Polymeron

Karma: 374

Polymeron 23 Mar 2015 7:48 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
That’s why the rule says challengable inductive inference. If in the context of the discussion this is not obvious then maybe yes, but in almost every other instance it’s fine to make these shortcuts, so long as you’reunderstood.

Polymeron 4 Feb 2014 19:55 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Dark Side Epistemology
No, and argument from authority can be a useful heuristic in certain cases, but at least you’d want to take away the one or two arguments you found most compelling and check them out later. In that sense, this is borderline.

Usually, however, this tactic is employed by people who are just looking for an excuse to flee into the warm embrace of an unassailable authority, often after scores of arguments they made were easily refuted. It is a mistake to give a low value to p(my position is mistaken | 10 arguments I have made have been refuted to my satisfaction in short order).

Polymeron 4 Feb 2014 5:33 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: VAuroch’s comment on: Dark Side Epistemology
I’ve had forms of this said to me; it basically means “I’m losing the debate because you personally are smart, not because I’m wrong. Whichever authority I listen to in order to reinforce my existing beliefs would surely crush all your arguments. So stop assailing me with logic...”

It’s Dark Side because it surrenders personal understanding to authority, and treats it as a default epistemological position.

Polymeron 6 Sep 2013 4:41 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care
Wouldn’t this only be correct if similar hardware ran the software the same way? Human thinking is highly associative and variable, and as language is shared amongst many humans, it means that it doesn’t, as such, have a fixed formal representation.

Polymeron 15 Aug 2013 16:28 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: AndHisHorse’s comment on: The flawed Turing test: language, understanding, and partial p-zombies
I agree on the basic point, but then my deeper point was that somewhere down the line you’ll find the intelligence(s) that created a high-fidelity converter for an arbitrary amount of information from one format to another. Sarle is free to claim that the system does not understand Chinese, but its very function could only have been imparted by parties who collectively speak Chinese very well, making the room at very least a medium of communication utilizing this understanding.

And this is before we mention the entirely plausible claim that the room-person system as a whole understands Chinese, even though neither of its two parts does. Any system you’ll take apart to sufficient degrees will stop displaying the properties of the whole, so having us peer inside an electronic brain asking “but where does the intelligence/understanding reside?” misses the point entirely.

Polymeron 11 Aug 2013 8:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: The flawed Turing test: language, understanding, and partial p-zombies
Wouldn’t such a GLUT by necessity require someone possessing immensely fine understanding of Chinese and English both, though? You could then say that the person+GLUT system as a whole understands Chinese, as it combines both the person’s symbol-manipulation capabilities and the actual understanding represented by the GLUT.

You might still not possess understanding of Chinese, but that does not mean a meaningful conversation has not taken place.

Polymeron 11 Aug 2013 7:34 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Baruta07’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Interestingly, my first reaction to this post was that a great deal of it reminds me of myself, especially near that age. I wonder if this is the result of ingrained bias? If I’m not mistaken, when you give people a horoscope or other personality description, about 90% of them will agree that it appears to refer to them, compared to the 8.33% we’d expect it to actually apply to. Then there’s selection bias inherent to people writing on LW (wannabe philosophers and formal logic enthusiasts posting here? A shocker!). And yet...

I’m interested to know, did you have any particular goal in mind posting this, or just making yourself generally known? If you need help or advice on any subject, be specific about it and I will be happy to assist (as will many others I’m sure).

Polymeron 23 Apr 2013 18:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
I suspect that with memory on the order of 10^70 bytes, that might involve additional complications; but you’re correct, normally this cancels out the complexity problem.

Polymeron 23 Apr 2013 18:50 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
I didn’t consider using 3 bits for pawns! Thanks for that :) I did account for such variables as may castle and whose turn it is.

Polymeron 17 Apr 2013 7:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Strange7’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
This is more or less what computers do today to win chess matches, but the space of possibilities explodes too fast; even the strongest computers can’t really keep track of more than I think 13 or 14 moves ahead, even given a long time to think.

Merely storing all the positions that are unwinnable—regardless of why they are so—would require more matter than we have in the solar system. Not to mention the efficiency of running a DB search on that...

Polymeron 17 Apr 2013 7:16 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
The two are not in conflict.

A-la Levinthal’s paradox, I can say that throwing a marble down a conical hollow at different angles and force can have literally trillions of possible trajectories; a-la Anfinsen’s dogma, that should not stop me from predicting that it will end up at the bottom of the cone; but I’d need to know the shape of the cone (or, more specifically, its point’s location) to determine exactly where that is—so being able to make the prediction once I know this is of no assistance for predicting the end position with a different, unknown cone.

Similarly, Eliezer is able to predict that a grandmaster chess player would be able to bring a board to a winning position against himself, even though he has no idea what moves that would entail or which of the many trillions of possible move sets the game would be comprised of.

Problems like this cannot be solved on brute force alone; you need to use attractors and heuristics to get where you want to get.

So yes, obviously nature stumbled into certain stable configurations which propelled it forward, rather than solve the problem and start designing away. But even if we can never have enough computing power to model each and every atom in each and every configuration, we might still get a good enough understanding of the general laws for designing proteins almost from scratch.

Polymeron 9 Aug 2012 2:12 UTC
13 points
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on: What Is Signaling, Really?
When I was studying under Amotz Zahavi (originator of the handicap principle theory, which is what you’re actually discussing), he used to make the exact same points. In fact, he used to say that “no communication is reliable unless it has a cost”.

Having this outlook on life in the past 5 years made a lot of things seem very different—small questions like why some people don’t use seatbelts and brag about it, or why men on dates leave big tips; but also bigger questions like advertizing, how hierarchical relationships really work, etc.

Also explained a lot about possible origins of (some) altruistic behaviors; Zahavi’s favorite examples were from the research he and his wife conducted, wherein they observed small groups of social birds (forgot the species, sorry) where altrusitic behavior is common. And it turns out, it’s the dominant birds who behave altrusitically, rather than exploit their weaker brethren—but doing so as a show of strength. My own favorite example is when a lower-status male caught a worm and tried feeding it to the alpha male. The latter proceeded to beat him up, take the morsel, and force-feed it back to the weaker male.

Best course I ever took :)

Polymeron 12 Jun 2012 17:23 UTC
2 points
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on: Problematic Problems for TDT
These questions seem decidedly UNfair to me.

No, they don’t depend on the agent’s decision-making algorithm; just on another agent’s specific decision-making algorithm skewing results against an agent with an identical algorithm and letting all others reap the benefits of an otherwise non-advantageous situation.

So, a couple of things:
1. While I have not mathematically formulated this, I suspect that absolutely any decision theory can have a similar scenario constructed for it, using another agent / simulation with that specific decision theory as the basis for payoff. Go ahead and prove me wrong by supplying one where that’s not the case...
2. It would be far more interesting to see a TDT-defeating question that doesn’t have “TDT” (or taboo versions) as part of its phrasing. In general, questions of how a decision theory fares when agents can scan your algorithm and decide to discriminate against that algorithm specifically, are not interesting—because they are losing propositions in any case. When another agent has such profound understanding of how you tick and malice towards that algorithm, you have already lost.

Polymeron 1 Jun 2012 6:37 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Help me transition to human society!
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to check out the code for this and heavily revise it to include things like data storage space, physical manufacturing capabilities, non-immediately-lethal discovery by humans (so you detected my base in another dimension? Why should I care, again?), and additional modes of winning. All of which I will get around to soon enough.

But, I’ll tell you this. Now when I revise it, I am going to add a game mode where your score is in direct proportion to the amount of office equipment in the universe, with the smallest allowed being a functional paperclip. I am dead serious about this.

Polymeron 26 May 2012 6:01 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
I have likewise adjusted down my confidence that this would be as easy or as inevitable as I previously anticipated. Thus I would no longer say I am “vastly confident” in it, either.

Still good to have this buffer between making an AI and total global catastrophe, though!

Polymeron 24 May 2012 8:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
The way I see it, there’s no evidence that these problems require additional experimentation to resolve, rather than find an obscure piece of experimentation that has already taken place and whose relevance may not be immediately obvious.

Sure, that more experimentation is needed is probable; but by no means certain.

Polymeron 24 May 2012 8:55 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
My point was that the AI is likely to start performing social experiments well before it is capable of even that conversation you depicted. It wouldn’t know how much it doesn’t know about humans.

Polymeron 23 May 2012 19:00 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: semianonymous’s comment on: Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue
I don’t see how that would be relevant to the issue at hand, and thus, why they “need to assume [this] possibility”. Whether they assume the people they talk to can be more intelligent than them or not, so long as they engage them on an even intellectual ground (e.g. trading civil letters of argumentation), is simply irrelevant.

Polymeron 23 May 2012 17:05 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)

What I was expressing skepticism about was that a system with even approximately human-level intelligence necessarily supports a stack trace that supports the kind of analysis you envision performing in the first place, without reference to intentional countermeasures.

Ah, that does clarify it. I agree, analyzing the AI’s thought process would likely be difficult, maybe impossible! I guess I was being a bit hyperbolic in my earlier “crack it open” remarks (though depending on how seriously you take it, such analysis might still take place, hard and prolonged though it may be).

One can have “detectors” in place set to find specific behaviors, but these would have assumptions that could easily fail. Detectors that would still be useful would be macro ones—where it tries to access and how—but these would provide only limited insight into the AI’s thought process.

[...]the difference between “the minimal set of information about humans required to have a conversation with one at all” (my phrase) and “the most basic knowledge about humans” (your phrase). What do you imagine the latter to encompass, and how do you imagine the AI obtained this knowledge?

I actually perceive your phrase to be a subset of my own; I am making the (reasonable, I think) assumption that humans will attempt to communicate with the budding AI. Say, in a lab environment. It would acquire its initial data from this interaction.

I think both these sets of knowledge depend a lot on how the AI is built. For instance, a “babbling” AI—one that is given an innate capability of stringing words together onto a screen, and the drive to do so—would initially say a lot of gibberish and would (presumably) get more coherent as it gets a better grip on its environment. In such a scenario, the minimal set of information about humans required to have a conversation is zero; it would be having conversations before it even knows what it is saying. (This could actually make detection of deception harder down the line, because such attempts can be written off as “quirks” or AI mistakes)

Now, I’ll take your phrase and twist it just a bit: The minimal set of knowledge the AI needs in order to try deceiving humans. That would be the knowledge that humans can be modeled as having beliefs (which drive behavior) and these can be altered by the AI’s actions, at least to some degree. Now, assuming this information isn’t hard-coded, it doesn’t seem likely that is all an AI would know about us; it should be able to see some patterns at least to our communications with it. However, I don’t see how such information would be useful for deception purposes before extensive experimentation.

(Is the fact that the operator communicates with me between 9am and 5pm an intrinsic property of the operator? For all I know, that is a law of nature...)

Polymeron 23 May 2012 16:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
Actually, I don’t know that this means it has to perform physical experiments in order to develop nanotechnology. It is quite conceivable that all the necessary information is already out there, but we haven’t been able to connect all the dots just yet.

At some point the AI hits a wall in the knowledge it can gain without physical experiments, but there’s no good way to know how far ahead that wall is.