All of Gram_Stone's Comments + Replies

Will there be LaTeX support?

(Not very familiar with math.)

The Heyting-algebraic definition of implication makes intuitive sense to me, or at least after you state your confusion. 'One circle lies inside the other' is like saying A is a subset of B, which is a statement that describes a relation between two sets, and not a statement that describes a set, so we shouldn't expect that that mental image would correspond to a set. Furthermore, the definition of implication you've given is very similar to the material implication rule; that we may substitute 'P implies Q' with 'not-P or Q'.

Also, I have personally been enjoying your recent posts with few prerequisites. (Seems to be a thing.)

I have what feels like a naive question. Is there any reason that we can't keep appealing to even higher-order preferences? I mean, when I find that I have these sorts of inconsistencies, I find myself making an additional moral judgment that tries to resolve the inconsistency. So couldn't you show the human (or, if the AI is doing all this in its 'head', a suitably accurate simulation of the human) that their preference depends on the philosopher that we introduce them to? Or in other cases where, say, ordering matters, show them multiple orderings, or t... (read more)

Discipline, especially internal psychological, also increases skills.

This is a little ambiguous; does he mean self-control or punishment?

I think these are all points that many people have considered privately or publicly in isolation, but that thus far no one has explicitly written them down and drawn a connection between them. In particular, lots of people have independently made the observation that ontological crises in AIs are apparently similar to existential angst in humans, ontology identification seems philosophically difficult, and so plausibly studying ontology identification in humans is a promising route to understanding ontology identification for arbitrary minds. So, thank you... (read more)

We had succeeded in obtaining John yon Neumann as keynote speaker. He discussed the need for, and likely impact of, electronic computing. He mentioned the "new programming method" for ENIAC and explained that its seemingly small vocabulary was in fact ample: that future computers, then in the design stage, would get along on a dozen instruction types, and this was known to be adequate for expressing all of mathematics. (Parenthetically, it is as true today as it was then that "programming" a problem means giving it a mathematical formu

spam

Neuroscience of art & art appreciation

A slightly broader keyword would be 'neuroaesthetics.'

Evolutionary basis for storytelling

I haven't done an exhaustive literature search, but one book I'm going through right now is Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction.

psychopathology* (Genuinely trying to be helpful, not nitpicky; keywords are important.)

Related, broader keyword: abnormal psychology.

Tangentially, I thought you might find repair theory interesting, if not useful. Briefly, when students make mistakes while doing arithmetic, these mistakes are rarely the effect of a trembling hand; rather, most such mistakes can be explained via a small set of procedural skills that systematically produce incorrect answers.

Do you think I disagree with that?

I've had a strong urge to ask about the relation between Project Hufflepuff and group epistemic rationality since you started writing this sequence. This also seems like a good time to ask because your criticism of the essays that you cite (with the caveat that you believe them to contain grains of truth) seems fundamentally to be an epistemological one. Your final remarks are altogether an uncontroversial epistemological prescription, "We have time and we should use it because other things equal taking more time increases the reliability of our reaso... (read more)

I enjoyed this very much. One thing I really like is that your interpretation of the evolutionary origin of Type 2 processes and their relationship with Type 1 processes seems a lot more realistic to me than what I usually see. Usually the two are made to sound very adversarial, with Type 2 processes having some kind of executive control. I've always wondered how you could actually get this setup through incremental adaptations. It doesn't seem like Azathoth's signature. I wrote something relevant to this in correspondence:

If Type 2 just popped up in the

Thank you for following up after all this time. Longitudinal studies seem important.

This is neat.

I find the metaphor plausible. Let's see if I understand where you're coming from.

I've been looking into predecision processes as a means of figuring out where human decisionmaking systematically goes wrong. One such process is hypothesis generation. I found an interesting result in this paper; the researchers compared the hypothesis sets generated by individuals, natural groups and synthetic groups. In this study, a synthetic group's hypothesis set is agglomerated from the hypothesis sets of individuals who never interact socially. They found that natural... (read more)

I was familiar with this.

I find the first etiology similar to my model. Did you mean to imply this similarity by use of the word 'indeed'? I can see how one might interpret my model as an algorithm that outputs a little 'gender token' black box that directly causes the self-reports, but I really didn't mean to propose anything besides "Once gendered behavior has been determined, however that occurs, cisgender males don't say "I'm a boy!" for cognitive reasons that are substantially different from the reasons that transgender males say "... (read more)

This is an excellent summary of my argument! Thank you so much for compressing this into a soundbite!

I think this topic is really only as political as you make it.

I did in fact decide not to reply to the grandparent because I estimated that it would cause less harm in this respect than replying. This article is intended to be a contribution to the philosophy of gender identity in the style of EY's executable philosophy, and it is more directly a reply to lucidfox's Gender Identity and Rationality. This topic was perfectly acceptable in 2010.

Can you break that down to the extent that I broke down my confusion above? I'm having a hard time seeing deep similarities between these problems.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was buil

"Why was I born as myself rather than someone else?" versus "Why do I think I was born as myself rather than someone else?"

This never got solved in the comments.

I was sitting in microeconomics class in twelfth grade when I asked myself, "Why am I me? Why am I not Kelsey or David or who-have-you?" Then I remembered that there are no souls, that 'I' was a product of my brain, and thus that the existence of my mind necessitates the existence of my body (or something that serves a similar function). Seeing the contradiction, I ... (read more)

The quote is from this article, section 4.1. There might be other descriptions elsewhere, Lenat himself cites some documents released by the organization hosting the wargame. You might want to check out the other articles in the 'Nature of Heuristics' series too. I think there are free pdfs for all of them on Google Scholar.

Recently in the LW Facebook group, I shared a real-world example of an AI being patched and finding a nearby unblocked strategy several times. Maybe you can use it one day. This example is about Douglas Lenat's Eurisko and the strategies it generated in a naval wargame. In this case, the 'patch' was a rules change. For some context, R7 is the name of one of Eurisko's heuristics:

A second use of R7 in the naval design task, one which also inspired a rules change, was in regard to the fuel tenders for the fleet. The constraints specified a minimum fractiona

Why do you mourn when you can contemplate politics no more? What makes you think about it so much in the first place? That just seems like something you wouldn't want to ignore.

I admit I don't quite understand what MINERVA-DM is...I glanced at the paper briefly and it appears to be a...theoretical framework for making decisions which is shown to exhibit similar biases to human thought? (With cells and rows and ones?)

I can't describe it too much better than that. The framework is meant to be descriptive as opposed to normative.

A complete description of MINERVA-DM would involve some simple math, but I can try to describe it in words. The rows of numbers you saw are vectors. We take a vector that represents an observation, called... (read more)

I am assuming the first point is about this post and the second two are about the planning primer?

The first two are about this article and the third is about the planning fallacy primer. I mentioned hypothesis generation because you talked about 'pair debugging' and asking people to state the obvious solutions to a problem as ways to increase the number of hypotheses that are generated, and it pattern matched to what I'd read about hypothesis generation.

There are definitely several papers on memory bias affecting decisions, although I'm unsure if we'r

There is a problem where I say "Your hypothesis is backed by the evidence," when your entirely verbal theory is probably amenable to many interpretations and it's not clear how many virtue points you should get. But, I wanted to share some things from the literature that support your points about using feelings as information and avoiding miserliness.

First, there is something that's actually just called 'feelings-as-information theory', and has to do with how we, surprise, use feelings as sources of information. 'Feelings' is meant to be a more g... (read more)

I'll try to write a short post on it at some point.

Please do!

(Tentatively upvoted.)

I find that a good way to make statements criticizing individuals or organizations less provocative is to frame your criticism as a confusion. This simultaneously allows you to demonstrate that you've thought about their reasoning for more than five minutes and tends to make any further discussion less adversial.

The abstract reasoning about why prison reform is a bipartisan cause makes sense to me: prisons cost lots of money (bad conservative metric) and they're disproportionately inhabited by minorities (bad liberal metric), but if your descriptions of their recommended organizations are charitable, then I too am confused right now.

Does anyone have an electronic copy of the Oxford Handbook of Metamemory that they're willing to share?

I think it's possible to exercise Hufflepuff virtue in the act of encouraging more Ravenclaw virtue, right? That is, getting an arbitrary ball rolling is a Hufflepuff thing to do, even if you roll the ball in a Ravenclaw direction? That's an important distinction to me.

A mid-term goal of mine is to replicate Dougherty et al.'s MINERVA-DM in MIT/GNU Scheme (it was originally written in Pascal; no, I haven't requested the authors' source code, and I don't intend to). I also intend to test at least one of its untested predictions using Amazon Mechanical Turk,... (read more)

(for example, focusing seems to be related to nonverbal parts, but it sort of breaks the S1/S2 dichotomy by being nonverbal but slow.)

Noncentral nitpick that is meant to be helpful: Focusing is a counterexample to the lay dual process theory that people sometimes use around here, but not the up-to-date, cognitive-scientific one.

Briefly, the key distinction (and it seems, the distinction that implies the fewest assumptions) is the amount of demand that a given process places on working memory.

nonverbal

Although language is often involved in Type 2 pro... (read more)

comments to comments

Do you know if you'll be able to maintain their familial relationships as well?

Not sure if this should make me feel better or worse.

Yeah, post hoc rationalization or deception makes more sense than what I said.

Stipulation is obviously sometimes a cheat. I would be surprised if it was always one.

(Upvoted.) Just wanted to say, "Welcome to LessWrong."

I think this is worth pointing out because it seems like an easy mistake to use my reasoning to justify dictatorship. I also think this is an example of two ships passing in the night. Eliezer was talking about a meta-level/domain-general ethical injunction. When I was talking to the student, I was talking about how to avoid screwing up the object-level/domain-specific operationalization of the phrase 'good governance'.

My argument was that if you're asking yourself the question, "What does the best government look like?", assuming that that is in... (read more)

Thanks for clarifying. It was easy for me to forget that as well as being a moderator, you're also just another user with a stake in what happens to LW.

Genuine question: Did the Apolitical Guideline become an Apolitical Rule? Or have I always been mistaken about it being a guideline?

Additional data point: I see [deleted].

I know this is on the blogroll right now, but since it was originally on Facebook I thought it might be nice to start a place for discussion on LW. Linkposts are also quite a bit more visible than the blogroll.

This post is already getting too long so I deleted the section on lessons to be learned, but if there is interest I'll do a followup. Let me know what you think in the comments!

I at least would be interested in hearing anything else that you have to say about this topic. I'm not averse to private conversation on the matter either; most such conversations of mine are private.

Hypothesis: Fiction silently allows people to switch into truthseeking mode about politics.

A history student friend of mine was playing Fallout: New Vegas, and he wanted to talk to m... (read more)

Something I've been meaning to say for a while:

Keyword: Utopian studies.

Genuine question: why do you anticipate that we'll assume that you're being disingenuous?

If you don't get a proper response, it may be worthwhile to make this into its own post, if you have the karma. (Open thread is another option.)

I've always really liked this idea. I already do the toothbrushing thing. Hygiene's a good category to pull from. A few others I use:

• Feeling of cold air
• Warmth of sunlight
• Warmth of water, be it bathing, dishwashing, etc.
• Smell of clean laundry
• Smell of coffee/warm beverages
• Feel of wearing freshly cleaned clothing
• Feel of a fresh shave
• I often have long hair, and notice that my hair actually starts to feel heavier the longer it goes unwashed, so, the lightness of freshly washed hair

But I would say that these disadvantages are necessary evils that, while they might be possible to mitigate somewhat, go along with having a genuinely public discourse and public accountability.

I'm often afraid of being an unwanted participant, so I've thought about this particular point somewhat. The worst case version of this phenomenon is the Eternal September, when the newbies become so numerous that the non-newbies decide to exit en masse.

I think there's something important that people miss when they think about the Eternal September phenomenon. Fr... (read more)

"letting people sell their organs after they're dead doesn't seem like it would increase the supply that much"

seems very suspect. If you could sell the rights to your organs, there's now incentive to set up a "pay people to be signed up for organ donation" business. This is also not harmful to the donor, unlike kidneys.

True. More than anything I was trying to bite off a small piece of the larger 'organ market question'. Given your comment, a better way to do this would have been to note that even perfectly allocating all cadaveric or... (read more)