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A first lesson in meta-rationality

metarationality.com

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Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#101

Post by SyzygistSix »

b3morales wrote: post #74
aaron-santos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see where you're coming from. I always have to judge my working solutions using the parsimony of features and parsimony of rules to navigate the feature/solution landscape of Bongard problems. The underlying assumption is that the problem's author has followed the same rules which is an assumption of good faith on my part. This narrows down the feature-solution space considerably or at least biases it in a way…

I was thinking along these lines too when the author went into machines solving the problems. One bit that jumped out was the quote from Hofstadter: > They depend on a sense of simplicity which is not just limited to earthbound human beings. Followed immediately by a problem whose solution depends on having a sense of 3-D objects in gravity! Solving Bongard problems is surely a hard thing to get an AI to do, but I am…

This makes a lot of sense. People have wondered how our cognition would be affected by living in zero gravity.

And our language reflects these cognitive biases; how we would express the experience of "getting high" in zero gravity?

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#102

Post by pontifier »

webmaven wrote: post #94
pontifier wrote: post #40

I have recently come up with a model that has been useful to me for thinking about thinking. It involves the realization that different brain regions must communicate, but also contain their own representation of reality. Partial thought precursors echo back and forth between these regions, with each region amplifying or dampening parts of the idea that it recognizes as valid. When multiple brain regions begin to agr…

> It involves the realization that different brain regions must communicate, but also contain their own representation of reality. Sure, but this is complicated by regions being fuzzy and overlapping (or perhaps interpenetrating).

Each part in a healthy brain should ideally take input, process it somehow, and reflect back an echo that amplifies and dampens the parts that match it's representation of reality. The lines between regions aren't as important.

I'm almost thinking about how this could be turned into a device for conveying information with actual echos.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#103

Post by webmaven »

pontifier wrote: post #102
webmaven wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It involves the realization that different brain regions must communicate, but also contain their own representation of reality. Sure, but this is complicated by regions being fuzzy and overlapping (or perhaps interpenetrating).

Each part in a healthy brain should ideally take input, process it somehow, and reflect back an echo that amplifies and dampens the parts that match it's representation of reality. The lines between regions aren't as important. I'm almost thinking about how this could be turned into a device for conveying information with actual echos.

> I'm almost thinking about how this could be turned into a device for conveying information with actual echos.

Like the acoustic delay line memory used in early computers?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Mercury_de...

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#104

Post by CRConrad »

ghusbands wrote: post #100
ScottBurson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a deduce-the-rule problem that completely stumped me until I wrote down a series of examples: https://illuminations.nctm.org/lessons/petals/petals.htm

It seems trivial from the name and I always get the same answer as it gives; is there a way to confirm my rule?

Spoiler?, ROT-13: Zl vagrecergngvba bs gur ehyr: "Crgnyf nebhaq gur ebfr" zrnaf pbeare qbgf nebhaq n pragre qbg, fb gjb sbe ebyyvat n guerr naq sbhe sbe ebyyvat n svir; mreb sbe nyy bgure ebyyf, nf gurl unir ab pragre qbg. Lrf, gur vafgehpgvba nobhg gur anzr orvat vzcbegnag jnf fb üore-boivbhf gung guvf jnf zl ulcbgurfvf rira orsber zl svefg tynapr ng gur qvpr.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#105

Post by CRConrad »

chubot wrote: post #39
throwamon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's my refutation of the (silly IMO) "simulation argument" I'm not one of these people, but your rebuttal wouldn't convince me if I were. Maybe we are the SimCity of a much more complex universe.

OK, but I'm saying the burden of proof is on who think that simulation is possible. It's not at all obvious that it is. As far as I can tell, the idea was basically made popular by movies [1], and there is no science behind it. All the science I know of points the other way -- simulating anything is incredibly hard and slow. It requires approximations and shortcuts to make it work for specific cases, and it doesn't w…

OK, somewhat stale already... But WTH, there are still "Reply" links, so AFAICS replying is acceptable. And the "reverse-perspective" rebuttal I'm about to propose hasn't been proposed so far.

> OK, but I'm saying the burden of proof is on who think that simulation is possible. It's not at all obvious that it is.

You seem to be arguing about whether it's possible to simulate this reality, the one we're in, within itself. That's like saying Sim City is impossible, because you can't build the computer Sim City is running on in Sim City; you can't have your Sims build a PC and then run that same copy of the Sim City game on that simulated PC.

If we and the universe we live in are all part of a simulation, that simulation can be running on something that cannot be built in our universe -- within that simulation itself -- without, AFAICS, that constituting any logical contradiction.

Or, IOW: Ants can build anthills, but we can build ant farms. If an ant claims "I can't be living in an ant farm; there can be no such thing, because we ants don't know how to make one!"... Then it is wrong.

In the simulation hypothesis, it is not necessary for humans to know how to build the simulation environment, because in that hypothesis we aren't the simulation builders. We're just the Sims (or ants).

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#106

Post by CRConrad »

webmaven wrote: post #96
roenxi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comment is picking at a fair critique, but some details seem to be wrong. > rationalists hope that if they take one map, and keep updating it long enough, this map will asymptotically approach the territory That is, as far as can be detected, what the human brain does. It isn't just the rationalists who have a view and keep updating it, hoping it will asymptotically approach the territory. It is exceedingly diff…

> I'm struggling to see how someone could hold 'different' maps because they become one map in your head. Rationalists are perfectly comfortable with there being multiple possible scenarios leading to an outcome. A street map and a subway map both describe the connectivity within a city, but even when a human internalizes them both, they don't get subsumed into a single map exactly, rather the human mode-switches bet…

> If you doubt this, try visualizing exactly which streets and landmarks are going by overhead as you travel between [subway -- CRC] stations. It is rather hard to do, and as a result people often treat stations more like portals into a parallel wormhole network.

Idunno, I find if you're somewhat familiar with the more detailed map -- and the subway stations are marked on it -- it comes somewhat naturally. You probably fool yourself a bit if / when the subway lines are very curved, because (I guess) you'll tend to imagine pretty straight lines between stations, but... On the whole, that's pretty much why subways were built in the first place, so I wouldn't think you'll be all that much off

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#107

Post by CRConrad »

brudgers wrote: post #98
handoflixue wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on whether your relevant criteria is "those 3 words at random" or you have some reason to draw attention to the fact that they all end in "ex". If I saw that list, I'd certainly assume there was something special about the "ex" ending since they don't otherwise have much in common and it's extremely unlikely for random chance to produce three "-ex" words just by chance. The shorter regex does a good job of hi…

It is easy to produce very brittle code by assuming a premise that allows one to rationalize being clever. Or as the British sometimes say “too clever by half.” I just picked three words I fancied at the time I was illustrating my point. Not random, but not because -ex was important. The language game I was playing was writing an HN comment for amusement. The finite state machine of my regular expression has one fewe…

The language game we're playing is defining the rules for the language game we're playing. In your extension of the rules, adding a requirement of extensibility (to add 'indices') is a valid move; in your opponent's version it isn't. It could just as well be argued that it is adding the extensibility requirement that is “too clever by half.”

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#108

Post by CRConrad »

mikhailfranco wrote: post #15

For the third I got: triangle never in circle - circle never in triangle compared to the given answer: triangle bigger than circle - circle bigger than triangle My solution is more general (worse), because it ignores size in non-containment arrangements, but also slightly more specific (better), because it constrains the single containment example in each set. Neither of the rules say anything about overlapping cases…

The idea is to arrive at a rule you can use for any given picture, to decide if it goes on the left or right:

> In a Bongard problem, you have to figure out what the rule is. You are given twelve specific images, and the result of applying the rule to each. (The rule assigns an image to either the left or right group.) Once you have discovered the rule, applying it to new images would be trivial.

Your rules don't do that. Most of the pictures have neither "triangle in circle" nor "circle in triangle", so your rules don't apply to... Ten out of the twelve pictures.

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