gwern comments on [LINK] Nick Szabo: Beware Pascal's Scams - Less Wrong

7 Post author: David_Gerard 17 July 2012 07:18AM

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Comment author: private_messaging 21 July 2012 05:31:55PM * -2 points [-]

The point is that it is still a Pascal's wager even if you have mis-estimated probabilities and argued that it is actually likely that God exists.

In case of SI, even if we assume that risk exists it is still the case that one is to donate to group of people whom, in all likelihood, are entirely incapable of affecting the risk in any way what so ever (and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect. It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters)

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2012 05:58:13PM 3 points [-]

and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect.

You realize DK is a narrow effect which only obtains in certain conditions, is still controversial, and invoking it just makes you look like you'll grab at any thing at all no matter how dubious in order to attack SI, right? (About on the same level as 'Hitler was an atheist!')

It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters

Seriously. In no area of research, medicine, engineering, or whatever, the first group to tackle a problem succeeded? Such a world would be far poorer and still stuck in the Dark Ages than the one we actually live in. I realize this may be a hard concept, but sometimes, the first person to tackle a problem - succeeds! In fact, sometimes multiple people tackling the problem all simultaneously succeed! (This is very common; called multiple discovery.)

Not every problem is as hard as fusion, or to put it another way, most hard problems are made of other, easier, problems, while if your hyperbolic statement were true, no progress would ever be made.

Comment author: JaneQ 21 July 2012 08:50:39PM 5 points [-]

Dunning Kruger effect is likely a product of some general deficiency in the meta reasoning facility leading both to failure of reasoning itself and failure of evaluation of the reasoning; extremely relevant to people that proclaim themselves to be more rational, more moral, and so on than anyone else but do not seem to accomplish above mediocre performance at fairly trivial yet quantifiable things.

Seriously. In no area of research, medicine, engineering, or whatever, the first group to tackle a problem succeeded? Such a world would be far poorer and still stuck in the Dark Ages than the one we actually live in. I realize this may be a hard concept, but sometimes, the first person to tackle a problem - succeeds!

Ghmm. He said first people to take money, not first people to tackle.

The first people to explain the universe (and take some contributions for that) produced something of negative value, nearly all of the medicine until last couple hundred years was not only ineffective but completely harmful, and so on.

If you look at very narrow definitions, of course, the first to tackle nuclear bomb creation did succeed - but the first to tackle the general problem of weapon of mass destruction were various shamans sending a curse. If saving people from AI is an easy problem, then we'll survive without SI; if it's a hard problem, at any rate SI doesn't start with a letter from Einstein to the government, it starts with a person with no quantifiable accomplishments cleverly employing oneself. As far as I am concerned, there's literally no case for donations here; the donations happen via sort of decision noise similar to how NASA has spent millions on various antigravity devices, the power companies have spent millions on putting electrons in hydrogen orbitals at below ground level (see Mills hydrinos), and millions were invested in Steorn's magnetic engine.

Comment author: VincentYu 24 July 2012 03:44:12PM 4 points [-]

Ghmm. He said first people to take money, not first people to tackle.

Speaking of yourself in the third person?

Dmytry, you are abusing sockpuppet accounts. Your use of private_messaging was questionable, but at least you declared it as an alias early on. Right now you are using a sockpuppet with the intent to deceive.

Comment author: gwern 24 July 2012 04:25:04PM 6 points [-]

"Ghmm" is a hapax legomenon used solely by private_messaging/Dmytry and JaneQ.

Comment author: VincentYu 24 July 2012 04:33:08PM 3 points [-]

hapax legomenon

Ah, nice. I've been looking for a phrase/word with this meaning.

"Ghmm" was the phrase that made me certain. Before that I found "edit: i.e." and "etc etc etc", but these were not quite as unique. (PB page)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 July 2012 06:05:00PM 2 points [-]

You know, I've been wondering about that for a while now, but it never occurred to me to look for hapaxes (nor had I been aware of the phrase). I have just learned a new technique, for which I have learned a cool new word, which helps solve a problem I actually had. If I endorsed upvoting multiple times, I would upvote you multiple times; as it is, you'll have to settle for an upvote and my gratitude.

Comment author: gwern 24 July 2012 06:45:10PM 2 points [-]

It's just one of the little-known advantages to reading critical analysis of classical or Biblical literature! Although I'd be hard-pressed to name a second advantage.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 24 July 2012 07:16:47PM 1 point [-]

The embarrassing thing, now that you mention it, is that I'm acquainted with this technique in that context (identifying source texts and common authors and so forth) but it still didn't occur to me to apply it here, despite it being the same problem even at a surface level.

(sigh) Corrupted hardware sucks. It ain't the things I don't know that irritate me. It's not even the things I do know that just ain't so. It's the things I know, that are so, and that somehow don't present themselves to be reasoned with when I need them.

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2012 10:26:51PM * 3 points [-]

Dunning Kruger effect is likely a product of some general deficiency in the meta reasoning facility leading both to failure of reasoning itself and failure of evaluation of the reasoning;

That seems unlikely. Leading both?

extremely relevant to people that proclaim themselves to be more rational, more moral, and so on than anyone else but do not seem to accomplish above mediocre performance at fairly trivial yet quantifiable things.

Mediocrity is sufficient to push them entirely out of the DK gap; your thinking DK applies is just another example of what I mean by these being fragile easily over-interpreted results.

(Besides blatant misapplication, please keep in mind that even if DK had been verified by meta-analysis of dozens of laboratory studies, which it has not, that still only gives a roughly 75 % chance that the effect applies outside the lab.)

The first people to explain the universe (and take some contributions for that) produced something of negative value, nearly all of the medicine until last couple hundred years was not only ineffective but completely harmful, and so on.

Without specifics, one cannot argue against that.

If you look at very narrow definitions, of course, the first to tackle nuclear bomb creation did succeed - but the first to tackle the general problem of weapon of mass destruction were various shamans sending a curse.

So you're just engaged in reference class tennis. ('No, you're wrong because the right reference class is magicians!')

Comment author: private_messaging 22 July 2012 05:01:14AM * 0 points [-]

That seems unlikely. Leading both?

Seems straightforward to me: Eliezer's unwarranted self importance did result in him not pursuing education or for that matter proper self education, and simultaneously to believing he's awesome and selling existential risk reduction that nobody else would sell. edit: The alternative explanation is the level of resistance to self deception so high that the process of the self education transcended the necessity to seek objective feedback on the progress (which one gets if one e.g. tries to prove mathematical theorems, as here an un-intelligent process of checking a proof can validate one's powers of reasoning).

So you're just engaged in reference class tennis. ('No, you're wrong because the right reference class is magicians!')

Did it ever occur to you that one has to actually do something incompatible with the broad reference class to get into much much smaller reference class? E.g. you are in reference class 'people', not reference class 'people with IQ>=150' unless you take IQ test or take other test with very low false positive rate. Likewise, the reference class is 'people with grand promises' until you actually do something that moves you into microscopic sub class of 'people with grand promises who deliver'.

Comment author: gwern 23 July 2012 02:13:50AM * 3 points [-]

Seems straightforward to me: Eliezer's unwarranted self importance did result in him not pursuing education or for that matter proper self education, and simultaneously to believing he's awesome and selling existential risk reduction that nobody else would sell. edit: The alternative explanation is the level of resistance to self deception so high that the process of the self education transcended the necessity to seek objective feedback on the progress (which one gets if one e.g. tries to prove mathematical theorems, as here an un-intelligent process of checking a proof can validate one's powers of reasoning).

Suppose one were to grant that for Eliezer. Out of curiosity, I would be interested in hearing how Nick Bostrom & FHI are similarly deluded and in the reference class of magicians.

Comment author: private_messaging comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: private_messaging 23 July 2012 05:19:30AM * -3 points [-]

Speculation of sufficiently advanced future technologies is indistinguishable from magical thinking.

Unless there is scientific method in what you're doing, and unless you're producing something testable and testing it, you are certainly not in the reference class of scientists. Unless there is plenty of rigour, you are not in reference class of people using mathematical methods (even if you have formulas in your papers). Not up to grabs here either. Maybe the reference class is philosophers. If you wish, philosophers with PhD.

As they do tend to honestly make actual arguments rather than just try to manipulate for profit the people who already agree with core ideas, one can examine actual argumentation. Which is not very good. E.g. simulation argument of his looks watertight at first glance but is really reliant on assumption about physics (suppose MWI is correct, now the counting patently doesn't work for probabilities), and does not account for potentially enormous number of simulated beings that can easily tell their reality is simulated as the simulator cuts some corners. Typical example of philosophy, making arguments that seem true for mere lack of alternative propositions to made up assertions. You only spend time formalizing such stuff if you can't see that you are building false precision, making up far too many assumptions for the results to be meaningful in any way (in the field where intuition is unlikely to work, too). If you don't see that you are making a lot of extremely shaky assumptions when you are making a lot of extremely shaky assumptions, you'll be susceptible to generating false precision precisely as per Nick Szabo's article.

Their musings about singularity are in precise agreement with the hypothesis that at the current point in time it is early enough that the only people 'working' on this are those who for some reason fail to see when they aren't making progress. I'm pretty sure all this movement will look very silly in 100 years - there will be dangers they did not see and there won't be dangers they focused on.

Comment author: gwern 23 July 2012 04:45:02PM 0 points [-]

suppose MWI is correct, now the counting patently doesn't work for probabilities

What is the correct counting for MWI, exactly?

does not account for potentially enormous number of simulated beings that can easily tell their reality is simulated as the simulator cuts some corners.

I think you are misunderstanding the SA, which is surprising since it's formally pretty simple.

The SA is a trilemma; finding evidence that strongly supports one leg of the trilemma is not a problem with the trilemma itself. It's just reasons for you to bite a particular bullet: "the SA says 'either X or Y or Z', and here our reality looks like a cutrate simulation, so I guess Z was right after all!'

So the trilemma remains 'watertight' even if the specific paper in enumerating reasons to believe X (or Y, or Z) fails to cover some favorite bit of reasoning of yours. The reasoning still fits inside the trilemma framework and is not an argument against the framework itself.

(My own impression is that your cutrate suggestion wouldn't go very far since it's not clear - to me, anyway - what a cutrate simulation would look like, and whether our own universe is not cutrate. One could validly argue that our failure to find good clear evidence that we're in a simulation is evidence against being in a simulation, but quantifying how much evidence this would be is even harder. And given how many crude simulation we run for science & business & pleasure, and the Fermi paradox, it seems especially unlikely that this point is strong enough to move someone from biting the we're-in-a-simulation bullet to biting one of the other bullets.)

I'm pretty sure all this movement will look very silly in 100 years - there will be dangers they did not see and there won't be dangers they focused on.

Everyone looks silly from 100 years on. That's not a useful point to make.

Comment author: private_messaging 23 July 2012 05:46:03PM * -2 points [-]

MWI: we don't know what is that works, but we can tell if something doesn't work. Probabilities don't seem to work out if you just count distinct observers. Plus, the number of distinct observers grows very rapidly with time, so you get extreme case of doomsday paradox. If you aren't just counting distinct observers but count copies twice then your probabilities could as well depend to e.g. thickness of wires in the computer, not just the raw number of simulated realities.

Furthermore, more significantly, under MWI it is not even clear what first two statements could even mean.

I think you are misunderstanding the SA, which is surprising since it's formally pretty simple.

We are discussing Nick Bostrom, and I take the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom to be at least somewhat representative of his contribution to simulation argument

The trilemma as stated is:

No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities.
No civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a significant number of simulated realities, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.
Any entities with our general set of experiences are almost certainly living in a simulation.

I assumed that the last statement is to be taken as 'we should expect to be in a sim if first two conditions are false and given our general set of experiences', by assumption of at least rudimentary relevance of this trilemma.

In such case there is the fourth possibility with probability overwhelmingly higher than of this entire argument: the wild guess that there would ever be a good reason to believe that we should be among most numerous, with same weight for real thing and simulator (or same weight for different types of simulator), is not spot on. Collaborated also by us not being among those in weird sims of any kind (we'd detect a god speaking to us every day).

Furthermore, the distinction between perfect simulator and reality strikes me as nonsensical. Until there is a measurement that we are in a simulation, we may most sensibly assume we are in both (this time merely drawing inspiration from the sort of intuitions we might have had if we believed in MWI). The probability of measurement that we are in a simulation, well that has an exceptionally good chance of being a much more complicated matter than assumed.

edit: To clarify, my point is that even putting this sort of stuff in words or equations is a great example of false precision that Nick Szabo complains about. Too many assumptions have to be made without noticing that those assumptions are made, for the statements to have meaning at all.

Everyone looks silly from 100 years on. That's not a useful point to make.

Those who aren't grossly wrong (Newton for example) don't look as silly as the silly I am speaking of.

Comment author: gwern 23 July 2012 09:33:22PM 2 points [-]

Furthermore, more significantly, under MWI it is not even clear what first two statements could even mean.

Then we can pardon Bostrom for not taking them into account.

I take the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom to be at least somewhat representative of his contribution to simulation argument

Wikipedia is pretty bad on philosophy (the SEP is much better), and in this case, there's no reason not to read Bostrom's original paper and the correction: he writes clearly, and they are readily available on his website.

In such case there is the fourth possibility with probability overwhelmingly higher than of this entire argument: the wild guess that there would ever be a good reason to believe that we should be among most numerous, with same weight for real thing and simulator (or same weight for different types of simulator), is not spot on. Collaborated also by us not being among those in weird sims of any kind (we'd detect a god speaking to us every day).

What? Could you write this more clearly, I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Those who aren't grossly wrong (Newton for example) don't look as silly as the silly I am speaking of.

Newton is actually a great example; if you don't choose to ignore the areas which make him look bad, he looks like an incredible fool in many respects. His constant pursuit of alchemy even then was the object of derision, and while we no longer would hang or exile him for his bizarre theology & eschatology, we (even most Christians) would regard them as hilarious. Then there are his priority disputes...

If even Newton looks this foolish, what hope can the rest of us have? No, the suggestion 'would this make me look foolish in 100 years?' does us no good in practice.

continue this thread »

Comment author: JaneQ 22 July 2012 12:34:16PM * -1 points [-]

What is the reasonable probability you think I should assign to the proposition by some bunch of guys (with at most some accomplishments in highly non-gradable field of philosophy) led by a person with no formal education nor prior job experience nor quantifiable accomplishments, that they should be given money to hire more people to develop their ideas on how to save the world from a danger they are most adept at seeing? The prior here is so laughably low you can hardly find a study so flawed it wouldn't be a vastly greater explanation for the SI behavior than it's mission statement taken at face value, even if we do not take into account SI's prior record.

So you're just engaged in reference class tennis. ('No, you're wrong because the right reference class is magicians!')

Reference class is not up for grabs. If you want narrower reference class you need to substantiate why it should be so narrow.

edit: Actually, sorry it comes as unnecessarily harsh. But do you recognize that SI genuinely has a huge credibility problem?

The donations to SI only make sense if we are to assume SI has extremely rare survival ability vs the technological risks. Low priors for extremely rare anything are a tautology, not an opinion. The lack of other alternatives is evidence against SI's cause.

Comment author: gwern 23 July 2012 02:06:47AM * 0 points [-]

What is the reasonable probability you think I should assign to the proposition by some bunch of guys (with at most some accomplishments in highly non-gradable field of philosophy) led by a person with no formal education nor prior job experience nor quantifiable accomplishments, that they should be given money to hire more people to develop their ideas on how to save the world from a danger they are most adept at seeing? The prior here is so laughably low you can hardly find a study so flawed it wouldn't be a vastly greater explanation for the SI behavior than it's mission statement taken at face value, even if we do not take into account SI's prior record.

What is this, the second coming of C.S. Lewis and his trilemma? SI must either be completely right and demi-gods who will save us all or they must be deluded fools who suffer from some psychological bias - can you really think of no intermediates between 'saviors of humanity' and 'deluded fools who cannot possibly do any good', which might apply?

I just wanted to point out that invoking DK is an incredible abuse of psychological research and does not reflect well on either you or Dymtry, and now you want me to justify SI entirely...

The lack of other alternatives is evidence against SI's cause.

Alternatives would also be evidence against donating, too, since what makes you think they are the best one out of all the alternatives? Curious how either way, one should not donate!

Comment author: JaneQ comment score below threshold [+] (12 children)

Comment author: gwern 23 July 2012 04:51:00PM 0 points [-]

Do you have a disagreement besides fairly stupid rhetoric? The lack of alternatives is genuinely evidence against SI's cause, whereas presence of alternatives would genuinely make it unlikely that either of them is necessary. Yep, it's very curious, and very inconvenient for you. The logic is sometimes impeccably against what you like. Without some seriously solid evidence in favour of SI, it is a Pascalian wager as the chance of SI making a difference is small.

I'll rephrase: your argument from alternatives is as much bullshit as invoking Dunning-Kruger. Both an argument and its opposite cannot lead to the same conclusion unless the argument is completely irrelevant to the conclusion. If alternatives matter at all, there must be some number of alternatives which reflect better on SI than the other numbers.

Comment author: JaneQ 24 July 2012 06:02:58AM * -2 points [-]

Both an argument and its opposite cannot lead to the same conclusion unless the argument is completely irrelevant to the conclusion.

It's not an argument and it's opposite. One of the assumptions in either argument is 'opposite', that could make distinction between those two assumptions irrelevant but the arguments themselves remain very relevant.

I take as other alternatives everyone who could of worked on AI risk but didn't, because I consider it to be an alternative not to work on AI risk now. Some other people take as other alternatives people working on precisely the kind of AI risk reduction that SI works on. In which case the absence of alternatives - under this meaning of 'alternatives' - is evidence against SI's cause - against the idea that one should work on such AI risk reduction now. There should be no way how you can change - against same world - meanings of the words and arrive at different conclusion; it only happens if you are exercising in the rationalization and rhetoric. In electromagnetism if you are to change right hand rule to left hand rule every conclusion will stay the same; in reasoning if you wiggle what is 'alternatives' that should not change the conclusion either.

This concludes our discussion. Pseudologic derived from formal maxims and employing the method of collision (like in this case, colliding 'assumption' with 'argument') is too annoying.

Comment author: gwern 24 July 2012 04:37:22PM 2 points [-]

I hope you don't mind if I don't reply to you any further until it's clear whether you're a Dmytry sockpuppet.

continue this thread »

Comment author: [deleted] 23 July 2012 11:25:31AM 0 points [-]

Without some seriously solid evidence in favour of SI, it is a Pascalian wager as the chance of SI making a difference is small.

Let's avoid inflationary use of Pascal's wager.

gwern comments on [LINK] Nick Szabo: Beware Pascal's Scams - Less Wrong

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