Rolf_Nelson2

Karma: 101

Rolf_Nelson2 18 Oct 2007 4:09 UTC
14 points
on: “Can’t Say No” Spending
“it’s heartbreaking to just say no”

Sounds like a false dilemma; I would argue that, even if you accepted James Shikwati’s analysis (which I don’t), the first reaction should be to see whether it’s possible to enact more effective methods of assistance, rather than immediately give up.

“What does aid to Africa have in common with healthcare spending?”

I assume “they’re both politicized topics that smart people seem to disagree about” is not the answer you’re looking for.

Rolf_Nelson2 9 Jun 2008 8:26 UTC
10 points
on: Against Devil’s Advocacy
if you manage to get yourself stuck in an advanced rut, dutifully playing Devil’s Advocate won’t get you out of it.

It’s not a binary either/or proposition, but a spectrum; you can be in a sufficiently shallow rut that a mechanical rule of “when reasoning, search for evidence against the proposition you’re currently leaning towards” might rescue you in a situation where you would otherwise fail to come to the correct conclusion. That said, yes, it would indeed be preferable to conduct the search because you actually have “true doubt” and lack overconfidence, rather than by rote, and rather than for the odd reasons that Michael Rose gives.

Dad was an avid skeptic and Martin Gardner / James Randi fan, as well as being an Orthodox Jew. Let that be a lesson on the anti-healing power of compartmentalization

Why do you think that, if he had not compartmentalized, he would have rejected Orthodox Judaism, rather than rejecting skepticism?

Rolf_Nelson2 9 Mar 2008 18:29 UTC
9 points
on: Dissolving the Question
Most of the proposed models in this thread seem reasonable.

I would write down all the odd things people say about free will, pick the simplest model that explained 90% of it, and then see if I could make novel and accurate predictions based on the model. But, I’m too lazy to do that. So I’ll just guess.

Evolution hardwired our cognition to contain two mutually-exclusive categories, call them “actions” and “events.”

“Actions” match: [rational, has no understandable prior cause]. “Rational” means they are often influenced by reward and punishment. Synonyms for ‘has no understandable prior cause’ include ‘free will’, ‘caused by elan vitale’ and ‘unpredictable, at least by the prediction process we use for things-in-general like rocks’.

“Events” match: [not rational, always directly caused by some previous and intuitively comprehendable physical event or action]. If you throw a rock up, it will come back down, no matter how much you threaten or plead with it.

We are born to axiomatically believe actions we take of this innate ‘free will’ category have no physical cause. In this model, symptoms might include:
- believing there is an interesting category called ‘free will’
- believing that arguing whether humans either belong to, or don’t belong to, this ‘free will’ category, is an interesting question
- believing that if we don’t have ‘free will’, it’s wrong to punish people
- believing that if we don’t have ‘free will’, we are marionettes, zombies, or in some other way ‘subhuman’.
- believing that if we don’t understand what causes a thunderstorm or a crop failure or an eclipse, it is the will of a rational agent who can be appeased through the appropriate sacrifices
- believing that if our actions are caused by God’s will, fate, spiritual possession, an ancient prophesy, Newtonian dynamics, or some other simple and easily-understandable cause, we do not have ‘free will’. However, if our actions are caused by an immaterial soul, spooky quantum mechanics, or anything else that ‘lives in another dimension beyond the grasp of intuitive reason’, then we retain ‘free will’.
I’m not particularly confident my model is correct, the human capacity to spot patterns where there are none works against me here.

Rolf_Nelson2 11 Feb 2008 0:51 UTC
8 points
on: Disguised Queries
What’s really at stake is an atheist’s claim of substantial difference and superiority relative to religion

Often semantics matter because laws and contracts are written in words. When “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”, it’s sometimes advantageous to claim that you’re not a religion, or that your enemy is a religion. If churches get preferential tax treatment, it may be advantageous to claim that you’re a church.

Rolf_Nelson2 5 Apr 2008 0:27 UTC
7 points
on: Zombies! Zombies?
* That-which-we-name “consciousness” happens within physics, in a way not yet understood, just like what happened the last three thousand times humanity ran into something mysterious.

not yet understood? Is your position that there’s a mathematical or physical discovery waiting out there, that will cause you, me, Chalmers, and everyone else to slap our heads and say, “of course, that’s what the answer is! We should have realized it all along!”

Question for all: How do you apply Occam’s Razor to cases where there are two competing hypotheses:
1. A and B are independently true
2. A is true, and implies B, but in some mysterious way we haven’t yet determined. (For example, “heat is caused by molecular motion” or “quarks are caused by gravitation”, to pick two inferences at opposite ends of the plausibility spectrum.)
I don’t know what the best answer is. Maybe the practical answer is a variant of Solomoff induction: somehow compare “P(A) P(B)” with “P(A) P(B follows logically from A, and we were too dumb to realize that)”, where the P’s are some type of Solomonoff-ish a-priori “2^shortest program” probabilities. But the best answer certainly isn’t, “A is simpler than A + B, so we know hypothesis 2 is correct, without even having to glance at the likelihood that B follows from A.” Otherwise, you would have to conclude that, logically, quarks are caused by gravitation, in some currently-mysterious way that future mathematicians will be certain to discover.

For the record, my belief is that many of the debaters have beliefs that are isomorphic to their opponent’s beliefs. When I hear things like, “You said this is a physical law without material consequences, but I define physical laws as things that have material consequences, so you’re wrong QED!” then that’s a sign that we’re in “does a tree falling in the forest make a noise” territory. Does a conciousness mapping rule “actually exist”? Does the real world “actually exist”? Does pi “actually exist”? Why should I care?

In the end, I care about actions and outcomes, and the algorithms that produce those actions. I don’t care whether you label conciousness as “part of reality” (because it’s something you observe), or “part of your utility function” (because it’s not derivable by an intelligence-in-general), or “part of this complete nutritious breakfast” (because, technically, anything that’s not poisonous can be combined with separate unrelated nutritious items to form a complete nutritious breakfast.)

Rolf_Nelson2 21 Feb 2008 14:06 UTC
7 points
on: Arguing “By Definition”
Frank, tcpkac:

What do you think of, say, philosophers’ endless arguments of what the word “knowledge” really means? This seems to me one example where many philosophers don’t seem to understand that the word doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning apart from how people define it.

If Bob sees a projection of an oasis and thinks there’s an oasis, but there’s a real oasis behind the projection that creates a projection of itself as a Darwinian self-defense mechanism, does Bob “know” there’s an oasis? Presumably Eliezer would ask, “for what purpose do we want to answer the question?” However, many philosophers would prefer to unconstructively argue what semantics are “correct”. So my personal experience is that I don’t think Eliezer’s attacking a straw man here.

A similar example in grammar: many people think usage of “ain’t” is somehow objectively wrong, rather than being just an uncommon and frowned-upon dialect.

Rolf_Nelson2 27 Feb 2008 1:53 UTC
6 points
on: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
Another solid essay.

To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it.

How do we model the fact that I know the Universe was in a specific low-entropy state (spacetime was flat) shortly after the Big Bang? It’s a small region in the phase space, but I don’t have enough bits of observations to directly pick that region out of all the points in phase space.

Rolf_Nelson2 21 Jun 2008 14:06 UTC
5 points
on: The Outside View’s Domain
The question of whether trying to consistently adopt meta-reasoning position A will raise the percentage of time you’re correct, compared with meta-reasoning position B, is often a difficult one.

When someone uses a disliked heuristic to produce a wrong result, the temptation is to pronounce the heuristic “toxic”. When someone uses a favored heuristic to produce a wrong result, the temptation is to shrug and say “there is no safe harbor for a rationalist” or “such a person is biased, stupid, and beyond help; he would have gotten to the wrong conclusion anyway, no matter what his meta-reasoning position was. The idiot reasoner, rather than my beautiful heuristic, has to be discarded.” In the absence of hard data, consensus seems difficult; the problem is exacerbated when a novel meta-reasoning argument is brought up in the middle of a debate on a separate disagreement, in which case the opposing sides have even more temptation to “dig in” to separate meta-reasoning positions.

Rolf_Nelson2 20 Oct 2007 17:21 UTC
4 points
on: Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities
Re: “However clever your algorithm, at that level, something’s bound to confuse it. Gimme FAI with checks and balances every time.”

I agree that a mature Friendly Artificial Intelligence should defer to something like humanity’s volition.

However, before it can figure out what humanity’s volition is and how to accomplish it, an FAI first needs to:
1. self-improve into trans-human intelligence while retaining humanity’s core goals
2. avoid UnFriendly Behavior (for example, murdering people to free up their resources) in the process of doing step (1)
If the AI falls prey to a paradoxes early on in the process of self-improvement, the FAI has failed and has to be shut down or patched.

Why is that a problem? Because if the AI falls prey to a paradox later on in the process of self-improvement, when the computer can outsmart human beings, the result could be catastrophic. (As Eliezer keeps pointing out: a rational AI might not agree to be patched, just as Gandhi would not agree to have his brain modified into becoming a psychopath, and Hitler would not agree to have his brain modified to become an egalitarian. All things equal, rational agents will try to block any actions that would prevent them from accomplishing their current goals.)

So you want to create an elegant (to the point, ideally, of being “provably correct”) structure that doesn’t need patches or hacks. If you have to constantly patch or hack early on in the process, that increases the chances that you’ve missed something fundamental, and that the AI will fail later on, when it’s too late to patch.

Rolf_Nelson2 10 Apr 2008 13:42 UTC
3 points
on: Quantum Explanations
Robin: is there a paper somewhere that elaborates this argument from mixed-state ambiguity?

Scott should add his own recommendations, but I would say here is a good starting introduction.

To my mind, the fact that two different situations of uncertainty over true states lead to the same physical predictions isn’t obviously a reason to reject that type of view regarding what is real.

The anti-MWI position here is that MWI produces different predictions depending on what basis is arbitrarily picked by the predictor; and that the various MWI efforts to “patch” this problem without postulating a new law of physics, are like squaring the circle. I think the anti-MWI’ers math is correct, but I’m not an expert enough to be 100% sure; what really makes me think MWI is wrong is the inability of the MWI’ers, after many decades, to produce an algorithm that you can “turn the crank” on to get the correct probabilities that we see in experiments; they have the tendency of trying to patch this “basis problem” by producing a new framework, which itself contains an arbitrary choice that’s just as bad as the arbitrary choice of basis.

More succinctly, in vanilla MWI you have to pick the correct basis to get the correct experimental results, and you have to peek at the results to get the correct basis.

Rolf_Nelson2 9 Apr 2008 13:16 UTC
3 points
on: Quantum Explanations
In many of your prior posts where you bring up MWI, your interpretation doesn’t fundamentally matter to the overall point you’re trying to make in that post; that is, your overall conclusion for that post held or failed regardless of which interpretation is correct, possibly to a greater degree than you tend to realize.

For example: “We used a true randomness source—a quantum device.” The philosophers’ point could equally have been made by choosing the first 2^N digits of pi and finding they correspond by chance to someone’s GLUT.

Rolf_Nelson2 30 Jan 2008 0:59 UTC
3 points
on: Trust in Bayes
It’s a pity I consider my current utility function bounded; the statement “there’s no amount of fun F such that there isn’t a greater amount of fun G such that I would I would prefer a 100% chance of having fun F, to having a 50% chance of having fun G and a 50% chance of having no fun” would have been a catchy slogan for my next party.

Rolf_Nelson2 23 Sep 2007 19:28 UTC
3 points
on: The Lens That Sees Its Flaws
Re: wishful thinking, I’ve personally seen this before, where people explicitly reject reason on an important topic; I knew a rabbi in Minnesota who insisted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process will succeed, simply because “it must succeed.” Usually people only explicitly reject reason on “one thought too many” topics like “I would never even think about betraying my friends”, but the wishful-thinking topics such as your nuclear-war example don’t seem to fit into this mold.

Anyone know what the research says on this? I know people faced with death will shift their values, but to what degree and in what directions do they shift their estimated probability of deaths and disasters when the disaster involves them or people they care about? And is this just part of a more general wishful-thinking bias? (Not that I know what the research says about wishful thinking, either.)

Conjecture: a New Yorker is more likely to see D.C. as the likely first target for a terrorist nuclear bomb, compared with a D.C. resident.

Rolf_Nelson2 4 Nov 2008 5:11 UTC
2 points
on: Complexity and Intelligence
If humanity unfolded into a future civilization of infinite space and infinite time, creating descendants and hyperdescendants of unlimitedly growing size, what would be the largest Busy Beaver number ever agreed upon?

Suppose they run a BB evaluator for all of time. They would, indeed, have no way at any point of being certain that the current champion 100-bit program is the actual champion that produces BB(100). However, if they decide to anthropically reason that “for any time t, I am probably alive after time t, even though I have no direct evidence one way or the other once t becomes too large”, then they will believe (with arbitrarily high probability) that the current champion program is the actual champion program, and an arbitrarily high percentage of them will be correct in their belief.

Rolf_Nelson2 20 Jun 2008 13:13 UTC
2 points
on: LA-602 vs. RHIC Review
CERN on its LHC:

Studies into the safety of high-energy collisions inside particle accelerators have been conducted in both Europe and the United States by physicists who are not themselves involved in experiments at the LHC… CERN has mandated a group of particle physicists, also not involved in the LHC experiments, to monitor the latest speculations about LHC collisions

Things that CERN is doing right:
1. The safety reviews were done by people who do not work at the LHC.
2. There were multiple reviews by independent teams.
3. There is a group continuing to monitor the situation.

Rolf_Nelson2 17 Mar 2008 12:53 UTC
2 points
on: Explaining vs. Explaining Away
Doug S., we get the point, nothing that Ian could say would pry you away from your version of reductionism, there’s no need to make any more posts with Fully General Counterarguments. “I defy the data” is a position, but does not serve as an explanation of why you hold that position, or why other people should hold that position as well.

I would agree with reductionism, if phrased as follows:
1. When entity A can be explained in terms of another entity B, but not vice-versa, it makes sense to say that entity A “has less existence” compared to the fundamental entities that do exist. That is, we can still have A in our models, but we should be aware that it’s only a “cognitive shortcut”, like when a map draws a road as a homogeneous black line instead of showing microscopic detail.
2. The number of fundamental entities is relatively small, as we live in a lawful universe. If we see a mysterious behavior, our first guess should be that it’s probably a result of the known entities, rather than a new entity. (Occam’s razor)
3. Reductionism, as a philosophy, doesn’t itself say what these fundamental entities are; they could be particles, or laws of nature, or 31 flavors of ice cream. If every particle were composed of smaller particles, then there would be no “fundamental particle”, but the law that states how this composition occurs would still be fundamental. If we discover tomorrow that unicorns exist and are indivisible (rather than made up of quarks), then this is a huge surprise and requires a rewrite of all known laws of physics, but it does not falsify reductionism because that just means that a “unicorn field” (which seems to couple quite strongly with the Higgs boson) gets added to our list of fundamental entities.
4. Reductionism is a logical/philosophical rather than an empirical observation, and can’t be falsified as long as Occam’s razor holds.

Rolf_Nelson2 13 Jan 2008 17:26 UTC
2 points
on: Is Reality Ugly?
I wish to hell that I could just not bring up quantum physics. But there’s no real way to explain how reality can be a perfect mathematical object and still look random due to indexical uncertainty, without bringing up quantum physics.

MWI doesn’t explain why the Universe has four large dimensions and three small neutrinos. In order to explain that by indexical uncertainty, you have to bring up other multiverse concepts anyway, and if you bring in “ultimate ensemble” theories, then MWI vs. non-MWI no longer matters for the rhetorical point you’re making.

I am personally unconvinced by the arguments that MWI does away with the need for a non-unitary operation, because of the inability of MWI proponents to show that MWI works in a rigorous way without one. I would bet that some combination of Objective Reduction + MWI is the correct physical theory. The point I’m trying to make is that the Eliezer’s conclusion about indexical uncertainty may still be correct, even if you find Everett’s MWI incoherent.

Rolf_Nelson2 5 Jan 2008 0:44 UTC
2 points
on: Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych
Is there a word for the similar case to the “just-so” story, but that has a spurious environmental explanation rather than a spurious genetic explanation? (For example, “boys are more aggressive than girls because parents give their boys more violent toys.”) I see many more of the former than the latter in the media.

Rolf_Nelson2 5 Dec 2007 1:31 UTC
2 points
on: Uncritical Supercriticality
And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond with violence.

I agree. However, here are my minority beliefs on the topic: unless you use Philosophical Majoritarianism, or some other framework where you consider yourself as part of an ensemble of fallible human beings, it’s fairly hard to conclusively demonstrate the validity of this rule, or indeed to draw any accurate conclusions about what to do in these cases.

If I consider my memories and my current beliefs in the abstract, as not a priori less infallible than anyone else’s, a “no exceptions to Freedom to Dissent” policy follows naturally. But if I, instead, always model my last ten minutes of thought as part of a privileged, infallible Bayesian process, then the simplest conclusion is that I have a right, and even a moral duty, to mete out political punishment as I see fit. (You’re also logically required, if the latter is your world-view, to eschew stock-market index funds in favor of placing diverse InTrade bets with your savings; finally, you’re also required, if a betting market ever opens up where people can bet on the consequences of mathematical proofs, to bet against the greatest mathematicians in the world, anytime you disagree with them on whether a proof is valid or not.)

Rolf_Nelson2 4 Nov 2008 4:56 UTC
1 point
on: Measuring Optimization Power
1. One difference between optimization power and the folk notion of “intelligence”: Suppose the Village Idiot is told the password of an enormous abandoned online bank account. The Village Idiot now has vastly more optimization power than Einstein does; this optimization power is not based on social status nor raw might, but rather on the actions that the Village Idiot can think of taking (most of which start with logging in to account X with password Y) that don’t occur to Einstein. However, we wouldn’t label the Village Idiot as more intelligent than Einstein.
2. Is the Principle of Least Action infinitely “intelligent” by your definition? The PLA consistently picks a physical solution to the n-body problem that surprises me in the same way Kasparov’s brilliant moves surprise me: I can’t come up with the exact path the n objects will take, but after I see the path that the PLA chose, I find (for each object) the PLA’s path has a smaller action integral than the best path I could have come up with.
3. An AI whose only goal is to make sure such-and-such coin will not, the next time it’s flipped, turn up heads, can apply only (slightly less than) 1 bit of optimization pressure by your definition, even if it vaporizes the coin and then builds a Dyson sphere to provide infrastructure and resources for its ongoing efforts to probe the Universe to ensure that it wasn’t tricked and that the coin actually was vaporized as it appeared to be.