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A first lesson in meta-rationality

metarationality.com

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Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#61

Post by skybrian »

rrmm wrote: post #24
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…

Probabilistic rules themselves tend to require much more data, which can be expensive.

In computing we try to write deterministic tests that either pass or fail, which means you can run them once after a change and know what the state is. Even if you just suspect flakiness you may have to run the test hundreds of times to be confident that the probability of failure is sufficiently low.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#62

Post by brudgers »

EricBurnett wrote: post #36
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 b…

‘*’ is fewer characters.

If we are playing that language game.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#63

Post by slx26 »

We should keep one morning of school a week, no matter our age, to get together with other humans and discuss about stuff like this. Individual reading and HN comments are fine, but we are missing the best part of learning, which is actually verbalizing and battle-testing those vague ideas. It would really help in cases like this... Have no friends? Make a club!

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#64

Post by skybrian »

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…

I think this has to do with tolerance for being stuck, and that varies depending on how rewarded you think you’ll be for figuring it out and getting unstuck.

Real science and math involves getting stuck on problems, perhaps for weeks, months, or years. I guess we should be happy that there are people who can tolerate being stuck.

My tolerance for getting stuck on a mere game has dropped dramatically since I was a kid; many of the games we played then are unplayable by modern standards. You had to draw maps and take notes, yourself, rather than the computer remembering things for you.

But text adventures back then sometimes weren’t meant to be played alone. The game might be single-player but it was a group activity for college students where you’d share ideas. The modern equivalent might be games where you’re expected to search the web to find recipes and strategies for things.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#66

Post by skybrian »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #50

I don’t see how Bongard problems are human complete if the author can’t even solve half of them. Does that mean he doesn’t have human intelligence? I think a better candidate for human complete is “knowing what other humans are thinking”. AKA “theory of mind”.

Being able to solve half of them by computer would be amazing progress, indicating a breakthrough in machine learning research.

But whether that means artificial general intelligence is solved is another question. Most people can’t play Go very well either.

It’s difficult to say whether the solution will generalize without having it, but easy to imagine that it might.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#67

Post by skybrian »

yewenjie wrote: post #8

David Chapman has multiple sites for approaching the same problem. However, all the sites (or 'books') are incomplete. Every time I come across something by him I just want to read a complete book on the topic of metarationality from cover to cover.

I’d settle for more progress on In the Cells of the Eggplant.

Oddly, this page is on that site but not linked from the table of contents, nor does it show up as a recently changed page.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#68

Post by nerdponx »

Buldak wrote: post #54
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.

Yeah, the author says that for any of these problems "there should only be one reasonable rule." But I suspect that "reasonable" here really points to contingent facts about human psychology, i.e. some rules just strike us as more intuitive or appealing than others, but they aren't correct in any objective sense. That sort of gives the lie to the notion that what we're exercising here is "meta-rationality."

The problem with these puzzles is that, without rules for the system, you can just make up your own rules and then solve the puzzle within the context of those rules.

For example, in the second puzzle, the arrangement of black-and-white shapes is the same on the left and right pages, but the right page is rotated relative to the left page. Is the question about the shapes as in an ordered collection? Or is the question about the pages in their entirety? These problems tend to be underspecified, and end up being more of a guessing exercise about the authors intentions than anything else.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#69

Post by aaron-santos »

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…

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 where I can prioritize hypotheses in a more tractable way.

Part of what I feel makes me a good puzzle solver is imagining that I'm a puzzle maker. What was going through the author's mind when they conceived the puzzle? If I can start to pull at that thread then the complexity of the puzzle will start to unravel.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#70

Post by tomcatfish »

> However, by “system” I mean, roughly, a set of rules that can be printed in a book weighing less than ten kilograms, and which a person can consciously follow.

Is this tongue in cheek or is it a very strange thing to say? That's definitely not a statement that should be made with no justification. I can guess what the author meant, but I don't really want to guess at basics of their argument.

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