Anecdote time: after a long discussion about the existence of any form of induction , on a CR forum, someone eventually popped up who had asked KRP the very question, after bumping into him at a conference many years ago , and his reply was that it existed , but wasn't suitable for science.
Source?
What anyone else thinks? I am very familiar with popular CR since I used to hang out in the same forums as Curi. I've also read some if the great man's works.
Which forums? Under what name?
Li and Vitanyi write:
Can a thing be simple under one definition of simplicity and not simple under another? The contemporary philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902– 1994) has said that Occam’s razor is without sense, since there is no objective criterion for simplicity. Popper states that every such proposed criterion will necessarily be biased and subjective.
There's no citation. There's one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn't contain the string "occam" (case insensitive search).
I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and ...
Which section of the 850 page book contains a clear explanation of this? On initial review they seem to talk about hypotheses, for hundreds of pages, without trying to define them or explain what sorts of things do and do not qualify or how Solomonoff hypotheses do and do not match the common sense meaning of a hypothesis.
Thanks. So "There are no black swans." is not a valid Solomonoff hypothesis? A hypothesis can't exclude things, only make positive predictions?
Is a hypothesis allowed to make partial predictions? E.g. predict some pixels or frames and leave others unspecified. If so, then you could "and" together two partial hypotheses and run into a similar math consistency problem, right? But the way you said it sounds like a valid hypothesis may be required to predict absolutely everything, which would prevent conjoining two hypotheses since they're already both complete and nothing more could be added.
I have never sock puppeted at LW and I have never been banned at the LW website. You're just wrong and smearing me.
Please leave me alone.
We're discussing social dynamics and rational conversations at http://curi.us/2363-discussion-with-gigahurt-from-less-wrong
past misbehaviors with sock puppets
What sock puppets?
A place to start is considering what problems we're trying to solve.
Epistemology has problems like:
What is knowledge? How can new knowledge be created? What is an error? How can errors be corrected? How can disagreements between ideas be resolved? How do we learn? How can we use knowledge when making decisions? What should we do about incomplete information? Can we achieve infallible certainty (how?)? What is intelligence? How can observation be connected to thinking? Are all (good) ideas connected to observation or just some?
Are those the sorts of problem...
Hi, Deutsch was my mentor. I run the discussion forums where we've been continuously open to debate and questions since before LW existed. I'm also familiar with Solomonoff induction, Bayes, RAZ and HPMOR. Despite several attempts, I've been broadly unable to get (useful, clear) answers from the LW crowd about our questions and criticisms related to induction. But I remain interested in trying to resolve these disagreements and to sort out epistemological issues.
Are you interested in extended discussion about this, with a goal of reaching some conclusions ...
More discussion of this post is available at https://curi.us/2366-analyzing-blackmail-being-illegal#comments
many motives ... mostly commonly to get money
If I threaten to do X unless you pay me, then the motive for making that threat is getting money. However, I don't get money for doing X. There are separate things involved (threat and action) with different motives.
I wrote a reply at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5ffPhqaLdrSajFe37/analyzing-blackmail-being-illegal-hanson-and-mowshowitz
I read only the initial overview at the top, did my own analysis, then read the rest to see if it'd change my mind.
Here are summaries of IMO the two most notable ideas from my analysis:
Compare blackmail to this scenario: My neighbor is having a party this weekend. I threaten to play loud music (at whatever the max loudness is that's normally within my rights) to disrupt it unless he pays me $100. Compare to: I often play loud music
I read the older, now-renamed book that I linked. The newer one has different authors. I saw it when searching and confirmed the right author for the one I read by searching old emails.
Do the PUAs really have a good model of an average human, or just a good model of a drunk woman who came to a nightclub wanting to get laid?
PUAs have evidence of efficacy. The best is hidden camera footage. The best footage that I’m aware of, in terms of confidence the girls aren’t actors, is Mystery’s VH1 show and the Cajun on Keys to the VIP. I believe RSD doesn’t use actors either and they have a lot of footage. I know some others have been caught faking footage.
My trusted friend bootcamped with Mystery and provided me with eyewitness accounts simila...
...Maybe another important thing is how your work is.... oriented. I mean, are you doing X to impress someone specific (which would signal lower status), or are you doing X to impress people in general but each of them individually is unimportant? A woman doing her make-up, a man in the gym, a professor recording their lesson... is okay if they do it for the "world in general"; but if you learned they are actually doing all this work to impress one specific person, that would kinda devalue it. This is also related to optionality: is the professor required to
gjm, going forward, I don't want you to comment on my posts, including this one.
Thanks for the reply. I think privacy is important and worth analyzing.
But I'm not convinced of your explanation. I have some initial objections.
I view LoLE as related to some other concepts such as reactivity and chasing. Chasing others (like seeking their attention) is low status, and reacting to others (more than they're reacting to you) is low status. Chasing and reacting are both types of effort. They don't strike me as privacy related. However, for LoLE only the appearance of effort counts (Chase's version), so to some approximation that means public...
When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it's not very provable. Your response is: they didn't explain that they left for bad reasons, so you (curi) can't really prove anything! Indeed. It's ambiguous. That's a large part of the problem.
I could go into detail about some of the specifics that I didn't reply to, explain why I think some of the things people wrote were low quality, argue my case, answer every question, etc. but I don't have a reasonable expectatio...
Yes I've found it's a major problem in practice, everywhere. I think most discussion interactions at LW end either at key moments or earlier. Hardly any make significant progress. The reasons they end early are rarely explained. Would examples help? There are multiple examples in this topic, e.g. remizidae dropped the discussion, as did G Gordon Worley III and Dagon.
note: i don't want to particularly blame or criticize them compared to the people who didn't write anything at all and would have done similarly well or worse. but discussion interactions like ...
I didn't quote you en masse. I didn't just dump all your posting history. I quoted some specific stuff related to my critical commentary. Did you even look?
No. Quoting is not a copyright violation. And I won't have a discussion with you without being able to mirror it. Goodbye and no discussion I guess?
This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent messages unless you pay them, which LW doesn't).
Well, fortunately, I did save copies of those discussions. You could find them in the FI archives if you wanted to. (Not blaming you at all but I do think this is kinda funny and I don't regret my actions.)
FYI, full disclosure, on a related note, I have mirrored recent discussion from LW to my own website. Mostly my own writing but also some comments from other people who were discussing with me, including you. See e.g. http://...
I'd be more interested in discussing Popper and Bayes stuff than your LoLE comments. Is there any literature which adequately explains your position on induction, which you would appreciate criticism of?
FYI I do not remember our past conversations in a way that I can connect any claims/arguments/etc to you individually. I also don't remember if our conversations ended by either of our choice or were still going when moderators suppressed my participation (slack ban with no warning for mirroring my conversations to my forum, allegedly violating privacy, as well as repeated moderator intervention to prevent me from posting to the LW1.0 website.)
I hereby grant you and everyone else license to break social norms at me. (This is not a license to break rational norms, including rational moral norms, which coincide with social norms.) I propose trying this until I get bent out of shape once. I do have past experience with such things including on 4chan-like forums.
I agree with you about common cases.
What I don't see in your comment is a solution. Do you regard this as an important, open problem?
I'm flexible. An option, which I think is hard but important, is what people want from a discussion partner and what sort of discussion partners are in shortage. I think our models of that are significantly different.
Would you like to try to resolve one of our disagreements by discussion?
But if you reckon my comments are low-quality and I'm likely to bail prematurely, you'll have to decide for yourself whether that's a risk you want to take.
I have decided and I don't want to take that risk in this particular case.
But I believe I'm socially prohibited from saying so or explaining the analysis I used to reach that conclusion.
This is a significant issue for me because I have a similar judgment regarding most responses I receive here (and at most forums). But it's problematic to just not reply to most people while providing no explanation. ...
Do you have any proposal for how to solve the problems of people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what's going on and no way for the error to get corrected?
I was using rationality in the same way you normally do – about a process, not about best or optimal. I don't know why you read it otherwise.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationality
Rationality is the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions.
There are discussion ending methods which are compatible with this and others which aren't. The same goes for other rationality issues like finding out if you're mistaken, biases being found instead of hidden, etc. What is the type error?
Also I hereby grant you and everyone else unlimited license to give me advice.
Suppose hypothetically that the worldwide availability of this type of discussion was zero. Do you think that would be important or consequential?
So are you on board with something like differentiating and labelling a particular type of discussion and using procedures along these lines for that type of discussion?
My assumed context, which I grant I underspecified, was intellectual discussion or discussion of ideas (though no doubt there is room to specify further). Stuff like LW comments are on a forum where substantive discussion and trying to seek the truth is, to some extent, the expected norm. I didn't intend this to apply to e.g. all small talk (though tbh I think people would benefit from applying norms like this much more widely, ).
I'm glad that you seem to have largely understood me and also given a substantive response about your main concern. That is fairly atypical. I'm also glad that you agree that there are important issues in this general area.
I will agree to discuss to a length 3 impasse chain with you (rather than 5) if that'd solve the problem (I doubt it). I'd also prefer to discuss impasse chains and discussion ending issues (which I consider a very important topic) over the conjunction fallacy or law of least effort, but I'm open to either.
I think you're overestimating h...
This is my proposed approach for unilateral discussion ending: https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/debates-and-impasse-chains
I'd be interested if anyone has any other attempts at solving the same problem that could be used instead.
I am interested in discussion, but not one plagued by certain problems (summarized briefly above re arbitrarily ending discussions in the middle without explanation or resolution). If you will acknowledge the problems are a real concern, we can talk about potential rational ways to address them which aren't overly burdensome to a...
What is your goal here? Do you want to find a point of disagreement and try seriously to discuss it persistently over time to a conclusion?
Re all your comments, do you want to attempt to debate these matters to a rational conclusion? I don't think we're going to reach a quick conclusion/agreement and I don't know if you're interested enough to make a serious effort at an organized, persistent-over-time discussion.
A common discussion failure case is something like someone decides (often around when they start losing the argument) that the other guy's messages are low quality and not worth engaging with further. Another is there are too many relevant tangents, so I’ll just stop discussing. I’d ...
Did you read my previous linked posts, which this post is a followup to?
The similar naming is unfortunate. It's LoLE in the article I linked explaining it as well as in that author's book, but I'll think about disambiguating in the future.
Those things were covered both under conformity (e.g. sharing interests with a group, fitting in) and value (which lists knowledge, skills, etc.)
LoLE isn't about conserving effort. It's about appearing to conserve effort and social dynamics. So a comment like
of course we conserve effort; what else would any living thing do?
shows a lack of understanding of LoLE. E.g. people put a lot of effort into doing their makeup instead of conserving that effort.
Saying something "seems more off track" is not an argument criticizing some error in it.
We already have the law of least effort for extensive other reasons. It's already a major part of our culture, so we should apply the tools we have. I understand it wouldn't look that way to someone who is new to the issue, but try to see it from a different perspective. If you want to debate that, fine, but assuming contrary premises to mine is missing the point.
And as I said this is not the full explanation. It's a followup post. LoLE explains not doing math, being careless, etc. It helps reinforce stuff I already covered which explains the particular result more.
There was a response to this post at http://curi.us/2359-asch-conformity-could-explain-the-conjunction-fallacy#16985
People got post-research interviewed and asked to explain their answers. There were social feedback mechanisms. Even if there wasn't peer to peer social feedback, it was certainly possible to annoy the authority (researchers) who is giving you the questions (like annoying your teacher who gives you a test). The researchers want you to answer a particular way so people, reasonably, guess what that is, even if they don't already have that way highly internalized (as most people do).
This is how people have learned to deal with questions in general. And people...
Yeah, (poor) context isolation is is a recurring theme I've observed in my discussions and debates. Here's a typical scenario:
There's an original topic, X. Then we talk back and forth about it for a bit: C1, D1, C2, D2, C3, D3, C4, D4. The C messages are me and D is the other guy.
Then I write a reply, C5, about a specific detail in D4. Often I quote the exact thing I'm replying to or explain what I'm doing (e.g. a statement like "I disagree with A because B" where A was something said in D4.).
Then the person writes a reply (more of a non sequitur from my p...
He said, “Well, um, I guess we may have to agree to disagree on this.”
I [Yudkowsky] said: “No, we can’t, actually. There’s a theorem of rationality called Aumann’s Agreement Theorem which shows that no two rationalists can agree to disagree. If two people disagree with each other, at least one of them must be doing something wrong.”
...
Robert Aumann’s Agreement Theorem shows that honest Bayesians cannot agree to disagree
...
...Regardless of our various disputes, we [Yudkowsky and Hanson] both agree that Aumann’s Agreement Theorem extends to imply th
In this situation, it sounds like the problem is that improvement for the plant came at cost for the DCs
Why do you think so? Merely because they are complaining or for some other reason?
The DCs were unable to substantively identify any problem that was created for them. And they spent 9 months refusing to use measurements or evidence to address this matter, in addition to failing to explain any cause-and-effect logic about what the problem they're now facing is and how it was caused by the change in production. (And, on top of that, without quantifying ...
People also reject ideas before they've been explored in depth. I've tried to discuss similar issues with LW before but the basic response was roughly "we like chaos where no one pays attention to whether an argument has ever been answered by anyone; we all just do our own thing with no attempt at comprehensiveness or organizing who does what; having organized leadership of any sort, or anyone who is responsible for anything, would be irrational" (plus some suggestions that I'm lo... (read more)