robertzk

Karma: 465

robertzk 23 Dec 2010 1:09 UTC
2 points
on: Extensions and Intensions
An important algorithm for attempting to translate extensional definition into intensional definition is Mitchell’s version spaces:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_space

robertzk 30 Sep 2011 12:13 UTC
9 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: A Rationalist’s Tale
Right. Moreover, of all the people who read GabrielDuquette’s comment and know someone that had cancer and went to a faith healer, I imagine only the ones with a story like Jayson_Virisimo’s will post a reply. Failed attempts are not reported. If you are acquaintances with someone that experienced a failed faith healing, you are likely not even aware of it! (If it was successful, they would have lauded it.) An easy Bayesian estimate makes the presence of Jayson_Virisimo’s comment unsurprising.

Given a sufficiently non-zero probability of spontaneous remission, this argument explains my lack of surprise at such a story. This is an important addition to your argument (and, I feel, indeed the crux), because a non-zero probability is not satisfactory. Consider if we had many people posting such claims; with sufficiently low probabilities of spontaneous remission, we would not expect such a density of claims.

robertzk 3 Oct 2011 4:44 UTC
0 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline
Are you suggesting that philosophy lies in the orthogonal complement to science and potential science (the questions science is believed to be capable of eventually answering)?

robertzk 5 Oct 2011 15:08 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation
Curiously, what are their names?

robertzk 6 Oct 2011 9:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: asr’s comment on: Ideas for posts: please eviscerate.
I have noticed that the people who understood their field as if it were their life and soul write in beautiful simplicity; consider Feynman, Minsky, Paul Graham.

robertzk 8 Oct 2011 14:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Ideas for posts: please eviscerate.
Thanks!

robertzk 9 Oct 2011 20:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Should I play World of Warcraft?
Economies of time and scale. I study mathematics because once a theorem is proved, it is established forever. On the other hand, working at McDonalds provides only a localized contribution in time and space, as does playing WoW.

robertzk 9 Oct 2011 20:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Levels of Action
Which would make it a waste if you never did much programming or novel writing!

robertzk 25 Oct 2011 14:11 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Level Above Mine
For what it’s worth, I’ve worked on a project and had lunch with Conway, and your ideas seem more prescient than his. But being a mathematician, I know people who are in turn far above Conway’s level.

robertzk 4 Nov 2011 2:30 UTC
−3 points
on: Rationality Quotes November 2011
“Do you know that a man has only one eye which sees and registers everything; this eye, like a superb camera which takes minute pictures, very sharp, tiny—and with that picture man tells himself: ‘This time I know the reality of things,’ and he is calm for a moment. Then, slowly superimposing itself on the picture, another eye makes its appearance, invisibly, which makes an entirely different picture for him. Then our man no longer sees clearly, a struggle begins between the first and second eye, the fight is fierce, finally the second eye has the upper hand, takes over and that’s the end of it. Now it has command of the situation, the second eye can then continue its work alone and elaborate its own picture according to the laws of interior vision. This very special eye is found here,” says Matisse, pointing to his brain.

robertzk 4 Nov 2011 10:28 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
Given the expected date would be skewed to infinity by a non-zero estimate of the Singularity not occurring, you can probably put your estimate of the year X so that P( S ⇐ X | C ) = 0.5, where S is the statistic “Year singularity will occur” and C is the event “Singularity will occur”.

robertzk 4 Nov 2011 10:35 UTC
10 points
on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
I took the survey and could feel my affective heuristics generating random near-the-ballpark numbers.

Given I am a mathematician and have no idea how to actually compute any of those probabilities (or what that would even formally mean, say in a probability measure space), I let those numbers stand without further scrutiny.

robertzk 22 Nov 2011 1:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tetsuo55’s comment on: Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help)
I am one such person. I finished college at the age of 16, and I knew I was merely very good at guessing the teacher’s password. People’s remarks about my intelligence were dismissed by me internally, because I was aware of my own ignorance.

However, what you say can be difficult to apply in practice during a semester. I see formal education as a method for gathering data, which you can use for Bayesian propagation after the fact. This is why it can feel like you learn much more thinking between semesters, rather than during.

Your notion of necessity of integration is uncorrelated to outlier students. Given an outlier student, I would be surprised if active integration of textbook data was lower than given a non-outlier student. In both cases this conditional probability is, sadly, very small.

robertzk 5 Dec 2011 1:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: K-complexity of everyday things
I cannot see how you could reconstruct a novel from a plot summary, regardless of additional information provided. Do you mean a text such that if a person read it, then read the actual Finnigan’s Wake say a year later, 95% of the time he would not notice the difference? In any case, this scheme clearly has greater K-complexity than a .zip file.

robertzk 14 Dec 2011 11:10 UTC
4 points
on: What are you working on? December 2011
Primarily, finishing my PhD thesis in mathematics. On the side, devouring through The Adapted Mind, The Cambridge Handbook of Experts & Expertise, and Russell and Norvig’s AI book (I can post LW summaries if anyone is interested).

robertzk 16 Dec 2011 12:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Curiouskid’s comment on: What are you working on? December 2011
Not much that I haven’t figured out on my own, but it helped me make my belief in belief congruent with my belief (I understand now that consuming certain media literally re-wires your brain in a way you have no control over, and it helped me understand how important it is to consciously only read / study certain things, and limit others.) Here are some important quotes:

“Research with these methods has shown that additional experience appears to make performance less effortful and less demanding, but to improve performance it is necessary to seek out practice activities that allow individuals to work on improving specific aspects, with the help of a teacher and in a protected environment, with opportunities for reflection, exploration of alternatives, and problem solving, as well as repetition with informative feedback.” (Deliberate practice)

Knowledge matters, and is almost exclusively characteristic of intelligence in humans: “In contrast, [computer] programs that are rich in general inference methods—some of which may even have some of the power of mathematical logic—but poor in domain-specific knowledge can behave expertly on almost no tasks.” There is no such thing as “general aptitude,” except maybe very subtly. The things you read, the people you socialize with, and the introspections you have to re-wire your thought, matter. This also means that going to a prestigious university is the best way to learn a given (academic) subject matter, neurophysiologically speaking, given the environment it immerses you in.

Unfortunately, “the history of psychology suggests that there is no one ‘truth’ about how to accomplish learning and instruction.”

robertzk 16 Dec 2011 12:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: What are you working on? December 2011
When I started the program, I didn’t know anything about the singularity or rationality or friendly AI or even much chemistry or biology! So I am doing some very hard and difficult introspecting about what I must do next to fulfill Horace Mann’s eternal proverb, “be ashamed to die until you have scored a victory for humanity.” Somehow, my calculations keep showing that the subject of my PhD, constructing a p-adic L-function for a class of automorphic representations in a particular reductive group called Gsp4, is not the way to go! I only need $15-20k a year to subsist and work on SIAI issues, but humorously enough my biggest concern is a job. Having a PhD in pure math makes me overqualified for almost everything except academia, and in that setting I would not have much time for existential risk issues given the postdoc rat race. I enjoy mathematics immensely, but it’s about time I make some personal Level 3 decisions and think about whether this is where I will fulfill most utility. Sadly, my emails to SIAI for the visiting fellows program have gone unanswered, but perhaps I should try again. I could always enter a neuroscience or theoretical computer science program.

robertzk 16 Dec 2011 14:22 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Scott_Aaronson2’s comment on: Einstein’s Arrogance
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-legends

Another urban legend, which I’ve heard told about various mathematicians, and which Misha Polyak self-effacingly tells about himself (and therefore might even be true), is the following:

As a young postdoc, Misha was giving a talk at a prestigious US university about his new diagrammatic formula for a certain finite type invariant, which had 158 terms. A famous (but unnamed) mathematician was sitting, sleeping, in the front row. “Oh dear, he doesn’t like my talk,” thought Misha. But then, just as Misha’s talk was coming to a close, the famous professor wakes with a start. Like a man possessed, the famous professor leaps up out of his chair, and cries, “By golly! That looks exactly like the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch Theorem!!!” Misha didn’t know what to say. Perhaps, in his sleep, this great professor had simplified Misha’s 158 term diagrammatic formula for a topological invariant, and had discovered a deep mathematical connection with algebraic geometry? It was, after all, not impossible. Misha paced in front of the board silently, not knowing quite how to respond. Should he feign understanding, or admit his own ignorance? Finally, because the tension had become too great to bear, Misha asked in an undertone, “How so, sir?” “Well,” explained the famous professor grandly. “There’s a left hand side to your formula on the left.” “Yes,” agreed Misha meekly. “And a right hand side to your formula on the right.” “Indeed,” agreed Misha. “And you claim that they are equal!” concluded the great professor. “Just like the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch Theorem!”

The rationalist’s checklist

robertzk16 Dec 2011 16:21 UTC

44 points

8 comments1 min readLW link

robertzk 17 Dec 2011 5:48 UTC
7 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011
Hacker News doesn’t seem to be having any of it, either. I got voted to 3rd top post then hit with a barrage of downvotes after Phil Welch’s comment. Asking under Crocker’s Rules, could I have phrased my comments more… sensitively? The goal of a rationalist is to win, and it is useless to engage reason and data when this meets affective heuristics and turns off the audience.

robertzk

The ra­tio­nal­ist’s checklist

The rationalist’s checklist