pjeby comments on Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 April 2009 06:52PM

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Comment author: pjeby 26 April 2009 11:14:18PM 1 point [-]

Viva randomness!

You sound like someone arguing that evolution shouldn't be able to work because it's all "blind chance". Learning, like evolution, is "unblind chance": what interests me is a combination of what I encounter plus what I already know.

The more I learn, the more I learn about what is and isn't useful, and I've found it useful to drop (or at least reduce the priority of) certain filters that I previously had, while tightening up other filters. That's not really "random", in the same way that natural selection is not "random".

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 April 2009 11:41:36PM 0 points [-]

That still isn't the same as self-experimenting with every procedure that was ever thought up and supported by a visible enough school. As an intelligent being, you should be able to do better than randomness, and well better than evolution. That's the power of intelligence.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 26 April 2009 11:44:18PM 1 point [-]

That still isn't the same as self-experimenting with every procedure that was ever thought up and supported by a visible enough school.

Still strawman? pjeby said:

My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, "near" language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don't bother evaluating things that don't make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I've tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who've offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 April 2009 11:47:28PM 1 point [-]

See? I don't even remember reading it.