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

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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

#241

Post by RodericDay »

Zarel wrote: post #212
RodericDay wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article is less about opting for snark over smarm, than it is about reading too much onto the method of delivery ie: "I can't imagine a good teacher being smug about it", being politicized in a particular way.

It kinda runs counter to the position you're advancing, but I thought you'd find it interesting anyway.

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

#242

Post by sawwit »

manish_gill wrote: post #235
sawwit wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot judge to which degree these theses are bullshit, but I've found LW a tremendously rich source of thinking tools and I'm convinced that reading or skimming a lot of the sequences have improved my thinking. Regarding the rape sequence in HPMOR: It's a terribly chosen trope to convey that the fictional society has very different values from ours. Apparently it ties into various parts of the story, so that EY di…

> I cannot judge to which degree these theses are bullshit. Go the link, go to references, read about them. I'll outline the gist: Most of what Yudkowsky says is extremely sci-fi, no real basis in scientific fact, but stretching the current technological progress to the point where his opinions on things (stuff like transhumanism, singularity) can be justified. What he's preaching isn't science. Certainly not rigorou…

I will look into Farnham Street's Blog, thanks.

> What he's preaching isn't science.

I don't buy into the necessity that everything has to be peer-reviewed in the old fashioned way. There is peer-review happening in the comments to some extent. I don't take a fancy to dismissing any radical ideas as pseudoscience. It's just the outer fringe of hypotheses that need to be tested against reality, and as long they are approximately humanist, enlightened and don't contradict existing physics without depending on mathematics (or disclaimers), I cannot see anything wrong with it. As a naturalist, I pretty much agree with everything I've read on LW so far, except for the parts I cannot judge (like hypotheses about physics), which I allocate a weaker priors for and a few unconvincing pieces.

> Not to mention, and this is a bit of a pet peeve, I find that most LW people are too self-absorbed, I've literally seen a blog where the person who runs it "warns" the readers that what he writes is too complicated for people to follow.

I have not yet experienced that, but there are also a lot of people on reddit and HN that I don't like, yet I differentiate within these communities between what is valuable and what is not.

> Most of what Yudkowsky says is extremely sci-fi, no real basis in scientific fact, but stretching the current technological progress to the point where his opinions on things (stuff like transhumanism, singularity) can be justified.

At the risk of seeming indoctrinated to you, this is what I believe with high certainty: If Moore's law continues another one or two decades, I think the singularity is a very real possibility. The human brain seems to be nothing more than a learning and prediction machine, nothing what transcends what we can understand in principle. Evolution did come up with complex organisms, but the complexity is limited by biochemical mechanisms and availability of energy. In addition, nature often approximates very simple things in overly complicated ways because evolution is based on incremental changes, not on an ultimate goal that prescribes a design of low complexity. I also think that AI will very likely be superintelligent and that poses a tremendous risk in the 10-40 years to come (on the order of atomic warfare and runaway climate change). By the time someone implements an approximately human-level intelligence, we better have a good idea about how to control such a machine.

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

#243

Post by RodericDay »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #228
RodericDay wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the only criticism here is that views of various people on LW forum do not conform to the mainstream social justice outrage narrative, where everything needs to be politicized and "status quo" must be fought? That's sort of the entire point of "Politics is the Mind-Killer" statement, a point which Bond also missed - LW community wants to focus on effective ways to deal with actual problems, as opposed to doing pol…

I'd love to reply to you all (ie: siblings) but this discussion is just sprawling (not a fan of "tree-and-leaf" fanning arguments, I much prefer linear forums), and I just can't put in the time.

FWIW, you strike me as a good person, as do many LWers. I wish I could communicate to you the nuance of my issues with statements like "humanity as one great family", but I'm a newbie at the study of ideology myself, so I wouldn't do a good job.

À la prochaine!

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

#244

Post by dmfdmf »

ItsMattyG wrote: post #216
dmfdmf wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MIRI’s three research objectives are, at present:

•highly reliable agent design: how can we design AI systems that reliably pursue the goals they are given?

•value learning: how can we design learning systems to learn goals that are aligned with human values?

Not exactly what I meant. What are these human values (for humans not robots) and how do you prove they are rational and scientific? Their goal is to design AI that will accept human goals/values without defining a rational basis for those human values.

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

#245

Post by Anderkent »

manish_gill wrote: post #236
Anderkent wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what I'm arguing is that if we only spent money on things everyone agrees are useful, we'd never get anything done.

Not everyone has to agree. That's why we have the scientific method and research institutes. If the current science shows that something is worth exploring in more detail, that some avenues are worth spending money on, spending money on them makes sense. Bullshit Ideas like AI apocalypse and singularity, transhumanism, downloading brain into a computer do not fit into that criteria.

So how do ideas get to the stage where the 'research institutes' agree they're worth investigating?

It seems to me like you're saying "I don't like these ideas, no one should be working on them". That seems a worse principle then "everyone should work on ideas they find worth investigating".

I also have no idea how you distinguish 'Bullshit Ideas' from non-bullshit ideas without investigating them. Your gut is not that good at distinguishing truth from a blunder.

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

#246

Post by jameshart »

discreteevent wrote: post #223
jameshart wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you go off the rails around step 5. "Something being much more intelligent than us means that, in effect, it has almost absolute power over what happens in the world" makes no sense. Since when does intelligence get you power? Are the smartest people you know also in positions of power? Are the most powerful people all highly intelligent? "whatever the goals of the AI will be, it will achieve them". Dude, if in…

"Since when does intelligence get you power?" You hit the nail on the head there. Its about I/O. (Just as its about I/O in the original article - garbage in, garbage out). Jaron Lanier makes this point in. http://edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai "This notion of attacking the problem on the level of some sort of autonomy algorithm, instead of on the actuator level is totally misdirected. This is where…

As I've said before, the singularity theorists seem to be somewhere between computer scientists, who think in terms of software, and philosophers, who think in terms of mindware, and they seem to have a tendency to completely forget about hardware.

There seems to be this leap from 'superintelligent AI' to 'omnipotent omniscient deity' which is accepted as inevitable by (what for shorthand here is being called the 'lesswrong' worldview) which seems to ignore the fact that there are limited resources, limited amounts of energy, and limitations imposed by the laws of physics and information, that stand between a superintelligent AI and the ability to actuate changes in the world.

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

#247

Post by Zarel »

RodericDay wrote: post #241
Zarel wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article is less about opting for snark over smarm, than it is about reading too much onto the method of delivery ie: "I can't imagine a good teacher being smug about it", being politicized in a particular way. It kinda runs counter to the position you're advancing, but I thought you'd find it interesting anyway.

Fair enough. I started skimming around halfway through so I missed that.

I'd agree that there are limits to what you can read into the method of delivery, but:

I think anger and indignance are valid attitudes to have, and that seems largely what he's defending. They're not like smugness in that I can still imagine someone sincerely caring about the truth having them.

I'd also point out that I react with discomfort when I see smugness from my side, and annoyance when I see smugness from the other side, and these are physiological reactions that can't exactly be controlled.

I guess I didn't see much actual content in the Bond article (ironically, most of _that_ article was criticizing method of delivery), so the method of delivery was all I had to comment on.

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

#248

Post by XFrequentist »

kybernetikos wrote: post #172
sharkbot wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem Essentially, two genuine Bayesian rationalists (with some hand wavy preconditions) cannot agree to disagree; ie, they will eventually converge onto the same understanding of an event.

One of the "handy wavy preconditions" is that they share priors. This nearly never happens in the real world. Almost all disagreements can be traced to differing priors.

No - the precondition is that agents share common knowledge of each others' priors (not that they have the same priors).

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

#249

Post by XFrequentist »

RodericDay wrote: post #185
edanm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"1. Bond posits Yudkowski thinks that racism is mostly due to genetic difference, and not about the deliberate, mostly political disenfranchisement of minorities." You don't need to take the author's word for it. Look at the article itself. The article is not about the question of whether race affects intelligence. It's saying that that question is much less important than the fact that individuals have different IQ…

I'm not gonna do a good job at explaining this, because it's far from my subject area, but the problem is that your demand for "the relevant part" asks for blunt evidence of a subtle phenomenon. When we talk about politics, context matters. Someone like Yudkowsky doesn't believe stupidly racist things, like a KKK member or turn-of-century politician, or even modern anti-immigration people. Bond's targeting something…

I think your premises are mistaken on several fronts, I'm annoyed by your (mis)characterizations of LW and Eliezer, and I disagree strongly with your conclusion...

but your comment helped me actually understand this position for the first time, so thank you for articulating it.

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

#250

Post by kybernetikos »

XFrequentist wrote: post #248
kybernetikos wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the "handy wavy preconditions" is that they share priors. This nearly never happens in the real world. Almost all disagreements can be traced to differing priors.

No - the precondition is that agents share common knowledge of each others' priors ( not that they have the same priors).

Here's the paper I read: http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/pdf/Agreeing%20to%20Disagr...

Here's how it starts: "Theorem: if two people have the same priors..."

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