I still don’t understand how this is any different from the notion of problem solving. And I really didn’t understand the human-AI equivalence, is it just the substrate independent nature of turing-completeness? If so, I think we still lack the epistemic toolkit to say anything conclusive about creating an equivalence, or for that matter any form of comparative relationship, especially given that AGI is still not a problem that is well-defined, let alone discussing the solution space. No?
A first lesson in meta-rationality
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They're closely related to Raven's Progressive Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices which are indeed the source for IQ tests.
But the point of this all is that rationality works within a frame; Bongard games are just an illustration that the real problem of meaning and choice and acting in the world is the not-rational one of choosing a framing.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#73I know this is a little bit out of topic but I think meta-rationality is more about organizing other people/machines intelligences to achieve your goal even when you are not highly intelligent.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#74Am 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…
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 wondering too about AI-authored instances. Or, say, problems authored by aliens, with a different evolutionary history, and different in-built biases for cognition. Would they necessarily be solvable by humans, or our Bongard problems solvable by them? Some aspects (number maybe?) are probably universal. But even a good-faith puzzle maker has to take some assumption of shared basis for perception.
This probably connects up to the author's final point that "what objects even are" is not absolute.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not an alternative to systematization, but different systems. Just that the analogies or groups that make sense to one group may not make sense to others.
Could you give an example of a different type?
A simple example that still constrains the puzzle to human abilities (but also makes it less universal) might be this. Rather than diagrams/images, each puzzle consists of two groups of short depictions of two people interacting. The differences are in the relationships, emotional states, or modes of expression. That kind of judgement requires different perception, intuition, knowledge, and so on compared to the puzzles based on shapes. Probably a lot of people who were good with the "standard" Bongard problems would struggle with the "interpersonal" variety, and vice versa.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#76> 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.
It's important to exclude infinite books, which could just contain a lookup table for every possible situation rather than any general rules. And also finite but exponentially large books, which could contain a lookup table for every possible image (and be something like 2^(1024x768x24) pages long.)
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#77Am 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 flaw with that "solution" is that if you have found the rule, you should be able to say whether a new image belong on the right or the left if it is presented to you. If you say, "I can do that, but I need one more bit of information, namely whether the new image belongs on the right or the left", that's a pretty severe defect.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#78For 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…
There is no correct answer (see nebulosity) , the point is to learn how the problem works.
And what a marvelous thing your brain is by being able to come up with any solution.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's an important misconception here. The part you're right about is that simulating what we understand about our own reality on some subset of that reality (e.g. some kind of computer) is really, really hard, possibly verging on impossible. But that's not really the simulation hypothesis at all. It's relatively easy to build a simulation of a simplified or (and this is important) a different reality in some subse…
> given the richness that we see around us, what is the difference between a "simulation" and something that isn't a simulation?
One thought that stayed with me for a while is, my entire experience could, theoretically, be encoded in (a rather large) integer and in the same way that the number 2 exists in many contexts maybe I exist simultaneously in reality and multiple simulations as well.
Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality
#80Earlier 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 flaw with that "solution" is that if you have found the rule, you should be able to say whether a new image belong on the right or the left if it is presented to you. If you say, "I can do that, but I need one more bit of information, namely whether the new image belongs on the right or the left", that's a pretty severe defect.
There's no necessity (in general) that a new image should be able to be classified under the rule. If I give you two finite groups A={1,3,9,-2} and B={7,-11,i,5} and the rule actually is tautological, Then a new number 22 doesn't belong to either group under the rule.
A few of the examples from the article actually are similar. The two circles where one circle is either clockwise or counterclockwise from the nearest indention only admits pictures with two circles, one on the surface of the other and an indentation. There are images which wouldn't fit into either.
A math professor of mine was illustrating this point with number series (of the sort on aptitude tests, eg squares,arithmetic sequences, etc), by listing an obvious sequences whose completion ended up being an obscure function which diverged at the next point.
So, the trivial solution (and the more ultra-complicated solution) is defective basically because it's not interesting under the rules of the game which assumes the answer is somehow interesting, but not impossible to guess.