All of tcpkac's Comments + Replies

We do not know that the territory is single- level. It is conceivable that it is not, and the available evidence does not exclude the possibility.

The territory is single level...... BY DEFINITION ....... waaaahahahahahahahahahaha !!!!!

Things in thingspace commonly coming within the boundary 'free will' :

moral responsibility could have done otherwise possible irrational action possible self-sacrificial action gallantry and style (thanks to Kurt Vonnegut for that one) non-caused agency I am a point in spacetime and my vector at t+1 has no determinant outside myself whimsy 'car c'est mon bon désir' absolute monarchy you can put a gun at my head and I'll still say 'no' idealistic non-dualism consciousness subtending matter disagreeing with Mum & Dad disagreeing with the big Mom & Po... (read more)

You've forgotten one important caveat in the phrase "And the way to carve reality at its joints, is to draw your boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace." The important caveat is : 'boundaries around where concentrations of unusually high probability density lie, to the best of our knowledge and belief' . All the imperfections in categorisation in existing languages come from that limitation. Other problems in categorisation, like those of Antonio, in 'Merchant of Venise', or those of the founding fa... (read more)

Firstly, saying "you can define a word any way you want" is not the same thing as "any way which is meaningful to you". Secondly, I don't believe the development on entropy has anything to do with the convenience of using short words for often used concepts. "chair" is a meaningful piece of jointed reality not because of its intrinsic physical properties but because of its handiness for humans. A dolphin would find "chair" as a significant piece of jointed reality absurd. Thirdly, there is an obvious distinction b... (read more)

Psychoh, do not despair. Remember : "The real challenge can be played as a single-player game, without speaking aloud.". We are looking for the natural joints of reality, and that is a purely subjective assessment. Every single pair of phenomena in the Universe can be the subject of a natural join if the difference in one of their attributes happens to be a salient division for you. So draw the line around Christmas any way you want, just like you can draw the line around 'food things living in the sea' any way which is relevant to your way of fishing. Just don't speak it aloud.

While we're staking out the new language, I want a word for red flowers, because I like red flowers, and that is much more important to me than their genotype or taxonomy. Also, I want a special word for slightly-out-of-focus photos, which is a very important category for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose. The joints of reality are articulated in a rather large number of dimensions. Carving it correspondingly is going to need one heck of a .... dictionary.

Ben, Rolf, no problem, I just thought that 'people who look at dictionnaries' was starting to be a category subject to sneaky connotations.. :)

I'll second Frank Hirsch's comment and add one point. I don't get this obsession with 'dictionary definitions' either. An etymological dictionary is endlessly fascinating precisely because it shows you the evolution of thought processes, concepts, and word usages, in action. Very much the opposite of the sort of table thumping that dictionaries are here supposed to give rise to. Eliezer's examples seem to be taken from a pretty toxic discussion environment

So if we have 100 pieces of information about phenomenon A, then we have 100 separate, weaker or stronger, potential categorisations, each with its own set of potential, weaker or stronger, inferences. All legit. and above board, nothing sneaky about it. One could imagine the interactions of these 100 sets of inferences as a multi-dimensional interference pattern, with some nodes glowing brightly as inferences re-inforce, others vanishing completely. The 101st piece of information will bring its own potential categorisation and an additional set of potential inferences. The alternative, I suppose, is just buying a whole truckload of hemlock and going round paying calls on all my friends......

Eliezer seems to want us to strike out some category of words from our vocabulary, but the category is not well defined. Perhaps a meta-Taboo game is necessary to find out what the heck we are supposed to be doing without. I'm not too bothered, grunting and pointing are reasonably effective ways of communicating. Who needs words ?

Albert and Barry's different usages of the word 'sound' are both perfectly testable. Once they've taken the reasonable and sufficient step of looking 'sound' up in a dictionary, and having identified the two (out of many) possible meanings they were using, then one can go off and test for the presence of pressure waves in the air, while the other tests for auditory perceptions in the humans (and/or other animals doted with hearing) nearest to the event. They can later compare their results and Albert will say 'there was sound according to the definition ... (read more)

Silas, billswift, Eliezer does say, introducing his diagrams in the Neural Categories post : "Then I might design a neural network that looks something like this:"

Again, very interesting. A mind composed of type 1 neural networks looks as though it wouldn't in fact be able to do any categorising, so wouldn't be able to do any predicting, so would in fact be pretty dumb and lead a very Hobbesian life....

The primary categorisation is "Threat / Not a threat", and the main categorisation bias is "Better safe than sorry". You'll find that many of your specific categorisation biases are particular examples of that. Examples are : nervousness about your Great Thing being a cult, Asch experiment situations where you have to join the group or stick out from it. Diagram 1b has 'Threat' written all over it.....

To summarise : A storm in a teacup between a pot and a kettle.

Excellent post, however, "But people often don't realize that their argument about where to draw a definitional boundary, is really a dispute over whether to infer a characteristic shared by most things inside an empirical cluster..." Indeed so, but there are other aspects. Humans also have obsessions with (a) how far your cluster is from mine (kinship or the lack of it) (b) given one empirical cluster, how can I pick a characteristic, however minor, which will allow me to split it into 'us vs them' (Robber's Cave). So when you get to discussing whether an uploaded human brain is part of the cluster 'human', those are the considerations which will be foremost.

I sense these 6 essays on cognitive semantics are going to bring us back to transhumanism sooner or later. As of right now, whatever the radial distance from the prototype, and except on the Island of Dr Moreau, you are DEFINITELY human or definitely not, definitely a bird or definitely not. Pluto is DEFINITELY a pla...... whoops.

Thanks for the stuff on typicality, interesting. Just as a side thought, I suspect this has a bearing on Robin's recent post on complexity in political discourse. If one 'plank' of a candidate's position becomes 'typical' of his whole set of ideas, then that gives strength and coherence to Candidate X as a concept.

I'm a little puzzled by all the above. A prediction market is supposed to squeeze out the last drop of (solvent) expert knowledge concerning a given outcome, but voting is a complex and chaotic phenomenon where 'expert knowledge' is thin on the ground or non-existent. If anyone could reliably forecast election results, I think we'd know about it by now. Think weather forecasting, as a comparison. So we're left with, at best, a few people who really believe in their favorite groundhog, and are prepared to place serious money, and others who are prepared ... (read more)

I suppose I should add, for those who are really stuck in maths or formal logic, that changing the definition of a symbol in a formal system is not the same thing as changing the meaning of a word in a language. In fact you can't, individually and as a decision of will, change the meaning of a word in a language. It either changes, as per my previous comment, or it doesn't.

Reactions to 500lb stripy feline things jumping unexpectedly come from pre-verbal categorisations(the 'low road', in Daniel Goleman's terms), so have nothing to do with word definitions. The same is true for many highly emotionally charged categorisations (e.g. for a previous generation, person with skin colour different from mine....). Words themselves do get their meanings from networks of associations. The content of these networks can drift over time, for an individual as for a culture. Words change their meanings. A deliberate attempt to change the ... (read more)

Hollerith, if 'most psychologists are idiots', I wonder how they discovered all the cognitive biases ?

Under Multiple Worlds, aren't you condemned, whatever you do or don't do, to there being a number tending to infinity of worlds where what you want to protect is protected, and a number tending to infinity where it is not ?

Eliezer, I don't read the main thrust of your post as being about Newcomb's problem per se. Having distinguished between 'rationality as means' to whatever end you choose, and 'rationality as a way of discriminating between ends', can we agree that the whole specks / torture debate was something of a red herring ? Red herring, because it was a discussion on using rationality to discriminate between ends, without having first defined one's meta-objectives, or, if one's meta-objectives involved hedonism, establishing the rules for performing math over subje... (read more)

An AGI project would presumably need a generally accepted, watertight, axiom based, formal system of ethics, whose rules can reliably be applied right up to limit cases. I am guessing that that is the reason why Eliezer et al are arguing from the basis that such an animal exists.
If it does, please point to it. The FHI has ethics specialists on its staff, what do they have to say on the subject ?
Based on the current discussion, such an animal, at least as far as 'generally accepted' goes, does not exist. My belief is that what we have are more or ... (read more)

Great New Theorem in color perception : adding together 10 peoples' perceptions of light pink is equivalent to one person's perception of dark red. This is demonstrable, as there is a continuous scale between pink and red.

The answer to 'shut up and multiply' is 'that's the way people are, deal with it'. One thing apparent from these exchanges is that 'inferential distance' works both ways.

To get back to the 'human life' examples EY quotes. Imagine instead the first scenario pair as being the last lifeboat on the Titanic. You can launch it safely with 40 people on board, or load in another 10 people, who would otherwise die a certain, wet, and icy death, and create a 1 in 10 chance that it will sink before the Carpathia arrives, killing all. I find that a strangely more convincing case for option 2. The scenarios as presented combine emotionally salient and abstract elements, with the result that the emotionally salient part will tend to be foreground, and the '% probabilities' as background. After all no-one ever saw anyone who was 10% dead (jokes apart).

Put baldly, the main underlying question is : how do you compare the value of (a) a unit of work expended now, today, on the well-being of a person alive, now, today, with the value of (b) the same unit of work expended now, today, for the well-being of 500 potential people who might be alive in 500 years' time, given that units of work are in limited supply. I suspect any attempt at a mathematical answer to that would only be an expression of a subjective emotional preference. What is more, the mathematical answer wouldn't be a discount function, it would... (read more)

Ben Jones, and Patrick (orthonormal), if you offer me 400$ I'll say 'yes, thank you'. If you offer me 500$ I'll say 'yes, thank you'. If, from whatever my current position is after you've been so generous, you ask me to choose between "a certain loss of $100 or a 20% chance of losing $200", I'll choose the 20% chance of losing 200$. That's my math, and I accept money orders, wire transfers, or cash....

James Bach, your point and EY's are not incompatible : it is a given that what you care about and give importance to is subjective and irrational, however having chosen what outcomes you care about, your best road to achieving them must be Bayesian.... perhaps. My problem with this whole Bayesian kick is that it reminds me of putting three masts and a full set of square-rigged sails on what is basically a canoe : the masts and sails are the Bayesian edifice, the canoe is our useful knowledge in any given real life situation.

Risk aversion, and the degree to which it is felt, is a personality trait with high variance between individuals and over the lifespan. To ignore it in a utility calculation would be absurd. Maurice Allais should have listened to his homonym Alphonse Allais (no apparent relation), humorist and theoretician of the absurd, who famously remarked "La logique mène à tout à condition d'en sortir". Logic leads to everything, on condition it don't box you in.

Just to respond to the theme that 'right wing' is a meaningless label, not so. It originally arose from the seating arrangements in the French Assembly, where the right wing were the monarchists. Hence right wing became generally accepted as a label for the authoritarian defence of a monarchic, aristocratic, or oligarchic power structure. As these power structure tended to be the ones in place, you have the confusion with Conservatism (e.g. Torys). By a further semantic slide, it came, for some, to mean any authoritarian power structure with power conc... (read more)

Charlie (Colorado), I'd appreciate your thoughts on the difference between 'hard core libertarian' and 'right wing'. For me they map to pretty much the same territory, obviously not for you.

When one got past pre-adolescence, one realised that Heinlein's writing skills, such as they were, were in the service of a political philosophy somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. Whatever floats your boat.

I just saw an incredibly beautiful sunset. I also see the beauty in some of EY's stuff. Does that mean the sunset was Bayesian, or indeed subject to underlying lawfulness ? No, it only means my enhanced primate brain has a tendency to see beauty in certain things. Not that there is any more epistemic significance in a sunset than there is in a theorem.

OK thanks, nice intuition pump.

"only because our fundamental theory tells us quite definitely that different versions of us will see different results".

EY, on what do you base your 'quite definitely' ? David Lewis ?

Thanks for the beauty, it feels good. Some thinking out loud. I can't help but feel that the key is in the successive layers of maps and territories : maths is (or contains) the map of which physics is the territory, physics is the map of which 'the real world' is the territory, 'the real world' is the map our brains create from the sensory input concerning the territory which is the 'play of energies' out there, while that in itself is another map. Antony Garrett Lisi's proposal, as an example, would be the most elegant meta-map yet. What these maps h... (read more)

The nature of 0 & 1 as limit cases seem to be fascinating for the theorists. However, in terms of 'Overcoming Bias', shouldn't we be looking at more mundane conceptions of probability ? EY's posts have drawn attention to the idea that the amount of information needed to add additional cetainty on a proposition increases exponentially while the probability increases linearly. This says that in utilitarian terms, not many situations will warrant chasing the additional information above 99.9% certainty (outside technical implementations in nuclear phys... (read more)