Brian_Jaress2
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Brian_Jaress2 has not written any posts yet.
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Daniel I. Lewis, as I said, lists can have structure even when that structure is not chosen by a person.
"Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you get sorted lists (forwards or backwards) more often than chance, and the rest of the time you get a random permutation."
Let's not say that, because it creates an artificial situation. No one would select randomly if we could assume that, yet random selection is done. In reality, lists that are bad for selecting from the middle are more common than by random chance, so random beats middle.
If you put the right kind of constraints on the input, it's easy to find a nonrandom algorithm that beats random. But those same constraints can change the answer. In your case, part of the answer was the constraint that you added.
I was hoping for an answer to the real-world situation.
GreedyAlgorithm, yes that's mostly why it's done. I'd add that it applies even when the source of the ordering is not a person. Measurement data can also follow the type of patterns you'd get by following a simple, fixed rule.
But I'd like to see it analyzed Eliezer's way.
How does the randomness tie in to acquired knowledge, and what is the superior non-random method making better use of that knowledge?
Using the median isn't it, because that generally takes longer to produce the same result.
How would you categorize the practice of randomly selecting the pivot element in a quicksort?
Brian, if this definition is more useful, then why isn't that license to take over the term?
Carey, I didn't say it was a more useful definition. I said that Eliezer may feel that the thing being referred to is more useful. I feel that money is more useful than mud, but I don't call my money "mud."
More specifically, how can there be any argument on the basis of some canonical definition, while the consensus seems that we really don't know the answer yet?
I'm not arguing based on a canonical definition. I agree that we don't have a precise definition of intelligence, but we do have... (read more)
To describe the universe well, you will have to distinguish these signatures from each other, and have separate names for "human intelligence", "evolution", "proteins", and "protons", because even if these things are related they are not at all the same.
Speaking of separate names, I think you shouldn't call this "steering the future" stuff "intelligence." It sounds very useful, but almost no one except you is referring to it when they say "intelligence." There's some overlap, and you may feel that what you are referring to is more useful than what they are referring to, but that doesn't give you license to take over the word.
I know you've written... (read more)
Cat Dancer, I think by "no alternative," he means the case of two girls.
Of course the mathematician could say something like "none are boys," but the point is whether or not the two-girls case gets special treatment. If you ask "is at least one a boy?" then "no" means two girls and "yes" means anything else.
If the mathematician is just volunteering information, it's not divided up that way. When she says "at least one is a boy," she might be turning down a chance to say "at least one is a girl," and that changes things.
At least, I think that's what he's saying. Most of probability seems as awkward to me as frequentism seems to Eliezer.
"How many times does a coin have to come up heads before you believe the coin is fixed?"
I think your LHC question is closer to, "How many times does a coin have to come up heads before you believe a tails would destroy the world?" Which, in my opinion, makes no sense.
I've never been on a transhumanist mailing list, but I would have said, "Being able to figure out what's right isn't the same as actually doing it. You can't just increase the one and assume it takes care of the other. Many people do things they know (or could figure out) are wrong."
It's the type of objection you'd have seen in the op-ed pages if you announced your project on CNN. I guess that makes me another stupid man saying the sun is shining. At first, I was surprised that it wasn't on the list of objections you encountered. But I guess it makes sense that transhumanists wouldn't hold up humans as a bad example.
When I read these stories you tell about your past thoughts, I'm struck by how different your experiences with ideas were. Things you found obvious seem subtle to me. Things you discovered with a feeling of revelation seem pedestrian. Things you dismissed wholesale and now borrow a smidgen of seem like they've always been a significant part of my life.
Take, for example, the subject of this post: technological risks. I never really thought of "technology" as a single thing, to be judged good or bad as a whole, until after I had heard a great deal about particular cases, some good and some bad.
When I did encounter that... (read more)
GreedyAlgorithm,
That's actually the scenario I had in mind, and I think it's the most common. Usually, when someone does a sort, they do it with a general-purpose library function or utility.
I think most of those are actually implemented as a merge sort, which is usually faster than quicksort, but I'm not clear on how that ties in to the use of information gained during the running of the program.
What I'm getting at is that the motivation for selecting randomly and any speedup for switching... (read more)