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Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

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Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#131

Post by withinboredom »

fsckboy wrote: post #77
_notreallyme_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should indeed try and target a 50% accuracy rate.

maybe I don't understand, 50% is the goal? when I played I thought % was how often it predicted what I pressed, and even though 0% is 100% wrong which is 100% right in a parallel universe, it would still represent me winning. in any case, my post was serious, regardless of the % number, if you are inspecting their algorithm and writing your own, I can't understand why you wouldn't use theirs in yours. Finding an isom…

50% means it is "no better than random" while 0% means it is accurately predicting what you won't press and 100% means it is accurately predicting what you will press.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#132

Post by GTP »

xattt wrote: post #115
fsckboy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The prediction algorithm is actually very straightforward[1]. It's a fun exercise to write a sequence generator specifically to defeat it. if you are inspecting the prediction algorithm, and you want to specifically defeat it, doesn't that mean copy the prediction algorithm and throw a "not" on it? It's the old halting problem trick...

It is an exercise of free will to overcome the imposed barriers of some test.

Although I do believe we have free will, I don't agree with this specific example: looking at the algorithm used to predict key presses and just doing the opposite of what would the algorithm predicts, is letting the algorithm tell you what to do. This is related to inverse psychology.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#133

Post by _notreallyme_ »

fsckboy wrote: post #77
_notreallyme_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should indeed try and target a 50% accuracy rate.

maybe I don't understand, 50% is the goal? when I played I thought % was how often it predicted what I pressed, and even though 0% is 100% wrong which is 100% right in a parallel universe, it would still represent me winning. in any case, my post was serious, regardless of the % number, if you are inspecting their algorithm and writing your own, I can't understand why you wouldn't use theirs in yours. Finding an isom…

The 50% goal is against an adaptative adversary. For some reason, Zero Knowledge Proof[1] came to my mind, so I interpreted the goal as reaching a 50% accuracy on the oracle side.

Your interpretation of the goal is also valid, but not in a cryptography context, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_knowledge_proof

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#134

Post by benj111 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #33
endominus wrote: post #6

From the Github description, a quote: "In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternation…

Free will is equivalent to randomness with many (asymptotically infinite) degrees of freedom. Not sure if the experiment tests this. (Pressing a different key or closing the browser tab are also variables in this probability distribution.)

How are you defining free will.

I have free will to eat the burger, or not.

The biggest impacts on that decision are whether I like burgers and if I'm hungry.

Whether I'm 'in the mood' is the only random component.

And the outcome isn't random. I can fairly accurately predict that after 20 times of being offered that choice, most people will say no.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#135

Post by legacynl »

karmakaze wrote: post #128

In what way is being unpredictable considered "free will"? Of course it's just being clickbaity but worth mentioning. I've seen this better used to show that humans are poor sources of randomness. Is there a difference between non-determinism and a free will choice? The latter seems to be a contradiction. A choice implies a reason which would be a cause, thus determinism. This test is asking to make random 'choices'.…

It's hard to come up with a scientifically valid test for something as wide and vague as 'free will'. So what happens is that the tests are designed to test for very specific things that are then used to reason better about vague things like 'free will'. What this test is actually focused on is decision making.

The participant in the test is asked to randomly press either button A or B. The cognitive/mental experience of the participant is the following sequence of operations that seem to happen sequentially in time: 1. The participants is asked which button to push. 2. the participant ponders his decision. 3. the participant pushes the chosen button.

But what this test shows is that while the participants internal monologue is still 'deciding' whether to press A or B in step 2. The software is already able to accurately predict the answer at step 1.

So this indicates that even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made.

This is what the clickbait headline refers to; even though it feels like we humans are able to dictate and direct our thoughts, it seems that it doesn't entirely works that way.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#136

Post by brvsft »

withinboredom wrote: post #131
fsckboy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe I don't understand, 50% is the goal? when I played I thought % was how often it predicted what I pressed, and even though 0% is 100% wrong which is 100% right in a parallel universe, it would still represent me winning. in any case, my post was serious, regardless of the % number, if you are inspecting their algorithm and writing your own, I can't understand why you wouldn't use theirs in yours. Finding an isom…

50% means it is "no better than random" while 0% means it is accurately predicting what you won't press and 100% means it is accurately predicting what you will press.

> it is accurately predicting what you won't press

That is not what it's predicting. You have changed the definition of predict so that an incorrect prediction can be misinterpreted as a correct prediction.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#137

Post by geophile »

gnramires wrote: post #116
eigenket wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will is equivalent to randomness with many (asymptotically infinite) degrees of freedom. I don't think this is obviously true. I can make a random number generating device with as many degrees of freedom as you like by producing a bunch of vertically polarised photons and measuring their horizontal polarisation. I don't think anyone would describe this system as having "free will". Conversely humans with "free…

I think that's true, I think free will is more reason (of the general kind that's not only logical but takes into account your mind), than more randomness . Rather, the more your actions are aligned with your own good, brought by understanding yourself and reality, the more free I think you are. (to give an example: is an addicted person free, even if he is in principle doing "what he wants?", or is he trapped by his…

Following reason is as deterministic as following your addiction.

Sure determinism and free will are compatible as long as you believe that free will is your emotional reaction to discovering what your mind has determined.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#138

Post by prometheus76 »

gnramires wrote: post #116
eigenket wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will is equivalent to randomness with many (asymptotically infinite) degrees of freedom. I don't think this is obviously true. I can make a random number generating device with as many degrees of freedom as you like by producing a bunch of vertically polarised photons and measuring their horizontal polarisation. I don't think anyone would describe this system as having "free will". Conversely humans with "free…

I think that's true, I think free will is more reason (of the general kind that's not only logical but takes into account your mind), than more randomness . Rather, the more your actions are aligned with your own good, brought by understanding yourself and reality, the more free I think you are. (to give an example: is an addicted person free, even if he is in principle doing "what he wants?", or is he trapped by his…

I don't agree that reason correlates with free will. Many people act irrationally. Behavioral economics was developed because "rational actor" predictions applied to large groups of people turned out to be consistently incorrect.

One can willfully be irrational.

I do agree with you though, that free will doesn't necessarily mean "doing what I want" (which is a libertarian principle from the French Revolution), but instead, is freedom from desires. That's true freedom, but is rarely found and achieved only after years of ascetic practice.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#139

Post by withinboredom »

brvsft wrote: post #136
withinboredom wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% means it is "no better than random" while 0% means it is accurately predicting what you won't press and 100% means it is accurately predicting what you will press.

> it is accurately predicting what you won't press That is not what it's predicting. You have changed the definition of predict so that an incorrect prediction can be misinterpreted as a correct prediction.

If you have two choices ... and I always predict the wrong one ... another way to say that is: "I always predict the one you won't choose." If I can't actually predict which one you choose, then statistically, I should be right 50% of the time.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#140

Post by ForwardObserver »

It got less than half right, so worse than just guessing.

Observation- predicting learned habits and other cognitive-effort preserving strategies your brain uses are not a refutation of free will. The whole point of habits, as Marvin Minsky pointed out in Society of Mind, is to save us from having to think through every little decision, i.e. to make ourselves predictable and unburden ourselves from decisions.

So in this instance, performing "randomly" in a low-stakes event is likely to reflexively trigger off a strategy in the brain which avails itself of some emergent pattern which serves the purpose of reducing cognitive effort. Call this test-taker strategy 1, i.e. just stab at the keys "randomly".

Another approach for the test-taker, call it strategy 2, is to expend considerable cognitive effort trying to model the machine's own model of the test taker's emerging behavior by observing the machine's responses, and then out fox it. (HN is great b/c I know everyone followed that). That's what I did, but it took real effort. Pretty soon, I wanted to drop the heavy thing and just go back to strategy 1.

IMHO the underlying assumption, that this is a test of "free will", is just flawed. Most people will enact strategy 1, be predictable and "lose".

predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: d, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: f

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