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Pavlov posted:True, but most undergrads won't learn about the random forest either, unless they go out of their way to take a machine learning class in their last year. From what I understand, most industry programmers don't go for higher level degrees either.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:50
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Cardiovorax posted:I did a project on them in my first semester, but then I go to a pretty big-name university. Anyway, it was just an example, but you know what I mean. Actually, I don't think I understood what you meant because if I understood what you meant I don't think they demonstrate your point at all. (see my post at the end of the last page)
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Oct 18, 2014 21:52
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I think we're just talking about completely different things at this point, let's just drop the issue. It's not that important anyway.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:56
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Nate_Gabriel posted:I once believed that six times one is one. Classic.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:58
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Cardiovorax posted:I think we're just talking about completely different things at this point, let's just drop the issue. It's not that important anyway. Yeah. Anyway let me tell you about the time I derived all of philosophy from first principles. (but did it right this time) </yud>
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Oct 18, 2014 22:00
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Cardiovorax posted:How many of those self-taught people could come up with a concept like the Random Forest, though? I've actually seen something like random forest be (not-perfectly) implemented by actuaries and engineers who didn't realize what they were doing at all. It seems like "one of these decision trees isn't working, lets try training a poo poo ton of these things" (or GLMs instead of decision trees, in the case of actuaries) is a pretty common thing to try. Now, could the people who randomly did this tell you exactly what their model is doing,statistically or optimize the parameters, etc? No.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:34
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If utilitarianism is the correct moral system, and moral relativism is thus, wrong, why is rape okay in Yudkowskyfuture as seen in Three Worlds Collide.
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Oct 24, 2014 18:16
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The Vosgian Beast posted:If utilitarianism is the correct moral system, and moral relativism is thus, wrong, why is rape okay in Yudkowskyfuture as seen in Three Worlds Collide. Utilitarianism doesn't inherently conflict with moral relativism. Utilitarianism, at the highest level, just says that the utility maximizing action is the best action, it does not define utility. You could have a utilitarianism in which the definition of "utility" is dependent on cultural views of utility. Even if utility is defined, you can still have a moral relativism-like system if utility is defined to be some concept internal to the subjects of the utilitarianism. For example, if I define "utility" as "human happiness", then my system is, to some extent, morally relativistic - it is dependent on what makes particular individuals happy. For Three Worlds Collide (which I haven't read) if you assume that the utility rule is "maximize intelligent being happiness" then... gently caress it, I don't think I'm willing to write the rest of that.
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Oct 24, 2014 18:35
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This is all true, but Yudkowsky always struck me as someone who would fly into a rage at the mention of the word relativism. Maybe I'm wrong.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:09
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The Vosgian Beast posted:This is all true, but Yudkowsky always struck me as someone who would fly into a rage at the mention of the word relativism. Maybe I'm wrong. That's why he wrote a short story about moral relativism and then wrote an ending essentially going 'well I've written myself into a rhetorical hole I'm not good enough at philosophy to get out of so I guess the protagonist just rejects it anyway for reasons?'
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Oct 24, 2014 19:22
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What story was that? That doesn't sound like Three Worlds Collide.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:26
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Monocled Falcon posted:What story was that? It is, he wrote multiple endings to it because he didn't like having to accept the unacceptable.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:27
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Big Yud said that the point of rape being legal in human society in Three Worlds Collide is to make all three societies morally unrecognizable. He didn't mean to actually defend it, but rather to create characters who rationalized a horrible thing because of their culture just like all the others. I think the idea just overcomplicated the story, but I also see why you wouldn't want to have the humans be more rightful than the other species.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:28
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UberJew posted:It is, he wrote multiple endings to it because he didn't like having to accept the unacceptable.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:40
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From what I recall, the in-world reasoning was that because they had the medical technology to completely heal any and all physical and mental trauma, and because they were in a post-scarcity economy, the damage resulting from rape was negligible, therefore why punish someone for it? So we're back to beep-boop utilitarianism.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:43
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UberJew posted:It is, he wrote multiple endings to it because he didn't like having to accept the unacceptable. Ah, man. I had hoped that there was another story. The human society in Three Worlds collide seemed like the closest we've gotten to seeing how he'd run things without magic computers.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:47
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UberJew posted:That's why he wrote a short story about moral relativism and then wrote an ending essentially going 'well I've written myself into a rhetorical hole I'm not good enough at philosophy to get out of so I guess the protagonist just rejects it anyway for reasons?' Hey I said I could be wrong 
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Oct 24, 2014 20:14
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Chamale posted:Big Yud said that the point of rape being legal in human society in Three Worlds Collide is to make all three societies morally unrecognizable. He didn't mean to actually defend it, but rather to create characters who rationalized a horrible thing because of their culture just like all the others. I think the idea just overcomplicated the story, but I also see why you wouldn't want to have the humans be more rightful than the other species. Good taste, though? That's absolute.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:26
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Another goldmine in the making! Choice quotes include:James Miller posted:I'm a pro-U.S. military libertarian. I have the standard free market libertarian beliefs but think that the world is a vastly better place because of U.S. military power which has done much to reduce the harm that governments cause. Basically, I find it historically exceptional that the United States doesn't use its military dominance to rule or extract tribute from rich but relatively weak nations such as Canada, Japan, and much of Western Europe. I attribute the post-WWII peace in Western Europe and South America mostly to the fact that the U.S. would slap down an attempt by one country to invade another. skeptical_lurker posted:I put 'other' and wrote 'technocracy', by which I mean rule of experts/replacement of elections with standardised tests. And I don't mean that the country should be run by someone with an IQ of 180 and no social skills, the tests should also measure aspects such as ability to detect lies/lie, emotional control, credence calibration and so forth. The tests and criteria would also be non-uniform, so a foreign minister would require more social skills then the health minister. In threads like these, the fact that the average LWer knows less than nothing about any of the humanities really shines through.
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Oct 25, 2014 07:09
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Years ago I listened to a presentation that was delivered at a skeptic convention on Bayes theorem, trying to disprove the Abrahamic god specifically with it. "A god with a bunch of specific associated claims are inherently less likely than one with no claims! Better stop believing things about god, Christians!" It also shoehorned in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Looking it up again I'm a bit disappointed it wasn't Yudkowsky himself.Not My Leg posted:Utilitarianism doesn't inherently conflict with moral relativism. Utilitarianism, at the highest level, just says that the utility maximizing action is the best action, it does not define utility. You could have a utilitarianism in which the definition of "utility" is dependent on cultural views of utility. John Stuart Mill in 'Utilitarianism' posted:[the utilitarian ideal] is not the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if it may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it. Utilitarianism absolutely does define utility! Pleasure, as an end, justifies itself. "Why do you want to enjoy yourself" is a nonsense question. Hobo By Design fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Oct 25, 2014 |
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Oct 25, 2014 07:11
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Cardiovorax posted:Frankly, I thought the constant anime references did a much better job of making future humanity look repulsive and horrible. Sexual consent is a matter of interpersonal boundaries, which vary between cultures as much as between individuals. I can conceive of a highly moral culture where forced sexual interaction is a more severe form of pushing someone down and tickling them silly. Hobo By Design posted:Utilitarianism absolutely does define utility! quote:Pleasure, as an end, justifies itself. "Why do you want to enjoy yourself" is a nonsense question. Or, you know, whatever sort of hypothetical "enjoy slavery" example I could come up with without confessing to having read Methods of Rationality.
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Oct 25, 2014 09:25
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Xander77 posted:What the poo poo.
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Oct 25, 2014 13:31
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No I'm going to go ahead and say that no amount of thoughtful analysis on the Rape Future makes you anything but a massive creep for writing about it.
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Oct 25, 2014 13:49
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Margaret Atwood would be disappointed to hear that, because she certainly did a very good and critically acclaimed job of it. I guess it depends on how you're writing it, though. The Yud is a massive creep no matter what he does.
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Oct 25, 2014 13:53
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Xander77 posted:No. Because that's where you end up with HPMOR, where the sole moment of consideration the scientist wizard that's totally going to change the wizarding world gives to the plight of a slave race is literally "welp, I guess they take pleasure in servitude, so it's all good, no need to worry about You're right but for the wrong reason. Mill thought slavery was sometimes okay (as a temporary stage for elevating the inferior peoples) and Bentham (the other major founder of utilitarianism) was an abolitionist. The bit I quoted is literally JS Mill arguing against that logic, though. Encouraging nobility (which includes "not being human tractors") in our fellow man is desirable, and arguably morally obligated. "Noble" pleasures are qualitatively better than "baser" ones. Of course this has all kinds of colonial, cultural, and classist garbage associated but that's what happens when rich 19th century white men talk about How Things Should Be. Hobo By Design fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Oct 25, 2014 |
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Oct 25, 2014 20:12
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"Pleasure" in servitude or slavery was pretty much a non-option for Mill. He was an "everyone works the bare minimum required, so everyone eats and everyone has time to relax and enjoy themselves" kinda guy. Think of that weird "origin story" for the Ubuntu OS where the anthropologist tries to have a footrace for school children in Africa with a basket of sweets going to the winner, and all the kids lock hands to make sure that they all cross the finish line at the same time so they all get the prize, and you have what Mill's utilitarianism is supposed to look like. Not that Yudkowsky cares about historical Utilitarianism... JS Mill "The Negro Question" posted:Work, I imagine, is not a good in itself. There is nothing laudable in work for work’s sake. To work voluntarily for a worthy object is laudable; but what constitutes a worthy object? On this matter, the oracle of which your contributor is the prophet has never yet been prevailed on to declare itself. He revolves in an eternal circle round the idea of work, as if turning up the earth, or driving a shuttle or a quill, were ends in themselves, and the ends of human existence. Yet, even in the case of the most sublime service to humanity, it is not because it is work that it is worthy; the worth lies in the service itself, and in the will to render it—the noble feelings of which it is the fruit; and if the nobleness of will is proved by other evidence than work, as for instance by danger or sacrifice, there is the same worthness. While we talk only of work, and not of its object, we are far from the root of the matter; or if it may be called the root, it is a root without flower or fruit.
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Oct 25, 2014 20:26
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That's somewhat more communist than I remember Mill being taught to me. Certainly fair, though.
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Oct 25, 2014 20:33
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I just realized that this effectively arguing for this as a serious branch of science.
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Oct 26, 2014 00:35
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I'm no mathologist but is there some fundamental detail of very large integers that make them different from more modest ones? My understanding was that 8732597295729385729358729037293857927852^07234298732 + 8732895723010192001325235^39921 is fundamentally the same sort of a thing as 8 + 6, it just takes longer to tote up the figures.
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Oct 26, 2014 00:46
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That's because they are. Big integers are fundamentally as boring as small integers, which is why you can iterate over an infinity of them so trivially easily that first-semester STEM students do it as homework. Large primes are interesting, but hardly anything else. There's no reason to "research" them at all.
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Oct 26, 2014 00:54
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Nessus posted:I'm no mathologist but is there some fundamental detail of very large integers that make them different from more modest ones? My understanding was that 8732597295729385729358729037293857927852^07234298732 + 8732895723010192001325235^39921 is fundamentally the same sort of a thing as 8 + 6, it just takes longer to tote up the figures. There is not, no. I mean, there's some funny things that emerge involving large numbers. Graham's Number is the textbook example. A more interesting and more manageable one though, I think, is monstrous moonshine. But in general, no, big numbers are not an end to themselves. They're just really big integers. They're quite possibly the least interesting thing in the universe. Being interested in them is like being the mathematical equivalent of a guy who pops a stiffy everytime he sees a manilla folder.
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Oct 26, 2014 01:07
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When he's talking about 'large' integers, he's talking about integers too large to even represent with their decimal expansion, or with polynomials, or anything else short of recursive algorithms (since he talks about Graham's number as 'tiny'). But your point remains, there's absolutely nothing special about integers just because they're big, or irrationals just because they're infinitely precise, aside from difficulties in representing them. Or maybe he's reaching at a silly "makes u think" point like "if a number has infinite digits, and we can encode anything as a number, then there are numbers that contain the entire universe". But I really like that he doesn't even address hypothesis #1 and just ignores it. Peak Yud on display here: "Hmm, maybe this is useless, or maybe everyone other than me is an idiot. Yeah, definitely the latter."
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Oct 26, 2014 01:11
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Honestly, at this point I think it's just because he's impressed by big things. It seems to be the driving motivation behind everything he does - bigger brain, bigger lifespan, bigger sense of morality... Just taking something and scaling it up beyond the reasonably possible gives him some kind of emotional satisfaction.
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Oct 26, 2014 01:15
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Cardiovorax posted:Honestly, at this point I think it's just because he's impressed by big things. It seems to be the driving motivation behind everything he does - bigger brain, bigger lifespan, bigger sense of morality... Just taking something and scaling it up beyond the reasonably possible gives him some kind of emotional satisfaction. If only there was a word for that. You know, like megalo... something-or-other.
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Oct 26, 2014 01:16
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That's not really what I mean. He's obviously narcissistic as gently caress, but that obsession with grandiosity of scale is separate. Like Sagan's tiny blue speck, except expressed as a fervent desire to be the opposite.
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Oct 26, 2014 01:18
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Moddington posted:But I really like that he doesn't even address hypothesis #1 and just ignores it. Peak Yud on display here: "Hmm, maybe this is useless, or maybe everyone other than me is an idiot. Yeah, definitely the latter." He actually thinks that! All the drat time! He thinks that exact thought so many times he has a special Capitalized Phrase for it: "Civilizational Incompetence", which shows up a dozen times in that blog post. It also kills me that his blog's subtitle is "the strange and vast thoughts of Eliezer Yudkowsky". Who calls their own thoughts "vast"? Christ, what an rear end in a top hat.
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Oct 26, 2014 01:19
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SolTerrasa posted:It also kills me that his blog's subtitle is "the strange and vast thoughts of Eliezer Yudkowsky". Who calls their own thoughts "vast"? Christ, what an rear end in a top hat.
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Oct 26, 2014 01:22
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Cardiovorax posted:That's somewhat more communist than I remember Mill being taught to me. Certainly fair, though. Well, a bit communist in that they both want a floor of basic human dignity that you can't fall beneath if you are working. The concept of "the working poor" would be utterly abominable to him. Mill also differs from Marx in that he's (Mill) all for you saving your money, building an awesome house, giving it to your kids when you die (after paying inheritance tax), throwing a huge orgy every night, etc. But you're going to build that house yourself. You're going to earn that money yourself. Owning a factory, owning a bunch of slaves who run a plantation for you, owning stock in a bunch of companies overseas that you pay junior employees to manage for you, that's not actually work, and you deserve none of the rewards that might accrue from that effort. By the 1850s he was actually a bit of a socialist, advocating for workers co-ops rather than capitalist run factories, which actually jives pretty well with his distrust of top-down government and authoritarianism if you think about it: JS Mill Principles of Political Economy Part IV posted:The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves. Think Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, who is a master craftsman, amazing jazz musician, fantastic hunter, etc. and who genuinely loves what he does, never taking shortcuts or putting in less than 100% on a project he has decided to commit to. His job is a means to an end, something he slouches through. But who also helps people when they ask, and is willing to teach people the skills he knows (even though he grumbles about it). That way they can help themselves and not bother him, a net win for the both of them. This is not to say there aren't flaws in Mill's world view (there most certainly are), but idealistically, this is how he thought the world would work if everyone followed his system.
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Oct 26, 2014 04:06
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Cardiovorax posted:Margaret Atwood would be disappointed to hear that, because she certainly did a very good and critically acclaimed job of it. Yeah, the real problem is that Yudkowsky does no analysis of the rape future at all. He just uses it as a random trait to make the future society quirky and different. But he could have chosen literally any other trait and it would have had the same effect. Even bad sci-fi shows are able to give different races quirks without pulling the rape card: these aliens' political parties are just colors with no ideology at all, those aliens are Chicago-style mobsters, these other aliens speak only in dactylic hexameter and are obsessed with anime. There are ways to make a culture seem different without invoking rape, so why would you pull in rape anyhow when you could have used absolutely anything else just as easily? It's the same thing with torture. There's nothing inherently wrong with discussing torture. But when your first reaction to every topic is a gleeful "And think of how much torture could be done with this!", as Yudkowsky does, it raises eyebrows. (Conway's Game of Life? Let's torture the cells in it somehow! A speck of dust in your eye? You should torture someone for fifty years to prevent it! Artificial intelligence? It's now simulating and about to torture you! God? Torture!) Beyond a certain point, the real question becomes why your mind is so one-track and keeps snapping back to torture all the time. And the answer would be "fetish probably" even if he weren't also openly a sadist who likes master/slave relationships.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:17
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Yeah, the real problem is that Yudkowsky does no analysis of the rape future at all. He just uses it as a random trait to make the future society quirky and different. But he could have chosen literally any other trait and it would have had the same effect. Even bad sci-fi shows are able to give different races quirks without pulling the rape card: these aliens' political parties are just colors with no ideology at all, those aliens are Chicago-style mobsters, these other aliens speak only in dactylic hexameter and are obsessed with anime. There are ways to make a culture seem different without invoking rape, so why would you pull in rape anyhow when you could have used absolutely anything else just as easily? When I got to the rape bit in Baby-Eaters my immediate thought was "Oh-ho! I see what you did there! You've made this future society as morally repellent to us as the aliens are. What a clever way to confront me with the challenge of moral relativism" Then it turns out to be none of that. Fucks sake.
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