All of bodry's Comments + Replies

"Can you clarify that a bit? When what project comes out? If you mean mine, I'm confused about why that would say something about the ability to derive special & general relativity."

I mean your project. I'm hoping it can allow us to be more precise by ranking models abilities to characterize between well-known systems. Like a model can characterize Special Relativity given what Einstein knew at the time but not General Relativity. If you were to walk along some hypothetical road from SR to GR we might ballpark a model is 30% of the way there. Maybe thi... (read more)

3eggsyntax
Got it, thanks. We're planning to try to avoid testing systems that are isomorphic to real-world examples, in the interest of making a crisp distinction between reasoning and knowledge. That said, if we come up with a principled way to characterize system complexity (especially the complexity of the underlying mathematical laws), and if (big if!) that turns out to match what LLMs find harder, then we could certainly compare results to the complexity of real-world laws. I hadn't considered that, thanks for the idea!

On the spectrum from stochastic parrot to general reasoner I'm at 70%. We're definitely closer to a general reasoner than a parrot. 

I don't have a clear answer as to what I expect the outcome to be. I was a physics major and I wish there were less discrete jumps in physics. Special relativity and general relativity seem like giant jumps in terms of their difficulty to derive and there aren't any intermediate theories. When this project comes out we'll probably be saying something the AI is 50% between being being able to derive this law and a conceptu... (read more)

3eggsyntax
I hereby grant you 30 Bayes points for registering your beliefs and predictions! Can you clarify that a bit? When what project comes out? If you mean mine, I'm confused about why that would say something about the ability to derive special & general relativity. Agreed that each added step of mathematical complexity (in this case from linear to quadratic) will make it harder. I'm less convinced that acceleration being a second-order effect would make an additional difference, since that seems more like a conceptual framework we impose than like a direct property of the data. I'm uncertain about that, though, just speculating. Thanks!

But a supermajority of the population ought to be capable of learning to do what Hermione and Holocaust resisters did.

I think this is a key point. The Milgram experiments illustrate more about average person's obedience than their inclination towards evil. If the experimenters had pressured the subjects to do something heroic and personally risky they would have gotten similar results with a supermajority choosing to do the heroic thing. Most humans can pursue a wide-range of goals under pressure and.only a minority have the willpower to stick to a narrow range of goals. 

Rationality is about how your mind holds itself, it is how you weigh evidence, it is how you decide where to look next when puzzling out a new area. 

I really liked this line. A couple of years I was with friends and we were playing Spades together along with the dad of one of the friends. We were all computer science majors and the dad was farmer. In all of our games he was either first or second. We also played mafia and he was clearly very good at reading people and appearing innocent. 

I've played some games since then with my friends dad and h... (read more)