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A first lesson in meta-rationality

metarationality.com

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Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#21

Post by brudgers »

I am reminded that the simplest regex for the words "apex, ibex, index" is 'apex|ibex|index'.

A commonality of all the boxes on the right is being on the right.

A commonality of all the boxes on the left is being on the left.

There is no offside in golf. The rules of the game only apply if when we are playing the game.

Here, Wittgenstein might have said Bongard problems are another language game and the confusion arises from using words in a peculiar way...the game is pretending there is a problem in a Bongard problem.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#22

Post by laszlokorte »

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 issue with your solution is that it can not decide for a single combination of circle and triangle if it would belong to the left or the right side.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#23

Post by chubot »

From the Church-Turing Thesis, we know there’s nothing special going on! We know humans can’t do anything more than a computer can.

I see people making such claims about human cognition all the time, and I have no idea how it follows. (note the author is paraphrasing "people" here)

The Church-Turing Thesis says nothing about human cognition.

It is perfectly plausible that a human can do things a computer can't. (Scott Aaronson has a paper "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" which sheds some light on why that might be, but it's far from the only possible reason.)

The burden of proof is on people who claim that human cognition can be simulated by computer, not the other way around. To me, it seems far more likely that it can't.

Human cognition can obviously be simulated by "the laws of physics", since brains are material, but it seems very likely that computers are less powerful than that.

That's my refutation of the (silly IMO) "simulation argument". I'd argue it's simply not possible to simulate another universe. You can simulate something like SimCity or whatever, but not a real universe. The people who make that argument always seem to leave out the possibility that it's physically impossible.

In fact I would actually take the simulation argument ("we are almost certainly living in a simulation") as proof by contradiction that simulation is impossible.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#24

Post by rrmm »

tlb wrote: post #7

An interesting category of problems are like Bongard problems in that you have to deduce the rule from examples, but the examples are presented one at a time at random long intervals so you have to work from memory. Most real-world learning is like this. When working from memory, it's normal for your memory to have already parsed the previous situation into features. As some of the later examples in the blog illustra…

You also have to know you want to solve a problem.

Once you get to the point where you have any hypothesis whatsoever, no matter how weak, a systematic approach (saving examples as test cases) helps to avoid confirmation bias and makes testing further hypothesis less costly.

Another hard one is when there is a simple, probabilistic rule. You usually end up with an over-complicated rule to cover all your data instead of the true rule. (Of course that gets down to what is at the basis of the probability: are you satisfied with a probability?)

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#25

Post by alpaca128 »

mckirk wrote: post #12

Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds of problems? I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's the frustration of having to find a needle in a haystack of essentially infinite size, as depending on how complicated you want to see the problem, there's an infinitude of potential 'solutions' and you never really know which level of complexity the author had in mind. I love…

The cumbersome part is that the first step requires you to pick up patterns and differences without knowing which are actually relevant. Which is fine for the first few puzzles, but gets much harder with increasing amounts of details.

It's basically the same kind of problem that one faces in the more frustrating debugging sessions where you're looking at tons of data and try to find a pattern or clue of what causes the bug under what circumstances.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#26

Post by rrmm »

mckirk wrote: post #12

Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds of problems? I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's the frustration of having to find a needle in a haystack of essentially infinite size, as depending on how complicated you want to see the problem, there's an infinitude of potential 'solutions' and you never really know which level of complexity the author had in mind. I love…

Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the examples on the right side are not.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#27

Post by rrmm »

rrmm wrote: post #26
mckirk wrote: post #12

Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds of problems? I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's the frustration of having to find a needle in a haystack of essentially infinite size, as depending on how complicated you want to see the problem, there's an infinitude of potential 'solutions' and you never really know which level of complexity the author had in mind. I love…

Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the examples on the right side are not.

The fact that the solution of these problems is in some sense satisfying also has a lot to do with the fact that the people making these problems are Western systematic-thinkers. They think like us (because we were trained by them).

That's not to say there isn't value in learning this way of thinking, it's gotten society a long way.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#28

Post by mckirk »

solveit wrote: post #18
mckirk wrote: post #12

Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds of problems? I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's the frustration of having to find a needle in a haystack of essentially infinite size, as depending on how complicated you want to see the problem, there's an infinitude of potential 'solutions' and you never really know which level of complexity the author had in mind. I love…

You're certainly not the only one, but the point of the article is that solving these kinds of problems, with all the vagueness that implies, is an important feature of human intelligence.

Since I generally seem to do fairly well in problem solving, that is exactly what I'm trying to figure out: Are these problems actually representative of an important skill that you need for general problem solving, or are they, through their nature of being man-made puzzles, actually in a realm of their own?

When I'm looking at some pattern that I'm trying to find a rule for in real-life, I don't think I'm running into the same frustration and in fact greatly enjoy trying to figure out rules for how things work (or so I believe, at least).

I think a crucial difference is that I know that the problems I encounter in real-life are only "as complex as necessary", and the data I'm looking at is a direct result of some process that serves a specific goal; presumably one I think "makes sense", as I wouldn't look for a rule otherwise. In contrast, puzzles are made to be complicated on purpose, and I suspect that annoys me subconsciously to the point where my brain complains about engaging with it. But it's only these kinds of "figure out the rules" puzzles, so there has to be another important difference compared to logic puzzles. Possibly the difference is: for the logic puzzle, the "meta-rules" for the problem are made explicit and I know the solution-space exactly. For the Bongard problems here I found myself thinking for example: "wait, is it always just two groups distinguished by single rule, or can there be dependencies on the positions of the symbols within the groups as well? What kind of solution am I even looking for?", and that also apparently frustrates me.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I've actually been trying to figure out why these kinds of problems get on my nerves for quite a long time, lol.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#29

Post by bordercases »

roenxi wrote: post #11
alboaie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite admitting verbally that a map is not the territory, rationalists hope that if they take one map, and keep updating it long enough, this map will asymptotically approach the territory. In other words, that in every moment, using one map is the right strategy. Meta-rationalists don’t believe in the ability to update one map sufficiently (or perhaps just sufficiently quickly), and intentionally use different map…

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…

There is nothing stopping me from using multiple frameworks to understand a position and seeing if they agree or not. Such an ability is integral in disciplines like design, like intelligence analysis, like trading... You can act as if you believe many things without endorsing beliefs, and at the level of behavior the two outcomes are indistinguishable.

Furthermore, cognitive dissonance exists, which shows that minds can maintain contradictory beliefs until their beliefs are made to be "live options" for a given situation; and there is no guarantee that the consistency of the mind's contents won't diverge again under new circumstances. Newton believed in alchemy.

The one concession I will make is that in the end, people take one action at a time, which implies a single judgement made at one time on which to act. But the train of thought leading up to that point doesn't have to feature a linear incrementing of ideas or beliefs.

You are also making some very strong assumptions about what is required to be a "semi-(!)functional member of society". What examples do you have in mind? Schizophrenics?

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