All of Constant2's Comments + Replies

I'm getting two things out of this.

1) Evolutionary cynicism produces different predictions from cognitive cynicism, e.g. because the current environment is not the ancestral environment.

2) Cognitive cynicism glooms up Eliezer's day but evolutionary cynicism does not.

(1) is worth keeping in mind. I'm not sure what significance (2) has.

However, we may want to develop a cynical account of a certain behavior while suspending judgment about whether the behavior was learned or evolved. Call such cynicism "agnostic cynicism", maybe. So we have three typ... (read more)

it would seem easier to build (or mutate into) something that keeps going forever than it is to build something that goes for a while then stops.

On reflection, I realize this point might be applied to repetitive drudgery. But I was applying it to the behavior "engage in just so much efficient exploration." My point is that it may be easier to mutate into something that explores and explores and explores, than it would be to mutate into something that explores for a while then stops.

the vast majority of possible expected utility maximizers, would only engage in just so much efficient exploration, and spend most of its time exploiting the best alternative found so far, over and over and over.

I'm not convinced of that. First, "vast majority" needs to use an appropriate measure, one that is applicable to evolutionary results. If, when two equally probable mutations compete in the same environment, one of those mutations wins, making the other extinct, then the winner needs to be assigned the far greater weight. So, for example,... (read more)

Seconding the expectation of a "useless clusterf--k."

The hope is that the shared biases will be ones that the site owner considers valuable and useful

The obvious way to do that is for the site owner to make some users more equal than others.

the Hacker News website seems to be doing fine.

Security through obscurity. Last I checked, it confirmed my impression, gathered from Digg and Reddit, that as long as the site remains sufficiently unpopular, it will not deteriorate.

Two separate issues:

1) Is it a good (legitimately persuasive) argument?

2) If not then after all the hairsplitting is done, what sort of bad argument is it?

The more important issue is (a). A few points:

a) Quibbling over the categorization of the fallacy is sometimes used to mask the fact that it's a bad argument.

b) There are plenty of people who can recognize bad arguments without knowing anything about the names of the fallacies, which leads to

c) We learn the names of the fallacies, not in order to learn to spot bad arguments, but as a convenience so that ... (read more)

Morality is an aspect of custom. Custom requires certain preconditions: it is an adaptation to a certain environment. Great political power breaks a key component of that environment.

More specifically, morality is a spontaneously arising system for resolving conflict among people with approximately equal power, such that adherence to morality is an optimal strategy for a typical person. A person with great power has less need to compromise and so his optimal strategy is probably a mix of compromise and brute force - i.e., corruption.

This does not require v... (read more)

Someone had just asked a malformed version of an old probability puzzle [...] someone said to me, "Well, what you just gave is the Bayesian answer, but in orthodox statistics the answer is 1/3." [..] That was when I discovered that I was of the type called 'Bayesian'.

I think a more reasonable conclusion is: yes indeed it is malformed, and the person I am speaking to is evidently not competent enough to notice how this necessarily affects the answer and invalidates the familiar answer, and so they may not be a reliable guide to probability and i... (read more)

Aaron - yes, I know that. It's beside the point.

My point was that vampires were by definition not real - or at least, not understandable - because any time we found something real and understandable that met the definition of a vampire, we would change the definition to exclude it.

But the same exchange might have occurred with something entirely real. We are not in the habit of giving fully adequate definitions, so it is often possible to find counterexamples to the definitions we give, which might prompt the other person to add to the definition to exclude the counterexample. For example:

A: What is a d... (read more)

Time - Philip Johnson is not just a Christian but a creationist. Do you mean, "if there are smart creationists out there..."? I don't really pay much attention to the religious beliefs of the smartest mathematicians and scientists and I'm not especially keen on looking into it now, but I would be surprised if all top scientists without exception were atheists. This page seems to suggest that many of the best scientists are something other than atheist, many of those Christian.

Whoever is censoring Caledonian: can it be done without adding the content-free nastiness (such as "bizarre objection", "illogic", and "gibberish")?

Any two AIs are likely to have a much vaster difference in effective intelligence than you could ever find between two humans (for one thing, their hardware might be much more different than any two working human brains). This likelihood increases further if (at least) some subset of them is capable of strong self-improvement. With enough difference in power, cooperation becomes a losing strategy for the more powerful party.

I read stuff like this and immediately my mind thinks, "comparative advantage." The point is that it can be (and probably is... (read more)

An AI can indeed have preferences that conflict with human preferences, but if it doesn't start out with such preferences, it's unclear how it comes to have them later.

We do not know very well how the human mind does anything at all. But that the the human mind comes to have preferences that it did not have initially, cannot be doubted. For example, babies do not start out preferring Bach to Beethoven or Beethoven to Bach, but adults are able to develop that preference, even if it is not clear at this point how they come to do so.

If you could do so easily ... (read more)

A tendency to become corrupt when placed into positions of power is a feature of some minds.

Morality in the human universe is a compromise between conflicting wills. The compromise is useful because the alternative is conflict, and conflict is wasteful. Law is a specific instance of this, so let us look at property rights: property rights is a decision-making procedure for deciding between conflicting desires concerning the owned object. There really is no point in even having property rights except in the context of the potential for conflict. Remove conf... (read more)

I say go ahead and pick a number out of the air,

A somewhat arbitrary starting number is also useful as a seed for a process of iterative approximation to a true value.

how you can talk about probabilities without talking about several possible worlds

But if probability is in the mind, and the mind in question is in this world, why are other worlds needed? Moreover (from wikipedia):

In Bayesian theory, the assessment of probability can be approached in several ways. One is based on betting: the degree of belief in a proposition is reflected in the odds that the assessor is willing to bet on the success of a trial of its truth.

Disposition to bet surely does not require a commitment to possible worlds.

Elephants are not properties of physics any more than probabilities are. The concept of an elephant is subjective - as are all concepts.

If you are indeed agreeing with the parallel I have set up between probability and elephants and if this is not just your own personal view, then perhaps the subjectivist theory of probability should more properly be called the subjectivist theory of pretty much everything that populates our familiar world. Anyway, I think I can agree that probability is as subjective and as psychological and as non-physical and as existing in the mind and not in the world as an elephant or, say, an exploding nuclear bomb - another item that populates our familiar world.

With complete information (and a big computer) an observer would know which way the coin would land - and would find probabilities irrelevant.

But this is true of most everyday observations. We observe events on a level far removed from the subatomic level. With complete information and infinite computing power an observer would would find all or virtually all ordinary human-level observations irrelevant. But irrelevancy to such an observer is not the same thing as non-reality. For example, the existence of elephants would be irrelevant to an observer who h... (read more)

If such ideas seem unproblematic to you

It is the example that seems on the face of it unproblematic. I am open to either (a) a demonstration that it is compatible with subjectivism[*], or (b) a demonstration that it is problematic. I am open to either one. Or to something else. In any case, I don't adhere to frequentism.

[*] (I made no firm claim that it is not compatible with subjectivism - you are the one who rejected the compatibility - my own purpose was only to raise the question since it seems on the face of it hard to square with subjectivism, not to answer the question definitively.)

Jaynes' perspective on the historical behaviour of biased coins would make no mention of probability - unless he was talking about the history of the expectations of some observer with partial information about the situation. Do you see anything wrong with that?

I see nothing wrong with that. Similarly, if someone mentions only the atoms in my body, and never mentions me, there is nothing wrong with that. However, I am also there.

What I have pointed out is that seemingly unproblematic statements can indeed be made of the sort that I described. That Jaynes h... (read more)

Not under the view we are discussing.

That was my point.

Probability isn't only used as an expression of a person's own subjective uncertainty when predicting the future. It is also used when making factual statements about the past. If a coin was flipped yesterday and came up heads 60% of the time, then it may have been a fair coin which happened to come up heads 60% of the time, or it may have been a trick, biased, coin, whose bias caused it to come up heads 60% of the time. To say that a coin is biased is to make a statement about probability. As Wikipedia explains:

In probability theory and statistics, a seq
... (read more)

There aren't necessarily any common elements, besides utterly trivial ones.

Maybe, maybe not. You won't know without looking. You have to start somewhere.

If you look at examples of misspelled words in various languages and examine their individual properties, you won't find what unites them in a category.

But then, what about correctly spelled words? There will be many observable systematic relationships between those. I happen to think you have the analogy backwards. In the good/evil dichotomy, it is the evil acts, not the not-evil acts, which are narrowly ... (read more)

Are you willing to have a neverending discussion, with everyone talking past each other, and no working definition for the central concept we're supposed to be examining?

I'm not in charge of the discussion, so it's not a question of what I'm willing to do. I've told you how to get the starting definition you're looking for. As I said: you can start with an ostensive definition by listing examples of evil acts. Then you can find common elements. For example, it might become apparent, after surveying them, that evil acts have in common that they all have vic... (read more)

Basic scientific methodology - you can't study what you can't produce a provisional definition for. Once you have that, you can learn more about what's defined, but you don't get anywhere without that starting point.

The first concepts that more less denoted, say, water, may have included things which today we would reject as not water (e.g., possibly clear alcohol), failed to distinguish water from things dissolved in the water, and excluded forms of water (such as steam and ice). The very first definitions of water were probably ostensive definitions (thi... (read more)

Constant, if moral truths were mathematical truths, then ethics would be a branch of mathematics. There would be axiomatic formalizations of morality that do not fall apart when we try to explore their logical consequences. There would be mathematicians proving theorems about morality. We don't see any of this.

If Tegmark is correct, then everything is mathematics. Do you dispute Tegmark's claim that "there is only mathematics; that is all that exists"? Do you think your argument is any good against Tegmark's hypothesis? Will you tell Tegmark, &qu... (read more)

Dynamically Linked writes: But, it seems pretty obvious, at least to me, that game theory, evolutionary psychology, and memetics are not contingent on anything except mathematics and the environment that we happened to evolve in.

According to Tegmark "there is only mathematics; that is all that exists". Suppose he is right. Then moral truths, if there are any, are (along with all other truths) mathematical truths. Unless you presuppose that moral truths cannot be mathematical truths then you have not ruled out moral truths when you say that so-and... (read more)

Z. M. Davis writes: ... objective illness is just as problematic as objective morality

I would argue that to answer Robin's challenge is not necessarily to assert that there is such a thing as objective illness.

Accounts have been given of the pressure producing the ability to see beauty (google sexual selection or see e.g. this). This does not require that there is some eternal beauty written in the fabric of the universe - it may be, for example, that each species has evolved its own standard of beauty, and that selection is operating on both sides, i.e., ... (read more)

Richard, we can understand how there would be evolutionary pressure to produce an ability to see light, even if imperfect. But what possible pressure could produce an ability to see morality?

Let's detail the explanation for light to see if we can find a parallel explanation for morality. Brief explanation for light: light bounces off things in the environment in a way which can in principle be used to draw correct inferences about distant objects in the environment. Eventually, some animals evolve a mechanism for doing just this.

Let's attempt the same for ... (read more)

But we already know why murder seems wrong to us. It's completely explained by a combination of game theory, evolutionary psychology, and memetics. These explanations screen off our apparent moral perceptions from any other influence. In order words, conditioned on these explanations being true, our moral perceptions are independent of (i.e. uncorrelated with) any possible morality-as-given, even if it were to exist.

Let's try the argument with mathematics: we know why we think 5 is a prime number. It's completely explained by our evolution, experiences, an... (read more)

What we know about the causal origins of our moral intuitions doesn't obviously give us reason to believe they are correlated with moral truth.

But what we know about morality, we know purely thanks to the causal origin. If you see no obvious connection to moral truth, then either it is purely a coincidence that we happen to believe correctly, or else it is not and you're failing to see something. If it is purely a coincidence, then we may as well give up now.

Yet most people in a situation of near simultaneity find it easier (or perhaps just safer?) to assume they had arrived simultaneously and come to agreement on dividing the pie 'fairly', rather than argue over who got there first.

You are claiming it is a common practice. But common practice is common practice - not necessarily "fairness". We often do things precisely because they are commonly done. One common practice which is not equal is, if two cars arrive at the same intersection at right angles, then the car on the right has the right of way.... (read more)

3Luke_A_Somers
We do it that way because the delay the car on the left will experience if the car on the right goes first is shorter than the delay the car on the right would experience if the car on the left went first. This rule is reversed in left-hand-of-the-road driving regions, because of the reversal of the asymmetry.

If you modify the scenario by postulating that the pie is accompanied by a note reading "I hereby leave this pie as a gift to whomever finds it. Enjoy. -- Flying Pie-Baking Monster", how does that make the problem any easier?

If, indeed, it requires that we imagine a flying pie-baking monster in order to come up with a situation in which the concept of 'fairness' is actually relevant (e.g. not immediately trumped by an external factor), then it suggests that the concept of 'fairness' is in the real world virtually irrelevant. I notice also that the three have arrived separately and exactly simultaneously, another rarity, but also important to make 'fairness' an issue.

And then they discover, in the center of the clearing, a delicious blueberry pie.

If the pie is edible then it was recently made and placed there. Whoever made it is probably close at hand. That person has a much better claim on the pie than these three and is therefore most likely rightly considered the owner. Let the owner of the pie decide. If the owner does not show up, leave the pie alone. Arguably the difficulty the three have in coming to a conclusion is related to the fact that none of the three has anything close to a legitimate claim on the pie.

Morality is just a certain innate functionality in our brains as it expresses itself based on our life experiences. This is entirely consistent with the assertion that what most people mean by morality -- an objective standard of conduct that is written into the fabric of reality itself -- does not exist: there is no such thing!

To use Eliezer's terminology, you seem to be saying that "morality" is a 2-place word:

Morality: Species, Act -> [0, ∞)

which can be "curried", i.e. can "eat" the first input to become a 1-place word:

Homosapiens::Morality == Morality_93745

I think we must conclude that morality is a means, not an end in itself.

Morality is commonly thought of neither as a means nor as an end, but as a constraint. This view is potentially liberating, because the conception of morality as a means to an end implies the idea that any two possible actions can be compared to see which is the best means to the end and therefore which is the most moral. To choose the less moral of the two choices is, on this conception, the very definition of immoral. Thus on this conception, our lives are in principle mapped out for... (read more)

Hopefully - "Choice" doesn't seem to enter into it, in my opinion, because the person may be functionally bounded to one, determined pathway, perhaps analogous to the way that I'm bounded from flying to the moon.

He may indeed have a determined path, but as Eliezer has attempted to argue, this is not incompatible with saying that he has a choice.

I think it only adds to the the main economic theories to remain reasonably skeptical about the concept of choice

And I think that it rips them apart, because they are weaved together from the concept of ch... (read more)

Hopefully, you are not addressing an important distinction. You haven't said what is to be done with it. The passage that I quoted includes these words:

while another bundle of goods is affordable

The bundles of goods that are affordable are precisely the bundle of goods among which we choose.

Hopefully writes: constant: buys, eats, etc. Here it's not any more necessary to assert or imply deliberation (which is what I think you mean by saying "choice"

No, it is not what I mean. A person chooses among actions A, B, and C, if he has the capacity ... (read more)

Joseph - "Choice" is, I should think, more like "fire" and "heat" than like "phlogiston" and "caloric". We have abandoned the last two as outdated scientific theories, but have not abandoned the first two even though they are much older concepts, presumably because they do not represent scientific theories but rather name observable mundane phenomena.

I think the more fundamental reason most physicists working in the foundations of quantum mechanics don't believe in many-worlds is that those who do believe in many worlds consider the foundations problem to be solved, and see no need to work on it anymore.

Bravo. This potential for systematic bias on certain questions can be generalized and ought to have a name. It suggests that we should reduce the weight that we place on expert opinion on certain questions in any field, to the extent that the choice to work in the field will depend on how a person answe... (read more)

3Eliezer Yudkowsky
But there is a foundational problem left, namely the Born statistics!

If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you'd get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out!

I agree. However, at the same time, we don't actually remember the many extrapolated pasts of the one world we inhabit. Of course, "remembering" multiple extrapolated pasts might be indistinguishable from failing to remember any particular past (e.g., if both X and not-X lie in our extrapolated past, then our "remembering" both X and not-X might be nothing other than failing to remember whether X or not-X).

So, if one looks at the current configuration space for a point of 'now', and works the equations backwards, does one get only one possible past, or an large number of possible pasts? If its the former, how can one claim that the equations are time symmetric? If its the latter, why don't we remember all of those quantum possibilities?

Both. Many possible pasts, because the many worlds are never entirely causally isolated, so we are to some minuscule degree always affected by parallel worlds (though not enough to notice). But one possible past, because only ... (read more)

I think making certain types of physics impossible to imagine is not such a great idea. What if it turns out that we need those types of physics to describe our universe?

Well, it's not literally impossible to imagine, it's just incoherent in that model. If it turns out that a seeming redundancy in an older model turns out not to be redundant, we can always backtrack.

Without something like mangled worlds, one can be tempted by an objective collapse view, as that at least gives a coherent account of the Born rule.

Does it really account for it in the sense of explain it? I don't think so. I think it merely says that the collapsing occurs in accordance with the Born rule. But we can also simply say that many-worlds is true and the history of our fragment of the multiverse is consistent with the Born rule. Admittedly, this doesn't explain why we happen to live in such a fragment but merely asserts that we do, but similarly... (read more)

You also get the same Big World effect from the inflationary scenario in the Big Bang, which buds off multiple universes. And both spatial infinity and inflation are implied by the Standard Model of physics.

How exactly do you get spatial infinity from a big bang in finite time? The stories I hear about the big bang are that the universe was initially very, very small at the beginning of the big bang. If it was small then it was finite. How does an object (such as the universe) grow from finite size to infinite size in finite time?

Am I correct in assuming that this is independent of (observations, "wave function collapses", or whatever it is when we say that we find a particle at a certain point)?

Wavefunction collapses are unpredictable. The claim in The Quantum Arena, if your summary is right, is that subsequent amplitude distributions are predictable if you know the entire current amplitude distribution. The amplitude distribution is the wavefunction. Since wavefunction collapses are unpredictable but the wavefunction's progression is claimed to be predictable, wavefunct... (read more)

aren't you writing this on the wrong blog?

As far as I know Robin doesn't actually have a separate economics blog and he seems to drop any economics topic that interests him into this one, so neither Eliezer nor Robin always stick closely to the "bias" theme. Does it really matter?

Why isn't this an example of the mind projection fallacy?

Surely it is not fallacious to subscribe to the Many-worlds interpretation (which is surely what Eliezer is talking about). If this is the sort of use to which the "mind projection fallacy" is put, then it turns out merely to be a cheap way to put down competing interpretations of the math.

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