All of solvalou's Comments + Replies

Perhaps instead of a tree it would be better to have a directed acyclic graph, since IME even if the discussion splits off into branches one often wants at some point to respond to multiple endpoints with one single comment. But I don't know if there's really a better UI for that shape of discussion than a simple flat thread with free linking/quoting of earlier parts of discussions. I don't think I have ever seen a better UI for this than 4chan's.

When surveys on mturk are designed to hold a single account occupied for longer than strictly necessary to fill out an answer that passes any surface-level validity checks, the obvious next step is for people to run multiple accounts on multiple devices, and you're back at people giving low-effort answers as fast as possible.

This bit was very interesting to me:

These models are “predictive” in the important sense that they perceive not just how things are at the moment but also anticipate how your sensory inputs would change under various conditions and as a consequence of your own actions. Thus:

• Red = would create a perception of a warmer color relative to the illuminant even if the illumination changes.

My current pet theory of qualia is that there is an illusion that they are a specific thing (e.g. the redness of red) when in reality there are only perceived relations b... (read more)

Using glossaries, indexes and other alphabetically ordered word listings to leverage the explicitly learned spellings in order to deduce beginnings of other words – e.g. if you knew how to spell the token 'the', and you kept seeing the token 'this' listed shortly after the token 'the' in alphabetic listings, you could reasonably guess that 
'this' begins with a T, its second letter could well be H, and if so, its third letter comes from the set {E, F, ..., Z}. By spending an astronomical amount of time attempting to solve something akin to a 50,000-dim

Thanks for mentioning reflective stability, it's exactly what I've been wondering about recently and I didn't know the term.

However, using the formalism of utility functions, we are able to make decently convincing arguments that this self-improvement process will tend to preserve utility functions.

Can you point me to the canonical proofs/arguments for values being reflectively stable throughout self-improvement/reproduction towards higher intelligence? On the one hand, it seems implausible to me on the intuition that it's incredibly difficult to predi... (read more)

The paper Galton - Visualised Numerals (1880) (there's several documents with this title floating around, this is the full paper and has the most pictures) contains a bunch of drawings of people's professed visualizations of the number line. Some are quite curled indeed!

Alternative explanation: everyone has qualia, but some people lack the mental mechanism that makes them feel like qualia require a special metaphysical explanation. Since qualia are almost always represented as requiring such an explanation (or at least as ineffable, mysterious and elusive), these latter people don't recognize their own qualia as that which is being talked about.

How can people lack such a mental mechanism? Either

1. they simply have never done the particular kind of introspection that's needed to realize the weirdness of qualia, or
2. there is

Your disagreement is mirrored almost exactly in Yudkowsky's post Zombies Redacted. The crucial point (as mentioned also in Hastings' sister comment) is that the thought experiment breaks down as soon as you consider the zombies making just the same claims about consciousness as we do, while not actually having any coherent reason for making such claims (as they are defined to not have consciousness in the first place). I guess you can imagine, in some sense, a scenario like that, but what's the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?

Suppose scientists one day solve the problem of consciousness according to one of these definitions, in a way that can be readily understood by any reasonably intelligent interested layman. I think it's quite likely that many adherents of other definitions would then come around and say, "ah, great job, they finally figured it out! This is exactly what I meant by 'consciousness' all along.". For example, if an explanation of the first-person subjective experience of pleasure and pain (no. 6) were available, it would probably explain perception-of-perceptio... (read more)