All of malthrin's Comments + Replies

'Shall be' refers to a change of future state, so it can't be about the way things are now.

7Spurlock
Agreed, but this prediction could be older than the Hallows and their creators.

Space colonization is part of the transhumanist package of ideas originating with Nikolai Federov.

Build something you need. What you don't know, you'll learn in the process.

You may have some inferential distance issues here.

IQ reverts to the mean across generations.

1wedrifid
Regresses, reversion would be overstating it.

This memory?

Into the vacuum rose the memory, the worst memory, something forgotten so long ago that the neural patterns shouldn't have still existed.

0Alsadius
That's the one. It certainly came from somewhere - IIRC, it's got details he wasn't told that have been confirmed, which means that it's not an internally-generated false memory. So either it's real, or it's been implanted by someone familiar with the tale.

Thanks, I didn't realize that was a real thing.

Harry's sleep schedule wasn't on the red herring list. Further investigation warranted.

4erratio
But equally not everything that happens is intended to have further meaning, eg. the Bacon diary was just intended as a character piece

Regarding the ending comments about Godric's Hollow: there was some earlier discussion about the wizarding community's consensus here.

3pedanterrific
You know, if Pringlescan had just put "frame Lord Jugson" a confidence of ninety percent would still be excessive, but it wouldn't be nearly as ridiculous as it currently is.

That description of the line of Merlin at the beginning sure sounded 'sacred'.

Agreed. I'm not sure why everyone's so fixated on a tradeoff by Harry.

What happened here?

The Veritaserum was brought in then, and Hermione looked for a brief moment like she was about to sob, she was looking at Harry - no, at Professor McGonagall - and Professor McGonagall was mouthing words that Harry couldn't make out from his angle. Then Hermione swallowed three drops of Veritaserum and her face grew slack.

8Danylo
Maybe H&C's final form was McGonagall? That'd be a fun twist.
  1. If Hermione's testimony had changed from last time, I'd have guessed that McGonagall was mouthing a spell or trying to Confound Hermione so she gave a different testimony under Veritaserum.
  1. Since that isn't the case, she was either trying to: a) provide moral support for Hermione ("Keep strong" and such)

b) communicating something. If it's this, then I strongly suspect that McGonagall is cooperating with future Harry in some rescue plan. She might be communicating a simple message like "Don't worry" or "We'll get you out"... (read more)

2Alsadius
She's the only sane one of Hermione's friends who was present? (There may be more to it, but it's hard to say)
7Percent_Carbon
(Edited in response to feedback) * Dumbledore says he meant Harry to have wicked step parents - readers excuse this because Harry didn't have wicked step parents * Dumbledore sets fire to a living thing - even in story, he is excused of this with speculation about how he could have seemed to do that without being evil, and readers excuse him too * Dumbledore probably said that he burned Narcissa alive - readers excuse this as unlikely, pick other suspects * Dumbledore says it is necessary for bad things to happen instead of good - readers buy it * Dumbledore puts off taking down the man behind WWII in Europe - readers buy his excuse that it wasn't possible * Dumbledore gaslights Snape - readers excuse him saying that isn't what he meant to happen * Dumbledore tricks Hermione into doing dangerous things by humiliating her - readers excuse him because he knows what he's doing When do we stop making excuses and start noticing the pattern under them? Dumbledore isn't a good guy, he is a schemer who thinks of himself as a good guy. But he is willing to do very bad things for very bad reasons, which is not a good guy thing.
5Alsadius
I think the key line here is Dumbledore's "The Death Eaters learned, toward the end of the war, not to attack the Order's families."(Ch. 62). IMO, he openly burned Narcissa alive, as a method of scaring the Death Eaters into leaving the Order's families alone. It's a reason that many would consider valid, I think, but it would sunder Harry from either Dumbledore(more likely) or Draco(less likely) when Harry finds out.
275th
One hypothesis is that it was actually Amelia Bones that torched her. When she believes Auror Bahry was killed seven months from retirement, she thinks "Someone would burn for this." Perhaps she thought the same thing when, say, Lucius killed someone close to her (is her husband alive?). I don't know if we're really supposed to read that much into it. But if we are, it stands to reason that Dumbledore might take the blame on Amelia's behalf, since he would be equipped to defend himself physically and politically from Lucius's onslaught, and since he didn't have a daughter whose life to fear for.

Good point. My interpretation of what you're saying is that the error is actually failure to re-plan at all, not bad math while re-planning.

0Douglas_Knight
I find that a very helpful formulation. I could not tell where Gwern was drawing distinctions.

To educate myself, I visited the SI site and read your December progress report. I should note that I've never visited the SI site before, despite having donated twice in the past two years. Here are my two impressions:

  • Many of these bullet points are about work in progress and (paywalled?) journal articles. If I can't link it to my friends and say, "Check out this cool thing," I don't care. Tell me what you've finished that I can share with people who might be interested.
  • Lots on transparency and progress reporting. In general, your communicati
... (read more)
5lukeprog
Of course, things we finished before December 2011 aren't in the progress report. E.g. The Singularity and Machine Ethics. Not really. We're also working on many things accessible to a wider crowd, like Facing the Singularity and the new website. Once the new website is up we plan to write some articles for mainstream magazines and so on.

There's a phrase that the tech world uses to describe the kind of people you want to hire: "smart, and gets things done." I'm willing to grant "smart", but what about the other one?

The sequences and HPMoR are fantastic introductory/outreach writing, but they're all a few years old at this point. The rhetoric about SI being more awesome than ever doesn't square with the trend I observe* in your actual productivity. To be blunt, why are you happy that you're doing less with more?

*I'm sure I don't know everything SI has actually done in the last year, but that's a problem too.

6Paul Crowley
"smart and gets things done" I think originates with Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

To educate myself, I visited the SI site and read your December progress report. I should note that I've never visited the SI site before, despite having donated twice in the past two years. Here are my two impressions:

  • Many of these bullet points are about work in progress and (paywalled?) journal articles. If I can't link it to my friends and say, "Check out this cool thing," I don't care. Tell me what you've finished that I can share with people who might be interested.
  • Lots on transparency and progress reporting. In general, your communicati
... (read more)

You're harder to relate to now that you've made progress on problems the rest of us are still struggling with. Don't take it personally.

1lukeprog
Yeah. I've gotten that comment before. No offense taken. I haven't devoted enough cycles to this problem yet. If suggestions come to mind, feel free to share them.

The winning program ignored a lot of information, and there weren't enough entries to convince me that the information couldn't be used efficiently.

Agreed. We can certainly do better than that. Unless I have a major life-event before the next AI challenge, I'll enter and get the LW community involved in the effort.

1gwern
What makes you think there's much better to be done? Some games or problems just aren't very deep, like Tic-tac-toe.

Right. Encryption is a lever; it permits you to use the secrecy of a small piece of data (the key) to secure a larger piece of data (the message). The security isn't in the encryption math. It's in the key storage and exchange mechanism.

*I stole this analogy from something I read recently, probably on HN.

I look forward to reading your thoughts. Ants looked like a fun problem.

0lavalamp
My life is looking crowded for the next few days, but I will try not to forget.

The main reason is that it requires your recipient to take an extra step. If you send an encrypted email to someone else, and they haven't configured their mail client for encryption, then they won't be able to read it. For most people, that negative outweighs the privacy gain.

1Viliam_Bur
Before you send an encrypted (PGP-style) mail to someone, you need their public key. The recipient's public key is used to encrypt the message for them. So when you are able to send en encrypted e-mail to someone, they probably already have everything configured. I guess most people don't care too much about their e-mail privacy; or at least don't have a clue that there is something that could be protected, but isn't. And if you use a free webmail, there is no point in encrypting your messages (and I don't know if it is even possible). If you are OK with Google company reading and archiving all your e-mails... yeah, Google would never do anything evil. ;-) And Google is probably better than Facebook, and many people don't mind sending their private data through Facebook messages. For many people the costs of encryption would be not only configuring their e-mail client, but first installing it, and accepting that they cannot send e-mails from any place, but only from their own computer. Some people don't even know that it is possible to use e-mails without connecting to a website.
1DanielLC
You only have to configure it because it isn't standard. If it was, anyone who had a mail client would be able to read it. I don't just mean email. I was referring to any kind of information transfer. What's especially odd is with webpages. I've never seen a browser that can't handle https, and yet, if you're not sending something secure, they just use http.
2khafra
Also, encryption is easy; key management is hard. If your workplace sets up a Public Key Infrastructure on your Exchange server, all you have to do is click "encrypt." But outside of an organization that uses it, you'll need some out-of-band way of exchanging keys with everyone you want to communicate with. And, as fun as key-signing parties are, they can be a little awkward for, say, someone you just met on reddit.

There's a similar guideline in the software world:

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

Is this the one you meant?

P(A & B) = P(B | A) P(A) = P(A | B) P(B)

Hold the second two statements equal and divide by P(A):

P(B | A) = P(A | B) * P(B) / P(A)

0timtyler
Yes - though the accompanying text helped quite a bit too.

That was interesting, thanks. Here's another take - specific to the field of language modeling, but addresses the same question of statistical versus formal models: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

0[anonymous]
.

It's a hack. Computation isn't free.

1cousin_it
I don't see how the cost of computation can be the deciding factor here. The exact computation (34% - 33% or whatever) would probably take fewer CPU instructions than the evolved hack. And anyway both costs are tiny, because the human brain's processing power is comparable to all computers in the world combined.

This reminds me of Explain/Worship/Ignore. Am I getting the right idea?

2jimrandomh
Not really. Worship and Ignore aren't question templates; they're things you might do instead of questioning. Some examples would probably help; I had a bunch, but I split them off into a second article (not yet finished) with the idea that holding off might cause people to generate some.

As Kahneman points out in his new book, failures of reasoning are much easier to recognize in others than in ourselves. His book is framed around introducing the language of heuristics and biases to office water-cooler gossip. Practicing on the hardest level (self-analysis) doesn't seem like the best way to grow stronger.

Voted you down. This is deontologist thought in transhumanist wrapping paper.

Ignoring the debate concerning the merits of eternal paradise itself and the question of Heaven's existence, I would like to question the assumption that every soul is worth preserving for posterity.

Consider those who have demonstrated through their actions that they are best kept excluded from society at large. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer would be prime examples. Many people write these villains off as evil and give their condition not a second thought. But it is quite p

... (read more)
5steven0461
Sure sounds like consequentialism to me.
5dlthomas
Is consequentialism an essential part of transhumanism?

Make sure you know which "SOPA" you're referring to. This piece of legislation has undergone significant change from the version that sparked popular outrage.

Added after reading some other comments: if you've made cynical predictions about SOPA's progress through Congress or its effects in the real world, don't forget to update your beliefs on the eventual outcome. Write this prediction down somewhere.

Regarding "convincing" children of things: this AI koan is relevant.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

So, I missed my goal of scoring 100% in the Stanford AI class. Time to do better - to do what others can't, or just haven't thought of yet.

Sure. S results from HH or from TT, so we'll calculate those independently and add them together at the end. We'll do that by this equation: P(p=x|S) = P(p=x|HH) P(H) + P(p=x|TT) P(T).

We start out with a uniform prior: P(p=x) = 1. After observing one H, by Bayes' rule, P(p=x|H) = P(H|p=x) P(p=x) / P(H). P(H|p=x) is just x. Our prior is 1. P(H) is our prior, multiplied by x, integrated from 0 to 1. That's 1/2. So P(p=x|H) = x1/(1/2) = 2x.

Apply the same process again for the second H. Bayes' rule: P(p=x|HH) = P(H|p=x,H) P(p=x|H) / P(H|H). The first term ... (read more)

Why is your name Miley Cyrus?

First name I thought of. I may or may not have been anchored by what was on TV.

There's a Stanford online course next semester called Probabilistic Graphical Models that will cover different ways of representing this sort of problem. I'm enrolled.

This recursive expected value calculation is what I implemented to solve my coinflip question. There's a link to the Python code in that post for anyone who is curious about implementation.

Speaking only for myself, I'm in that awkward middle stage - I understand probability well enough to solve toy problems, and to follow explanations of it in real problems, but not enough to be confident in my own probabilistic interpretation of new problem domains. I'm looking forward to this sequence as part of my education and definitely appreciate seeing the formality behind the applications.

Can you elaborate on the calculation for S? I think it should be this, but I'm not confident in my math.

0cadac
Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm unsure how to calculate P(S). I'd appreciate it if someone could post an explanation.
1Vaniver
Yours was correct; editing the post. I skipped a step and that made my previous answer wrong.

That N is correct, or at least it's what I calculated. Nice work.

No, you have to state N before you start flipping coins.

0Matt_Simpson
Yeah, which means if I'm trying to maximize my payout, I'll set N arbitrarily large and abort the game at sufficient evidence that the coin isn't predictable enough for the game to have positive expected value. If the coin is predictable enough, then I'll pump my friend for every last cent he has. However, note that the problem as stated asks for the minimum value of N so that the game has positive expected value. (I'm not too sure why we're interested in this except as an exercise). edit: just clarifying for others. Not that I think you misunderstood.
1thomblake
Ah, I get it now. N is stated ahead of time, but you can (predictably) use the information so far to "stop playing" whenever you want, and that's part of the optimal strategy to consider in the expectation.

You're missing the third option - the choice to stop playing.

1thomblake
So then can N be the dynamic result of a function, rather than a value?

Right. The coin has a fixed value for P(heads), set when your friend tampered with it. You just don't know what it is.

3Shmi
OK, so you are averaging over all possible flip odds, assuming a uniform distribution of them. That's what "Assume that all heads:tails ratios are equally likely for the coin." means. Your obvious best playing strategy is to look at the history of flips and trust the apparent bias. Assuming that N is much larger than the time it takes for the apparent bias to settle to the real one (perfect modeling), your odds of winning are max(p,1-p). Let's assume p > 0.5. Your expected payout per flip is 1p-3(1-p)=4p-3. Averaged over 0.5<p<1, this gives 0. In other words, even if the coin bias is given to you, you do not come out ahead when averaged over all biases, regardless of N. Hmm, what else am I missing?

Good post. I like how you explained both the technique and the process that you used to develop it.

I see another potential benefit in estimating VoI. Asking myself, "Does any state of knowledge exist that would make me choose differently here?" bypasses some of my involuntary defenses against, "What state of knowledge would make me choose differently here?" The difference is that the former triggers an honest search, while the latter queries for a counterfactual scenario but gives up quickly because one isn't available.

The meta-pattern for reasoning errors is question substitution. A question with an available answer is substituted for the actual query and the answer is translated using intensity matching if the units don't match.

In this case, the subjects were primed to recall the cheers of their football team by the context of a political survey. The question they substituted was, "Does this statement resemble any of the professed beliefs of my political affiliation?"

Their answers were never considered empirically. Most questions never are.

Sorry, I don't know what morality is. I thought we were talking about "morality". Taboo your words.

0TimS
Ok, I like "ordered list of (abstract concepts people use to make decisions)." I reiterate my points above: When people say a decision is better, they mean the decision was more consistent with their list than alternative decisions. When people disagree about how to make a choice, the conflict resolution procedure each side prefers is also determined by their list.

That's a good start. Let's take as given that "morality" refers to an ordered list of values. How do you compare two such lists? Is the greater morality:

  • The longer list?
  • The list that prohibits more actions?
  • The list that prohibits fewer actions?
  • The closest to alphabetical ordering?
  • Something else?

Once you decide what actually makes one list better than another, then consider what observable evidence that difference would produce. With a prediction in hand, you can look at the world and gather evidence for or against the hypothesis that "morality" is increasing.

0TimS
People measure morality be comparing their agreement on moral choices. It's purely behavioral. As a corollary, a morality that does not tell a person how to make a choice is functionally defective, but it is not immoral. ---------------------------------------- There are lots of ways of resolving moral disputes (majority rule, check the oracle, might makes right). But the decision of which resolution method to pick is itself a moral choice. You can force me to make a particular choice, but you can't use force to make me think that choice was right.

My most important thought was to ensure that all CPU time is used. That means continuing to expand the search space in the time after your move has been submitted but before the next turn's state is received. Branches that are inconsistent with your opponent's move can be pruned once you know it.

Architecturally, several different levels of planning are necessary: food harvesting and anticipating new food spawns. Pathfinding, with good route caching so you don't spend all your CPU here. Combat instances, evaluating a small region of the map with alpha/beta ... (read more)

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