DanielLC comments on Complexity based moral values. - Less Wrong

-6 Post author: Dmytry 06 April 2012 05:09PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 06 April 2012 06:36:13PM 10 points [-]

People don't want you to be happy for complex reasons. They want you to be happy for specific reasons, that just happen to not be simple.

People want you to be happy because you enjoy some piece of fine art, not because the greatest common divisor of the number of red and black cars you saw on the way to work is prime.

Comment author: Dmytry 06 April 2012 06:39:34PM * 1 point [-]

what is complex about the greatest common divisor being prime? It's a laughably simple thing compared to image recognition of any kind, involved in the appreciation of piece of fine art. I can easily write the thing that will check the GCD of number of coloured cars for primeness. I can't write human level image recognition software. It's so bloody complex in comparison, it's not even funny.

Comment author: orthonormal 07 April 2012 12:10:36AM 5 points [-]

You're not engaging with his point. By writing what he did, he was inviting you to consider the idea of a genuinely arbitrary complex concept, without the bother of writing one out explicitly (because there's no compact way to do so— the compact ways of representing complex concepts in English are reserved for the complex concepts that we do care about).

Comment author: Dmytry comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: DanielLC 07 April 2012 05:32:18PM 1 point [-]

Would you be happier for him than someone with down syndrome that was just always happy?

If I offered you a pill that would modify you so that you use some hash function to figure out happiness that's far more complex than what you have now, along with completely unrelated, would you take it?

that also engages his brain in precisely the way in which the GCD does not.

I don't see why it would engage it differently. More perhaps, but not differently.

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 05:39:06PM * -1 points [-]

You sort of are still agreeing with me here even though your explicit notion of complex is very different from your implicit notion.

The hash functions are simple. The visual recognition is hard. If I spend my life trying to break encryption codes and hash functions - that is very hard, and that's what is complex about the hash functions - they are easy to compute, not easy to reverse - and be intellectually happy when i break some encryption, it'd generally be a quite respectable thing to do. Even though that is a case of happiness from some really difficult nonsense.

edit: and I do agree that something entirely random, we don't consider complex.

Comment author: DanielLC 07 April 2012 05:52:00PM 1 point [-]

Hash functions tend to be simple, but they don't have to be. If you came up with something of a certain complexity at random, it would look like an extremely complex hash function, not image recognition.

edit: and I do agree that something entirely random, we don't consider complex.

In that case, you are using an entirely different definition of complexity than I am. Define complexity.

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 06:13:25PM * 0 points [-]

I'll link other post, that I didn't know of, which explains it considerably better:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/196/boredom_vs_scope_insensitivity/

Ultimately, the complexity as in Kolmogorov's complexity, is not computable (nor always useful). There are various complexity metrics that are more practical. The interesting thing about complexity metrics, is that under certain conditions, the complexity of concatenation of A and B is close to sum of their complexities, and under other conditions, it is far; that generally has to do with how much A and B have in common. The problem of course is that we can't quite pin down which exact metric is used there.

One sort of complexity is the size of the internal representation inside the head. We don't know how we represent things internally. That is a very complicated problem. It does seem that we use compression, implying that the 'size' of thing inside the head depends to the complexity of it, in terms of it's repetitiveness, but ignoring randomness. It may be that - our hardware being faulty and all - it plays a role how big is the internal representation. It is clearly the case that the more abstractly we represent strangers the less we care about them.

Comment author: DanielLC 07 April 2012 07:38:49PM 0 points [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/196/boredom_vs_scope_insensitivity/

I don't see how that's relevant.

There are various complexity metrics that are more practical.

What complexity metric are you using? I suspect it involves only counting information that you find interesting, or something to that extent. Otherwise, I don't see how random data could possibly have low complexity.

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 07:55:47PM * 0 points [-]

We compress random data into 'random data' (along with standard deviation etc) because we don't care about exact content or find it irrelevant. Maybe a bit like random noise image after it been blurred.

continue this thread »

Comment author: cocopium 07 April 2012 10:31:35PM -2 points [-]

I think you could have found a nicer way to make your point..... a better example.

In California autism rates have reached 1 in 88 (propaganda.... or real rate? Hard to tell. Nonetheless, it is high), and are steadily increasing all over the world.

This disorder is so prevalent now that when you speak on any issue at all, someone in your audience has probably been affected by autism.

Using traits of the disabled as some type of caricature example to espouse your unrelated opinions is not only unproductive..... but it also makes you look like a jerk.

I am absolutely NOT in support of a 'politically correct' society, but your example was in poor taste.

Comment author: gjm 07 April 2012 08:25:28PM 0 points [-]

How are you going to count the red and black cars without image recognition?

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 08:57:00PM * 0 points [-]

With very simple kind that I can write easily. Not with human like that takes immense effort. Detecting a car in image isn't as hard as it sounds. Having been shown pictures of cats and dogs or other arbitrary objects, and then telling apart cats and dogs, that's hard. Bonus points for not knowing which is which and finding out that there's two different types of item.

Comment author: gjm 07 April 2012 09:25:41PM 0 points [-]

Surely identifying cars isn't that much easier than identifying cats. I dare say it's somewhat easier; cars commonly have uniform colours, geometrical shapes, and nice hard edges. But are you really sure you could easily write a piece of software that, given (say) a movie of what you saw on your way to work, would count the number of red and black cars you saw? (Note that it needs to determine when two things in different frames are the same car, and when they aren't.)

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 10:20:21PM * 0 points [-]

Well, processing a movie that was taken by eyes is somewhat difficult indeed. Still, the difficulty in free form image recognition at human level is so staggering, that this doesn't get close. Cars are recognizable with various hacks.

DanielLC comments on Complexity based moral values. - Less Wrong

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