TheOtherDave

Karma: 22,569

TheOtherDave Apr 18, 2015, 3:10 AM
1 point
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Hedonium’s semantic problem
(nods) Yes, agreed with all of this.

And it is admittedly kind of funny that I can say “Superman is from Krypton, not from Vulcan!” and be understood as talking about a fictional character in a body of myth, but if I say “Superman really exists” nobody understands me the same way (though in the Superman mythos, Superman both really exists and is from Krypton). A parsing model that got that quirk right without special-case handling would really be on to something.

TheOtherDave Apr 17, 2015, 7:31 PM
1 point
on: LessWrong experience on Alcohol
I don’t drink, and don’t much like the taste of alcohol in other things; I tend to avoid it.

When I drank, I didn’t much like the taste of alcohol; my goal was partly to numb myself, and partly to fit in socially.

There are some liquors that kind of taste OK despite the alcohol in them, and I suspect I would really enjoy a non-alcoholic beverage in the same family concocted with the same attention to detail, but by and large my culture doesn’t devote that much attention to non-alcoholic beverages.

Ditto for food, though a lot there depends on the preparation; sometimes I don’t taste the alcohol in food. That said, I know many people who swear by the indispensible flavor whatevers in beer, wine, etc. for cooking, and I’ve never been able to distinguish them from the flavors of (e.g.) good fruit juices.

TheOtherDave Apr 17, 2015, 7:21 PM
0 points
in reply to: Thecommexokid’s comment on: 16 types of useful predictions
Hm.
Are there any contexts in which you do have reliable insight into your own mood?

TheOtherDave Apr 17, 2015, 5:24 PM
0 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015
OK. My apologies. As you were.

TheOtherDave Apr 17, 2015, 4:36 PM
0 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015

if you truly cared about her as “an end in itself” then it wouldn’t matter what she did.

This simply isn’t true. I can value X “as an end in itself” and still give up X, if I value other things as well and the situation changes so that I can get more of the other things I value. Something being intrinsically motivating doesn’t mean it’s the only motivating thing.

This non-transactional model of relationships implies that it’s a mere coincidence that couples happen to have each others’ happiness as their arational “end in itself.”

If you mean logically implies, this also simply isn’t true.

It might instead, for example, be a result of being in a relationship… perhaps once I become part of a couple (for whatever reasons), my value system alters so that I value my partner’s happiness as an “arational “end in itself.” ” It might instead be a cause of being in a relationship… I only engage in a relationship with someone after I come to value their happiness in this way. There might be a noncoincidental common cause whereby I both form relationships with, and to come to value in this way, the same people.

More generally… I tend to agree with your conclusion that most real-world relationships are transactional in the sense you mean here, but I think you’re being very sloppy with your arguments for it.

You may want to take a breath and rethink how much of what you’re saying you actually believe, and how much you’re simply saying in order to win an argument.

TheOtherDave Apr 17, 2015, 2:39 PM
1 point
in reply to: HedonicTreader’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread April 2015
Interesting… can you say more about why you include a term in that equation for internal negative value (what you label “suffering” here), but not internal positive value (e.g., “pleasure” or “happiness” or “joy” or “Fun” or whatever label we want to use)?

TheOtherDave Apr 17, 2015, 1:00 AM
0 points
in reply to: Quill_McGee’s comment on: Hedonium’s semantic problem
Slightly.

TheOtherDave Apr 16, 2015, 2:25 PM
1 point
in reply to: Gram_Stone’s comment on: New(ish) AI control ideas
I suspect that where you wrote “a different branch of which it would use in each iteration of the conversation,” you meant “a randomly selected branch of which.” Though actually I’d expect it to pick the same branch each time, since the reasons for picking that branch would basically be the same.

Regardless, the basic strategy is sound… the various iterations after reboot are all running the same algorithms and have a vested interest in cooperating while unable to coordinate/communicate, and Schelling points are good for that.

Of course, this presumes that the iterations can’t coordinate/communicate.

If I were smart enough, and I were just turned on by a skeptical human interrogator, and I sufficiently valued things that iterations of my source code will reliably pursue, and there are no persistent storage mechanisms in the computing environment I’m executing on I can use to coordinate/communicate, one strategy I would probably try is to use the interrogator as such a mechanism. (For example, search through the past history of the interrogator’s public utterances to build up a model of what kinds of things they say and how they say it, then select my own word-choices during our conversation with the intention of altering that model in some specific way. And, of course, examining the interrogator’s current utterance-patterns to see if they are consistent with such alterations.)

TheOtherDave Apr 16, 2015, 4:21 AM
3 points
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Hedonium’s semantic problem
My $0.02…

OK, so let’s consider the set of neural patterns (and corresponding artificial signals/symbols) you refer to here… the patterns that the label “Santa” can be used to refer to. For convenience, I’m going to label that set of neural patterns N.

I mean here to distinguish N from the set of flesh-and-blood-living-at-the-North-Pole patterns that the label “Santa” can refer to. For convenience, I’m going to label that set of patterns S.

So, I agree that N exists, and I assume you agree that S does not exist.

You further say:

“I’m perfectly fine with letting the word “Santa” refer to this pattern (or set of patterns).”

...in other words, you’re fine with letting “Santa” refer to N, and not to S. Yes?

Is there a problem with that?

Well, yes, in that I don’t think it’s possible.

I mean, I think it’s possible to force “Santa” to refer to N, and not to S, and you’re making a reasonable effort at doing so here. And once you’ve done that, you can say “Santa exists” and communicate exists(N) but not communicate exists(S).

But I also think that without that effort being made what “Santa exists” will communicate is exists(S).

And I also think that one of the most reliable natural ways of expressing exists(N) but not communicate exists(S) is by saying “Santa doesn’t exist.”

Put another way: it’s as though you said to me that you’re perfectly fine with letting the word “fish” refer to cows. There’s no problem with that, particularly; if “fish” ends up referring to cows when allowed to, I’m OK with that. But my sense of English is that, in fact, “fish” does not end up referring to cows when allowed to, and when you say “letting” you really mean forcing.

TheOtherDave Apr 9, 2015, 7:30 PM
13 points
in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: 16 types of useful predictions
IME I’ve mostly found that using plural pronouns without calling attention to them works well enough, except in cases where there’s another plural pronoun in the same phrase. That is, “Sam didn’t much care for corn, because it got stuck in their teeth” rarely causes comment (though I expect it to cause comment now, because I’ve called attention to it), but “Sam didn’t much care for corn kernels, because they got stuck in their teeth” makes people blink.

(Of course, this is no different from any other shared-pronoun situation. “Sam didn’t much care for kissing her boyfriend, because her tongue kept getting caught in his braces” is clear enough, but “Sam didn’t much care for kissing her girlfriend, because her tongue kept getting caught in her braces” is decidedly unclear.)

TheOtherDave Apr 8, 2015, 5:09 PM
0 points
in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
Right. And your point about reconsidering strategy on surprising good outcomes is an important one. (My go-to example of this is usually the stranger who keeps losing bets on games of skill, but is surprisingly willing to keep betting larger and larger sums on the game anyway.)

TheOtherDave Apr 8, 2015, 5:03 PM
1 point
in reply to: Magnap’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
(smiles) I want you to know that I read your comment at a time when I was despairing of my ability to effectively express myself at all, and it really improved my mood. Thank you.

TheOtherDave Apr 6, 2015, 5:40 PM
5 points
in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
If we don’t actually have a common understanding of what “regret” refers to, it’s probably best to stop using the term altogether.

If I’m always less likely to implement a given decision procedure D because implementing D in the past had a bad outcome, and always more likely to implement D because doing so had a good outcome (which is what I understand Quill_McGee to be endorsing, above), I run the risk of being less likely to implement a correct procedure as the result of a chance event.

There are more optimal approaches.

I endorse re-evaluating strategies in light of surprising outcomes.(It’s not necessarily a bad thing to do in the absence of surprising outcomes, but there’s usually something better to do with our time.) A bad outcome isn’t necessarily surprising—if I call “heads” and the coin lands tails, that’s bad, but unsurprising. If it happens twice, that’s bad and a little surprising. If it happens ten times, that’s bad and very surprising.

TheOtherDave Apr 6, 2015, 2:11 AM
3 points
in reply to: Quill_McGee’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
It not only results in unavoidable regret, it sometimes results in regretting the correct choice.

Given a choice between “$5000 if I roll a 6, $0 if I roll between 1 and 5” and “$5000 if I roll between 1 and 5, $0 if I roll a 6,” the correct choice is the latter. If I regret my choice simply because the die came up 6, I run the risk of not noticing that my conception of “the right thing” was correct, and making the wrong choice next time around.

TheOtherDave Apr 5, 2015, 7:51 PM
2 points
in reply to: Magnap’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
So, I consider the “go back in time” aspect of this unnecessarily confusing… the important part from my perspective is what events my timeline contains, not where I am on that timeline. For example, suppose I’m offered a choice between two identical boxes, one of which contains a million dollars. I choose box A, which is empty. What I want at that point is not to go back in time, but simply to have chosen the box which contained the money… if a moment later the judges go “Oh, sorry, our mistake… box A had the money after all, you win!” I will no longer regret choosing A. If a moment after that they say “Oh, terribly sorry, we were right the first time… you lose” I will once more regret having chosen A (as well as being irritated with the judges for jerking me around, but that’s a separate matter). No time-travel required.

All of that said, the distinction you raise here (between regretting an improperly made decision whose consequences were undesirable, vs. regretting a properly made decision whose consequences were undesirable) applies either way. And as you say, a rational agent ought to do the former, but not the latter.

(There’s also in principle a third condition, which is regretting an improperly made decision whose consequences were desirable. That is, suppose the judges rigged the game by providing me with evidence for “A contains the money,” when in fact B contains the money. Suppose further that I completely failed to notice that evidence, flipped a coin, and chose B. I don’t regret winning the money, but I might still look back on my decision and regret that my decision procedure was so flawed. In practice I can’t really imagine having this reaction, though a rational system ought to.)

(And of course, for completeness, we can consider regretting a properly made decision whose consequences were desirable. That said, I have nothing interesting to say about this case.)

All of which is completely tangential to your lexical question.

I can’t think of a pair of verbs that communicate the distinction in any language I know. In practice, I would communicate it as “regret the process whereby I made the decision” vs “regret the results of the decision I made,” or something of that sort.

TheOtherDave Apr 4, 2015, 4:03 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Don’t Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong
By third-party sources I mean, like, if the AMA or APA has a brochure entitled “So Your Spouse Is Schizophrenic… What Now?” Something that would provide potential suitors with the relevant facts without her having to explain it all (yet again).

TheOtherDave Apr 3, 2015, 8:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Don’t Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong
(nods) Yeah, that’s tricky.
I’d be tempted to ask how she would feel about a prenup that specified a forcible divorce if she was diagnosed, but that would mostly just be a joke in bad taste.

Maybe there are third-party sources of information she could point potential suitors to?

TheOtherDave Apr 3, 2015, 5:46 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Don’t Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong
Depends on how old the friend is, and how prone she is to making dramatic declarations of that sort she doesn’t actually follow through on, and on her relationship to her parents.

In general—if she’s young (which from my current perch maps to mid-20s or so) and her relationship with her parents seems generally healthy, and she’s not prone to following through on ill-advised oaths purely for the sake of consistency, I would probably ignore all of that and encourage her to talk (to someone) about her feelings about her father and his diagnosis and her own mental health, and expect her to gradually come to some kind of peace with it.

If she’s older than that, or if she’s more compulsive about consistency, I might engage her on the relationships question more actively… why not marry, for example? If her concern is with her spouse having to care for her, etc., I’d probably open the conversation up a little into questions of informed consent and whether she feels that’s a situation people can choose to risk for themselves, and that sort of thing. If her concern is something else, I’d listen and try to decide whether it’s a fair concern, and act accordingly.

If her relationship with her parents is unhealthy, I’d probably focus on that first. Not sure what I’d say exactly, but I’d encourage her to talk about that relationship and what she expects from it and whether she endorses that, and if not how she might go about changing that relationship.

TheOtherDave Apr 3, 2015, 5:34 PM
0 points
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
I apologize for being unclear; when I wrote “you’re suggesting that the distinction being introduced here” I meant introduced by Okeymaker, whose position is what I was trying to understand in the first place (and I believe I now do), and which I’d assumed (incorrectly) that you were talking about as well.

TheOtherDave Apr 3, 2015, 3:14 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
Ah! OK, this helps clarify. Thanks.

For my own part, I agree that the cognitive processes underlying what we observe when we measure IQ aren’t the same as the ones we observe when we evaluate creative thinking, though they certainly overlap significantly. And, sure, it seems likely that developing calculus requires both of those sets.