Tim_Tyler

Karma: 208

Tim_Tyler 29 Mar 2008 15:20 UTC
27 points
on: Initiation Ceremony
Beware the hidden prior: that all Virtuists are assumed to be either men or women.

Tim_Tyler 24 Jun 2008 17:46 UTC
22 points
on: The Psychological Unity of Humankind
The theme of this post isn’t very accurate, as large phenotypic polymorphisms in various other species demonstrate—e.g.:
From a strategic point of view we are especially interested in those species that have two kinds of males. It’s almost like having a third sex. In fact the winged males look far more like females than they look like wingless males. Both females and winged males are almost believable as wasps, although they are tiny. But the wingless males are nothing like wasps to look at. Many have savage pincer jaws which make them look a bit like miniature earwigs going backwards. They seem to use these jaws only for fighting — lacerating and slicing to death other males that they encounter as they stalk the length and breadth of the dark, moist, silent garden that is their only world. - Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins.

Where did the reasoning go off the rails?

It isn’t just the case of males and females where different alleles can form a truce. There’s the whole phenomenon of frequent-dependent selection. Most people are familiar with this from blood types, and sickle-cell anaemia. Alleles with phenotypic effects involving disease resistance can be advantageous when rare and disadvantageous when common—resulting in them never going near extinction or fixation.

Also, this premise is inaccurate:
If gene B depends on gene A to produce its effect, then gene A has to become nearly universal in the gene pool before there’s a substantial selection pressure in favor of gene B.

Gene B can spread if gene A is present at a frequency of 20% in the population—provided it is not deleterious in the absence of gene A. Sure, then the selection pressure maintaining it is reduced by a factor of five, but that’s not necessarily enough to kill it off.

Finally, phenotypic variation does not necessarily depend on genetic variation. There’s also the influence of the environment to consider. In general, the environment is quite capable of sending some organisms down different developmental paths depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. This is known as phenotypic plasticity.

There are plenty of examples of phenotypic plasticity in humans—e.g. the effect is an important part of the reason why a Sumo wrestler and a racing jockey have different phenotypes.

Tim_Tyler 13 May 2008 8:50 UTC
17 points
0
on: The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?
According to:

http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm#believes

...most “leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists” thought that the “Many-Worlds Interpretation was correct 10 years ago.

Supporters tend to cite not Solomonoff induction, but simply Occam’s razor.

Solomonoff induction is simply an attempt to formalise Occam’s razor around an impractical theoretical model of serial computation.

Tim_Tyler 14 Jul 2008 18:08 UTC
10 points
on: Probability is Subjectively Objective
To answer Allan Crossman and “I never saw Jaynes spell out explicitly”:

For some sixty years it has appeared to many physicists that probability plays a fundamentally different role in quantum theory than it does in statistical mechanics and analysis of measurement errors. It is a commonly heard statement that probabilities calculated within a pure state have a different character than the probabilities with which different pure states appear in a mixture, or density matrix. As Pauli put it, the former represents “Eine prinzipielle Unbestimmtheit, nicht nur Unbekanntheit”. But this viewpoint leads to so many paradoxes and mysteries that we explore the consequences of the unified view, that all probability signifies only incomplete human information.

This is from Probability In Quantum Theory (1999). Jaynes seems to be ignoring animals and AIs.

Tim_Tyler 22 Mar 2008 9:53 UTC
10 points
on: Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
Re: Seriously, why can’t we just say that buying lottery tickets is stupid?

Buying a lottery ticket is not stupid—under some conditions.

Say you have two cents, and can’t afford your train fare home (which is one stop away). If you can gamble those two cents in a game of chance, you may be able to convert them into a whole train fare.

The conditions of being stuffed—unless you have a lot of money—may not be that uncommon: so many people may be inclined to gamble this way.
What links here?
- timtyler's comment on [SEQ RERUN] New Improved Lottery by badger (31 May 2011 18:41 UTC; 0 points)
- TobyBartels's comment on Lotteries: A Waste of Hope by Eliezer Yudkowsky (16 Jan 2011 2:21 UTC; 0 points)

Tim_Tyler 11 Dec 2008 21:45 UTC
8 points
on: What I Think, If Not Why
Tim probably read my analysis using the self-optimizing compiler as an example, then forgot that I had analyzed it and thought that he was inventing a crushing objection on his own.

It does not seem very likely that I am copying you—when my essay on this subject dates from February 3rd, while yours apparently dates from November 25th.

So what exactly is the counter-argument you were attempting to make?

That self-optimising compilers lack “insight”—and “insight” is some kind of boolean substance that you either have or you lack?

In my view, machines gradually accumulate understanding of themselves—and how to modify themselves. There is a long history of automated refactoring—which seems to me to clearly demonstrate that “insight” within machines into how to modify computer code comes in a vast number of little pieces, which are gradually being assembled over the decades into ever more impressive refactoring tools. I have worked on refactoring tools myself—and I see no hint of sudden gains in capability in this area—rather progress is made in thousands, or even millions of tiny steps.

Tim_Tyler 11 Dec 2008 20:44 UTC
8 points
on: What I Think, If Not Why
An AI that reaches a certain point in its own development becomes able to improve itself. At this point, recursive cascades slam over many internal growth curves to near the limits of their current hardware, and the AI undergoes a vast increase in capability.

This seems like the first problem I detected. An intelligence being able to improve itself does not necessarily lead to a recursive cascade of self-improvement—since it may only be able to improve some parts of itself—and it’s quite possible that after it has done those improvements, it can’t do any more.

Say that machine intelligence learns how to optimise FOR loops, eliminatining unnecessary conditions, etc. Presto, it can optimise its entire codebase—and thus improve itself. However, that doesn’t lead to a self-improving recursive cascade—because it only improved itself in one way, and that was a rather limited way. Of course this kind of improvement has been going on for decades—via lint tools and automatic refactoring.

As machines get smarter, they will gradually become able to improve more and more of themselves. Yes, eventually machines will be able to cut humans out of the loop—but before that there will have been much automated improvement of machines by machines—and after that there may still be human code reviews.

This is not the first time I have made this point here. It does not seem especially hard to understand to me—but yet the conversation sails gaily onwards, with no coherent criticism, and no sign of people updating their views: it feels like talking to a wall.

Tim_Tyler 1 Dec 2008 23:20 UTC
7 points
on: ...Recursion, Magic
yes, we use programming languages to write better programming languages—but there are some people out there who still swear by Emacs [...]

It’s not just computer languages. Computers help build better computers, editors help build better editors—and so on.

Plus there are synergetic loops: computers help build better editors, and editors help build better computers.

Look as the whole system and you see that the whole man-machine symbiosis builds the next generation of man-machine symbiosis.

The result is the cumulative snowballing of technological progress: technology making better technology. That has actually been going on for billions of years, if you include “natural technologies”—such as photosyntesis, cellulose, sexual reproduction—and so on.

The result is what I refer to as the ongoing “technology explosion”. From such a perspective, superintelligent machines are the latest move in an ancient dance.

Tim_Tyler 27 Aug 2008 7:05 UTC
7 points
on: Dreams of AI Design
Re: Simply mimicking the human brain in an attempt to produce intelligence is akin to scavenging code off the web to write a program. Will you understand well how the program works? No. Will it work? If you can hack it, very possibly.

Except that this is undocumented spaghetti code which comes with no manual, is written in a language for which you have no interpreter, was built by a genetic algorithm, and is constructed so that it disintegrates.

The prospective hacker needs to be more than brave, they need to have no idea that other approaches are possible.

Tim_Tyler 6 Nov 2008 7:33 UTC
6 points
on: Mundane Magic
The rebels’ time is almost done. Soon we will crush them utterly.

We are not doing very well so far. We can’t even seem to keep the blighters out of our tiny, digital, deterministic and engineered computer systems yet.

Tim_Tyler 28 Oct 2008 7:21 UTC
6 points
on: Measuring Optimization Power
it is now clear that playing checkers requires no optimization power, since you can solve it as deterministically as water running downhill.

Surely not! Just because a problem has a known, deterministic solution, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t require optimisation to produce that solution.

It would be extremely odd epistemological terminology to classify problems as optimisation problems only if we do not already have access to their solutions.

Tim_Tyler 9 Sep 2008 21:58 UTC
6 points
on: Points of Departure
Re: why might a Hollywood scriptwriter make those particular mistakes?

Script writers often aim for things like dramatic tension over realism—and in that context, those are probably not mistakes.

Most sci-fi is just garbage—if read as attempted futurism. Unmodified humans in the far future? Humanoid aliens all over the place? It’s really not worth criticising most of it from a futurist perspective.

Tim_Tyler 27 Jun 2008 19:00 UTC
6 points
on: 2-Place and 1-Place Words
I doubt that “Fred” ever made the statement attributed him. I expect he would have been more likely to say:

“What!?! Didn’t I make a clear enough artistic statement that my job security depends on the selling of comic books to pimply teenage males?”

Tim_Tyler 25 Jun 2008 10:42 UTC
6 points
on: The Design Space of Minds-In-General
What if AIXI accidentally bashed its own brains out before it tried that?

Tim_Tyler 26 Feb 2008 22:07 UTC
6 points
on: No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
In biology, “evolution” is defined as being the process involving changes of the heritable characteristics of a population over time.

Corporations pass all manner of things on to other companies—including resouces, employees, business methods, intellectual property, documents, premises, computer programs, etc. We are not talking about just a few bits of analog information here—often vast quantities of digital resources are involved.

Corporations form a population. Frequencies of instances of the above listed items in that population varies over time.

Therefore the population of corporations evolves—in the spirit of the classical biological sense of the term.

Tim_Tyler 27 Dec 2008 14:02 UTC
5 points
on: Nonperson Predicates
If you would balk at killing a million people with a nuclear weapon, you should balk at this.

The main problem with death is that valuable things get lost.

Once people are digital, this problem tends to go away—since you can relatively easily scan their brains—and preserve anything of genuine value.

In summary, I don’t see why this issue would be much of a problem.

Tim_Tyler 6 Dec 2008 9:28 UTC
5 points
on: Sustained Strong Recursion
GenericThinker is right, ‘halting problem’ is very relevant there [...]

GenericThinker is simply extremely confused—as the comments about the halting problem make abundantly clear. I would comment on the idea of singletons being ruled out by the speed of light—but I can’t think of anything polite to say.

Tim_Tyler 4 Dec 2008 23:17 UTC
5 points
on: Underconstrained Abstractions
Moravec, “Mind Children”, page 68: “Human equivalence in 40 years”. There he is actually talking about human-level intelligent machines arriving by 2028 - not just the hardware you would theoretically require to build one if you had the ten million dollars to spend on it.

You can hire a human for less than ten million dollars. So there would be little financial incentive to use a more expensive machine instead. When the machine costs a thousand dollars things are a bit different.

I think it misrepresents his position to claim that he thought we should have human-level intelligent machines by now.
What links here?
- Daniel Kokotajlo's comment on Biology-Inspired AGI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works by Eliezer Yudkowsky (12 Dec 2021 18:41 UTC; 19 points)
- jacob_cannell's comment on Some abstract, non-technical reasons to be non-maximally-pessimistic about AI alignment by Rob Bensinger (12 Dec 2021 17:49 UTC; 5 points)

Tim_Tyler 27 Nov 2008 10:34 UTC
5 points
on: Total Nano Domination
So nanotechnology can plausibly automate away much of the manufacturing in its material supply chain. If you already have nanotech, you may not need to consult the outside economy for inputs of energy or raw material.

Why would you not make use of resources from the outside world?

IMO, the issue in this area is with folks like Google—who take from the rest of the world, but don’t contribute everything they build back again—so they develop their own self-improving ecosystem that those outside the company have no access to. Do that faster than your competitors in a suitably-diverse range of fields and eventually you find yourself getting further and further ahead—at least until the monopolies commission takes notice.

Tim_Tyler 17 Aug 2008 8:11 UTC
5 points
on: When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid
The puppy’s parents may push it to the ground when it does something wrong, but that doesn’t mean the puppy is doing moral reasoning. Our current theories of evolutionary psychology holds that moral reasoning arose as a response to more complex social challenges than that—in their full-fledged human form, our moral adaptations are the result of selection pressures over linguistic arguments about tribal politics.

Right, but dogs know right from wrong, even if they don’t have something akin to language. Much as they can catch a ball—even though they don’t know how to solve the differential equations that describe the ball’s arc.

Dogs have pretty complex social lives—as a result of their pack-hunting ancestry. This no doubt came in useful when it came to their more recent symbiosis with humans.