|
Mr. Sunshine posted:But the birth order isn't relevant for the question, is it? I mean, we have three distinct sets of possibilities - Two boys, two girls and one of each. We can dismiss the two girls possibility, leaving us with a 50/50 split between two boys or one of each. What am I missing? That the fact that there's two instances with a boy and a girl IS significant and the point of the whole excersize. Also I might be weird but I thought of our hypothetical mathemetician as a lady.
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 12:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 18:55 |
|
|
Mr. Sunshine posted:But the birth order isn't relevant for the question, is it? I mean, we have three distinct sets of possibilities - Two boys, two girls and one of each. We can dismiss the two girls possibility, leaving us with a 50/50 split between two boys or one of each. What am I missing? Because this is a "Mathematician" question and not a normal question. There are four possible scenarios, based on the two children- GG, GB, BG, BB. When you remove GG from the equation, you are left with three outcomes- GB, BG, and BB- which means that there are three equally-likely scenarios to choose from. Two of them might well be identical, but that doesn't decrease the likelihood of them happening. The probability of a single boy is still double the probability of two boys, even if you ignore birth order. Since there are three possible scenarios, they are equally likely, and only one of the three fits the question, the probability is 1/3. To put it another way, you are 25% likely to have GG, 25% likely to have BB, and 50% likely to have either BG or GB.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 12:38
|
|
|
Right, I think I got it. It just seems counter-intuitive, since on the face of it the question boils down to "What is the gender of one of my children?". But when you consider the probability of a set of two children having a certain gender combination, it does indeed produce a 50/25/25 split. E: And now I get why Yudkowsky hosed up. He assigned probabilities according to what the mathematician did or didn't say, not according to the gender-distribution of a two-child set. E2: What the hell does a Baysean prior even do, apart from letting you prove that you were right all along? The way the yuddists use them to arrive at conclusions (8 lives saved per dollar! You are infinitesimally likely to be real! You'll win the lottery!), it seems they just pull numbers out of their rear end, and then use those numbers to prove that the numbers were correct. Mr. Sunshine fucked around with this message at 13:11 on May 5, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 12:52
|
|
|
These sorts of statistical questions are great because even if they're counterintuitive, you can easily check them with a Monte Carlo simulation (which is also a great beginner's programming exercise because it's probably the absolute simplest thing that you can write a program for that's actually useful). Generate 10,000 (or however many you want) random families, throw out the ones that are both girls, and then count how many have two boys. You'll find it's 1/3. However, the Monte Carlo method (i.e. the Actually Trying It A Bunch Of Times And Seeing What Happens method) is pretty much the definition of frequentist, and so would naturally be eschewed by Yudkowsky in favour of his "Bayesian" Pull-Numbers-Out-Of-Your-rear end method.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 13:05
|
|
|
ol qwerty bastard posted:These sorts of statistical questions are great because even if they're counterintuitive, you can easily check them with a Monte Carlo simulation (which is also a great beginner's programming exercise because it's probably the absolute simplest thing that you can write a program for that's actually useful). Generate 10,000 (or however many you want) random families, throw out the ones that are both girls, and then count how many have two boys. You'll find it's 1/3. The dumbest thing is that his "Bayesian" method should be taking samples in order to ensure that the model is accurate. Bayes Theorem doesn't just pull numbers out of its rear end, it's all about using real world data to create a model.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 13:22
|
|
|
Mr. Sunshine posted:E2: What the hell does a Baysean prior even do, apart from letting you prove that you were right all along? The way the yuddists use them to arrive at conclusions (8 lives saved per dollar! You are infinitesimally likely to be real! You'll win the lottery!), it seems they just pull numbers out of their rear end, and then use those numbers to prove that the numbers were correct. The idea behind Bayes' rule is that it helps you use evidence to update your initial beliefs (your priors) into new beliefs in light of the new data. It's a very useful and versatile tool, and without priors it doesn't do anything at all. The problem is that there's a bit of a "garbage in, garbage out" element: if you choose your priors badly, the output isn't going to be very good. The way Yudkowsky uses it, "Bayesian" is synonymous with "math" and "priors" are synonymous with "assumptions". A lot of the things that he claims are based on Bayes' rule really aren't. For example, the eight lives per dollar thing doesn't use Bayes rule or priors at all. It takes two assumptions (one-in-a-zillion chance of saving a zillion lives) and runs a simple expected value calculation to get the expected value, and then presents the expected value as something meaningful. This has two flaws: expected values aren't always useful (see the St. Petersburg Lottery), and any answer is worthless if it is derived from blatantly false assumptions. But it also has nothing to do with Bayes' rule. Bayes' rule is about updating your beliefs in response to evidence, but the lesswrong dream factory never actually does that. Eight lives per dollar isn't the refined value obtained after many trials, it's just made up out of whole cloth. In the mathematician's-children argument, Yudkowsky describes his model of the mathematician's psychological behavior as "priors". This is wrong. (And infectiously so; he got me to misuse the term too when I first quoted him.) His model is used to compute the probabilities involved in the Bayes' rule formula, which is a separate factor from the priors. The priors are answers (and associated probabilities) to the thing you're trying to know, e.g. "How many of the children are boys?". He used "priors" to describe "What will the the mathematician say?", which is incorrect because the mathematician's statement is not what he is ultimately trying to learn. To use Bayes' rule to learn about something, you're basically using the scientific method: start with a hypothesis, run an experiment, modify the hypothesis based on the experiment's outcome, and repeat. But as we've seen, Yudkowsky considers himself "above" the scientific method, and for all his fellating of "Bayesianism", he would dismiss actual experimentation and the collection of actual data as an evil, dirty frequentist act. If you want to understand about Bayes' rule and how priors work, you should really avoid reading anything Yudkowsky says on the subject. He's really bad at it, misuses the terms constantly, is unlikely to actually know what they mean, abuses the terminology to suit is own ends, and outright makes things up when it suits him. (Also this is true of pretty much any subject, not just Bayes' rule.) e: beaten much more succinctly: Slime posted:The dumbest thing is that his "Bayesian" method should be taking samples in order to ensure that the model is accurate. Bayes Theorem doesn't just pull numbers out of its rear end, it's all about using real world data to create a model. Yudkowsky doesn't like it when we point out that he's just pulling Pascal's Wager, so he's decided to tell us why we're wrong: The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:So I observed that: Yudkowsky believes that the only problem with Pascal's Wager is that it unfairly singles out the Christian God from among other gods, and that the positive utility-probability of choosing the correct god is negated by the negative utility-probability of choosing the wrong one. Already this seems like a spurious claim. Pascal's Wager has a lot of holes, and remains an unconvincing argument even if that particular hole were smoothed over. (Imagine an alien planet on which only one god is worshipped: Xaxaxar. A very large chunk of the population worships Xaxaxar, and there are also many who do not; but none of them have any knowledge of any civilization worshipping any other god. There are no serious social consequences to declining to worship Xaxaxar (no burning of heretics), but proper worship of Xaxaxar requires a tithe of 100 space-dollars per space-week. Would it be unjustified, then, for the aliens to single out Xaxaxar above all other hypothetical gods? That he alone has worshippers and a thriving religion makes it much more probable from their perspective for him to exist than for other gods, and even if a different god did exist, they would be unlikely to jealously punish Xaxaxar-worshippers, as if they really cared so much about worship they could have used their power to ensure a thriving religion of their own. "Xaxaxar's Wager" does not seem to fall into the one pit that Yudkowsky thinks Pascal's Wager does - and yet there are still many good arguments against Xaxaxar's Wager.) Even were it not for the problems Yudkowsky singles out, Pascal's Wager would still fail in much the same way as the St. Petersburg Lottery. But for argument's sake, let's see how Yudkowsky argues that cryonics doesn't fall into this particular pitfall: Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:But current physics also says that any finite amount of matter can only do a finite amount of computation, and the universe is expanding too fast for us to collect an infinite amount of matter. We cannot, on the face of things, expect to think an unboundedly long sequence of thoughts. Here's Yudkowsky's argument: physics as we understand it doesn't actually admit the possibility of the infinite-power immortal computers he always imagines. But, it is possible to write down laws, such as those of Conway's Game of Life, in which machines can keep on computing forever. Therefore, there's a decent chance that we'll discover that our understanding of physics is incorrect, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is outright false, and immortality is possible. And since the rules of Conway's Game of Life are simple, the set of physical laws in which immortality is possible has low ~Kolmogorov complexity~, so the probability of a deity-AI being physically possible is not low, whereas the probability of a deity-God is low. There are a lot of obvious objections to this. One is that this doesn't deal with the entire cryonics problem, it just deals with arguing that one facet of the ideal scenario is not quite as improbable as it seems. But it doesn't even do that properly. Conway's Game of Life has low Kolmogorov complexity... but we already know that our universe is not Conway's Game of Life. The real question is not the complexity of laws in which immortality is possible, but rather the complexity of laws in which immortality is possible that do not disagree with our observations of our universe. What's the Kolmogorov complexity of those laws? Not so low anymore. And without further investigating that, we have no particular reason to think that such physics is any more likely than, well, God. Having spent most of his article failing to defend one fraction of his point, Yudkowsky has only one paragraph left: Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:And cryonics, of course, is the default extrapolation from known neuroscience: if memories are stored the way we now think, and cryonics organizations are not disturbed by any particular catastrophe, and technology goes on advancing toward the physical limits, then it is possible to revive a cryonics patient (and yes you are the same person). There are negative possibilities (woken up in dystopia and not allowed to die) but they are exotic, not having equal probability weight to counterbalance the positive possibilities. There's a lot wrong with this. You can't assume that the fundamental laws of physics will be found to be different, then turn around and say that everything else must continue along its default path. You can't treat Moore's Law as an actual physical law that will continue without bound. You can't pretend we actually know as much about neuroscience as he implies here. You can't pretend that a damaged, long-dead brain with necessarily have its data intact. You can't treat "someday cryonics will work" as equivalent to "the lovely cryonics lab suckering me out of money will totally do it right". You can't make "counterbalancing anti-payoffs don't exist here" the core of your argument for why this isn't Pascal's Wager, then dismiss it in a throwaway remark without justification. You can't say that the positive outcome is good enough to outweigh the negatives without saying anything about why the positive outcome is so good. But the most glaring problem is that Eliezer "3^^^^3 copies of you are simulated and tortured for eternity" Yudkowsky thinks that the potential negative outcomes of an AI scanning your brain are trivial and vanishingly unlikely. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 13:33 on May 5, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 13:30
|
|
|
Swan Oat posted:The funniest thing about Roko's Basilisk is that when Yudkowski finally did discuss it on reddit a couple years ago he tried to make people call it THE BABYFUCKER, for some reason. This is from a while back but did he mean that name for the theory or the website? Edit: Somebody already made this joke, which is strange because it's really unusual and out there. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 14:31 on May 5, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 14:18
|
|
|
Slime posted:The dumbest thing is that his "Bayesian" method should be taking samples in order to ensure that the model is accurate. Bayes Theorem doesn't just pull numbers out of its rear end, it's all about using real world data to create a model. Yeah, this. Bayes theorem is incredibly powerful if you're using it right. Yudkowsky is not using it right. He clearly knows, at some level, that to do science right you have to get data from the real world - at least, he has his Harry Potter quote Feynman about observation having the final say in science - so it's really strange that he then has no trouble just inventing whatever ludicrous numbers he wants in order to justify his predetermined beliefs and then calling it "rationality". And his numbers really are absolutely ludicrous sometimes. He'll assign near-infinitesimal probabilities to an event but then multiply it by idiotic things like 3^^^^3 or whatever, as if it's even meaningful to talk about a number so large in the context of any physical thing that can happen ever in the universe. The biggest numbers any real scientist ever runs into are on the order of 1010n, in the context of statistical mechanics, which is such a miniscule amount in comparison that it might as well be equal to 0.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 16:28
|
|
|
The thing about Bayesian math is that depending on the initial priors, you can end up with wildly different conclusions but a lot of evidence will eventually lead you in the right direction. Suppose a woman finds a pair of panties that aren't hers in her husband's dresser. Let's assume that out of all the reasons a man would have those panties in his dresser, 90% are that he's cheating on his wife and 10% are perfectly innocent - perhaps the panties are a present for her next birthday. If the woman initially thought there is only a 1% chance her husband is unfaithful, she now assess that there is an 8% chance he is cheating on her. If she already had doubts and thought there was a 25% chance of infidelity, she now determines there is a 77% chance her husband is cheating. When you set a probability of something as 0 or 1, you'll continue to have irrational beliefs no matter what evidence arises. However, setting the probability of something to a level like 1/(3^^^^3) also makes you very slow to accept evidence.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 16:48
|
|
|
quote:1. Although the laws of physics as we know them don't allow any agent to survive for infinite subjective time (do an unboundedly long sequence of computations), it's possible that our model of physics is mistaken. This does not sound like a religious apologist's argument, no sir, not at all. Totally different, guys, I swear.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 17:49
|
|
|
ol qwerty bastard posted:These sorts of statistical questions are great because even if they're counterintuitive, you can easily check them with a Monte Carlo simulation (which is also a great beginner's programming exercise because it's probably the absolute simplest thing that you can write a program for that's actually useful). Generate 10,000 (or however many you want) random families, throw out the ones that are both girls, and then count how many have two boys. You'll find it's 1/3. You're still injecting an assumption when you generalize from an example to a population. Which is the real point of the exercise, not proving one kind of statistics is better than another. If you generalize the example into the population of 2-children mathematicians with a boy, then GG is excluded and the odds are 1/3. If you generalize the example into the population of 2-children mathematicians naming a random child's gender, then GG is not excluded and the odds are 1/2.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 17:55
|
|
|
Hate Fibration posted:I always feel intensely embarrassed on behalf of scientists who venture outside of their expertise and hold forth in public. It's always especially bad with physicists too.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 18:08
|
|
|
It is almost always 'hard' sciences, though. And almost always from folks with a certain disdain for 'soft' sciences, because they involve people and qualitative analysis and often cannot be handled with pure math problems and a set of "right" answers.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 19:24
|
|
|
Mr. Sunshine posted:E2: What the hell does a Baysean prior even do, apart from letting you prove that you were right all along? The way the yuddists use them to arrive at conclusions (8 lives saved per dollar! You are infinitesimally likely to be real! You'll win the lottery!), it seems they just pull numbers out of their rear end, and then use those numbers to prove that the numbers were correct. Another real life example. Andrew Wakefield published a study with the conclusion that the MMR vaccine could cause autism in children. Is it more likely that a Doctor with a small sample size discovered an effect that had not been seen in larger studies, or that a Doctor who stood to make enormous amounts of money by "proving" the MMR vaccine was unsafe and introducing his alternative had reached a biased conclusion? For a more rigorously mathematical one, this section of the Wikipedia article for Bayes' Theorem demonstrates why taking prior probability into account for drug testing is important because there is not an equal chance that a randomly selected individual does or does not use drugs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Drug_testing Leonard Mlodinow wrote in The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives (a great book that pretty much anyone in this thread would enjoy) about testing positive for HIV and the math behind a positive result on a single test corresponding to only a 1 in 11 chance that he was actually infected.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 21:33
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:It's not - Richard Dawkins and James Watson are notably cringeworthy counter-examples. Point. I think it's just that physicists stand out the most in my mind though because they're the closest to what I'm interested in. So I tend to feel a more acute sense of embarrassment. quote:It is almost always 'hard' sciences, though. And almost always from folks with a certain disdain for 'soft' sciences, because they involve people and qualitative analysis and often cannot be handled with pure math problems and a set of "right" answers. I think that's really interesting though. Because one of the things, that I got at least, when studying math was an appreciation for the scope of mathematics and how formal deductive methods can fail, or more likely, not be able to give you useful answers. And it's something that I see the people on Less Wrong fail to grasp, a lot. I'm pretty sure it actually comes from a weak grasp of the material in question, the brushing off the problem of selecting proper priors in Bayesian analysis being the most egregious example. I actually think that STEM people's disdain for the 'soft' fields arises from a lack of appreciation of this fact too. It ties in quite nicely with how Less Wrongers disdain for said areas of study cause them to do ridiculous things(like comparing anime and Shakespeare) And now, here's Less Wrongers talking about how ART IMPACTS PEOPLE EMOTIONALLY OH MY GOD
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 00:03
|
|
|
Robin Hanson posted:President Bush just spoke of "income inequality" for the first time, Tyler Cowen (the most impressive mind I’ve met) said last week that "inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated," while Brad DeLong just said that "on the level of individual societies, I believe that inequality does loom as a serious political-economic problem." That's a coincidence because I find it striking that you could possibly be such a loving idiot. His explanation for why "between the siblings of a family" is a greater form of inequality consists of half a line: Robin Hanson posted:Consider that "sibling differences [within each family] account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality" Robin Hanson posted:Clearly, we do not just have a generic aversion to inequality; our concern is very selective. The best explanation I can think of is that our distant ancestors got into the habit of complaining about inequality of transferable assets with a tribe, as a way to coordinate a veiled threat to take those assets if they were not offered freely. Such threats would have been far less effective regarding the other forms of inequality. Hmm yes quite an interesting theory. Or maybe it's because we focus on a type of inequality that wouldn't be completely stupid to focus on. Want to eliminate inequality between eras of human history? Better return to a state of pre-civilizational subsistence, so we don't end up better off than our ancestors, and halt all scientific and technological progress forever, so our descendants don't live any better than we do. Want to eliminate inequality of sex and kids? Better institute state-enforced rape breeding programs. But yes I'm sure income disparity complaints are just leftover primitive whiny tribal warcry  CLASS WARFARE AGAINST THE DEFENSELESS RICH Robin Hanson posted:Added 5/7/07: There is also a huge ignored inequality between actual and possible siblings. 
Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 06:13 on May 6, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 05:09
|
|
|
Bet you they're talking about vaginas and not cocks there. Millions of 'potential dead siblings' every time some game designer starts designing a female character's outfit is A-OK to these nerds.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 07:46
|
|
|
All right, let's talk about these seven kinds. I know how these lists happen, by the way. Someone comes up with a number, and then desperately tries to fill the list. 1. Inequality across species Clear bullshit. We've won the species war so far. The guy who wrote this doesn't care about this issue. Not about income anyway. Next. 2. Inequality across the eras of human history We're supposed to do better with every generation. That's the point of advancing technology. Not about income, anyway. This is a non-issue. Next. 3. Non-financial inequality, such as of popularity, respect, beauty, sex, kids gently caress off. If I have sufficient money, I can have any of these things, easily. This is a legit point, but it does not outrank actual inequality. Also not about income. 4. Income inequality between the nations of a world Actual legit point. A lot of people, though, do talk about this kind of inequality. Not in terms of income, though. Nice save there, guy.  5. Income inequality between the families of a nation This is a huge part of inequality discussion- inheritance law and dynasty building is massive when it comes to inequality. This is usually what is talked about. Again, though, not in terms of income- in terms of hoardings. 6. Income inequality between the siblings of a family Okay, this is one of those cases where a guy lists off all the problems with women and it becomes increasingly obvious that he has specific problems with one specific woman. 7. Income inequality between the days of a person’s life And finally this one, which makes no loving sense at all. NOT MENTIONED: Inequality between planets in a system / systems in the galaxy / galaxies. Income inequality between pets. Income inequality between working periods of the day and non-working periods of the day. Income inequality between men and women.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 09:46
|
|
|
Somfin posted:2. Inequality across the eras of human history HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 10:31 on May 6, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 10:28
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:There's historians in this thread, and we don't like it when you say that a development is "supposed to" happen. You'd like technological improvements to mean that peoples' lives get better, I would too, but (1) that still doesn't mean we can talk about what historical processes are "supposed to" do and (2) it's not always the case. For instance, living standards for almost everyone in England plummeted during the early 19th century until the 1840s. By supposed to, I meant that that was what people are (for the most part) trying to achieve through technological innovation. People, in general, want their children to have better, easier, richer lives than they did. I didn't mean some sort of deterministic goal-oriented thing. Sorry about the phrasing.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 11:07
|
|
|
I would object to considering inequality between historical eras as a subject for discussion because history in in the past. It is literally impossible to redistribute the wealth from 2014 to Victorian England, for all the good it might do. Although I suppose you could consider redistributing the wealth from 2014 to 2020 or something.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 11:25
|
|
|
I'm assuming that argument is that incomes are higher now, unlike they were in the glorious [Holy Roman Empire/Third Reich/Mussolini's Italy/Classical Sparta/Classical Athens/Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire/chosen political fetish period]. And the "income equality between years of your life" is asking why young people don't make as much money as older people. (yes this is dumb)
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 12:21
|
|
|
potatocubed posted:I would object to considering inequality between historical eras as a subject for discussion because history in in the past. It is literally impossible to redistribute the wealth from 2014 to Victorian England, for all the good it might do. In his mouth, though, it sounds an awful lot like the claim that because women have it rough in many Islamic countries, American feminists have no ground to complain. He's throwing chaff.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 13:18
|
|
|
potatocubed posted:I would object to considering inequality between historical eras as a subject for discussion because history in in the past. It is literally impossible to redistribute the wealth from 2014 to Victorian England, for all the good it might do. You can if you have an AI simulate it perfectly from facebook's data! 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 15:37
|
|
|
Lottery of Babylon posted:
fade5 posted:Make sure you don't confuse sequences with series though.  Next you'll tell me he doesn't know that there are both finite series and infinite series, or that the are multiple types of series including arithmetic series and geometric series, or how to use basic tests to determine series divergence or convergence. I just had sequences and series in Calculus II, this is all very recent to me.To explain the joke a bit, and to make sure I actually learned this stuff correctly in Calculus: A sequence is a list of numbers, and the order in which the numbers are listed is important. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... (this is an infinite arithmetic sequence) 4, 40, 400, 4000, 40,000 (this is an infinite geometric sequence) Sequences are usually based in a mathematical formula. A series is a sum of numbers, usually of a given sequence, so using the previous examples, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... 4 + 40 + 400 + 4000 + 40,000 + ··· are examples of series. Or, written in series notation, (this was harder to type that I thought it would be) ∞ ∑ K = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... K=1 ∞ ∑ 4(10)K-1= 4 + 40 + 400 + 4000 + 40,000 + ··· K=1 So, in summation, (more Calculus jokes  ) you don't know poo poo Yudkowsky.
fade5 fucked around with this message at 21:13 on May 6, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 21:10
|
|
|
Strategic Tea posted:You can if you have an AI simulate it perfectly from facebook's data! Well, you just have go get a perfect simulation of Earth going from Google Maps data and people's webcams, and then just wind the clock back. The AI will simulate the fall of Troy, the Mongols, that one day Homer stubbed his toe on a rock, everything. Hell, we'll probably be able to see human evolution happening!
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 21:34
|
|
|
I really like how everything comes down to magical A.Is, like that stupid post listed in the OP dismissing one of the oldest intellectual disciplines on the planet because among other things.quote:Many naturalists aren't trained in cognitive science or AI. Cognitive science is essential because the tool we use to philosophize is the brain, and if you don't know how your tool works then you'll use it poorly. AI is useful because it keeps you honest: you can't write confused concepts or non-natural hypotheses in a programming language. Yes that's right, in order to be a good Philosopher you must be a computer programmer.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 18:08
|
|
|
Dr Pepper posted:Yes that's right, in order to be a good Philosopher you must be a computer programmer. 
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 18:13
|
|
|
Sham bam bamina! posted:And no programmer has ever produced bad, confused code that doesn't compile. And of course there's no CS equivalent for a concept which appears valid on its surface but is surprisingly difficult to evaluate for full correctness. E: for the non CS people in the room, the answer is literally all code, and it was proven by Turing. SolTerrasa fucked around with this message at 18:26 on May 8, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 18:24
|
|
|
Man, it's not like philosophers have been studying logic and the proper method of forming a logical argument since before computers existed. Nope, totally need to learn to code.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 18:44
|
|
|
The only real advantage I can think of is that a computer can quickly evaluate your ideas for obvious stupidity. Like, if you're trying to write some proof in a programming language, say that the number of animals on Noah's Ark is k, and later define k to be a kind of fruit, the computer will automatically complain at you and then you won't have to go to a person to find out your idea was stupid. That's actually a pretty significant advantage if you ask me, because not all mistakes are as stupid and obvious as that and it's nice to have your PC check in advance whether you're shooting yourself in the foot, but it's not a magic bullet. (Short version: it's far easier to prove a program wrong than to prove it right, but eliminating obviously wrong programs has its perks.)
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 20:28
|
|
|
Brains are not computers! Jesus loving Christ, do we need to pass a law requiring a poster in every Computer Science classroom explaining that brains and modern personal computers have only the most superficial of similarities, despite both being computation devices? Just because you can run both on potatoes and both break if you overheat them doesn't mean you can draw useful metaphors between the two of them.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 20:47
|
|
|
People everywhere rail against the idea that being an expert in one thing does not make you an expert in all things.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 21:04
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:People everywhere rail against the idea that being an expert in one thing does not make you an expert in all things. Or being an expert at no things. Has this guy ever held a job besides basically starting a cult that believes giving him money will prevent you from dying?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 21:16
|
|
|
Has this guy actually written a single line of actual code? The only philosophy that programming makes you good at is nihilism.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 21:46
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:People everywhere rail against the idea that being an expert in one thing does not make you an expert in all things. With one exception, that being lying.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 22:12
|
|
|
Mr. Sunshine posted:Has this guy actually written a single line of actual code? The only philosophy that programming makes you good at is nihilism. Not that he's published, not that I know of, but I personally wouldn't doubt him on it. It's hard to explain, but he... Ugh, I only know how to talk about this using the terminology I learned over there. He signals his experience in a way that CS people recognize? Or... He writes like we talk, when he writes about code. I don't think that he has anything of note done on his actual AI project, but I'd be really surprised if he wasn't fluent and practiced in a language or two, minimum.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2014 23:18
|
|
|
SolTerrasa posted:Not that he's published, not that I know of, but I personally wouldn't doubt him on it. It's hard to explain, but he... Ugh, I only know how to talk about this using the terminology I learned over there. He signals his experience in a way that CS people recognize? Or... He writes like we talk, when he writes about code. He has some coauthor credits with a mathematician crony of his that works in formal logic and theoretical computer science, I know that much. I remember when I was looking through his older site, sysops or whatever on the wayback machine, he said that he programmed in some language, and that he even helped develop a programming language. Unfortunately I cannot remember the URL at all.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2014 01:10
|
|
|
Hate Fibration posted:He has some coauthor credits with a mathematician crony of his that works in formal logic and theoretical computer science, I know that much. Yeah, it wouldn't shock me at all if he "designed a language" because he used to be one of those people who thought that the problem with creating a really smart AI was that current programming languages just aren't ~expressive~ enough. I see it all the time in college first-years and it's common enough even in real programmers that Randall Munroe makes fun of it sometimes. Of course I don't know for sure, but it strikes me as the sort of self-deception he'd be vulnerable to: self-aggrandizing and pointless. The language you end up with is almost always either nonfunctional, useless, or exactly the same as something that already exists but slower. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that compilers are *hard*.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2014 05:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 18:55 |
|
|
SolTerrasa posted:Not that he's published, not that I know of, but I personally wouldn't doubt him on it. He has never contributed to any open source projects, nor has there ever been any publicly available code that he has written. He has never worked as a programmer, or taken a CS course. He has learned to 'signal' competence in order to bilk money out of CS people- its how he gets speaking engagements and how he solicits money. When he talks about math, he manages to keep it together for long stretches, but occasionally a howler slips in and you realize he doesn't understand the first thing of what he is talking about. The same for physics. Similarly, he routinely confuses CS concepts (its very clear from his discussions of the busy beaver function and solomonoff induction that he doesn't understand what it means for something to be computable). Here is a direct quote from Yudkowsky, where he very clearly has no idea about computational complexity (but that doesn't stop him from drawing sweeping conclusions about physics!) BigYud posted:Nothing that has physically happened on Earth in real life, such as proteins folding inside a cell, or the evolution of new enzymes, or hominid brains solving problems, or whatever, can have been NP-hard. Period. It could be a physical event that you choose to regard as a P-approximation to a theoretical problem whose optimal solution would be NP-hard, but so what, that wouldn't have anything to do with what physically happened. It would take unknown, exotic physics to have anything NP-hard physically happen. Anything that could not plausibly have involved black holes rotating at half the speed of light to produce closed timelike curves, or whatever, cannot have plausibly involved NP-hard problems. NP-hard = "did not physically happen". "Physically happened" = not NP-hard As a simple, obvious counterexample, I once solved a 3 stop traveling salesman problem in my head. If any non-CS people want an explanation of how incredibly wrong this is, let me know and I'll try to go into more detail. The proper model of Yudkowsky is con-man with a decent vocabulary. He has learned to fake it well enough to bilk money from the rubes, but nothing he says holds up to any real scrutiny. Hate Fibration posted:He has some coauthor credits with a mathematician crony of his that works in formal logic and theoretical computer science, I know that much. Only one unpublished, but submitted manuscript (having read it, I'd be incredibly surprised if it gets through review. Most academic papers don't repeatedly use the phrase 'going meta'). His only actual (non-reviewed) publications have been through "transhumanist" vanity prints and through his own organization. The thing that kills me- if I donated money to a research institute and MORE THAN A DECADE LATER it had only even submitted one paper to review (ONE! EVER!) but the lead investigator had been able to write hundreds of pages of the worst Harry Potter fanfic ever, I'd be outraged. Instead, the Lesswrong crowd seems grateful. su3su2u1 fucked around with this message at 05:18 on May 14, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 14, 2014 05:15
|
|
