is nec­es­sar­ily perfect. The en­vi­ron­ment, there­fore, was de­signed and cre­ated not to ever change.

  One could ar­gue that in­di­vi­d­u­als are thus im­perfect be­cause they are born young and then ma­ture. I’ve never heard a counter-ar­gu­ment against this ac­cu­sa­tion, though I sus­pect they ex­ist in the wreck­age of me­dieval the­ol­ogy.