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an all-knowing God could predict which humans would sin and which would not
And how would God predict (with perfect fidelity) what humans would do without simulating them flawlessly? A truly flawless physical simulation has no less moral weight than "reality" -- indeed, the religious argument could very well be that our world exists as a figment of this God's imagination.
systems that have a tendency to evolve towards a narrow target configuration set when started from any point within a broader basin of attraction, and continue to do so despite perturbations.
When determining whether a system "optimizes" in practice, the heavy lifting is done by the degree to which the set of states that the system evolves toward -- the suspected "target set" -- feels like it forms a natural class to the observer.
The issue here is that what the observer considers "a natural class" is informed by the data-distribution that the observer has previously been exposed to.
Whether or not an axis is "useful" depends on your utility function.
If you only care about compressing certain books from The Library of Babel, then "general optimality" is real — but if you value them all equally, then "general optimality" is fake.
When real, the meaning of "general optimality" depends on which books you deem worthy of consideration.
Within the scope of an analysis whose consideration is restricted to the cluster of sequences typical to the Internet, the term "general optimality" may be usefully applied to a predictive model. Such analysis is unfit to reason about search over a design-space — unless that design-space excludes all out-of-scope sequences.
Yeah. Here's an excerpt from Antifragile by Taleb:
One can make a list of medications that came Black Swan–style from serendipity and compare it to the list of medications that came from design. I was about to embark on such a list until I realized that the notable exceptions, that is, drugs that were discovered in a teleological manner, are too few—mostly AZT, AIDS drugs.
Backpropagation designed it to be good on mostly-randomly selected texts, and for that it bequeathed a small sliver of general optimality.
"General optimality" is a fake concept; there is no compressor that reduces the filesize of every book in The Library of Babel.
This was kinda a "holy shit" moment
Publicly noting that I had a similar moment recently; perhaps we listened to the same podcast.
For what it's worth, he has shared (confidential) AI predictions with me, and I was impressed by just how well he nailed (certain unspecified things) in advance—both in absolute terms & relative to the impression one gets by following him on twitter.
Surprise exists in the territory because the territory contains the map.