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Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

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Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#211

Post by RodericDay »

RodericDay wrote: post #209
yummyfajitas wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to suss this kind of thing out, and if you plain don't want to believe me that there's something enabling towards racism and sexism and other various supremacist ideologies in the LessWrong ecosystem, you don't really have to. There is definitely something enabling about it. A lot of modern politics wants you to NOT believe black people are stupid criminals. Yudkowsky would almost certainly endorse "if black…

Someone who feels injustice, but hasn't had the time or resources to codify it into a calm rational treatise is said to be speaking from emotion. Someone who merely experiences base greed, but is able to justify it to themselves as righteous and deliberate and socially beneficial with a bunch of babble, is considered rational. And so, the idea that the rigid set of discursive boundaries that LessWrongians impose upon…

I can't seem to post a reply, so I'll wrap it up here.

I'm criticizing an ecosystem. Yudkowsky-types noodle with weird hypotheticals, others with elitist views get validation. Fantasizing of fixing our current issues with futuristic tech, using it as a yard-stick to criticize ie: a collective black identity from forming a political block, is not explicitly pro-status quo but ends up being so in practice.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#212

Post by Zarel »

RodericDay wrote: post #156
Zarel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was posted on the Less Wrong Facebook page recently, where the reaction was mostly "There's no substantive criticism in this article, only mudslinging". Other reactions include "I was raised in an actual cult, and the differences I see include that LW encourages debate and EY is frequently criticized." Some commenters did agree with at least parts of the article, though. Even the ones that agreed said it seemed…

I don't want this to get too meta, but I like the style of your post. If you're bored, could you tell me what you think about this article? http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

That is a very long article...

The point seems to be that while there's been a lot of criticism of snark (too much negativity), smarm (too much positivity) is also bad.

It seems to me that the way he describes them, snark and smarm are pretty similar: snark is being smug (acting unnecessarily superior) about someone else doing something wrong in judgment (like being ignorant or making a bad decision), while smarm is being smug about someone else doing something morally wrong.

I would probably mostly agree with the idea that smarm is bad, although I'm not sure I would have spent 30 pages on it.

He defends snark as criticism of smarm, but I think it's important to note that while criticism or negativity itself isn't necessarily wrong, it's the smugness that makes it bad. I'd probably describe smugness as criticism mainly for looking good to your ingroup, and for making your target feel bad.

For instance, I can imagine a good teacher criticizing me, but I can't imagine a good teacher being smug about it. Being smug seems correlated with impure motives, which decreases the accuracy and diminishes the trustworthiness of the criticism, to me.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#213

Post by jamiek88 »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #102
RogerL wrote: post #8

I prefer to think of it in terms of the statistical inversion problem. That is, we have an event(s) that occur, which we may imperfectly understand. We take noisy measurements of that event. Clearly, the causal relationship is the events cause the measurements - a bad measurement does not cause the event to move. But, in practice all we have are measurements, and from that we want to find an optimal (or good) estimat…

Most measurements do affect the event.

ALL measurements at a quantum level at least!

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#214

Post by btown »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #196
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that at least with Bayesian methods the prior is explicitly laid out. Frequencist methods when they are used to make predictions and get useful information out of experiments have hidden implicit priors that bias inferences in opaque ways. The very honest frequencists will admit that their procedures are only rejecting hypotheses so small as to have no practical utility. Others will use weird and dishonest dou…

If frequentism is so terrible, why has the field of statistics had so much success over the last century or so.

Just because something is better than nothing, doesn't mean it's optimal.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#215

Post by dmfdmf »

edanm wrote: post #157
jacobolus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LessWrong folks aren’t obviously better or worse at calculating priors than anyone else. The “problem” is that their hobby is spending their free time considering outlandish scenarios, inventing arbitrary assumptions related to such scenarios, drawing questionable conclusions, and then convincing themselves that because they used logic and math, their analysis must be correct. Plenty of other folks who spend time…

So I'm a LessWronger and know a bit about the "movement", and think you are misunderstanding what "LessWrongers think". Obviously not all LessWrongers think the same thing at all, but I'm talking about the average position of the people who believe AI safety should be worked towards. I'd love to explain the basic position, and tell me where you disagree with it. This is the basic position: 1. Intelligence can be crea…

1) Define intelligence, knowledge, truth, proof (deductive and inductive)... how do concepts work?, etc. I am not being facetious here. AI is an epistemology problem not a technological one.

2) I agree but we have to solve the problem of induction first but LW/EY are certain that there is no problem of induction. How can one be certain in a Kantian/Popper framework where statements can be proved false but never true?

3a) Here is where we part ways. It is a common assumption that AI implies consciousness but I think that is an unwarranted assumption. Whatever the principles behind intelligence are, we know that consciousness minds have found a way to (implicitly) enact them. It does not follow that consciousness is necessary for intelligence (just the biological manifestation of them) and I think good arguments exist to think that they are not correlatives. If they are correlatives then it will be easier to genetically design better babies, now that evolution is in conscious control, than to start from scratch.

3b) Goals, values, aims, etc. are teleological concepts that apply to living things only because they face the alternative of life or death. Turning off your computer does not kill it in the same sense that a living thing that stops functioning dies forever. 3a) & 3b) diffuses all the scary AI scenarios about AI taking over the world. It does raise the issue of AI in the hands of bad people with evil goals and values, like the dictator of North Korea who now apparently has the H-Bomb. This is the real danger today.

4) I agree. Computer aided intelligence will allow us to accelerate the accumulation of knowledge (and its application to human life) in unimaginable ways. But it will be no more conscious than your (deductive) calculator.

5) Non Sequiturs. Possibly psychological projection of helplessness or hopelessness.

6) As the joke goes, we can always unplug it.

7) Granting your premises then the goal of LW/EY should not be AI but the scientific, rational proof and definition of ethics but their fundamental philosophic premises won't allow it.

8) For me the threat is bad, evil people in possession of powerful technologies.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#216

Post by ItsMattyG »

dmfdmf wrote: post #215
edanm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm a LessWronger and know a bit about the "movement", and think you are misunderstanding what "LessWrongers think". Obviously not all LessWrongers think the same thing at all, but I'm talking about the average position of the people who believe AI safety should be worked towards. I'd love to explain the basic position, and tell me where you disagree with it. This is the basic position: 1. Intelligence can be crea…

1) Define intelligence, knowledge, truth, proof (deductive and inductive)... how do concepts work?, etc. I am not being facetious here. AI is an epistemology problem not a technological one. 2) I agree but we have to solve the problem of induction first but LW/EY are certain that there is no problem of induction. How can one be certain in a Kantian/Popper framework where statements can be proved false but never true?…

>Granting your premises then the goal of LW/EY should not be AI but the scientific, rational proof and definition of ethics but their fundamental philosophic premises won't allow it.

That is the goal of MIRI, the organization that EY founded, and is a frequent topic of discussion on LW

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#217

Post by nshepperd »

gaur wrote: post #11
njohnson41 wrote: post #2

Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian", but because it is based on sound set-theoretic and analytic principles. If Bayes' theorem is false, so is probability theory, and so is nearly everything we know about probability. Edit: Here is a good…

I guess a hard-line frequentist (if such a person exists) would counter that you can't assign probabilities to hypotheses or fixed parameters. Then Bayes's theorem (and every other statement about probability) is true only when applied to statements about how often a certain event will occur. But of course, most people do assign probabilities to hypotheses and fixed parameters, even if only informally. Bayesian proba…

I have heard of people genuinely saying such a thing. Fortunately, it is nothing but an empty redefinition of the word "probability". In fact, rational degrees of belief in hypotheses do follow the kolmogorov axioms (as shown by eg. Cox's theorem or the VNM theorem), and bayes theorem does therefore apply. Whether or not someone refuses to call that "probability" makes no difference.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#218

Post by edanm »

ac29 wrote: post #168
edanm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm a LessWronger and know a bit about the "movement", and think you are misunderstanding what "LessWrongers think". Obviously not all LessWrongers think the same thing at all, but I'm talking about the average position of the people who believe AI safety should be worked towards. I'd love to explain the basic position, and tell me where you disagree with it. This is the basic position: 1. Intelligence can be crea…

> 1. Intelligence can be created, because there is nothing "special"/"magical" about humans, and our intelligence was eventually created. Human intelligence evolved through a (very long!) series of natural processes, to the best of my knowledge. To say it was "created" implies something closer to a religious or philosophical opinion, rather than something supported by science. > 2. At some point, humanity will create…

Totally agree with your first point, I just didn't want to have too many caveats and nitpicking words. If it's not clear, then of course my arugment in no way implies that human intelligence was "created" by an intelligence - it evolved. Poor wording aside, my statement remains the same.

"This is hugely debatable. Why is AGI inevitable? Even given great amounts of computing resources, a artificial general intelligence does not just automatically appear [...]"

Well no one thinks AGI will appear without anyone working on it, but lots and lots of people are working on it now. And since there are huge incentives to create one, the belief is that more people will work on it as time goes on.

"[...] there really isn't any evidence that I know of that a general intelligence is any closer than it was 20 years ago."

Well, in some sense I agree, in that we still have no idea how far off AGI is. If it's going to happen in 10 years, we should definitely prepare now. If it's 500 years away, maybe it's too early to think about it. But since neither of us knows, wouldn't you say it's worth putting some effort to working towards safety?

In another sense though, I disagree with you that we're not any closer to AGI. As you said jsut the sentence before, fields like comptuer vision have advanced tremendously. While this doesn't necessarily mean AGI is closer, it certainly seems that the fields are related, so advancement in one is a sign that advancement in the other is closer.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#220

Post by manish_gill »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #45
RodericDay wrote: post #30

I think Stephen Bond did some excellent takedowns of the identity politics that has arisen around Bayes' Theorem back in the day. I wonder where he's at these days. The Cult of Bayes' Theorem http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/cultofbayes.html > One of Yudkowsky's constant refrains, appropriating language from Frank Herbert's Dune, is "Politics is the Mind-killer". Under this rallying cry, Lesswrong insiders attempt to…

I've seen this type of writing before. It's a kind of twisted pseudo-criticism you write against a group you dislike. You can compose stuff like this against any group. It sounds believable from the outside, especially if you start sceptical to begin with. But take a closer look - it's actually full of ad-hominems, cherry-picking facts and presenting them in worst light possible. I've been a part of several groups th…

If your ideas can stand on their own merit, you can defend them against criticism without resorting down to saying things like "oh it's a pseudo criticism and cherry picking facts". You're the one calling it bullshit. You even admit you wouldn't want to refute specific accusations.

And then go on to call it "malicious bullshit".

So, basically what you're saying is that we shouldn't listen to this criticism (which provides very valid points btw) but listen to you, when all you've done is attack the critique in a classic ad-hominem fallacy.

See the problem here?

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