Tyrrell_McAllister2

Karma: 59

Tyrrell_McAllister2 28 Nov 2008 17:37 UTC
9 points
on: Thanksgiving Prayer
Here’s a Daniel Dennett essay that seems appropriate:

THANK GOODNESS!

Tyrrell_McAllister2 28 Aug 2008 0:01 UTC
8 points
0
on: Against Modal Logics
You write that “Philosophy doesn’t resolve things, it compiles positions and arguments”. I think that philosophy should be granted as providing something somewhat more positive than this: It provides common vocabularies for arguments. This is no mean feat, as I think you would grant, but it is far short of resolving arguments which is what you need.

As you’ve observed, modal logics amount to arranging a bunch of black boxes in very precisely stipulated configurations, while giving no indication as to the actual contents of the black boxes. However, if you mean to accuse the philosophers of seeing no need to fill the black boxes, then I think you go too far. Rather, it is just an anthropological fact that the philosophers cannot agree on how to fill the black boxes, or even on what constitutes filling a box. The result is that they are unable to generate a consensus at the level of precision that you need. Nonetheless, they at least generate a consensus vocabulary for discussing various candidate refinements down to some level, even if none of them reach as deep a level as you need.

I don’t mean to contradict your assertion that (even) analytic philosophy doesn’t provide what you need. I mean rather to emphasize what the problem is: It isn’t exactly that people fail to see the need for reductionistic explanations. Rather the problem is that no one seems capable of convincing anyone else that his or her candidate reduction should be accepted to the exclusion of all others. It may be that the only way for someone to win this kind of argument is to build an actual functioning AI. In fact, I’m inclined to think that this is the case. If so, then, in my irrelevant judgement, you are working with just about the right amount of disregard for whatever consensus results might exist with the analytic philosophical tradition.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 24 Nov 2008 11:35 UTC
5 points
on: Cascades, Cycles, Insight...
I’ve been following along and enjoying the exchange so far, but it doesn’t seem to be getting past the “talking past each other” phase.

For example, the Fermi story works as an example of a cycle as a source of discontinuity. But I don’t see how it establishes anything that Robin would have disputed. I guess that Eliezer would say that Robin has been inattentive to its lessons. But he should then point out where exactly Robin’s reasoning fails to take those lessons into account. Right now, he just seems to be pointing to an example of cycles and say, “Look, a cycle causing discontinuity. Does that maybe remind you of something that perhaps your theorizing has ignored?” I imagine that Robin’s response will just be to say, “No,” and no progress will have been made.

And, of course, once the Fermi story is told, I can’t help but think of how else it might be analogous to the current discussion. When I look at the Fermi story, what I see is this: Fermi took a powerful model of reality and made the precise prediction that something huge would happen between layers 56 and 57, whereas someone without that model would have just thought, “I don’t see how 57 is so different from 56.” What I see happening in this conversation is that Robin says, “Using a powerful model of reality, I predict that an event, which Eliezer thinks is very likely, will actually happen only with probability <10%.” (I haven’t yet seen a completely explicit consensus account of Robin and Eliezer’s disagreement, but I gather that it’s something like that.) And Eliezer’s replies seem to me to be of the form “You shouldn’t be so confident in your model. Previous black swans show how easily predictions based on past performance can be completely wrong.”

I concede that the analogy between the Fermi story and the current conversation is not the best fit. But if I pursue it, what I get is this: Robin is in a sense claiming to be the Fermi in this conversation. He says that he has a well-established body of theory that makes a certain prediction: that Eliezer’s scenario has very low probability of happening.

Eliezer, on the other hand, is more like someone who, when presented with Fermi’s predictions (before they’d been verified) might have said, “How can you be so confident in your theory? Don’t you realize that a black swan could come and upset it all? For example, maybe a game-changing event could happen between layers 32 and 33, preventing layer 57 from even occurring. Have you taken that possibility into account? In fact, I expect that something will happen at some point to totally upset your neat little calculations”

Such criticisms should be backed up with an account of where, exactly, Fermi is making a mistake by being so confident in his prediction about layer 57. Similarly, Eliezer should say where exactly he sees the flaws in Robin’s specific arguments. Instead, we get these general exhortations to be wary of black swans. Although such warnings are important, I don’t see how they cash out in this particular case as evidence that Robin is the one who is being too confident in his predictions.

In other words, Robin and Eliezer have a disagreement that (I hope) ultimately cashes out as a disagreement about how to distribute probability over the possible futures. But Eliezer’s criticisms of Robin’s methods are all very general; they point to how hard it is to make such predictions. He argues, in a vague and inexact way, that predictions based on similar methods would have gone wrong in the past. But Eliezer seems to dodge laying out exactly where Robin’s methods go wrong in this particular case and why Eliezer’s succeed.

Again, the kinds of general warnings that Eliezer gives are very important, and I enjoy reading them. It’s valuable to point out all the various quarters from which a black swan could arrive. But, for the purposes of this argument, he should point out how exactly Robin is failing to heed these warnings sufficiently. Of course, maybe Eliezer is getting to that, but some assurance of that would be nice. I have a large appetite for Eliezer’s posts, construed as general advice on how to think. But when I read them as part of this argument with Robin, I keep waiting for him to get to the point.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 16 Feb 2009 16:51 UTC
4 points
on: An African Folktale
Some here seem to think it significant that the good-doers in the story are not naive fools over whom the audience can feel superior. It is argued that that sense of superiority explains stories like the Frog and the Scorpion in the West. The inference seems to be that since this sense of superiority is lacking in this African tale, the intent could only have been to inform the audience that this is how the world works.

However, I don’t think that the “superiority” explanation can be so quickly dismissed. To me, this story works because the audience keeps having their expectations of gratitude violated. Hence, the storyteller gets to feel superior to the audience by proving him or herself to be wiser in the ways of the world. The closing lines ---

That’s all. For so it always has been—if you see the dust of a fight rising, you will know that a kindness is being repaid! That’s all. The story’s finished.
--- read to me like a self-satisfied expression of condescension towards an audience so naive as to expect some justice in this world.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 5 Feb 2009 18:38 UTC
4 points
on: True Ending: Sacrificial Fire (7/8)
If the Super-Happies were going to turn us into orgasmium, I could see blowing up Huygens. Nor would it necessarily take such an extreme case to convince me to take that extreme measure. But this . . . ?

“Our own two species,” the Lady 3rd said, “which desire this change of the Babyeaters, will compensate them by adopting Babyeater values, making our own civilization of greater utility in their sight: we will both change to spawn additional infants, and eat most of them at almost the last stage before they become sentient.” … “It is nonetheless probable,” continued the Lady 3rd, “that the Babyeaters will not accept this change as it stands; it will be necessary to impose these changes by force. As for you, humankind, we hope you will be more reasonable. But both your species, and the Babyeaters, must relinquish bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles. In exchange, we will change our own values in the direction of yours. We are willing to change to desire pleasure obtained in more complex ways, so long as the total amount of our pleasure does not significantly decrease. We will learn to create art you find pleasing. We will acquire a sense of humor, though we will not lie. From the perspective of humankind and the Babyeaters, our civilization will obtain much utility in your sight, which it did not previously possess. This is the compensation we offer you. We furthermore request that you accept from us the gift of untranslatable 2, which we believe will enhance, on its own terms, the value that you name ‘love’. This will also enable our kinds to have sex using mechanical aids, which we greatly desire. At the end of this procedure, all three species will satisfice each other’s values and possess great common ground, upon which we may create a civilization together.”

Sure, I would turn this down if it were simply offered as a gift. But I really, really, cannot see preferring the death of fifteen billion people over it. Although I value the things that the Super-Happies would take away, and I even value valuing them, I don’t value valuing them all that much. Or, if I do, it is very far from intuitively obvious to me. And the more I think about it, the less likely it seems.

I hope that Part 8 somehow makes this ending seem more like the “right” one. Maybe it will be made clear that the Super-Happies couldn’t deliver on their offer without imposing significant hidden downsides. It wouldn’t stretch plausibility too much if such downsides were hidden even from them. They are portrayed as not really getting how we work. As I said in this comment to Part 3, we might expect that they would screw us up in ways that they don’t anticipate.

But unless some argument is made that their offer was much worse than it seemed at first, I can’t help but conclude that the crew made a colossal mistake by destroying Huygens, to understate the matter.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 30 Jan 2009 16:27 UTC
4 points
on: The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)
It’s good. Not baby-eatin’ good, but good enough ;).

Tyrrell_McAllister2 19 Nov 2008 17:57 UTC
4 points
on: The First World Takeover
I don’t yet see why exactly Eliezer is dwelling on the origin of replicators. As Robin said, it would have been very surprising if Robin had disagreed with any of it.

I guess that Eliezer’s main points were these: (1) The origin of life was an event where things changed abruptly in a way that wouldn’t have been predicted by extrapolating from the previous 9 billion years. Moreover, (2) pretty much the entire mass of the universe, minus a small tidal pool, was basically irrelevant to how this abrupt change played out and continues to play out. That is, the rest of the universe only mattered in regards to its gross features. It was only in that tidal pool that the precise arrangement of molecules had and will have far-reaching causal implications for the fate of the universe.

Eliezer seems to want to argue that we should expect something like this when the singularity comes. His conclusion seems to be that it is futile to survey the universe as it is now to try to predict detailed features of the singularity. For, if the origin of life is any guide, practically all detailed features of the present universe will prove irrelevant. Their causal implications will be swept aside by the consequences of some localized event that is hidden in some obscure corner of the world, below our awareness. Since we know practically nothing about this event, our present models can’t take it into account, so they are useless for predicting the details of its consequences. That, at any rate, is what I take his argument to be.

There seems to me to be a crucial problem with this line of attack on Robin’s position. As Eliezer writes of the origin of life,

The first replicator was the first great break in History—the first Black Swan that would have been unimaginable by any surface analogy. No extrapolation of previous trends could have spotted it—you’d have had to dive down into causal modeling, in enough detail to visualize the unprecedented search. Not that I’m saying I would have guessed, without benefit of hindsight—if somehow I’d been there as a disembodied and unreflective spirit, knowing only the previous universe as my guide—having no highfalutin’ concepts of “intelligence” or “natural selection” because those things didn’t exist in my environment, and I had no mental mirror in which to see myself—and indeed, who should have guessed it with short of godlike intelligence? When all the previous history of the universe contained no break in History that sharp? The replicator was the first Black Swan.

The difference with Robin’s current position, if I understand it, is that he doesn’t see our present situation as one in which such a momentous development is inconceivable. On the contrary, he conceives of it as happening through brain-emulation.

Eliezer seems to me to establish this much. If our present models did not predict an abrupt change on the order of the singularity, and if such a change nonetheless happens, then it will probably spring out of some very local event that wipes out the causal implications of all but the grossest features of the rest of the universe. However, Robin believes that our current models already predict a singularity-type event. If he’s right (a big if!), then a crucial hypothesis of Eliezer’s argument fails to obtain. The analogy with the origin of life that Eliezer makes in this post breaks down.

So the root of the difference between Eliezer and Robin seems to be this: Do our current models already give some significant probability to the singularity arising out of processes that we already know something about, e.g., the development of brain emulation? If so, then the origin of life was a crucially different situation, and we can’t draw the lessons from it that Eliezer wants to.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 25 Feb 2009 16:43 UTC
3 points
on: Formative Youth
michael vassar:
[Nerds] perceive abstractions handed to them explicitly by other people more easily than patterns that show up around them. Oddly, this seems to me to be a respect in which nerds are more feminine rather than being more masculine as they are in many other ways.
Would you elaborate on this? What is the generally-feminine behavior of which the first sentence describes an instance?

My first inclination would be to think that your first sentence describes something stereotypically masculine. It’s an example of wanting things to come in pre-structured formats, which is part of wanting to operate in a domain that is governed by explicit pre-established rules. That is often seen as a stereotypically-masculine desire that manifests in such non-nerdy pursuits as professional sports and military hierarchies.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 9 Feb 2009 19:12 UTC
3 points
on: (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
I think that you make good points about how fiction can be part of a valid moral argument, perhaps even an indispensable part for those who haven’t had some morally-relevant experience first-hand.

But I’m having a hard time seeing how your last story helped you in this way. Although I enjoyed the story very much, I don’t think that your didactic purposes are well-served by it.

My first concern is that your story will actually serve as a counter-argument for rationality to many readers. Since I’m one of those who disagreed with the characters’ choice to destroy Huygens, I’m pre-disposed to worry that your methods could be discredited by that conclusion. A reader who has not already been convinced that your methods are valid could take this as a reductio ad absurdum proof that they are invalid. I don’t think that your methods inexorably imply your conclusion, but another reader might take your word for it, and one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. Of course, all methods of persuasion carry this risk. But it’s especially risky when you are actively trying to make the “right answer” as difficult as possible to ascertain for dramatic purposes.

Another danger of fictional evidence is that it can obscure what exactly is the structure and conclusion of the argument. For example, why were we supposed to conclude that evading the Super-Happies was worth killing 15 billion at Huygens but was not worth destroying Earth and fragmenting the colonies? Or were we necessarily supposed to conclude that? Were you trying to persuade the reader that the Supper-Happies’ modifications fell between those two choices? As far as I could tell, there was no argument in the story to support this. Nor did I see anything in your preceding “rigorous” posts to establish that being modified fell in this range It appeared to be a moral assertion for which no argument was given. Or perhaps it was just supposed to be a thought-provoking possibility, to which you didn’t mean to commit yourself. You subsequent comments don’t lead me to think that, though. This uncertainty about your intended conclusion would be less likely if you were relying on precise arguments.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 4 Aug 2008 15:56 UTC
3 points
on: No Logical Positivist I
I have to agree with komponisto and some others: this post attacks a straw-man version of logical positivism. As komponisto alluded to, you are ignoring the logical in logical positivisim. The logical positivists believed that meaningful statements had to be either verifiable or they had to be logical constructs built up out of verifiable constituents. They held that if A is a meaningful (because verifiable) assertion that something happened, and B is likewise, then A & B is meaningful by virtue of being logically analyzable in terms of the meaning of A and B. They would maintain this even if the events asserted in A and B had disjoint light cones, so that you could never experimentally verify them both. In effect, they subscribed to precisely the view that you endorse when you wrote, “A great many untestable beliefs . . . talk about general concepts already linked to experience, like Suns and chocolate cake, and general frameworks for combining them, like space and time.”

Your “general frameworks for combining” do exactly the work that logical positivists did by building statements from verifiable constituents using logical connectives. In particular space and time would be understood by them in logical terms as follows: space and time reduce to geometry via general relativity, and geometry, along with all math, reduces to logic via the logicist program of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. See, for example, Hans Reichenbach’s The Philosophy of Space and Time.

So, even without invoking omnipotent beings to check whether the cake is there, the logical positivist would attribute meaning to that claim in essentially the same way that you do.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 17 Feb 2009 19:41 UTC
2 points
on: An African Folktale
George Weinberg:

Does it occur to anyone else that the fable is not a warning against doing favors in general but of siding with “outsiders” against “insiders”?
Wow; now that you mention it, that is a blatant recurring theme in the story. I now can’t help but think that that is a major part, if not the whole, of the message. Each victim betrays an in-group to perform a kindness for a stranger. It’s pretty easy to see why storytellers would want to remind listeners that their first duty is to the tribe. Whatever pity they might feel for a stranger, they must never let that pity lead them to betray the interests of their tribe.

Can’t believe I missed that :).

Tyrrell_McAllister2 4 Dec 2008 16:07 UTC
2 points
on: Underconstrained Abstractions
But has that been disproved? I don’t really know. But I would imagine that Moravec could always append, ”. . . provided that we found the right 10 trillion calculations.” Or am I missing the point?

Tyrrell_McAllister2 20 Nov 2008 7:48 UTC
2 points
on: The First World Takeover
Tim Tyler,

I don’t yet see why exactly Eliezer is dwelling on the origin of replicators.

Check with the title: if you are considering the possibility of a world takeover, it obviously pays to examine the previous historical genetic takeovers.

Right. I get the surface analogy. But it seems to break down when I look at its deeper structure.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 29 Sep 2008 8:54 UTC
2 points
on: Friedman’s “Prediction vs. Explanation”
Here’s my answer, prior to reading any of the comments here, or on Friedman’s blog, or Friedman’s own commentary immediately following his statement of the puzzle. So, it may have already been given and/or shot down.

We should believe the first theory. My argument is this. I’ll call the first theory T1 and the second theory T2. I’ll also assume that both theories made their predictions with certainty. That is, T1 and T2 gave 100% probability to all the predictions that the story attributed to them.

First, it should be noted that the two theories should have given the same prediction for the next experiment (experiment 21). This is because T1 should have been the best theory that (would have) predicted the first batch. And since T1 also correctly predicted the second batch, it should have been the best theory that would do that, too. (Here, “best” is according to whatever objective metric evaluates theories with respect to a given body of evidence.)

But we are told that T2 makes exactly the same predictions for the first two batches. So it also should have been the best such theory. It should be noted that T2 has no more information with which to improve itself. T1, for all intents and purposes, also knew the outcomes of the second batch of experiments, since it predicted them with 100% certainty. Therefore, the theories should have been the best possible given the first two batches. In particular, they should have been equally good.

But if “being the best, given the first two batches” doesn’t determine a prediction for experiment 21, then neither of these “best” theories should be predicting the outcome of experiment 21 with certainty. Therefore, since it is given that they are making such predictions, they should be making the same one.

It follows that at least one of the theories is not the best, given the evidence that it had. That is, at least one of them was constructed using flawed methods. T2 is more likely to be flawed than is T1, because T2 only had to post-dict the second batch. This is trivial to formalize using Bayes’s theorem. Roughly speaking, it would have been harder for T1 to been constructed in a flawed way and still have gotten its predictions for the second batch right.

Therefore, T1 is more likely to be right than is T2 about the outcome of experiment 21.
What links here?
- Tyrrell_McAllister's comment on Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective by Eliezer Yudkowsky (5 Dec 2009 17:55 UTC; 0 points)

Tyrrell_McAllister2 9 Aug 2008 5:14 UTC
2 points
on: Inseparably Right; or, Joy in the Merely Good
Eliezer, you write, “Most goods don’t depend justificationally on your state of mind, even though that very judgment is implemented computationally by your state of mind. A personal preference depends justificationally on your state of mind.”

Could you elaborate on this distinction? (IIRC, most of what you’ve written explicitly on the difference between preference and morality was in your dialogues, and you’ve warned against attributing any views in those dialogues to you.)

In particular, in what sense do “personal preferences depend justificationally on your state of mind”? If I want to convince someone to prefer rocky road ice cream over almond praline, I would most likely proceed by telling them about the ingredients in rocky road that I believe that they like more than the ingredients in almond praline. Suppose that I know that you prefer walnuts over almonds. Then my argument would include lines like “rocky road contains walnuts, and almond praline contains almonds.” These would not be followed by something like ”… and you prefer walnuts over almonds.” Yes, I wouldn’t have offered the comparison if I didn’t believe that that was the case, but, so far as the structure of the argument is concerned, such references to your preferences would be superfluous. Rather, as you’ve explained with morality, I would be attempting to convince you that rocky road has certain properties. These properties are indeed the ones that I think will make the system of preferences within you prefer rocky road over almond praline. And, as with morality, that system of preferences is a determinate computational property of your mind as it is at the moment. But, just as in your account of moral justification as I understand it, I don’t need to refer to that computational property to make my case. I will just try to convince you that the facts are such that certain things are to be found in rocky road. These are things that happen to be preferred by your preference system, but I won’t bother to try to convince you of that part.

Actually, the more I think about this ice cream example, the more I wonder whether you wouldn’t consider it to be an example of moral justification. So, I’m curious to know an example of what you would consider to be a personal preference but not a moral preference.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 23 Jan 2009 15:17 UTC
1 point
on: Higher Purpose
Daniel Dennett’s standard response to the question “What’s the secret of happiness” is “The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

I think that this avoids Eliezer’s criticism that “you can’t deliberately pursue ‘a purpose that takes you outside yourself’, in order to take yourself outside yourself. That’s still all about you.” Something can be more important than you and yet include you. Depending on your values, the future of the human race itself could serve as an example. It would seem also to be still an available “hedonic accessory” in any eutopia that includes humanity in some form.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 19 Jun 2008 12:24 UTC
1 point
on: LA-602 vs. RHIC Review
Eliezer,

You point to a problem: “You can’t admit a single particle of uncertain danger if you want your science’s funding to survive. These days you are not allowed to end by saying, “There remains the distinct possibility...” Because there is no debate you can have about tradeoffs between scientific progress and risk. If you get to the point where you’re having a debate about tradeoffs, you’ve lost the debate. That’s how the world stands, nowadays.”

As a solution, you propose that “where human-caused uncertain existential dangers are concerned, the only way to get a real, serious, rational, fair, evenhanded assessment of the risks, in our modern environment,

Is if the whole project is classified, the paper is written for scientists without translation, and the public won’t get to see the report for another fifty years.”

Wouldn’t it just be easier to convince the public to accept a certain amount of risk, to accept debates about trade-offs? What you propose would require convincing that same public to give the government a blank check to fund secret projects that are being kept secret precisely because they present some existential threat. That might work for military projects, since the public could be convinced that the secrecy is necessary to prevent another existential threat (e.g., commies).

It just seems easier to modify public sentiment so that they accept serious discussions of risk. Otherwise, you have to convince them to trust scientists to accurately evaluate those risks in utter secrecy, which scientists will be funded only if they find that the risks are acceptable.

Anyways, I’m unconvinced that secrecy was the cause for the difference in rhetorical style between LA-602 and the RHIC review. What seems more plausible to me is this: Teller et al. could afford to mention that risks remained because they figured that a military project like theirs would get funded anyways. The authors of the RHIC Review had no such assurance.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 11 Feb 2009 19:00 UTC
0 points
on: Informers and Persuaders
Paul Crowley:

One trivial example of signalling here is the way everyone still uses the Computer Modern font. This is a terrible font, and it’s trivial to improve the readability of your paper by using, say, Times New Roman instead, but Computer Modern says that you’re a serious academic in a formal field.
I don’t think that these people are signaling. Computer Modern is the default font for LaTeX. Learning how to change a default setting in LaTeX is always non-trivial.

You might argue that people are signaling by using LaTeX instead of Word or whatever, but switching from LaTeX to some other writing system is also not a trivial matter.

Tyrrell_McAllister2 11 Feb 2009 17:26 UTC
0 points
on: Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ?)
Eliezer, the link in your reply to nazgulnarsil links to this very post. I’m assuming that you intended to link to that recent post of yours on SJG, but I’ll leave it to you to find it :).

Tyrrell_McAllister2 5 Feb 2009 19:58 UTC
0 points
on: True Ending: Sacrificial Fire (7/8)
Psy-Kosh: Yeah, I meant to have a “as Psy-Kosh has pointed out” line in there somewhere, but it got deleted accidentally while editing.

ad:

How many humans are there not on Huygens?

I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t matter to me. I generally find on reflection that, with respect to my values, doing bad act A to two people is less than twice as bad as doing A to one person. Moreover, I suspect that, in many cases, the badness of doing A to n people converges to a finite value as n goes to infinity. Thus, it is possible that doing some other act B is worse than doing A to arbitrarily many people. At this time, I believe that this is the case when A = “allow the Super-Happies to re-shape a human” and B = “kill fifteen billion people”.