lukeprog comments on Will the world's elites navigate the creation of AI just fine? - Less Wrong

20 Post author: lukeprog 31 May 2013 06:49PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 31 October 2013 10:27:12PM *  6 points [-]

Lately I've been listening to audiobooks (at 2x speed) in my down time, especially ones that seem likely to have passages relevant to the question of how well policy-makers will deal with AGI, basically continuing this project but only doing the "collection" stage, not the "analysis" stage.

I'll post quotes from the audiobooks I listen to as replies to this comment.

Comment author: lukeprog 13 April 2014 12:46:49AM 0 points [-]

From Ayres' Super Crunchers, speaking of Epagogix, which uses neural nets to predict a movie's box office performance from its screenplay:

Some studios are utterly closed-minded to the idea that statistics could help them decide whether to greenlight a project. Copaken tells the extraordinary story of bringing two hedge fund managers to meet with a studio head. "These hedge fund guys had raised billions of dollars," Copaken explained, "and they were prepared to start with $500 million to fund films that would pass muster by our [neural net] test and be optimized for box office... [But] there was a lot of resistance to this new way of thinking... and finally one of these hedge fund guys sort of jumped into the discussion and said, 'Well, let me ask you a question. If Dick's system here gets it right fifty times out of fifty times, are you telling me that you wouldn't take that into account to change the way you decide which movies to make or how to make them?' And the guys said, 'No, that's absolutely right. We would not even if he were right fifty times out of fifty times... So what if we are leaving a billion dollars of the shareholder's money on the table; that is shareholders' money... Whereas if we change the way we do this, we might antagonize various people. We might not be invited. Our wives wouldn't be invited to the parties. People would get pissed at us. So why mess with a good thing?'"

Copaken was completely depressed when he walked out of the meeting, but when he looked over he noticed that the hedge fund guys were grinning from ear to ear. He asked them why they were so happy. They told him, "You don't understand, Dick. We make our fortunes by identifying small imperfections in the marketplace. They are usually tiny and they are usually fleeting and they are immediately filled by the efficiency of the marketplace. But if we can discover these things... we end up making lots of money before the efficiency of the marketplace closes out that opportunity. What you just showed us here in Hollywood is a ten-lane paved highway of opportunity. It's like they are committed to doing things the wrong way..."

Comment author: lukeprog 13 April 2014 01:01:49AM 0 points [-]

More (#1) from Super Crunchers:

...the Office of Education and the Office of Economic Opportunity sought to determine what types of education models could best break this cycle of failure. The result was Project Follow Through, an ambitious effort that studied 79,000 children in 180 low-income communities for twenty years at a price tag of more than $600 million... At the time it was the largest education study ever done. Project Follow Through looked at the impact of seventeen different teaching methods, ranging from models like DI [direct instruction], where lesson plans are carefully scripted, to unstructured models where students themselves direct their learning by selecting what and how they will study... Project Follow Through's designers wanted to know which model performed the best, not only in developing skills in its area of emphasis, but also across the board.

Direct Instruction won hands down. Education writer Richard Nadler summed it up this way: "When the testing was over, students in DI classrooms had placed first in reading, first in math, first in spelling, and first in language. No other model came close." And DI's dominance wasn't just in basic skill acquisition. DI students could also more easily answer questions that required higher-order thinking... DI even did better in promoting students' self-esteem than several child-centered approaches...

More recent studies by both the American Federation of Teachers and the American Institutes for Research reviewed data on two dozen "whole school" reforms and found once again that the Direct Instruction model had the strongest empirical support.

And:

The news media almost completely ignored the point that Summers was just talking about a difference in variability. It's not nearly as sexy as reporting "Harvard President Says Women Are Innately Deficient in Mathematics." (They might as easily have reported that Summers was claiming that women are innately superior in mathematics, since they are less likely to be really bad in math.) Many reporters simply didn't understand the point or couldn't figure out a way to communicate it to a general audience... At least in small part, Summers may have lost his job because people don't understand standard deviations.

And:

I remember when my partner, Jennifer, and I were expecting for the first time — back in 1994. Back then, women were told the probability of Down syndrome based on their age. After sixteen weeks, the mother could have a blood test for measuring her alphafetoprotein (AFP) level, and then they'd give you another probability. I remember asking the doctor if they had a way of combining the different probabilities. He told me flat out, "That's impossible. You just can't combine probabilities like that."

I bit my tongue, but I knew he was dead wrong. It is possible to combine different pieces of evidence, and has been since 1763 when a short essay by the Reverand Thomas Bayes was posthumously published...

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