In response to I love zebras
Comment author: [deleted] 06 February 2014 12:03:15AM 0 points [-]

Turn the question on it's head and make up a story where the math matches the observation in every circumstance. If you can, and I'm not sure I could, work backwards from there to find the breaking point. Or just remember that the map is not the territory, the finger that points to the moon is not the moon, and get on with things.

In response to comment by [deleted] on I love zebras
Comment author: Apprentice 06 February 2014 07:44:02AM 0 points [-]

This was my attempt to make up a story where the math would match something real:

Statistically comparing two samples of equids would make some sense if Dr. Yagami had sampled 2987 horses and 8 zebras while Dr. Eru had sampled 2995 horses and 0 zebras. Then Fisher's exact test could tell us that they did, with high probability, not sample the same population with the same methods.

But in the actual case what we have is just a "virtual sample". I'm wondering if there are any conceivable circumstances where a virtual sample would make sense.

In response to I love zebras
Comment author: Protagoras 05 February 2014 08:23:07PM 8 points [-]

The description of the case doesn't make sense to me, either. But I'm not having an easy time imagining what the philology example would be like, which makes me worry that there might be something specific about the philology example that would affect things. I presume there's a reason you're avoiding giving too many details on purpose, but if you only reconstruct the features of the case that you consider relevant, and the case doesn't make sense to you, it may not be very revealing that the case doesn't make sense to others; the problem may be that something you are treating as irrelevant and not mentioning actually matters.

I mean, if I imagine that we're looking at words in a body of literature, and horses are word A and zebras are word B, and the argument is intended to show that word B was actually in use in that body of literature (as opposed to only appearing as a result of slips of the pen, copyist errors, etc.), then I can't see that this statistical argument proves anything; what we'd really want is some data about how common such errors are and what forms they usually take, in order to determine how many errors would be likely to arise by chance. Comparing to a hypothetical no-error case seems, as you say, a red herring, entirely and bizarrely beside the point. But this is also so obvious that I find it hard to imagine that anything like this was the original argument. Perhaps I am being too charitable.

In response to comment by Protagoras on I love zebras
Comment author: Apprentice 05 February 2014 08:35:04PM 2 points [-]

Yes, I'd prefer not to give Dr. Yagami's exact words so as not to make it too easy to find him - or for him to stumble on this post. I, too, worry that I may have left something essential out - but I can't for the life of me see what.

If I can swear you to secrecy, I'd be happy to send you a scan of the actual couple of pages from the actual book.

In response to I love zebras
Comment author: Apprentice 05 February 2014 05:53:14PM 6 points [-]

The main reason I posted this is that I am sometimes wrong about things. Maybe the zebra example turns out to make sense in some way I hadn't thought of. Maybe Yagami is using some sort of standard method. Maybe there's some failure mode I haven't thought of. It would be really good to know this before I make an ass of myself with the review. And talking about asses - there are some wild asses in Mongolia which got left out of my parable - but they're kind of cute so here is a link.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 31 January 2014 08:48:21PM 0 points [-]

You seem to say that the difficult part of driving is staying in the lane. That's by far the easiest part of driving, both for humans and computers.

Comment author: Apprentice 31 January 2014 09:05:34PM 0 points [-]

I do all my driving north of the 64th parallel. It's been all ice, snow and darkness for the past few months. That's probably coloring my perception here.

Comment author: ChristianKl 31 January 2014 04:32:43PM 2 points [-]

Humans can hundred of thousand years of evolution to get walking right, I don't consider it to be that exiting as something like operating machinery like cars, bikes and airplaines.

Comment author: Apprentice 31 January 2014 08:47:58PM 4 points [-]

But do we come with pre-programmed methods for moving around - or do we just pick it up as we go along? I noticed that my two children used very different methods for moving around as babies. My daughter sat on her butt and pushed herself around. My son somehow jumped around on his knees. Both methods were surprisingly effective. There's supposedly a "crawling stage" in development but neither of my kids did any crawling to speak of. I guess this isn't as straightforwardly innate as one might think. Maybe Esther Thelen had it right.

Comment author: shminux 30 January 2014 07:09:46PM *  3 points [-]

Here is my understanding of the issue.

Traffic works well because driving is one of the activities that is relatively easy to internalize and perform as a matter of habit, like walking or riding a bicycle. System 1 thinking is usually fast, predictable and reliable. You don't need to "focus intently". It is true that you cannot take your eyes off the road (or, more accurately, shift your passive attention (see http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/attention2.php) away) for longer than a brief instant, otherwise the subconscious feedback loop which includes visual and auditory inputs, your brain, your extremities and the vehicle breaks down, not because you have to consciously "focus intently". The "magnets in the road" are built into the area of your brain that controls your reflexes. That's why learning safe driving habits is so important.

Not everyone is equally capable of internalizing the driving process, or put in enough time to do so. These people white-knuckle it, constantly engaging their full slow and unsuitable System 2 in the loop, and consequently they find the normal driving activity exhausting, rather than relaxing. It is often easy to notice these drivers by their slow reaction to traffic lights, overly careful driving style and by generally overcompensating for road hazards. After all, System 2 is taxing, slow and unreliable. Ironically, these people may be safer drivers overall, since they never let their attention wander.

This passive attention escalates to active when something unusual happens, like when you hear emergency vehicles and have to make decisions which are not internalized. Or when some other car wanders into your lane, or if the traffic stops unexpectedly. Anything that either breaks the passive attention loop or causes this escalation from passive to active attention to slip is dangerous: texting, arguing, listening to a child fussing in the back, concentrating on a phone call.

In contrast, there are activities which do not naturally lend themselves to internalizing. Programming is one of them. Even after doing it for decades, people are still as consciously engaged in it as they did in the beginning. Thus your hope for a safe AGI "by analogy with safe driving", seems misplaced to me.

Comment author: Apprentice 30 January 2014 07:56:11PM 0 points [-]

These people white-knuckle it, constantly engaging their full slow and unsuitable System 2 in the loop, and consequently they find the normal driving activity exhausting, rather than relaxing

There's some of that in me. I probably am an overcautious driver.

Thus your hope for a safe AGI .. seems misplaced

Fair enough. Your regularly scheduled doom and gloom will resume shortly.

Comment author: Stefan_Schubert 30 January 2014 05:24:11PM *  1 point [-]

Indeed. The problem of driving has been set up by car designers so that it should be easy for us to solve it. By contrast, the problem of creating a safe AGI has not been set up so that it should be easy for us to solve (if you don't believe that there is a God who has made this the best of all possible worlds that is...). So I don't think the analogy works. If you want to make an argument making use of human past performance, it would be better to use examples of problems (that we've solved) that weren't set up by us (e.g. moon-landing, relativity theory, computers, science in general, etc).

Comment author: Apprentice 30 January 2014 06:42:15PM 1 point [-]

(e.g. moon-landing, relativity theory, computers, science in general, etc).

Or nuclear weapon design. Chicago Pile-1 did work. Trinity did work. Little Boy did work. Burster-Able failed - but not catastrophically. Who knows if whatever the North Koreans cobbled together worked as intended - but it doesn't seem to have destroyed anything it wasn't supposed to. No-one has yet accidentally blown up a city. That's something. Anyway, I'll edit the post.

Comment author: MathiasZaman 30 January 2014 03:33:43PM 2 points [-]

I'm occasionally still amazed that traffic works as well as it does. I must say I'm hesitant at using this example to claim that people are more capable than you might think. Driving is just something humans happen to be competent at. There are plenty of things roughly as complicated as driving a car that people aren't surprisingly good at.

This also reminded my of something people said at the latest meetup. At least two people told me they had deliberately tried to get more scared of driving, because they had noticed they had less fear in a car than on a plane despite planes being safer.

Comment author: Apprentice 30 January 2014 04:13:21PM 0 points [-]

I'm occasionally still amazed that traffic works as well as it does. I must say I'm hesitant at using this example to claim that people are more capable than you might think.

I actually agree. I'm not sure what lesson to draw from the fact that humans can drive. But it's interesting that so many of you seem to share my intuition that this is surprising or counterintuitive.

Comment author: Stefan_Schubert 30 January 2014 12:23:02PM 2 points [-]

Good post - this has struck me too. By the way, this is a good example showing that social life and human behaviour in general is much more "law-like" and indeed predictable than many "anti-positivists" in the social sciences would have it. Car drivers' behaviour is remarkably regular and predictable, even though it is, as you say, in no way trivial to drive a car.

Still many mistakes which end up causing accidents are made, and thus I'm sure automatized or semi-automatized cars could decrease the number of accidents hugely.

Comment author: Apprentice 30 January 2014 01:10:17PM 4 points [-]

By the way, this is a good example showing that social life and human behaviour in general is much more "law-like" and indeed predictable than many "anti-positivists" in the social sciences would have it.

A good point - compare with this comic.

Humans can drive cars

33 Apprentice 30 January 2014 11:55AM

There's been a lot of fuss lately about Google's gadgets. Computers can drive cars - pretty amazing, eh? I guess. But what amazed me as a child was that people can drive cars. I'd sit in the back seat while an adult controlled a machine taking us at insane speeds through a cluttered, seemingly quite unsafe environment. I distinctly remember thinking that something about this just doesn't add up.

It looked to me like there was just no adequate mechanism to keep the car on the road. At the speeds cars travel, a tiny deviation from the correct course would take us flying off the road in just a couple of seconds. Yet the adults seemed pretty nonchalant about it - the adult in the driver's seat could have relaxed conversations with other people in the car. But I knew that people were pretty clumsy. I was an ungainly kid but I knew even the adults would bump into stuff, drop things and generally fumble from time to time. Why didn't that seem to happen in the car? I felt I was missing something. Maybe there were magnets in the road?

Now that I am a driving adult I could more or less explain this to a 12-year-old me:

1. Yes, the course needs to be controlled very exactly and you need to make constant tiny course corrections or you're off to a serious accident in no time.

2. Fortunately, the steering wheel is a really good instrument for making small course corrections. The design is somewhat clumsiness-resistant.

3. Nevertheless, you really are just one misstep away from death and you need to focus intently. You can't take your eyes off the road for even one second. Under good circumstances, you can have light conversations while driving but a big part of your mind is still tied up by the task.

4. People can drive cars - but only just barely. You can't do it safely even while only mildly inebriated. That's not just an arbitrary law - the hit to your reflexes substantially increases the risks. You can do pretty much all other normal tasks after a couple of drinks, but not this.

So my 12-year-old self was not completely mistaken but still ultimately wrong. There are no magnets in the road. The explanation for why driving works out is mostly that people are just somewhat more capable than I'd thought. In my more sunny moments I hope that I'm making similar errors when thinking about artificial intelligence. Maybe creating a safe AGI isn't as impossible as it looks to me. Maybe it isn't beyond human capabilities. Maybe.

Edit: I intended no real analogy between AGI design and driving or car design - just the general observation that people are sometimes more competent than I expect. I find it interesting that multiple commenters note that they have also been puzzled by the relative safety of traffic. I'm not sure what lesson to draw.

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