GuySrinivasan comments on Folk grammar and morality - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Emile 17 December 2010 09:20PM

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Comment author: GuySrinivasan 18 December 2010 02:20:59AM 3 points [-]

I've always chalked it up to the fact that you can get decent results with a model that doesn't even pretend to try to correspond to reality and which is thus not robust to things like counterfactuals. Great results on exactly the domain you programmed for is just asking someone to accidentally apply it to a different domain...

I don't know if this is the actual reason.

Comment author: jsteinhardt 18 December 2010 04:41:52AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. I think the reason I don't find this compelling is that I see statistical methods being applied to increasingly general problems; I also see the same general ideas being applied to solve problems in many different domains (after, of course, specializing the ideas to the domain in question). It seems to me that if we continue on this path, the limit is being able to solve fully general problems. But this seems closer to an intuition than something I can actually convince anyone of.