Antisuji comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Gondolinian 26 January 2015 12:46AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 January 2015 02:16:00AM 11 points [-]

Sometimes when one learns something it makes many other things "click" by making them all make sense in a broader framework. Moreover, when this happens I will be astounded I hadn't learned about the thing in the first place. One very memorable such occasion is when I learned about categories and how many different mathematical structures could be thought of in that context. Do people have other examples where they have been "Wow. That makes so much sense. Why didn't anyone previously say that?"

Comment author: Antisuji 26 January 2015 04:02:16AM 5 points [-]

Schmidhuber's formulation of curiosity and interestingness as a (possibly the) human learning algorithm. Now when someone says "that's interesting" I gain information about the situation, where previously I interpreted it purely as an expression of an emotion. I still see it primarily about emotion, but now understand the whys of the emotional response: it's what (part of) our learning algorithm feels like from the inside.

There are some interesting signaling implications as well.

Comment author: Dorikka 26 January 2015 11:47:55PM 4 points [-]

I would be wary of concluding too much from phatic statements. "That's interesting" is more likely to be a phatic utterance than not in some contexts/with some people

Comment author: Username 26 January 2015 05:42:20AM *  4 points [-]

Direct link to the page on the theory.

That's really interesting! (ha!) I recommend reading the full page for good examples, but here's a summary:

Apart from external reward, how much fun can a subjective observer extract from some sequence of actions and observations? His intrinsic fun is the difference between how many resources (bits & time) he needs to encode the data before and after learning. A separate reinforcement learner maximizes expected fun by finding or creating data that is better compressible in some yet unknown but learnable way, such as jokes, songs, paintings, or scientific observations obeying novel, unpublished laws.

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