A first lesson in meta-rationality • Hacker News Board

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#31

Post by layer8 » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 1:38 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #25

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 t…

At least with Bongard problems you don’t have heisenbugs.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#32

Post by Gys » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #21

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 ari…

‘There is no spoon’

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#33

Post by formerly_proven » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

mckirk wrote: post #28

solveit wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Bongard puzzles are pretty much the same as the test matrices in IQ tests, which annoy me in the exact same way these Bongard puzzles do. If you'd ask people questions in the same manner these puzzles do, they would refuse to answer because they'd feel trolled. Arguably, that's the case.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#34

Post by hliyan » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

I've always considered "pattern recognition for the purpose of prediction" a core function of the human brain that precedes language, rationality or any form of logic. So it feels counter-intuitive to me to label this meta-rationality or even associate it with rationality. I subscribe somewhat to the idea that much of our rational decision making is ex post facto, i.e a verbal narration that comes after the decision making to explain the decision. The actual decision making being an opaque process that takes place inside our brain's neural network. Confession: I lost the author about halfway through the article.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#35

Post by throwamon » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #23

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. (Scot…

> 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.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#36

Post by EricBurnett » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #21

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 ari…

It depends how you define "simple" : '(ap|ib|ind)ex' is fewer symbols and a smaller character graph.

There is no offside in golf...yet. But the rules are surprisingly long, and will only get longer as loopholes are found and exploited. Humans trying to codify a game, or any system, cannot do so precisely; others can and will find the gaps between the written rules and the intended meaning, and play a different game but pretend it's the same. Or I guess, every game is a language game?

Which I think is a point of meta rationality: we can't avoid including questions of the rules of the problem. It's clouds all the way down.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#37

Post by jxf » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

rrmm wrote: post #27

rrmm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you characterize the opposite of (or alternative to) "systematic" thinking?

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#38

Post by fouc » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #16

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…

There's existing terminology for this idea. Rationalists are positivists and meta-rationalists are constructivists. These are terms from the philosophy of science, and directly relate to how one treats the map-territory relationship. They also relate directly to the philosophies of materialism and emergentism.

Those two terms don't seem to map like you suggest? Doing good science is basically the same as solving Bongard problems. Good positivist science relies on meta-rationality.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#39

Post by chubot » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

throwamon wrote: post #35

chubot wrote: post #23

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. (Scot…

> 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 work in the general case.

(Maybe some alternative model like quantum computation will be different, but we're MUCH much further there. I think "adding two small numbers" is still an issue for state of the art quantum computers.)

-----

Here's a nice example from a few days ago, trying to represent even a tiny part of the human brain in a computer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27362883

[1] I think this is more literally true than you might expect; IIRC the published papers in philosophy liberally reference The Matrix, maybe because it attracts readers.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#40

Post by pontifier » Sun, Jun 06, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

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 agree on its validity to a high level, the aha moment occurs.

This model has some characteristics of waveform collapse, and discrete task specific neural networks. When multiple tasks specific networks arrive at consensus that a model matches experience, the proto-idea forms. This proto-idea can then be evaluated, and inspected. New scenarios are reflected off this new idea, to see if it continues to make sense.

Converting an idea into words makes it useful to others, and allows sharing of ideas. This process requires refinement by echoing back and forth with the proto-idea until the words match it's shape.

In order for these words to be understood effectively, they need to make sense to the brains that are receiving them. That means the words chosen need to activate multiple brain regions that the listener may use to evaluate this new idea and have the aha moment themselves.

This process is easier when the 2 brains have many shared experiences to draw on, or communication is bi-directional to allow message refinement.