Discord: LemonUniverse (lemonuniverse). Reddit: u/Smack-works. Substack: The Lost Jockey. About my situation: here.
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Karma: 151
Could you give a specific example/clarify a little bit more? Maybe there’s no conflict.
Reading the post I didn’t understand this:
Could evolution really build a consequentialist? The post itself kind of contradicts that.
Could a consequentialist really foresee all consequences without having any drives (such as curiosity)?
I think your critique about computational complexity is related to the 1st point.
Even if my ideas are vague, shouldn’t rationality be applicable even at that stage? The idea of levels of intelligence (or hard intelligence ceilings) isn’t very specific either. “Are there unexpected/easy ways to get smarter?”, people should have some opinions about that even without my ideas. It’s safe to assume Eliezer doesn’t believe there’s an unknown way to get smarter (or that it’s easier to find such a way than to solve the Alignment problem).
My more specific hypotheses are related to guessing what such a way might be. But that’s not what you meant, I think.
In this post I described the information I use to reach the conclusion. I’m afraid I don’t know rationality good enough to make it more clear (or investigate if my belief is rational myself). So one of my later posts will likely be about some of my specific ideas.
About the g-factor. I can imagine a weak person who has an extremely strong leg. I would think that such a person isn’t “generally” strong. Because I already have an idea how a generally strong (and above average) person looks like.
But with IQ tests, I’m not starting from believing that they measure general intelligence. Maybe I don’t even have a good idea how a generally intelligent (and above average) person should look like. So the fact that there are in fact multiple different ways to break the correlation makes me doubt IQ more.
Just my emotions! And I had an argument about the value of artists behind the art (Can people value the source of the art? Is it likely that majority of people may value it?). Somewhat similar to Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone). I decided to put the topic into a more global context (How long can you replace everything with AI content? What does it mean for the connection between people?). I’m very surprised that what I wrote was interesting for some people. What surprised you in my post?
I’m also interested in applying the idea of “prior knowledge” to values (or to argumentation, but not in a strictly probabilistic way). For example, maybe I don’t value (human) art that much, or very uncertain about how much I value it. But after considering some more global/fundamental questions (“prior values”, “prior questions”) I may decide that I actually value human art quite a lot in certain contexts. I’m still developing this idea.
I feel (e.g. when reading arguments why AGI “isn’t that scary”) that there’s not enough ways to describe disagreements. I hope to find a new way to show how and why people arrive at certain conclusions. In this post I tried to show “fundamental” reasons of my specific opinion (worrying about AI content generation). I also tried to do a similar thing in a post about Intelligence (I wanted to know if that type of thinking is rational or irrational).
(Drafts of a future post.)
Could you help me to formulate statistics with the properties I’m going to describe?
I want to share my way of seeing the world, analyzing information, my way of experiencing other people. (But it’s easier to talk about fantastical places and videogame levels, so I’m going to give examples with places/levels.)
If you want to read more about my motivation, check out “part 3”.
Part 1: Theory
I got only two main philosophical ideas. First idea is that a part/property of one object (e.g. “height”) may have a completely different meaning in a different object. Because in a different object it relates to and resonates with different things. By putting a part/property in a different context you can create a fundamentally different version of it. You can split any property/part into a spectrum. And you can combine all properties of an object into just a single one.
The second idea is that you can imagine that different objects are themselves like different parts of a single spectrum.
I want to give some examples of how a seemingly generic property can have a unique version for a specific object.
Example 1. Take a look at the “volume” of this place: (painting 1)
Because we’re inside of “something” (the forest), the volume of that “something” is equal to the volume of the whole place.
Because we have a lot of different objects (trees), we have the volume between those objects.
Because the trees are hollow we also have the volume inside of them.
Different nuances of the place reflect its volume in a completely unique way. It has a completely unique context for the property of “volume”.
Example 2. Take a look at “fatness” of this place: (painting 2)
The road doesn’t have too much buildings on itself: this amplifies “fatness”, because you get more earth per one small building.
The road is contrasted with the sea. The sea adds more size to the image (which indirectly emphasizes fatness).
Also because of the sea we understand that it’s not the whole world that is stretched: it’s just this fat road. We don’t look at this world through a one big distortion.
Different nuances of the place reflect its fatness in a completely unique way.
Example 3. Take a look at “height” of this place: (painting 3)
The place is floating somewhere. The building in the center has some height itself. It resonates with the overall height.
The place doesn’t have a ceiling and has a hole in the middle. It connects the place with the sky even more.
The wooden buildings are “light”, so it makes sense that they’re floating in the air.
...
I could go on about places forever. Each feels fundamentally different from all the rest.
And I want to know every single one. And I want to know where they are, I want a map with all those places on it.
Key philosophical principles
Here I describe the most important, the most general principles of my philosophy.
Objects exist only in context of each other, like colors in a spectrum. So objects are like “colors”, and the space of those objects is like a “spectrum”.
All properties of an object are connected/equivalent. Basically, an object has only 1 super property. This super property can be called “color”.
Colors differentiate all usual properties. For example, “blue height” and “red height” are 2 fundamentally different types of height. But “blue height” and “blue flatness” are the same property.
So, each color is like a world with its own rules. Different objects exist in different worlds.
The same properties have different “meaning” in different objects. A property is like a word that heavily depends on context. If the context is different, the meaning of the property is different too. There’s no single metric that would measure all of the objects. For example, if the property of the object is “height”, and you change any thing that’s connected to height or reflects height in any way—you fundamentally change what “height” means. Even if only by a small amount.
Note: different objects/colors are like qualia, subjective experiences (colors, smells, sounds, tactile experiences). Or you could say they’re somewhat similar to Gottfried Leibniz’s “monads”: simple substances without physical properties.
The objects I want to talk about are “places”: fantastical worlds or videogame levels. For example, fantastical worlds of Jacek Yerka.
Details
“Detail” is like the smallest structural unit of a place. The smallest area where you could stand.
It’s like a square on the chessboard. But it doesn’t mean that any area of the place can be split into distinct “details”. The whole place is not like a chessboard.
This is a necessary concept. Without “details” there would be no places to begin with. Or those places wouldn’t have any comprehensible structure.
Colors
“Details” are like cells. Cells make up different types of tissues. “Details” make up colors. You can compare colors to textures or materials.
(The places I’m talking about are not physical. So the example below is just an analogy.)
Imagine that you have small toys in the shape of 3D solids. You’re interested in their volume. They have very clear sides, you study their volume with simple formulas.
Then you think: what is the volume of the giant cloud behind my window? What is a “side” of a cloud? Do clouds even have “real” shapes? What would be the formula for the volume of a cloud, would it be the size of a book?
The volume of the cloud has a different color. Because the context around the “volume” changed completely. Because clouds are made of a different type of “tissue”. (compared to toys)
OK, we resolved one question, but our problems don’t end here. Now we encounter an object that looks like a mix between a cloud and a simple shape. Are we allowed to simplify it into a simple shape? Are we supposed to mix both volumes? In what proportions and in what way?
We need rules to interpret objects (rules to assign importance to different parts or “layers” of an object before mixing them into a single substance). We need rules to mix colors. We need rules to infer intermediate colors.
Spectrum(s)
There are different spectrums. (Maybe they’re all parts of one giant spectrum. And maybe one of those spectrums contains our world.)
Often I imagine a spectrum as something similar to the visible spectrum: a simple order of places, from the first to the last.
A spectrum gives you the rules to interpret places and to create colors. How to make a spectrum?
You take a bunch of places. Make some loose assumptions about them. You assume where “details” in the places are and may be.
Based on the similarities between the places, you come up with the most important “colors” (“materials”) these places may be made of.
You come up with rules that tell you how to assign the colors to the places. Or how to modify the colors so that they fit the places.
The colors you came up with have an order:
The farther you go in a spectrum, the more details dissolve. First you have distinct groups of details that create volume. Then you have “flat”/stretched groups of details. Then you have “cloud-like” groups of details.
But those colors are not assigned to the places immediately. We’ve ordered abstract concepts, but haven’t ordered the specific places. Here’re some of the rules that allow you to assign the colors to the places:
When you evaluate a place, the smaller-scale structures matter more. For example, if the the smaller-scale structure has a clear shape and the larger-scale structure doesn’t have a clear shape, the former structure matters more in defining the place.
The opposite is true for “negative places”: the larger scale structures contribute more. I often split my spectrum into a “positive” part and a “negative” part. They are a little bit like positive and negative numbers.
You can call those “normalization principles”. But we need more.
The principle of explosion/vanishing
Two places with different enough detail patterns can’t have the same color. Because a color is the detail pattern.
One of the two places have to get a bigger or a smaller (by a magnitude) color. But this may lead to an “explosion” (the place becomes unbelievably big/too distant from all the other places) or to a “vanishing” (the place becomes unbelievably microscopic/too distant).
This is bad because you can’t allow so much uncertainty about the places’ positions. It’s also bad because it completely violates all of your initial assumptions about the places. You can’t allow infinite uncertainty.
When you have a very small amount of places in a spectrum, they have a lot of room to move around. You’re unsure about their positions. But when you have more places, due to the domino effect you may start getting “explosions” and “vanishings”. They will allow you to rule out wrong positions, wrong rankings.
Overlay (superposition)
We also need a principle that would help us to sort places with the “same” color.
I feel it goes something like this:
Take places with the same color. Let’s say this color is “groups of details that create volume”.
If the places have no secondary important colors mixed in:
Overlay (superimpose) those places over each other.
Ask: if I take a random piece of a volume, what’s the probability that this piece is from the place X? Sort the places by such probabilities.
If the places do have some secondary important colors mixed in:
Overlay (superimpose) those places over each other.
Ask: how hard is it to get from the place’s main color to the place’s secondary color? (Maybe mix and redistribute the secondary colors of the places.) Sort places by that.
For example, let’s say the secondary color is “groups of details that create a surface that covers the entire place” (the main one is “groups of details that create volume”). Then you ask: how hard is it to get from the volume to that surface?
Note: I feel it might be related to Homeostatic Property Clusters. I learned the concept from a Philosophy Tube video. It reminded me of “family resemblance” popularized by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Note 2: https://imgur.com/a/F5Vq8tN. Some examples I’m going to write about later.
Thought: places by themselves are incomparable. They can be compared only inside of a spectrum.
3 cats (a slight tangent/bonus)
Imagine a simple drawing of a cat. And a simple cat sculpture. And a real cat. Do they feel different?
If “yes”, then you experience a difference between various qualia. You feel some meta knowledge about qualia. You feel qualia “between” qualia.
You look at the same thing in different contexts. And so you look at 3 versions of it through 3 different lenses. If you looked at everything through the same lens, you would recognize only a single object.
If you understand what I’m talking about here, then you understand what I’m trying to describe about “colors”. Colors are different lenses, different contexts.
Part 2: Examples
Part 3: Motivation
I think my ideas may be important because they may lead to some new mathematical concepts.
Sometimes studying a simple idea or mechanic leads to a new mathematical concept which leads to completely unexpected applications.
For example, a simple toy with six sides (dice) may lead to saving people and major progress in science. Connecting points with lines (graphs) may lead to algorithms, data structures and new ways to find the optimal option or check/verify something.
Not any simple thing is guaranteed to lead to a new math concept. But I just want you to consider this possibility. And maybe ask questions answers to which could rise the probability of this possibility.
A new type of probability?
I think my ideas may be related to:
Probability and statistics.
Ways to describe vague things.
Ways to describe vague arguments or vague reasoning, thinking in context. For example arguments about “bodily autonomy”
Maybe those ideas describe a new type of probability:
You can compare classic probability to a pie made of a uniform and known dough. When you assign probabilities to outcomes and ideas you share the pie and you know what you’re sharing.
And in my idea you have a pie made of different types of dough (colors) and those types may change dynamically. You don’t know what you’re sharing when you share this pie.
This new type of probability is supposed to be applicable to things that have family resemblance, polyphyly or “cluster properties” (here’s an explanation of the latter in a Philosophy Tube video).
Blind men and an elephant
Imagine a world where people don’t know the concept of a “circle”. People do see round things, but can’t consciously pick out the property of roundness. (Any object has a lot of other properties.)
Some people say “the Moon is like a face”. Other say “the Moon is like a flower”. Weirder people say “the Moon is like a tree trunk” or “the Moon is like an embrace”. The weirdest people say “the Moon is like a day” or “the Moon is like going for a walk and returning back home”. Nobody agrees with each other, nobody understands each other.
Then one person comes up and says: “All of you are right. Opinions of everyone contain objective and useful information.”
People are shocked: at least someone has got to be wrong? If everyone is right, how can the information be objective and useful?
The concept of a “circle” is explained. Suddenly it’s extremely easy to understand each other. Like 2 and 2. And suddenly there’s nothing to argue about. People begin to share their knowledge and this knowledge finds completely unexpected applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
The situation was just like in the story about blind men and an elephant, but even more ironic, since this time everyone was touching the same “shape”.
With my story I wanted to explain my opinions and goals:
I want to share my subjective experience.
I believe that it contains objective and important information.
I want to share a way to share subjective experience. I believe everyone’s experience contains objective and important information.
Meta subjective knowledge
If you can get knowledge from/about subjective experience itself, it means there exists some completely unexplored type of knowledge. I want to “prove” that there does exist such type of knowledge.
Such knowledge would be important because it would be a new fundamental type of knowledge.
And such knowledge may be the most abstract: if you have knowledge about subjective experience itself, you have knowledge that’s true for any being with subjective experience.
People
I’m amazed how different people are. If nothing else, just look at the faces: completely different proportions and shapes and flavors of emotions. And it seems like those proportions and shapes can’t be encountered anywhere else. They don’t feel exactly like geometrical shapes. They are so incredibly alien and incomprehensible, and yet so familiar. But… nobody cares. Nobody seems surprised or too interested, nobody notices how inadequate our concepts are at describing stuff like that. And this is just the faces, but there are also voices, ways to speak, characters… all different in ways I absolutely can’t comprehend/verbalize.
I believe that if we (people) were able to share the way we experience each other, it would change us. It would make us respect each other 10 times more, remember each other 10 times better, learn 10 times more from each other.
It pains me every day that I can’t share my experience of other people (accumulated over the years I thought about this). My memory about other people. I don’t have the concepts, the language for this. Can’t figure it out. This feels so unfair! All the more unfair that it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.
This state of the world feels like a prison. This prison was created by specific injustices, but the wound grew deeper, cutting something fundamental. Vivid experiences of qualia (other people, fantastic worlds) feel like a small window out of this prison. But together we could crush the prison wall completely.
I want to share a part of a conversation I had in order to explain my post better:
“Vague concepts”
A game is clearly defined in any context. What do you mean that it is impossible to understand outside of “any context”?
Sorry for not making it more clear, I was just referring to this idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. Games, which Wittgenstein used as an example to explain the notion, have become the paradigmatic example of a group that is related by family resemblances.
The idea is that when you consider a bunch of “games”, it’s easy to see the common features. But when you consider more and more “games” and things that are sometimes called “games”, it turns out that everything can be a game.
And yet no matter how you stretch the concept (e.g. say something like “love is just a game”), in a specific context the meaning is clear enough.
You can also call concepts like this “cluster properties” (explanation in Philosophy Tube video). Or even the (in)famous “social constructs”. In the text form:
Even more interestingly, Harris’ idea is an accidental ripoff of a theory developed by philosopher Richard Boyd in 1982, called: ‘The Homeostatic Cluster Property Theory of Metaethical Naturalism’ Sexy title. Boyd thought that words like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ refer to real properties out there in the material world, and that therefore statements like ‘Murder is bad’ are capable of being objectively true, or at least true in the same way as scientific statements are. Which prompts the question, “To what exactly do these words refer?”
Boyd’s answer is that they are cluster properties—groups of things that tend to go together. The example he uses is actually the same one Harris does—health. There are all kinds of things we would want to include in a definition of the word “healthy,” like your heart should be beating and you should be able to breathe, but do you have to be a certain size in order to be healthy? Do you have to not be in pain? Can you have a beating heart and be unhealthy? There’s a cluster of properties here somewhere that makes up the definition of the word health but we’re never going to pin down a definite list because that’s just not how the concept works. Despite that vagueness it’s still very obviously useful and meaningful.
Similarly Boyd thinks that a word like ‘good’ refers to a cluster of things that are non-morally good for humans, like sharing friendship, sharing love, having fun, watching quality YouTube videos, but just like with health, you’re never going to be able to pin down a full list because the concept just isn’t like that.
And here’s the big takeaway—if we say ‘John is healthy’ we could be talking about any number of things in the cluster of health—whether he a has disease, whether he works out, whether he has a good relationship with his mother—all of which are objective—but whether the sentence ‘John is healthy’ is true will still depend on what aspect of his health we’re talking about. It will be relative to the context in which we’re saying it.
...
So, I call clusters like this (games, health, goodness) “vague concept”: those concepts obtain specific meaning in a specific context, but they can’t be defined outside of context.
How to understand a vague concept? You can try to memorize all contexts (that you know of) in which it’s used. Or you can learn to infer its meaning in new contexts and learn to create new contexts for this concept yourself. This is what I meant by “creating new contexts”.
I feel that it’s related to hypotheses generation because some general (scientific) ideas/paradigms don’t have any meaning outside of context
You could imagine a hypothesis based on vague concepts, for example “healthy people earn more money than unhealthy people” or “people who love games earn more money”. In their most abstract form, those theories can’t be falsified. But it’s easy to generate specific falsifiable hypotheses based on those ideas.
Scientific theories, too, can have an unfalsifiable core. This is Imre Lakatos’ model of scientific progress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos#Research_programmes
Lakatos’s second major contribution to the philosophy of science was his model of the “research programme”,[19] which he formulated in an attempt to resolve the perceived conflict between Popper’s falsificationism and the revolutionary structure of science described by Kuhn. Popper’s standard of falsificationism was widely taken to imply that a theory should be abandoned as soon as any evidence appears to challenge it, while Kuhn’s descriptions of scientific activity were taken to imply that science is most fruitful during periods in which popular, or “normal”, theories are supported despite known anomalies. Lakatos’ model of the research programme aims to combine Popper’s adherence to empirical validity with Kuhn’s appreciation for conventional consistency.
A Lakatosian research programme[20] is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the “hard core” are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme—they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to “protect” the “hard core”. Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme’s explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely.
Vague concepts lead to vague hypotheses (“research programmes”). Vague hypotheses work the same way vague concepts do. (part 1⁄2)
Properties, differences
What do you mean by “meaning” here? How does an attribute of size have inherent meaning?
It is absolutely unclear what you mean by this. What does “height” relate to and resonate with, and why does that change with object? What do you even mean by “relate and resonate”?
What do you mean by “part/property”? Something like “height”? How do you put “height” into a different context? “You can create a [...] different version of it”? What do you mean by “fundamentally different”? A version of what? Of “height”?
I tried to give 3 examples there (with paintings). But here’s a simpler example:
Imagine a cube and a tree. Think about their heights. Cube’s height has a different “meaning” because it’s the same thing as its width and length.
You may need to make a leap of faith/understanding here somewhere, it’s a new concept or perspective. I may try explaining it in different ways and analogies, but I can’t reduce this idea to simpler ideas.
For example, I could make an analogy with homology in biology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_biology#The_control_of_body_structure
Roughly spherical eggs of different animals give rise to unique morphologies, from jellyfish to lobsters, butterflies to elephants. Many of these organisms share the same structural genes for body-building proteins like collagen and enzymes, but biologists had expected that each group of animals would have its own rules of development. The surprise of evo-devo is that the shaping of bodies is controlled by a rather small percentage of genes, and that these regulatory genes are ancient, shared by all animals. The giraffe does not have a gene for a long neck, any more than the elephant has a gene for a big body. Their bodies are patterned by a system of switching which causes development of different features to begin earlier or later, to occur in this or that part of the embryo, and to continue for more or less time.[7]
Those topics talk about the ways animals’ parts and properties get differentiated.
And you can combine all properties of an object into just a single one.
I tried to give 3 examples of this. It’s some type of holism: “you should view a part in the context of the whole”, “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
I give this idea a fractal spin: “any part of a thing is equivalent to the whole”. The most similar philosophical idea I know of is Gottfried Leibniz’s Monadology, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology
(III) Composite substances or matter are “actually sub-divided without end” and have the properties of their infinitesimal parts (§65). A notorious passage (§67) explains that “each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond”.
You can compare colors to monads and spectrums to the “supreme monad” (God).
So you are describing art theory! That is something learned in 10th grade art. Contrast /homo-/heterogenity of form, color etc.
I don’t think it’s art theory. Not 10th grade.
No idea what you are getting at. Why are you calling your new super property “color” when you are also discussing classical form and color? This makes confusing these terms incredibly likely.
I believe I don’t discuss classical “color”. I only mention it in a single analogy (and one more time when I mention qualia).
My goal
I guess you are talking about categorizing arbitrary qualia properties and their relations, but that is a matter of art theory. How do you even propose to objectively study something inherently subjective? It does seem that what you describe is covered by artists. Beyond that it is incredibly unclear what you are talking about.
I can explain my goal with a story. I didn’t include it in the post to not make it too big, but maybe I should have:
Blind men and an elephant
Imagine a world where people don’t know the concept of a “circle”. People do see round things, but can’t consciously pick out the property of roundness. (Any object has a lot of other properties.)
Some people say “the Moon is like a face”. Other say “the Moon is like a flower”. Weirder people say “the Moon is like a tree trunk” or “the Moon is like an embrace”. The weirdest people say “the Moon is like a day” or “the Moon is like going for a walk and returning back home”. Nobody agrees with each other, nobody understands each other.
Then one person comes up and says: “All of you are right. Opinions of everyone contain objective and useful information.”
People are shocked: at least someone has got to be wrong? If everyone is right, how can the information be objective and useful?
The concept of a “circle” is explained. Suddenly it’s extremely easy to understand each other. Like 2 and 2. And suddenly there’s nothing to argue about. People begin to share their knowledge and this knowledge finds completely unexpected applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
The situation was just like in the story about blind men and an elephant, but even more ironic, since this time everyone was touching the same “shape”.
With my story I wanted to explain my opinions and goals:
I want to share my subjective experience.
I believe that it contains objective and important information.
I want to share a way to share subjective experiences. I believe everyone’s experience contains objective and important information.
(part 2⁄2)
Sorry if I’ll dumb it down too much. I tried to come up with specific examples without terminology. That’s how I understand what you’re saying:
A vague concept can be compared to an agent (AI).
You can use vague concepts to train agents (AIs).
An agent can use a vague concept to define its field of competence.
Simple/absurd examples:
Let’s say we got a bunch movies. And N vague concepts such as “bad movie”, “funny movie” and etc. Each concept is an AI of sorts. Those concepts “discuss” the movies and train each other.
We got a vague concept, such as “health”. And some examples of people who can be healthy or not healthy. Different AIs discuss if a person is healthy or not and train each other.
Let’s say the vague concept is “games”. AI uses this concept to determine what is a game and what is not. Or “implications” of treating something as a game (see “Internal structure, “gradient”″).
This might be a bridge between machine learning and agent foundations that is itself related to alignment.
In this case, could you help me with the topic about “colors”? I wouldn’t write this post if I didn’t write about “colors”. So, this is evidence (?) that the topic about “colors” isn’t insane.
There a “place” is a vague concept. “Spectrum” is a specific context for the place. Meaning is a distribution of “details”. Learning is guessing the correct distribution of details (“color”) for a place in a given context.
This post about vague concepts in general is mostly meaningless for me too: I care about something more specific, “colors”. However, I think a text may be “meaningless” and yet very useful:
You thought about topics that are specific and meaningful for you. You came up with an overly general “meaningless” sketch (A).
I thought about topics that are specific and meaningful for me. I came up with an overly general “meaningless” post (B).
We recognized a similarity between our generalizations. This similarity is “meaningless” too.
Did we achieve anything? I think we could have. If one of us gets a specific insight, there’s a chance to translate this insight (from A to B, or from B to A).
So I think the use of “agent” in the first point I quoted is about adjudicators, in the second point both adjudicator and outer agent fit (but mean different things), and the third point is about the outer agent (how its goodhart scope relates to those of the adjudicators). (link)
I just tried to understand (without terminology) how my ideas about “vague concepts” could help to align an AI. Your post prompted me to think in this direction directly. And right now I see this possibility:
The most important part of my post is the idea that the specific meanings of a vague concept have an internal structure. (at least in specific circumstances) As if (it’s just an analogy) the vague concept is self-aware about its changes of meaning and reacts to those changes. You could try to use this “self-awareness” to align an AI, to teach it to respect important boundaries.
For example (it’s an awkward example) let’s say you want to teach an AI that interacting with a human is often not a game or it may be bad to treat it as a game. If AI understands that reducing the concept of “communication” to the concept of a “game” may bear some implications, you would be able to explain what reductions and implications are bad without giving AI complicated explicit rules.
(Another example) If AI has (or able to reach) an internal worldview in which “loving someone” and “making a paperclip” are fundamentally different things and not just a matter of arbitrary complicated definitions, then it may be easier to explain human values to it.
However this is all science fiction if we have no idea how to model concepts and ideas and their changes of meaning. But my post about colors, I believe, can give you ideas how to do this. I know:
Maybe it doesn’t have enough information for an (interesting) formalization.
Even if you make an interesting formalization, it won’t automatically solve alignment even in the best case scenario.
But it may give ideas, a new approach. I want to fight for this chance, both because of AI risk and because of very deep personal reasons.
(Drafts of a future post.)
My idea:
Every concept (or even random mishmash of ideas) has multiple versions. Those versions have internal relationships, positions in some space relative to each other. Those relationships are “infinitely complex”. But there’s a way to make drastic simplifications of those relationships. We can study the overall (“infinitely complex”) structure of the relationships by studying those simplifications. What do those simplifications do, in general? They put “costs” on versions of a concept.
We can understand how we think if we study our concepts (including values) through such simplifications. It doesn’t matter what concepts we study at all. Anything goes, we just need to choose something convenient. Something objective enough to put numbers on it and come up with models.
Once we’re able to model human concepts this way, we’re able to model human thinking (AGI) and human values (AI Alignment) and improve human thinking.
Context
1.1 Properties of Qualia
There’s the hard problem of consciousness: how is subjective experience created from physical stuff? (Or where does it come from?)
But I’m interested in a more specific question:
Does qualia have properties? What are they?
For example, “How do qualia change? How many different qualia can be created?” or “Do qualia form something akin to a mathematical space, e.g. a vector space? What is this space exactly?”
Is there any knowledge contained in the experience itself, not merely associated with it?1 For example, “cold weather can cause cold (disease)” is a fact associated with experience, but isn’t very fundamental to the experience itself. And this “fact” is even false, it’s a misconception/coincidence.
When you get to know the personality of your friend, do you learn anything “fundamental” or really interesting by itself? Is “loving someone” a fundamentally different experience compared to “eating pizza” or “watching a complicated movie”?
Those questions feel pretty damn important to me! They’re about limitations of your meaningful experience and meaningful knowledge. They’re about personalities of people you know or could know. How many personalities can you differentiate? How “important/fundamental” are those differences? And finally… those questions are about your values.
Those questions are important for Fun Theory. But they’re way more important/fundamental than Fun Theory.
1 Philosophical context for this question: look up Immanuel Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” propositions.
1.2 Qualia and morality
And those questions are important for AI Alignment. If AI can “feel” that loving a sentient being and making a useless paperclip are 2 fundamentally different things, then it might be way easier to explain our values to that AI. By the way, I’m not implying that AI has to have qualia, I’m saying that our qualia can hint us towards the right model.
I think this observation gets a little bit glossed over: if you have a human brain and only care about paperclips… it’s (kind of) still objectively true for you that caring about other people would feel way different, way “bigger” and etc. You can pretend to escape morality, but you can’t escape your brain.
It’s extremely banal out of context, but the landscape of our experiences and concepts may shape the landscape of our values. Modeling our values as arbitrary utility functions (or artifacts of evolution) misses that completely.
2.1 Mystery Boxes
Box A
There’s a mystery Box A. Each day you find a random object inside of it. For example: a ball, a flower, a coin, a wheel, a stick, a tissue...
Box B
There’s also another box, the mystery Box B. One day you find a flower there. Another day you find a knife. The next day you find a toy. Next—a gun. Next—a hat. Next—shark’s jaws...
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How to understand the boxes? If you could obtain all items from both boxes, you would find… that those items are exactly the same. They just appear in a different order, that’s all.
I think the simplest way to understand Box B is this: you need to approach it with a bias, with a “goal”. For example “things may be dangerous, things may cause negative emotions”. In its most general form, this idea is unfalsifiable and may work as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But this general idea may lead to specific hypotheses, to estimating specific probabilities. This idea may just save your life if someone is coming after you and you need to defend yourself.
Content of both boxes changes in arbitrary ways. But content change of the second box comes with an emotional cost.
There’re many many other boxes, understanding them requires more nuanced biases and goals.
I think those boxes symbolize concepts (e.g. words) and the way humans understand them. I think a human understands a concept by assigning “costs” to its changes of meaning. “Costs” come from various emotions and goals.
“Costs” are convenient: if any change of meaning has a cost, then you don’t need to restrict the meaning of a concept. If a change has a cost, then it’s meaningful regardless of its predictability.
2.2 More Boxes
More examples of mystery boxes:
First box may alternate positive and negative items.
Second box may alternate positive, directly negative and indirectly negative items. For example, it may show you a knife (directly negative) and then a bone (indirectly negative: a “bone” may be a consequence of the “knife”).
Third box may alternate positive, negative and “subverted” items. For example, it may show you a seashell (positive), and then show you shark’s jaws (negative). But both sharks and seashells have a common theme, so “seashell (positive)” got subverted.
Fourth box may alternate negative items and items that “neutralize” negative things. For example, it may show you a sword, but then show you a shield.
Fifth box may show you that every negative thing has many related positive things.
You can imagine a “meta box”, for example a box that alternates between being the 1st box and the 2nd box. Meta boxes can “change their mood”.
I think, in a weird way, all those boxes are very similar to human concepts and words.
The more emotions, goals and biases you learn, the easier it gets for you to understand new boxes. But those “emotions, goals, biases” are themselves like boxes.
2.3 Words
This is a silly, wacky subjective example. I just want to explain the concept.
Here are some meanings of the word “beast”:
(archaic/humorous) any animal.
an inhumanly cruel, violent, or depraved person.
a very skilled human. example: “Magnus Carlsen (chessplayer) is a beast”
something very different and/or hard. example: “Reading modern English is one thing, but understanding Shakespeare is an entirely different beast.”
a person’s brutish or untamed characteristics. example: “The beast in you is rearing its ugly head”
What are the internal relationships between these meanings? If these meanings create a space, where is each of the meanings? I think the full answer is practically unknowable. But we can “probe” the full meaning, we can explore a tiny part of it:
Let’s pick a goal (bias), for example: “describing deep qualities of something/someone”. If you have this goal, the negative meaning (“cruel person”) of the word is the main one for you. Because it can focus on the person’s deep qualities the most, it may imply that the person is rotten to the core. Positive meaning focuses on skills a lot, archaic meaning is just a joke. 4rd meaning doesn’t focus on specific internal qualities. 5th meaning may separate the person from their qualities.
When we added a goal, each meaning started to have a “cost”. This cost illuminates some part of the relationships between the meanings. If we could evaluate an “infinity” of goals, we could know those relationships perfectly. But I believe you can get quite a lot of information by evaluating just a single goal. Because a “goal” is a concept too, so you’re bootstrapping your learning. And I think this matches closely with the example about mystery boxes.
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By combining a couple of goals we can make an order of the meanings, for example: beast 1 (rotten to the core), beast 2 (skilled and talented person), beast 3 (bad character traits), beast 4 (complicated thing), beast 5 (any animal). This order is based on “specificity” (mostly) and “depth” of a quality: how specific/deep is the characterization?
Another order: beast 1 (not a human), beast 2 (worse than most humans), beast 3 (best among professionals), beast 4 (not some other things), beast 5 (worse than yourself). This order is based on the “scope” and “contrast”: how many things contrast with the object? Notice how each order simplifies and redefines the meanings. But I want to illustrate the process of combining goals/biases on a real order:
2.4 Grammar Rules
You may treat this part of the post as complete fiction. But it illustrates how biases can be combined. And this is the most important thing about biases.
Gramar rules are concepts too. Sometimes people use quite complicated rules without even realizing, for example:
Adjective order or Adjectives: order, video by Tom Scott
There’s a popular order: opinion, size, physical quality or shape, age, colour, origin, material, purpose. What created this order? I don’t know, but I know that certain biases could make it easier to understand.
Take a look at this part of the order: opinion, age, origin, purpose. You could say all those are not “real” properties. They seem to progress from less related/less specific to the object to more related/specific. If you operate under this bias (relatedness/specificity), swapping the adjectives may lead to funny changes of meaning. For example: “bad old wolf” (objective opinion), “old bad wolf” (intrinsic property or cheesy overblown opinion), “old French bad wolf” (a subspecies of the “French wolf”). You can remember how mystery boxes created meaning using order of items.
Another part of the order: size, physical quality or shape, color, material. You can say all those are “real” physical properties. “Size” could be possessed by a box around the object. “Physical quality” and “shape” could be possessed by something wrapped around the object. “Color” could be possessed by the surface of the object. “Material” can be possessed only by the object itself. So physical qualities progress like layers of an onion.
You can combine those two biases (“relatedness/specificity” + “onion layers”) using a third bias and some minor rules. The third bias may be “attachment”. Some of the rules: (1) an adjective is attached either to some box around the object or to some layer of the object (2) you shouldn’t postulate boxes that are too big. It doesn’t make sense for an opinion to be attached to the object stronger than its size box. It doesn’t make sense for age to be attached to the object stronger than its color (does time pass under the surface layer of an object?). Origin needs to be attached to some layer of the object (otherwise we would need to postulate a giant box that contains both the object and its place of origin). I guess it can’t be attached stronger than “material” because material may expand the information about origin. And purpose is the “soul” of the object. “Attachment” is a reformulation of “relatedness/specificity”, so we only used 2.5 biases to order 8 things. Unnecessary biases just delete themselves.
Of course, this is all still based on complicated human intuitions and high level reasoning. But, I believe, at the heart of it lies a rule as simple as the Bayes Rule or Occam’s razor. A rule about merging arbitrary connections into something less arbitrary.
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I think stuff like sentence structure/word order (or even morphology) is made of amalgamations of biases too.
Sadly, it’s quite useless to think about it. We don’t have enough orders like this. And we can’t create such orders ourselves (as a game), i.e. we can’t model this, it’s too subjective or too complicated. We have nothing to play with here. But what if we could do all of this for some other topic?
3.1 Argumentation
I believe my idea has some general and specific connections to hypotheses generation and argumentation. The most trivial connection is that hypotheses and arguments use concepts and themselves are concepts.
You don’t need a precisely defined hypothesis if any specification of your hypothesis has a “cost”. You don’t need to prove and disprove specific ideas, you may do something similar to the “gradient descent”. You have a single landscape with all your ideas blended together and you just slide over this landscape. The same goes for arguments: I think it is often sub-optimal to try to come up with a precise argument. Or waste time and atomize your concepts in order to fix any inconsequential “inconsistency”.
A more controversial idea would be that (1) in some cases you can apply wishful thinking, since “wishful thinking” is able to assign emotional “costs” to theories (2) in some cases motivated reasoning is even necessary for thinking. My theory already proposes that meaning/cognition doesn’t exist without motivated reasoning.
3.2 Working with hypotheses
A quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 22: The Scientific Method
Observation:
Wizardry isn’t as powerful now as it was when Hogwarts was founded.
Hypotheses:
Magic itself is fading.
Wizards are interbreeding with Muggles and Squibs.
Knowledge to cast powerful spells is being lost.
Wizards are eating the wrong foods as children, or something else besides blood is making them grow up weaker.
Muggle technology is interfering with magic. (Since 800 years ago?)
Stronger wizards are having fewer children.
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You can reformulate the hypotheses in terms of each other, for example:
(1) Magic is fading away. (2) Magic mixes with non-magic. (3) Pieces of magic are lost. (4) Something affects the magic. (5) The same as 2 or 4. (6) Magic creates less magic.
(1) Pieces of magic disappear. (2) ??? (3) Pieces of magic containing spells disappear. (4) Wizards don’t consume/produce enough pieces of magic. (5) Technology destroys pieces of magic. (6) Stronger wizards produce fewer pieces of magic.
Why do this? I think it makes hypotheses less arbitrary and highlights what we really know. And it rises questions that are important across many theories: can magic be split into discrete pieces? can magic “mix” with non-magic? can magic be stronger or weaker? can magic create itself? By the way, those questions would save us from trying to explain a nonexistent phenomenon: maybe magic isn’t even fading in the first place, do we really know this?
3.3 New Occam’s Razor, new probability
And this way hypotheses are easier to order according to our a priori biases. We can order hypotheses exactly the same way we ordered meanings if we reformulate them to sound equivalent to each other. Here’s an example how we can re-order some of the hypotheses:
(1) Pieces of magic disappear by themselves. (2) Pieces of magic containing spells disappear. (3) Wizards don’t consume/produce enough pieces of magic. (4) Stronger wizards produce fewer pieces of magic. (5) Technology destroys pieces of magic.
The hypotheses above are sorted by 3 biases: “Does it describe HOW magic disappears?/Does magic disappear by itself?” (stronger positive weight) and “How general is the reason of the disappearance of magic?” (weaker positive weight) and “novelty compared to other hypotheses” (strong positive weight). “Pieces of magic containing spells disappear” is, in a way, the most specific hypotheses here, but it definitely describes HOW magic disappears (and gives a lot of new information about it), so it’s higher on the list. “Technology destroys pieces of magic” doesn’t give any new information about anything whatsoever, only a specific random possible reason, so it’s the most irrelevant hypothesis here. By the way, those 3 different biases are just different sides of the same coin: “magic described in terms of magic/something else” and “specificity” and “novelty” are all types of “specificity”. Or novelty. Biases are concepts too, you can reformulate any of them in terms of the others too.
When you deal with hypotheses that aren’t “atomized” and specific enough, Occam’s Razor may be impossible to apply. Because complexity of a hypothesis is subjective in such cases. What I described above solves that: complexity is combined with other metrics and evaluated only “locally”. By the way, in a similar fashion you can update the concept of probability. You can split “probability” in multiple connected metrics and use an amalgamation of those metrics in cases where you have absolutely no idea how to calculate the ratio of outcomes.
3.4 “Matrices” of motivation
You can analyze arguments and reasons for actions using the same framework. Imagine this situation:
You are a lonely person on an empty planet. You’re doing physics/math. One day you encounter another person, even though she looks a little bit like a robot. You become friends. One day your friend gets lost in a dangerous forest. Do you risk your life to save her? You come up with some reasons to try to save her:
I care about my friend very much. (A)
If my friend survives, it’s the best outcome for me. (B)
My friend is a real person. (C)
You can explore and evaluate those reasons by formulating them in terms of each other or in other equivalent terms.
“I’m 100% sure I care. (A) Her survival is 90% the best outcome for me in the long run. (B) Probably she’s real (C).” This evaluates the reasons by “power” (basically, probability).
“My feelings are real. (A) The goodness/possibility of the best outcome is real. (B) My friend is probably real. (C)” This evaluates the reasons by “realness”.
“I care 100%. (A) Her survival is 100% the best outcome for me. (B) She’s 100% real. (C).” This evaluates the reasons by “power” strengthened by emotions: what if the power of emotions affects everything else just a tiny bit? By a very small factor.
“Survival of my friend is the best outcome for me. (B) The fact that I ended up caring about my friend is the best thing that happened to me. Physics and math aren’t more interesting than other sentient beings. (A) My friend being real is the best outcome for me. But it isn’t even necessary, she’s already “real” in most of the senses. (C)” This evaluates the reasons by the quality of “being the best outcome”.
Some evaluations may affect others, merge together. I believe the evaluations written above only look like precise considerations, but actually they’re more like meanings of words, impossible to pin down. I gave this example because it’s similar to some of my emotions.
I think such thinking is more natural than applying a pre-existing utility function that doesn’t require any cognition. Utility of what exactly should you calculate? Of your friend’s life? Of your life? Of your life with your friend? Of your life factored by your friend’s desire “be safe, don’t risk your life for me”? Should you take into account change of your personality over time? I believe you can’t learn the difference without working with “meaning”.
4.1 Synesthesia
Imagine a face. When you don’t simplify it, you just see a face and emotions expressed by it. When you simplify it too much, you just see meaningless visual information (geometric shapes and color spots).
But I believe there’s something very interesting in-between. When information is complex enough to start making sense, but isn’t complex enough to fully represent a face. You may see unreal shapes (mixes of “face shapes” and “geometric shapes”… or simplifications of specific face shapes) and unreal emotions (simplifications of specific emotions) and unreal face textures (simplifications of specific face textures).
4.2 Unsupervised learning
Action
If my idea is true, what can we do?
We need to figure out the way to combine biases.
We need to find some objects that are easy to model.
We need to find “simplifications” and “biases” for those objects that are easy to model.
We may start with some absolutely useless objects.
What can we do? (in general)
However, even from made-up examples (not connected to a model) we can be getting some general ideas:
Different versions of a concept always get described in equivalent terms and simplified. (When a “bias” is applied to the concept.)
Multiple biases may turn the concept into something like a matrix?
Sometimes combined biases are similar to a decision tree.
It’s not fictional evidence because at this point we’re not seeking evidence, we’re seeking a way to combine biases.
What specific thing can we do?
I have a topic in mind: (because of my synesthesia-like experiences)
You can analyze shapes of “places” and videogame levels (3D or even 2D shapes) by making orders of their simplifications. You can simplify a place by splitting it into cubes/squares, creating a simplified texture of a place. “Bias” is a specific method of splitting a place into cubes/squares. You can also have a bias for or against creating certain amounts of cubes/squares.
3D and 2D shapes are easy to model.
Splitting a 3D/2D shapes into cubes or squares is easy to model.
Measuring the amount of squares/cubes in an area of a place is easy to model.
Here’s my post about it: “Colors” of places. The post gets specific about the way(s) of evaluating places. I believe it’s specific enough so that we could come up with models. I think this is a real chance.
I probably explained everything badly in that post, but I could explain it better with feedback.
Maybe we could analyze people’s faces the same way, I don’t know if faces are easy enough to model. Maybe “faces” have too complicated shapes.
My evidence
I’ve always had an obsession with other people.
I compared any person I knew to all other people I knew. I tried to remember faces, voices, ways to speak, emotions, situations, media associated with them (books, movies, anime, songs, games).
If I learned something from someone (be it a song or something else), I associated this information with them and remembered the association “forever”. To the point where any experience was associated with someone. Those associations weren’t something static, they were like liquid or gas, tried to occupy all available space.
At some point I knew that they weren’t just “associations” anymore. They turned into synesthesia-like experiences. Like a blind person in a boat, one day I realized that I’m not in a river anymore, I’m in the ocean.
What happened? I think completely arbitrary associations with people where putting emotional “costs” on my experiences. Each arbitrary association was touching on something less arbitrary. When it happened enough times, I believe associations stopped being arbitrary.
“Other people” is the ultimate reason why I think that my idea is true. Often I doubt myself: maybe my memories don’t mean anything? Other times I feel like I didn’t believe in it enough.
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When a person dies, it’s already maximally sad. You can’t make it more or less sad.
But all this makes it so, so much worse. Imagine if after the death of an author all their characters died too (in their fictional worlds) and memories about the author and their characters died too. Ripples of death just never end and multiply. As if the same stupid thing repeats for the infinith time.
Updated the post (2).
Probably I didn’t fully understand your position, but here are my thoughts and emotions about this topic:
Not reifying concepts may be boring: we miss the opportunity to think about new and interesting types of properties.
The dichotomy “either concepts have fixed meanings or they don’t exist” is false for me. At least for the most part.
You can argue that “vague concepts” objectively exist, that they just describe natural clusters of things.
I don’t think “only particular thoughts exist” is a justified level of reductionism. People are able to learn language.
There’re some “contradictions” in your reply. You say that concepts don’t exist, but then you’re talking about positions in semantic spaces, something “drifting” and etc. All those things you could call “concepts”. Why do you decide to not do this?
Some concepts I absolutely 100% want to fully “exist”. Those concepts are personalities of other people.
I think I have an idea how we could solve AI Alignment, create an AGI with safe and interpretable thinking. I mean a “fundamentally” safe AGI, not a wildcard that requires extremely specific learning to not kill you.
Sorry for a grandiose claim. I’m going to write my idea right away. Then I’m going to explain the context and general examples of it, implications of it being true. Then I’m going to suggest a specific thing we can do. Then I’m going to explain why I believe my idea is true.
My idea will sound too vague and unclear at first. But I think the context will make it clear what I mean. (Clear as the mathematical concept of a graph, for example: a graph is a very abstract idea, but makes sense and easy to use.)
Please evaluate my post at least as science fiction and then ask: maybe it’s not fiction and just reality?
Key points of this post:
You can “solve” human concepts (including values) by solving semantics. By semantics I mean “meaning construction”, something more abstract than language.
Semantics is easier to solve than you think. And we’re closer to solving it than you think.
Semantics is easier to model than you think. You don’t even need an AI to start doing it. Just a special type of statistics. You don’t even have to start with analyzing language.
I believe ideas from this post can be applied outside of AI field.
Why do I believe this? Because of this idea:
Every concept (or even random mishmash of ideas) has multiple versions. Those versions have internal relationships, positions in some space relative to each other. You can understand a concept by understanding those internal relationships.
One problem though, those relationships are “infinitely complex”. However, there’s a special way to make drastic simplifications. We can study the real relationships through those special simplifications.
What do those “special simplifications” do? They order versions of a concept (e.g. “version 1, version 2, version 3″). They can do this in extremely arbitrary ways. The important thing is that you can merge arbitrary orders into less arbitrary structures. There’s some rule for it, akin to the Bayes Rule or Occam’s razor. This is what cognition is, according to my theory.
If this is true, we need to find any domain where concepts and their simplifications are easy enough to formalize. Then we need to figure out a model, figure out the rule of merging simplifications. I’ve got a suggestion and a couple of ideas and many examples.
Context
If this idea isn’t ruled out, then it may be the simplest possible explanation (of the way humans create/think about concepts). I think there isn’t a lot of such ideas.
I’m bad at math. But I know a topic where you could formulate my ideas using math. I could try to formulate them mathematically with someone’s help.
I can give a very abstract example. It’s probably oversimplified (in a wrong way) and bad, but here it is:
You got three sets, A {9, 1} and B {5, −3} and C {4, 4}. You want to learn something about the sets. Or maybe you want to explain why they’re ordered A > C > B in your data. You make orders of those sets using some (arbitrary) rules. For example:
A {9} > B {5} > C {4}. This order is based on choosing the largest element.
A {10} > C {8} > B {2}. This order is based on adding elements.
A {10} > C {8} > B {5}. This order is based on this: you add the elements if the number grows bigger, you choose the largest element otherwise. It’s a merge of the previous 2 orders.
If you want to predict A > C > B, you also may order the orders above:
(2) > (3) > (1). This order is based on predictive power (mostly) and complexity.
(2) > (1) > (3). This order is based on predictive power and complexity (complexity gives a bigger penalty).
(3) > (2) > (1). This order is based on how large the numbers in the orders are.
This example is likely useless out of context. But you read the post: so, if there’s something you haven’t understood just because it was confusing without numbers, then this example should clarify something to you. For example, it may clarify what my post misses to be understandable/open to specific feedback.
If you’d like to get some more concrete feedback from the community here, I’d recommend phrasing your ideas more precisely by using some common mathematical terminology, e.g. talking about sets, sequences, etc.
“No math, no feedback” if this is an irrational requirement it’s gonna put people at risk. Do you think there isn’t any other way to share/evaluate ideas? For example, here’re some notions:
On some level our thoughts do consist of biases. See “synaptic weight”. My idea says that “biases” exist on (almost) all levels of thinking and those biases are simple enough/interpretable enough. Also it says that some “high-level thinking” or “high-level knowledge” can be modeled by simple enough biases.
You could compare my theory to other theories. To Shard Theory, for example. I mean, just to make a “map” of all theories: where each theory lies relative to the others. Shard Theory says that value formation happens through complex enough negotiation games between complex enough objects (shards). My theory says that all cognition happens because of a simpler process between simpler objects.
I think it would be simply irrational to abstain from having any opinions about those notions. Do you believe there’s something simpler (and more powerful) than Shard Theory? Do you believe that human thinking and concepts are intrinsically complex and (usually) impossible to simplify? Etc.
A rational thing would be to say your opinions about this and say what could affect those opinions. You already said about math, but there should be some other things too. Simply hearing some possibilities you haven’t considered (even without math) should have at least a small effect on your estimates.
I don’t have a model. The point of my idea is to narrow down what model is needed (and where/how we can easily find it). The point of math language (“acasual trade” and “decision trees”) is the same.
Everything mentioned in the post is like a container. Container may not model what’s inside of it at all, but it limits the amount of places we need to check out (in order to find what we want). If we don’t easily find what we wanted by looking into the container (and a little bit around it), then my idea is useless.
Can anything besides useful math change your opinion in any way? I saw your post (Models Modeling Models, 1. Meanings of words):
When I say “I like dancing,” this is a different use of the word ‘like,’ backed by a different model of myself, than when I say “I like tasting sugar.” The model that comes to mind for dancing treats it as one of the chunks of my day, like “playing computer games” or “taking the bus.” I can know what state I’m in (the inference function of the model) based on seeing and hearing short scenes. Meanwhile, my model that has the taste of sugar in it has states like “feeling sandpaper” or “stretching my back.” States are more like short-term sensations, and the described world is tightly focused on my body and the things touching it.
I think my theory talks about the same things, but more and deeper. I want to try to prove that you can’t rationally prefer your theory to mine.
Yes, I think it’s related. Added “aesthetics” as a tag.