Does anyone here know of (or would be willing to offer) funding for creating
experimental visualization tools?
I’ve been working on a program which I think has a lot of potential, but it’s
the sort of thing where I expect it to be most powerful in the context of
“accidental” discoveries made while playing with it (see e.g. early use of the
microscope, etc.).
1
2Prometheus3d
The following is a conversation between myself in 2022, and a newer version of
me earlier this year.
On the Nature of Intelligence and its "True Name":
2022 Me: This has become less obvious to me as I’ve tried to gain a better
understanding of what general intelligence is. Until recently, I always made the
assumption that intelligence and agency were the same thing. But General
Intelligence, or G, might not be agentic. Agents that behave like RLs may only
be narrow forms of intelligence, without generalizability. G might be something
closer to a simulator. From my very naive perception of neuroscience, it could
be that we (our intelligence) is not agentic, but just simulates agents. In this
situation, the prefrontal cortex not only runs simulations to predict its next
sensory input, but might also run simulations to predict inputs from other parts
of the brain. In this scenario, “desire” or “goals”, might be simulations to
better predict narrowly-intelligent agentic optimizers. Though the simulator
might be myopic, I think this prediction model allows for non-myopic behavior,
in a similar way GPT has non-myopic behavior, despite only trying to predict the
next token (it has an understanding of where a future word “should” be within
the context of a sentence, paragraph, or story). I think this model of G allows
for the appearance of intelligent goal-seeking behavior, long-term planning, and
self-awareness. I have yet to find another model for G that allows for all
three. The True Name of G might be Algorithm Optimized To Reduce Predictive
Loss.
2023 Me: interesting, me’22, but let me ask you something: you seem to think
this majestic ‘G’ is something humans have, but other species do not, and then
name the True Name of ‘G’ to be Algorithm Optimized To Reduce Predictive Loss.
Do you *really* think other animals don’t do this? How long is a cat going to
survive if it can’t predict where it’s going to land? Or where the mouse’s path
trajectory is heading? Did you th
2devansh3d
(I promised I'd publish this last night no matter what state it was in, and then
didn't get very far before the deadline. I will go back and edit and improve it
later.)
I feel like I keep, over and over, hearing a complaint from people who get most
of their information about college admissions from WhatsApp groups or their
parents’ friends or a certain extraordinarily pervasive subreddit (you all know
what I’m talking about). Something like “College admissions is ridiculous! Look
at this person, who was top of his math class and took 10 AP classes and started
lots of clubs, he didn’t get into a single Ivy, he’s going to UCLA!” I think the
closest allegory I can find for this is something like “look at this guy, he’s 7
feet tall, didn’t even make it to the NBA!” There’s something important that
they’re both missing, some fundamental confusion of a tiny part of the overall
metric from reality.
2riceissa4d
I used to have a model of breathing that went something like this: when
breathing in, the lungs somehow get bigger, creating lower air pressure inside
the lungs causing air to flow in. Then when breathing out the lungs get smaller,
creating higher air pressure inside the lungs and causing air to flow out. How
do the lungs get bigger and smaller? Eventually I learned that there's a muscle
called the diaphragm that is attached to the bottom of the lungs (??) that pulls
or pushes the lungs. If I keep my nose plugged but my mouth open, the air will
travel through my mouth. If I keep my mouth closed but my nose open, the air
will travel through my nostrils. So far, so good.
Then a few days ago, I noticed that if I keep both my nose and mouth open, I
could choose to breathe in solely through one or the other. This... doesn't make
sense, according to the model. The model would predict that the air just flows
through both pathways, maybe preferentially going through the mouth since that
seems like the larger pathway.
So something is clearly wrong with how I think about breathing. Is there some
sort of further switch inside that blocks one of the pathways? Does the nose or
the mouth contain variable-size cavities that can control air pressure to direct
the flow? I still have no idea. I'm eventually going to look it up, but I might
think about this for a little bit longer (or maybe someone here will tell me).
I thought this was a pretty interesting example of how the explanations you hear
about seemingly-basic things are easy to accept but don't make sense on further
reflection. But it's hard to notice the flaw too. In my case, after a recent ENT
visit where I was told my nasal passages are inflamed, I've been putting more
effort into consciously breathing through my nose. Then one day I woke up and as
soon as I woke up I did something like consciously breathe through my nose with
mouth closed, and then somehow I opened my mouth but then still tried to breathe
through my n