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Lê Nguyên Hoang — LessWrong

Lê Nguyên Hoang

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Lê Nguyên Hoang

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Dr. in math. AI Alignment and Safety researcher. Bayesian. Science YouTuber, podcaster, writer. Author of the books "The Equation of Knowledge", "Le Fabuleux Chantier" and "Turing à la plage".

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Lê Nguyên Hoang

Dr. in math. AI Alignment and Safety researcher. Bayesian. Science YouTuber, podcaster, writer. Author of the books "The Equation of Knowledge", "Le Fabuleux Chantier" and "Turing à la plage".

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Bayesian examination

A few months ago, Olivier Bailleux, a Professor of computer science and reader of my book on Bayesianism, sent me an email. He suggested to apply some of the ideas of the book to examine students. He proposed Bayesian examination. I believe it to be a brilliant idea, which could have an important impact on how many people think. At least, I think that this is surely worth sharing here. tl;dr Bayesian examinations seem very important to deploy because they incentivize both probabilistic thinking and intellectual honesty. Yet, as argued by Julia Galef in this talk, incentives seem critical to change our thinking habits. Let's take an example Where is the International Olympic Committee? 1. Geneva 2. Lausanne 3. Zurich 4. Lugano Quite often, students are asked to select one of the four possible answers. But this is arguably pretty bad, for several reasons: - It makes impossible to distinguish a student who has a hunch from a student who really studied and knew the answer. - It gives students the habit of self-identifying with a single answer. - It normalizes deterministic question answering. - It motivates students to defend the answer they gave (which encourages the motivated reasoning fallacy...). Instead, Bayesian examination demands that students provide probabilistic answers. In other words they will have to provide percentage for each answer. In our case, a student, call her Alice, might thus answer 1. 33% 2. 33% 3. 33% 4. 1% Alice would essentially be formalizing the sentence "I really don't know but I would be very surprised if Lugano was the right answer". Another student, let's call him Bob, might answer 1. 5% 2. 40% 3. 50% 4. 5% Bob might be having in mind something like "I know that FIFA and CIO are in Zurich and Lausanne, but I don't remember which is where; though Zurich is larger so it would make sense for CIO to be in Zurich rather than Lausanne". Spoiler: the answer turns out to be Lausanne. Why naive notation is bad Now, how would such an

A rant against robots

The Equation of Knowledge

Pathways: Google's AGI

SmartPoop 1.0: An AI Safety Science-Fiction

I have just released a science-fiction novel called SmartPoop, which is freely available on github, in epub and in pdf, and can be purchased on Amazon. The book is co-written with a medical doctor friend. Here's the pitch: > SmartPoop 1.0 aims to be a very realist science fiction, whose...

Dec 15, 2021•7

Pathways: Google's AGI

A month ago, Jeff Dean, lead of Google AI, announced at TED that Google is developing a "general purpose intelligence system". To give a bit of context, last January, Google already published a paper on a 1.6-trillion parameter model based on the architecture of switch transformers, which improves by on...

Sep 25, 2021•47

The Equation of Knowledge

My book The Equation of Knowledge has just been published at CRC Press, and I'm guessing that it may be of interest to readers of LessWrong. The book aims to be a somewhat accessible and very complete introduction to Bayesianism. No prior knowledge is needed; though some sections require an...

Jul 7, 2020•58

A rant against robots

What comes to your mind when you hear the word "artificial intelligence" (or "artificial general intelligence")? And if you want to prepare the future, what should come to your mind? It seems that when most people hear AI, they think of robots. Weirdly, this observation includes both laymen and some...

Jan 14, 2020•66

Bayesian examination

A few months ago, Olivier Bailleux, a Professor of computer science and reader of my book on Bayesianism, sent me an email. He suggested to apply some of the ideas of the book to examine students. He proposed Bayesian examination. I believe it to be a brilliant idea, which could...

Dec 9, 2019•86