Outside of politically motivated issues (e.g. global warming), most people tend to generally not disagree with accomplished scientists on the topics within that scientist's area of expertise and accomplishment, and to treat the more accomplished person as source of wisdom rather than as opponent in a debate. It is furthermore my honest opinion that Wang is more intelligent than Luke, and it is also the opinion that most reasonable people would share, and Luke must understand this.
It is not accusation or insult. It is the case though that the people in question (Luke, Eliezer) need to assume the possibility that people they are talking to are more intelligent than they are - something that is clearly more probable than not given available evidence - and they seem not to.
It also does not present valid inference. Ideally, you're right but in practice people do not make the inferences they do not like.
I try not to assume narcissist personality disorder. Most people have IQ around 100 and are perfectly comfortable with the notion that accomplished PhD is smarter than they are. Most smart people, also, are perfectly comfortable with the notion that someone significantly more accomplished is probably smarter than they are. Some people have NPD and have operating assumption 'I am the smartest person in the world' but they are a minority across entire spectrum of intelligence. There are also cultural differences.
I fail to see how the suggestion that Wang is much smarter than Luke is an insult - unless Luke believes that there can't be a person much smarter than him.
My point is that this bell curve shouldn't be a new argument, it should be the first step in your reasoning and if it was not, you must have been going in the other direction. You seem to be now doing the same with the original social status.
I think I have sufficiently answered your question: I find Wang's writings and accomplishments to require significantly higher intelligence (at minimum) than Luke's, and I started with normal distribution as the prior (as everyone should). In any game of wits with no massive disparity in training in favour of Luke, I would bet on Wang.
Ah, that's what you meant by the other remark. In that case, this isn't backing up claimed prior proxies and is a new argument.
New to you. Not new to me. Should not have been new to you either. Study and train to reduce communication overhead.
Anyone who has read what Luke has to say or interacted with Luke can tell pretty strongly that Luke is on the right side of the Bell curve.
Exercise for you: find formula for distribution of IQ of someone whom you know to have IQ>x . (I mean, find variance and other properties).
...There are a lot of Chinese
I apologise for my unawareness that you call China second world. It is still the case that it is very difficult to move from China to US.
Also, if we go back in time 20 years, so that Pei Wang would be about the same age Luke is now, do you think you'd have an accomplishment list for Pei Wang that was substantially longer than Luke's current one? If so, how does that impact your claim?
If we move back 20 years, it is 1992, and Pei Wang has already been a lecturer in China then moved to Indiana University. Length of the accomplishment list is a poor proxy...
There is very little data on Luke and that is a proxy for Luke being less intelligent, dramatically so. It is instrumental to Luke's goals to provide such data. On the second world or third world that is irrelevant semantics.
edit: and as rather strong evidence that Luke is approximately as intelligent as the least intelligent version of Luke that can look the same to us, it suffices to cite normal distribution of intelligence.
Accomplishments of all kinds, the position, the likelihood that Wang has actually managed to move from effectively lower class (third world) to upper class (but I didn't look up where he's from, yet), etc.
What proxies do you think would indicate Luke is more intelligent? I can't seem to think of any.
I'm unsure how you are getting more intelligent.
I'm unsure how you are not. Every single proxy for intelligence indicates a fairly dramatic gap in intelligence in favour of Wang. Of course for politeness sake we assume that they would be at least equally intelligent, and for phyg sake that Luke would be more intelligent, but it is simply very, very, very unlikely.
If you clear away all the noise arising from the fact that this interaction constitutes a clash of tribal factions...
Pei seems to conflate the possibility...
I'm finding these dialogues worthwhile for (so far) lowering my respect for "mainstream" AI researchers...
and so on.
I think it'd be great if SIAI would not lath on the most favourable and least informative interpretation of any disagreement, in precisely the way how e.g. any community around free energy devices does. It'd be also great if Luke allowed for the possibility that Wang (and mos...
I think you must first consider simpler possibility that SIAI actually has a very bad argument, and isn't making any positive contribution to saving mankind from anything. When you have very good reasons to think it isn't so (high iq test scores don't suffice), very well verified given all the biases, you can consider possibility that it is miscommunication.
Well, my prior for someone on the internet who's asking for money being scam is no less than 99% (and I do avoid pascal mugging by not taking strings from such sources as proper hypotheses), and I think that is a very common prior, so there better be good evidence that it isn't scam - a panel of accomplished scientists and engineers, working to save the world, etc etc. think something on the scale of IPCC. rather than some weak evidence that it is scam, and something even less convincing than e.g. Steorn's perpetual motion device.
Scamming works best by sel...
You can eliminate the evidence that you consider double counted, for example grandiose self worth and grandiose plans, though those need to be both present because grandiose self worth without grandiose plans would just indicate some sort of miscommunication (and the self worth metric is more subjective), and are alone much poorer indicators than combined.
In any case accurate estimation of anything of this kind is very difficult. In general one just adopts a strategy such that sociopaths would not have sufficient selfish payoff for cheating it; altruism is...
I thought about it some more and the relevant question is - how do we guess what are his abilities? And what is his aptitude at those abilities? Is there statistical methods we can use? (e.g. SPR) What would the outcome be? How can we deduce his utility function?
Normally, when one has e.g. high mathematical aptitude, or programming aptitude, or the like, as a teenager one still has to work on it and train (the brain undergoes significant synaptic pruning at about 20 years of age, limiting your opportunity to improve afterwards), and regardless of the final...
I did understand his point. The issue is that the psychological traits are defined as what is behind the correlation, what ever this may be - brain lesion A, or brain lesion B, or weird childhood, or the like. They are very broad and are defined to include the 'other features'
It is probably better to drop the word 'sociopath' and just say - selfish - but then it is not immediately apparent why e.g. arrogance not backed by achievements is predictive of selfishness, even though it very much is, as it is a case of false signal of capability.
The cat is defined outside being a combination of traits of owner; that is the difference between the cat and IQ or any other psychological measure. If we were to say 'pet', the formula would have worked, even better if we had a purely black box qualifier into people who have bunch of traits vs people who don't have bunch of traits, regardless of what is the cause (a pet, a cat, a weird fetish for pet related stuff).
It is however the case that narcissism does match sociopathy, to the point that difference between the two is not very well defined. Anyhow we...
He is a high IQ individual, though. That is rare on its own. There are smart people who pretty much maximize their personal utility only.
People don't gain ability to program out of empty air... everyone able to program has long list of various working projects that they trained on. In any case, programming is real work, it is annoying, it takes training, it takes education, it slaps your ego on the nose just about every time you hit compile after writing any interesting code. And the newbies are grossly mistaken about their abilities. You can't trust anyone to measure their skills accurately, let alone report them.
She did expensive altruistic stuff that was more expensive than expected self interested payoff, though; the actions that are more expensive to fake than the win from faking are a very strong predictor for non-psychopathy; the distinction between psychopath that is genuinely altruistic, and non-psychopath, is that of philosophical zombie vs human.
People do it selectively, though. When someone does IQ test and gets high score, you assume that person has high IQ, for instance, and don't postulate existence of 'low IQ people whom solved first two problems on the test', whom would then be more likely to solve other, different problems, while having 'low IQ', and ultimately score high while having 'low IQ'.
To explain the issue here in intuitive terms: let's say we have the hypothesis that Alice owns a cat, and we start with the prior probability of a person owning a cat (let's say 1 in 20), and then update on the evidence: she recently moved from an apartment building that doesn't allow cats to one that does (3 times more likely if she has a cat than if she doesn't), she regularly goes to a pet store now (7 times more likely if she has a cat than if she doesn't), and when she goes out there's white hair on her jacket sleeves (5 times more likely if she has a...
The 'sociopath' label is not a well identified brain lesion; it is a predictor for behaviours; the label is used for the purpose of decreasing the computational overhead by quantizing the quality (and to reduce communication overhead). One could in principle go without this label and directly predict the likehood of unethical self serving act based on the prior observed behaviour, and that is ideally better but more computationally expensive and may result in much higher failure rate.
This exchange is, by the way, why I do not think much of 'rationality' as...
They are not independent - the sociopathy (or lesser degree, narcissism) is a common cause.
I am talking about conditional independence. Let us assume that the answer to your first two questions is true, and now you have a posterior of 0.1 that he is a sociopath. Next you want to update on the third claim "Is he talking people into giving him money as source of income?". You have to estimate the ratio of people for whom the third claim is true, and you have to do it for two groups. But the two group is not sociopaths versus non-sociopaths. Rather, sociopaths for whom the first two claims are true versus non-sociopaths for whom the first two claims are true. You don't have any data that would help you to estimate these numbers.
Threads like that make me want to apply Bayes theorem to something.
You start with probability 0.03 that Eliezer is sociopath - the baseline. Then you do Bayesian updates on answers to questions like: Does he imagine grandiose importance to him or is he generally modest/in line with actual accomplishments? Does he have grand plans out of the line with his qualifications and prior accomplishments, or are the plans grandiose? Is he talking people into giving him money as source of income? Is he known to do very expensive altruistic stuff that is larger than s...
It seems you are talking about high-functioning psychopaths, rather than psychopaths according to the diagnostic DSM-IV criteria. Thus the prior should be different from 0.03. Assuming a high-functioning psychopath is necessarily a psychopath then it seems it should be far lower than 0.03, at least from looking at the criteria:
...A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as >indicated by three or more of the following: failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful beha
The signal being what exactly?