One other point I should make: this isn't just about "someone" being wrong. It's about an author frequently cited by people in the LessWrong community on an important issue being wrong.

Indeed, I'm not sure I'd know about Taubes at all if not for the LessWrong community.

I've already mentioned Eliezer's "Correct Contrarian Cluster" as an example in another thread, but perhaps it would be helpful to mention other examples:

• In a thread where someone asked what the evidence in favor of paleo was, Taubes was the main concrete source that came up. Specifically, Luke mentioned Taubes as the person he's "usually" referred to on this question, without taking a stand himself and saying he didn't have time to evaluate the evidence personally.
• Sarah Constantin (commenter at Yvain's blog, author of reply to Yvain's non-libertarian FAQ, and I just learned a MetaMed VP) has cited Taubes a couple times partly to make a libertarian point.
• Jack bringing up Taubes in offline conversation
• Yvain's old blog had a review of Taubes which doesn't seem to be public right now, but which I remember as partly criticizing Taubes but also lauding him for things that now I don't think Taubes deserves credit for.

So Taubes was someone I could expect to see cited in the future when the issue of expert consensus gets discussed on LessWrong. In spite of all the people who didn't like these posts, I think I may have accomplished the goal of getting people to stop citing Taubes.

To learn more about this, see "Scientific Induction in Probabilistic Mathematics", written up by Jeremy Hahn

This line:

Choose a random sentence from S, with the probability that O is chosen proportional to u(O) - 2^-length(O).

...looks like a subtraction operation to the reader. Perhaps use "i.e." instead.

The paper appears to be arguing against the applicability of the universal prior to mathematics.

However, why not just accept the universal prior - and then update on learning the laws of mathematics?

Agents wireheading themselves or accidentally performing fatal experiments on themselves will probably be handled in much the same way that biology has handled it to date - e.g. by liberally sprinkling aversive sensors around the creature's brain

Band-aids as a solution to catastrophes require that we're able to see all the catastrophes coming. Biology doesn't care about letting species evolve to extinction, so it's happy to rely on hacky post-hoc solutions. We do care about whether we go extinct, so we can't just turn random AGIs loose on our world and worry about all the problems after they've arisen.

The argument that such approaches do not scale up is probably wrong - designers will always be smarter than the creatures they build

Odd comment marked in bold. Why do you think that?

and will successfully find ways to avoid undesirable self-modifications

I'm confused. Doesn't this predict that no undesirable technology will ever be (or has ever been) invented, much less sold?

If this issue does prove to be a significant problem, we won't have to solve it without superhuman machine intelligence.

We can't rely on a superintelligence to provide solutions to problems that need to be solved as a prerequisite to creating an SI it's safe to ask for help on that class of solutions. Not every buck can be passed to the SI.

The vision of an agent improving its own brain is probably wrong

What about the vision of an agent improving on its design and then creating the new model of itself? Are you claiming that there will never be AIs used to program improved AIs?

once you have one machine intelligence, you will soon have many copies of it - and a society of intelligent machines

Because any feasible AI will want to self-replicate? Or because its designers will desire a bunch of copies?

What's the relevant difference between a society of intelligent machines, and a singular intelligent machine with a highly modular reasoning and decision-making architecture? I.e., why did you bring up the 'society' topic in the first place?

However, a farsighted organization would probably avoid such fates - in order to avoid eternal oblivion at the hands of less short-sighted aliens.

I'm not seeing it. If wireheading is plausible, then it's equally plausible given an alien-fearing government, since wireheading the human race needn't get in the way of putting a smart AI in charge of neutralizing potential alien threats. Direct human involvement won't always be a requirement.

This was discussed on Facebook. I'll copy-paste the entire conversation here, since it can only be viewed by people who have Facebook accounts.

Kaj Sotala: Re: Cartesian reasoning, it sounds like Orseau & Ring's work on creating a version of the AIXI formalism in which the agent is actually embedded in the world, instead of being separated from it, would be relevant. Is there any particular reason why it hasn't been mentioned?

Tsvi BT: [...] did you look at the paper Kaj posted above?

Luke Muehlhauser: [...] can you state this open problem using the notation from Orseau and Ring's "Space-Time Embedded Intelligence" (2012), and thusly explain why the problem you're posing isn't solved by their own attack on the Cartesian boundary?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Orseau and Ring say: "It is convenient to envision the space-time-embedded environment as a multi-tape Turing machine with a special tape for the agent." As near as I can make out by staring at their equations and the accompanying text, their version is something I would still regard as basically Cartesian. Letting the environment modify the agent is still a formalism with a distinct agent and environment. Stating that the agent is part of the environment is still Cartesian if the agent gets a separate tape. That's why they make no mention of bridging laws.

Tsvi BT:

...their version is something I would still regard as basically Cartesian.

(Their value definition is Cartesian because the utility is a function of just pi_t. I’m ignoring that as an obvious error, since of course we care about the whole environment. If that’s all you meant, then skip the rest of this comment.)

As I understand, their expression for V boils down to saying that the value of an agent (policy) pi₁ is just the expected value of the environment, given that pi₁ is embedded at time 1. This looks almost vacuously correct as an optimality notion; yes, we want to maximize the value of environment, so what? But it’s not Cartesian. The environment with pi₁ embedded just does whatever its rules prescribe after t=1, which can include destroying the agent, overwriting it, or otherwise modifying it.

Letting the environment modify the agent is still a formalism with a distinct agent and environment. Stating that the agent is part of the environment is still Cartesian if the agent gets a separate tape.

I think their formalism does not, despite appearances, treat pi₁ differently from the rest of the environment, except for the part where it is magically embedded at t=1 (and the utility being a function of pi_t). The separate tape for the agent is an immaterial visualization - the environment treats the agent’s tape the same as the rest as the environment. The formalism talks about an agent at each time step, but I could write down a function, that only mentions pi₁, assigning the same value to agents.

Anyway, for either a human or an AI, maximizing V amounts to solving the tiling problem and decision theory and so on, in an unbounded recursion, under uncertainty. A.k.a., "build a good AI". So, it looks like a optimality notion that is correct (modulo some problems) and non-Cartesian, albeit just about useless. (Some problems: the utility is defined to depend on just the “agent” pi_t at time t, where it should depend on the whole environment; the series is, as usual, made to converge with an inexplicable discount factor; the environment is assumed to be computable and timeful; and we are supposed to maximize over a mysteriously correct prior on computable environments.)

Joshua Fox: I have to disagree with: "Stating that the agent is part of the environment is still Cartesian if the agent gets a separate tape."

Orseau & Ring, in the paragraph you reference, say "This tape is used by the environment just like any other working-memory tape... The agent's tape can be seen as a partial internal state of the environment." So, that "separate" tape is just for purposes of discussion -- not really part of their model.

In the next paragraph, they describe a Game-of-Life model in which the cells which are the agent are in no real way isolated from other cells. The designation of some cells as the agent is again, just a convenience and not a significant part of their model.

Orseau & Ring's real insight is that in the end, the agent is just a utility function.

This eliminates the Cartesian boundary. The agent sees its world (which we can, for purposes of discussion, model as a Turing Machine, Game-of-Life, etc.) holistically -- with no separate object which is the agent itself.

In practice, any agent, even if we interpret it using O&R's approach, is going to have to care about its own implementation, to avoid those anvils. But that is only because protecting the a certain part of the universe (which we call the "embodiment") is part of optimizing that utility function.

Evolution does not "care" about its own embodiment (whatever that may mean). A gene does not "care" about its embodiment in DNA, just about copying itself.

A superintelligent paper-clip optimizer does not care if its own parts are recycled, so long as the result is improved long-term paper-clip production.

So, following O&R, and taking this abstractly, can't we just ask how good an agent/utility-function is at getting optimized given its environment?

We would note that many agents/utility-functions which do get optimized happen to be associated with special parts of the universe which we call the "embodiment" of the agent.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Joshua, I might be underimpressed by O&R due to taking that sort of thing as a background assumption, but I didn't see any math which struck me as particularly apt to expressing those ideas. Making the agent be a separate tape doesn't begin to address naturalism vs. Cartesianism the way a bridging law does, and having your equation talk about completely general arbitrary modifications of the agent by the environment doesn't get started on the agent representing itself within a universe the way that tiling does. I don't mean to sound too negative on O&R in particular, in general in life I tend to feel positive reinforcement or a sense of progress on relatively rare and special occasions, but this was not one of those occasions. My feelings about O&R was that they set themselves a valid challenge statement, and then wrote down an equation that I wouldn't have considered progress if I'd written it down myself. I also don't reward myself for valid challenge statements because I can generate an unlimited number of them easily. I do feel a sense of progress on inventing an interesting well-posed subproblem with respect to a challenge that previously seemed impossible vague as a challenge, but O&R didn't include what I consider to be an especially well-posed subproblem. Again, I bear no animus to O&R, just trying to explain why it is that I'm gazing with a vaguely distant expression at the celebrating that some other people seem to do when they read the paper.

Luke Muehlhauser: I sent Eliezer's comment about the Ring & Orseau paper ("As near as I can make out by staring at their equations...") to Orseau, and Orseau replied:

Regarding Eliezer's comment... Tsvi's reply is approximately correct.

Tsvi still also made a mistake: Our equation can take into account the whole universe's internal state, but he's been understandably confused (as has been Eliezer) by our ambiguous notation where we use "pi" instead of just some memory state "m". The trick is that since the environment outputs a memory state at the second iteration, which can really be anything, and not just the policy of the agent, it is easy to define this state to be the whole internal state or, put differently, to consider only environments that output their whole internal state.

But our equation also allows for something more local, as we may not want the utility function to have access to the whole universe. It can also be locally growing for example.

Orseau doesn't have time to engage the conversation on Facebook, but he gave me permission to post this bit of our private conversation here.

Naturalized induction is an open problem in Friendly Artificial Intelligence. The problem, in brief: Our current leading models of induction do not allow reasoners to treat their own computations as processes in the world.

I checked. These models of induction apparently allow reasoners to treat their own computations as modifiable processes:

• Orseau L., Ring M. - Self-Modification and Mortality in Artificial Agents, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 2011, Springer, 2011.
• Ring M., Orseau L. - Delusion, Survival, and Intelligent Agents, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 2011, Springer, 2011.

Deutsch is interesting. He seems very close to the LW camp, and I think he's someone LWers should at least be familiar with. (This article is not as good an introduction as The Beginning of Infinity, I think.)

I suspect, personally, that the conflict between "Popperian conjecture and criticism" and the LW brand of Bayesianism is a paper tiger. See this comment thread in particular.

Deutsch is right that a huge part of artificial general intelligence is the ability to infer explanatory models from experience from the complete (infinite!) set of possible explanations, rather than just fit parameters to a limited set of hardcoded explanatory models (as AI programs today work). But that's what I think people here think (generally under the name Solomonoff induction).

I looked it up, and I couldn't find a Hanson/Yudkowsky bloggingheads. I'm not sure if it was taken down or if the video was not done through bloggingheads.

The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.

I disagree with this. The development of probabilistic graphical models (incl. bayesian networks and some types of neural networks) was a very important forward advance, I think.

It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation.

A little bit of arrogance here from Deutsch, but we can let it slide.

This astounding claim split the intellectual world into two camps, one insisting that AGI was none the less impossible, and the other that it was imminent. Both were mistaken. The first, initially predominant, camp cited a plethora of reasons ranging from the supernatural to the incoherent. All shared the basic mistake that they did not understand what computational universality implies about the physical world, and about human brains in particular.

Absolutely true, and the first camp still persists to this day, and is still extremely confused/ignorant about universality. It's a view that is espoused even in 'popular science' books.

Suppose you were somehow to give them a list, as with the temperature-conversion program, of explanations of Dark Matter that would be acceptable outputs of the program. If the program did output one of those explanations later, that would not constitute meeting your requirement to generate new explanations. For none of those explanations would be new: you would already have created them yourself in order to write the specification. So, in this case, and actually in all other cases of programming genuine AGI, only an algorithm with the right functionality would suffice. But writing that algorithm (without first making new discoveries in physics and hiding them in the program) is exactly what you wanted the programmers to do!

I don't follow. You can write a program to generate random hypotheses, and you can write a program to figure out the implications of those hypotheses and whether they fit in with current experimental data, and if they do, to come up with tests of those ideas for future experiments. Now, just generating hypotheses completely randomly may not be a very efficient way, but it would work. That's very different from saying "It's impossible". It's just a question of figuring out how to make it efficient. So what's the problem here?

Nor can it be met by the technique of ‘evolutionary algorithms’: the Turing test cannot itself be automated without first knowing how to write an AGI program, since the ‘judges’ of a program need to have the target ability themselves.

But the Turing test is very different from coming up with an explanation of dark matter. The Turing test is a very specific test of use of language and common sense, which is only defined in relation to human beings (and thus needs human beings to test) whereas an explanation of dark matter does not need human beings to test. Thus making this particular argument moot.

The prevailing misconception is that by assuming that ‘the future will be like the past’, it can ‘derive’ (or ‘extrapolate’ or ‘generalise’) theories from repeated experiences by an alleged process called ‘induction’. But that is impossible.

What else could it possibly be? Information is either encoded into a brain, or predicted based on past experiences. There is no other way to gain information. Deutsch gives the example of dates starting with 19- or 20-. Surely, such information is not encoded into our brains from birth. It must be learned from past experiences. But knowledge of dates isn't the only knowledge we have! We have teachers and parents telling us about these things so that we can learn how they work. This all falls under the umbrella of 'past experiences'. And, indeed, a machine who's only inputs were dates would have a tough time making meaningful inferences about them, no matter how intelligent or creative it was.

But in reality, only a tiny component of thinking is about prediction at all, let alone prediction of our sensory experiences. We think about the world: not just the physical world but also worlds of abstractions such as right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, the infinite and the infinitesimal, causation, fiction, fears, and aspirations — and about thinking itself.

I cannot make head or tail of this.

Anyway, I stopped reading after this point because it was disappointing. I expected an interesting and insightful argument, one to make me actually question my fundamental assumptions, but that's not the case here.

He also says confusing things about induction being inadequate for creativity which I'm guessing he couldn't support well in this short essay (perhaps he explains better in his books).

He does - but it isn't pretty.

Here is my review of The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World.

In his last paragraph, he makes the following controversial statement:

For yet another consequence of understanding that the target ability is qualitatively different is that, since humans have it and apes do not, the information for how to achieve it must be encoded in the relatively tiny number of differences between the DNA of humans and that of chimpanzees.

I remember Eliezer making the same point in a bloggingheads video with Robin Hanson. I believe Hanson's position (although I watched this years ago, and I may be confabulating) was that our intelligence works via the same kludge as other animals and we got better results mostly by developing a better talent for social transmission.

That idea makes a lot of sense to me. I recall reading that chimpanzees have at various times invented more advanced tools (e.g. using spears to hunt bush babies )--but they seem to spread the methods by accident rather than deliberate teaching. New chimpanzee technologies don't seem to persist as they do for humans.

ETA: I looked it up, and I couldn't find a Hanson/Yudkowsky bloggingheads. I'm not sure if it was taken down or if the video was not done through bloggingheads.