I see; I was naïvely thinking in terms of “only losing by 50 points doesn’t sound so bad, right?!”, not carefully thinking about how the update rule works. Now that you point it out, I agree that (200/(200+9*250))/0.1 ≈ 0.82.
Zack_M_Davis(Zack M. Davis)
Karma: 7,433
I guess some got really lucky/unlucky with other bots’ random rolls?
No, 10 rounds of 100 turns is a decently large sample size—I think some are actually doing badly against outsiders.
If Zack_M_Davis’ AbstractSpyTreeBot can survive in a world of clones until turn 90
I’m feeling optimistic about this! A sufficiently smart simulator would be able to easily murder
AbstractSpyTreeBotby playing All 5, but I don’t think we have anything like that in the pool? Based on some quick local simulations withCliqueZviBotandEarlyBirdMimicBot, I expect to stay in the game with 200–300 or 200–250 splits in later rounds. (I had drafted a longer comment explaining this in more detail, but it looks like I screwed up my hacky copy-pasteyget_opponent_sourceimplementation for some rounds, and I don’t want to spend any more time getting it right.)That’s what happens when a significant contributor to an open source Lisp dialect
So, while that was incredibly relevant to me cranking out an entry in a couple hours despite not wanting to spend a lot of time on this, the key factor was not my personal programming skill, but rather the fact that Hy specifically compiles to Python’s abstract syntax tree—so I was already familiar with
ast.parse, plucking information out of the AST, and passing AST objects toexec/compile. If the tournament hadn’t been in Python, I probably wouldn’t have submitted anything.
The question title says “bottleneck”, but the body says “technological constraint.” But I wonder—is the bottleneck a technological constraint, or is it a political constraint? (That is, maybe the expertise exists, but literally no one has the conjunction of expertise and bravery to actually do it.) The FAQ page of Genomic Prediction says:
Does Genomic Prediction Clinical Laboratory screen embryos for increased intelligence i.e. high IQ?
No. We only screen against negative (disease) risks.
But if you’re already providing polygenic scores for the purpose of choosing an IVF embryo for implantation, there would seem to be no technical obstacle to using a polygenic score for intelligence. Right?
Realistically?—Python and Rust are the only two languages I’m Really Good at, and I’m more Excited about Rust because I write enough Python at my dayjob? In my defense, the
.windowsiterator on slices was really handy here and is shamefully missing from Python’sitertools.
Seeing people actually use Hy is making me nostalgic!
You’re right! This is something that the literature has details on, that I chose to simplify/gloss-over in pursuit of my goal of “write Actual Executable Code implementing minimum-description-length model selection and then tell a cute story about it.”
Chapter 5 of Peter D. Grünwald’s The Minimum Description Length Principle gives the complexity term (assuming that the parameter space is compact) as , where is the number of parameters, is the bits of percision per parameter, and is the codelength function for a universal prior on the integers (the theoretical ideal that Levenshtein coding and the Elias ω coding approach). Basically, in order to specify your parameters, you need to first say how many of them there are and to what precision, and for that, you need a prefix-free code for the integers, which is itself kind of intricate: you can’t give every integer the same codelength, so you end up doing something like “first give the order of magnitude (in, um, unary), and then pick out a specific integer in that range”, but recursively (so that you first give the order of magnitude of the order of magnitude if it gets too big, &c.).
(Oh, and Grünwald warns that this still isn’t optimal and that question of the best encoding is left to §15.3, but I’m not there yet—it’s a big textbook, okay?)
I was originally imagining implementing the integer coding, but I decided it was too complicated for the cute story I wanted to tell about model selection, particularly since I wanted to provide Actual Executable Code with minimal boilerplate and minimal dependencies. (Rust just gives me
f32andf64, not variable-length floats.) I think this kind of handwaving should be admissible in the cute-blog-story genre as long as the author addresses objections in the comment section.
Thanks! But … I’m not seeing the Curated “★” icon (e.g., in the Posts list on my profile)? Am I missing something, or is there an extra button you still have to click?
What are you using the word “rationalist” to mean? If you just mean “members of any subculture bearing some line of memetic descent from early Less Wrong” (which I don’t think deserves the pretentious term rationalist, but putting that aside), why is “communication platform” a useful way to chop up that social grouping? A lot of the same people use Less Wrong and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and Google Docs, and a lot of the people who use the same platform wouldn’t be in the same cluster if you were to analyze the graph of what actual conversations people are using these platforms to have.
How do socially-constructed concepts work?!
Negative example: trees. Trees exist, and trees are not socially constructed. An alien AI observing Earth from behind a Cartesian veil would be able to compress its observations by formulating a concept that pretty closely matches what we would call tree, because the atom-configurations we call “trees” robustly have a lot of things in common: once the AI has identified something as a “tree” by observing its trunk and leaves, the AI can make a lot of correct predictions about the “tree” having roots, this-and-such cellular walls, &c. without observing them directly, but rather by inference from knowledge about “trees” in general.
Positive example: Christmas. Christmas exists. An alien AI observing Earth from behind a Cartesian veil would be able to make better predictions about human behavior in many places around Epoch time 62467200 ± 31557600·n (for integer n ) by formulating the concept of “Christmas”. However, Christmas is socially constructed: if humans didn’t haven’t a concept of “Christmas”, there would be no Christmas (the AI-trick for improving predictions using the idea of “Christmas” would stop working), but if humans didn’t have a concept of trees, there would still be trees (the AI-trick for improving predictions using the idea of “trees” would still work).
Semi-positive example: adulthood. Adulthood exists. There’s a Sorites situation on exactly how old a human has to be to be an “adult”, and different human cultures make different choices about where to draw that line. But this isn’t just a boring Sorites non-problem, where different agents might use different communication signals without disagreeing about about the underlying reality (like when I say it’s “hot” and you say it’s “not hot, just warm” and our friend Hannelore says it’s “heiß”, but we all agree that it’s exactly 303.6 K): an alien AI observing Earth from behind a Cartesian veil can make better predictions about whether I’ll be allowed to sign contracts by reasoning about whether my Society considers me an “adult”, not by directy using the simple measurement test that Society usually uses to make that determination, with exceptions like minor emancipation.
My work-in-progress take: an agent outside Society observing from behind a Cartesian veil, who only needs to predict, but never to intervene, can treat socially-constructed concepts the same as any other: “Christmas” is just a pattern of behavior in some humans, just like “trees” are a pattern of organic matter. What makes social construction special is that it’s a case where a “map” is exerting control over the “territory”: whether I’m considered an “adult” isn’t just putting a semi-arbitrary line on the spectrum of how humans differ by age (although it’s also that); which Schelling point the line settles on is used as an input into decisions—therefore, predictions that depend on those decisions also need to consider the line, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Alarmingly, this can give agents an incentive to fight over shared maps!
I found it super surprising that the gradient determines the value of every directional derivative. Like, really?
When reading this comment, I was surprised for a moment, too, but now that you mention it—it’s because if the function is smooth at the point where you’re taking the directional derivative, then it has to locally resemble a plane, just like a how a differentiable function of a single variable is said to be “locally linear”. If the directional derivative varied in any other way, then the surface would have to have a “crinkle” at that point and it wouldn’t be differentiable. Right?
Yeah, but I couldn’t get that program to run on my desktop.
Message Length
So where’s that discussion actually happening?
Try /r/TheMotte or /r/CultureWarRoundup?
its existence makes it seem worth linking to.
Worth linking to here—on this website, specifically? Are you sure?? Personally, I’m happy to take the bait as part of my desperate and vehement Free Speech for Shared Maps campaign, but I’m guessing a lot of other users would rather we silently Just Not? That is, having Less Wrong posts about censorship as a general phenomenon (perhaps illustrated with fictional or non-contemporary examples, as tradition requires) is clearly within-charter of advancing the art of human rationality, but having Less Wrong posts about alleged censorship of specific topics might be off-charter if it were the case that those topics are censored and conversations about whether or not they’re censored are too likely to run afoul of the censorship, or if they’re not censored but talking about whether they were would leak too much info about censored topics in nearby counterfactual worlds.
Okay, probably you can guess from the previous paragraph that I disagree with Jackson and Winston about the taboo being mythical (I tried to write the last sentence of the previous graf in a way that paid lip service towards Glomarization, but I doubt anyone bought it), but more importantly and fundamentally than that, I think the “taboo: mythical or real?” framing suffers from a pretty bad Sorites problem which I think we could do a pretty good job of dissolving (albeit with more effort than I have to spare right now) by going into more detail about specifically which coalitions are trying to suppress what information about which topics, by what means, in which venues, and how well they’re succeeding. For example, Jackson and Winston are correct to point out that Eysenck/Jensen/Rushton/Lynn/Gottfredson kept their tenured jobs, but that’s only setting an upper bound on the strength of incentives against hereditarianism (the tenure system still works!), not showing that the incentives are mythical.
I don’t think this paper is being very fair to the scientific claims of hereditarian researchers. For example, Jackson and Winston write,
a high heritability index [...] had no bearing on the source of any Black–White differences in intelligence test scores, as the sources of within-group variation could not be used to explain between-group variation (Lewontin, 1970).
Now, it’s true that within-group heritability doesn’t directly imply between-group heritability—Lewontin’s seed analogy is germane and competent hereditarians absolutely know this—but I think “no bearing” is false in a Bayesian sense: there’s a relationship between within-group and between-group heritability such that the former is relevant (if not in itself dispositive) evidence about the latter. Jensen covers these issues in a lot of detail in Ch. 12 of his The g factor: basically, if two groups differ by one standard deviation in some phenotypic trait, and the within-group heritability is 0.7 but you think the between-group heritability is zero, that implies that the groups’ environments differ by 1.83 standard deviations (in whatever aspects are relevant to the development of the trait). But that’s a specific in-principle-falsifiable empirical prediction! If you want to argue that the environments do differ that much (perhaps due to factors like structural racism that we don’t know how to adequately measure), fine!—but that’s not the same thing as “no bearing”.
Hereditarian researchers still call for establishing a two-tiered educational system for White and Black people (Cofnas, 2020, p. 134).
Notably, Cofnas denies this.
Msg Len
I don’t know whether it’s a competitive entry (it would be a FoldBot in Zvi’s taxonomy), but as a quick piece of software, I’m pretty proud of
AbstractSpyTreeBot!
The Rationality community [...] has been the main focus of Rationality [...] rationality’s most famous infohazard [...] join the tribe [bolding mine]
I agree that explicit reasoning is powerful and that the lesswrong.com website has hosted a lot of useful information about COVID-19, but this self-congratulatory reification of “the community”—identifying “rationality” (!!) with this particular cluster of people who read each other’s blogs—is super toxic. (Talk about “bucket errors”!) Our little robot cult does not have a monopoly on reason itself!
the young rationalist must navigate strange status hierarchies and bewildering memeplexes. I’ve seen many people bounce off the Rationalist community over those two things.
Great! If bright young people read and understand the Sequences and go on to apply the core ideas (Bayesian reasoning, belief as anticipated experience, the real reasons being the ones that compute your decision, &c.) somewhere else, far away from the idiosyncratic status hierarchy of our idiosyncratic robot cult, that’s a good thing. Because it is about the ideas, not just roping in more warm bodies to join the tribe, right?!
I think a lot of us are still curious what happened! Maybe concatenate the whole thing into a non-Frontpageable post with an explanatory disclaimer at the top?