Antisuji — LessWrong

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Replying toHow much do we know about creativity?

First of all, I can highly recommend Nachmanovitch's Free Play. It's at the very least thought-provoking and entertaining—whether it helps you be more creative is harder to tell. I got a bit of milage creativitywise out of Comedy Writing Secrets, which I hear is well-regarded among professional humor writers. I wasn't very diligent about the exercises, or I might have gotten more out of it.

Regarding LW-like thought and creativity, I'm reading through Minsky's Society of Mind and the Puzzle Principle section talks about machines and creativity:

Many people reason that machines do only what they're programmed to do — and hence can never be creative or original. The trouble is that this argument

Antisuji11y

[Link]: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

Syntactically it's quite a bit better than an N-gram markov chain: it gets indentation exactly right, it balances parentheses, braces, and comment start/end markers, delimits strings with quotation marks, and so on. You're right that it's no better than a markov chain at understanding the "code" it's producing, at least at the level a human programmer does.

Replying to[Link]: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

Antisuji11y

[Link]: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

Discussion on Hacker News. Definitely an interesting article, very readable and (to me) entertaining. But I agree with interstice that it doesn't say much about strong AI.

Replying toAre consequentialism and deontology not even wrong?

Antisuji11y

Are consequentialism and deontology not even wrong?

Yes and no. Morality is certainly less fundamental than physics, but I would argue no less real a concept than "breakfast" or "love," and has enough coherence – thingness – to be useful to try to outline and reason about.

The central feature of morality that needs explaining, as I understand it, is how certain behaviors or decisions make you feel in relation to how other people feel about your behaviors. Which is not something you have full control over. It is a distributed cognitive algorithm, a mechanism for directing social behavior through the sharing of affective judgements.

I'll attempt to make this more concrete. Actions that are morally prohibited have consequences, both in... (read more)

[Link] Small-game fallacies: a Problem for Prediction Markets

Antisuji

11y

Nick Szabo writes about the dangers of taking assumptions that are valid in small, self-contained games and applying them to larger, real-world "games," a practice he calls a small-game fallacy.

Interactions between small games and large games infect most works of game theory, and much of microeconomics, often rendering such analyses useless or worse than useless as a guide for how the "players" will behave in real circumstances. These fallacies tend to be particularly egregious when "economic imperialists" try to apply the techniques of economics to domains beyond the traditional efficient-markets domain of economics, attempting to bring economic theory to bear to describe law, politics, security protocols, or a wide variety of other

Antisuji11y

Effective effective altruism: Get $400 off your next charity donation

In my experience, micro optimizations like these represent yet another thing to keep track of. The upside is pretty small, while the potential downside (forget to cancel a card?) is larger. If you're ok with paying the attentional overhead or it's a source of entertainment, go for it.

Personally I'd rather use a standard rewards card (mine is 1.5% cash), not have to think about it, and spend my limited cognitive resources on doing well at my job, looking out for new opportunities with large upsides, working on side projects, or networking.

Replying toRequest for Intelligence Philosophy Essay Topic Suggestions

Antisuji11y

Request for Intelligence Philosophy Essay Topic Suggestions

That's interesting, because to me it read more like "I'm going to write something interesting about anything you like, do some research for you, and even share the results" and "as long as I have to do this assignment I might as well make it useful to someone" but maybe that's because I recognized the poster's name, read his blog, etc.

I can see how someone might interpret it this way, though.

Replying toBragging Thread March 2015

Antisuji11y

Bragging Thread March 2015

Not something I actually did last month, since I wrote the piece two years ago, but it feels like it since that's when the validation arrived. A blog post of mine hit /r/basicincome and then /r/futurism, which are sitting at ~470 (98% positive) and ~1080 (92% positive) votes respectively, and found its way to hacker news. Some of the discussion is pretty good. The relevant quote:

"Let us keep in mind how poorly we treat those who cannot currently contribute to society. Sooner or later we will have to face this question: how do we define personal worth in a world where most people have no economic value?"

The actual accomplishment of the month is a post on Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form, which won't be as big a hit, and I'm ok with that.

[Link] YC President Sam Altman: The Software Revolution

Antisuji

11y

Writing about technological revolutions, Y Combinator president Sam Altman warns about the dangers of AI and bioengineering (discussion on Hacker News):

Two of the biggest risks I see emerging from the software revolution—AI and synthetic biology—may put tremendous capability to cause harm in the hands of small groups, or even individuals.

I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get. If we can synthesize new diseases, maybe we can synthesize vaccines. If we can make a bad AI, maybe we can make a good AI

Antisuji11y

Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015

Schmidhuber's formulation of curiosity and interestingness as a (possibly the) human learning algorithm. Now when someone says "that's interesting" I gain information about the situation, where previously I interpreted it purely as an expression of an emotion. I still see it primarily about emotion, but now understand the whys of the emotional response: it's what (part of) our learning algorithm feels like from the inside.

There are some interesting signaling implications as well.

Replying toOpen thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015

Antisuji11y

Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015

This, I assume? (It took me a few tries to find it since first I typed in the name wrong and then it turns out it's "Wardley" with an 'a'.) Is the video on that page a good introduction?

Replying toProgramming-like activities?

Antisuji11y

Programming-like activities?

Networking.

[LINK] How Long Does Habit Formation Take?

Antisuji

12y

I ran across this bit of pop-sci (a review of Jeremy Dean's Making Habits, Breaking Habits), which claims that habits typically take around 66 days to form, not the 21 days that self-help articles tend to cite. The somewhat surprising thing to me, on reflection, was how readily I'd taken the 21-day statistic as fact. From the article:

When he became interested in how long it takes for us to form or change a habit, psychologist Jeremy Dean found himself bombarded with the same magic answer from popular psychology websites and advice columns: 21 days. And yet, strangely — or perhaps predictably, for the internet — this

... (read 399 more words →)

Interactive Infographic on Simpson's Paradox

Antisuji

12y

Since Simpson's Paradox has been discussed here recently (and not so recently), I thought I'd share this interactive¹ infographic that I found via the FlowingData blog. I already understood Simpson's Paradox pretty well, but playing with the sliders helped me get a more intuitive feel for it.

I expect similar tools would be helpful for explaining Bayes' Theorem and some of the other things we talk about on LW (like Pareto efficiency and Nash equilibria). Do such things exist?

¹ The interactive part is farther down the page.

Stats Advice on a New N-back Game

Antisuji

13y

Cross-posted to my blog. I expect this will be of some interest to the LessWrong community both because of previous interest in N-back and because of the opportunity to apply Bayesian statistics to a real-world problem. The main reason I'm writing this article is to get feedback on my approach and to ask for help in the areas where I'm stuck. For some background, I'm a software developer who's been working in games for 7+ years and recently left my corporate job to work on this project full-time.

As I mentioned here and here, since early February I've been working on an N-back-like mobile game. I plan to release for iOS this summer and for Android a few months later... (read 857 more words →)

[LINK] "Moral Machines" article in the New Yorker links to SI paper

Antisuji

13y

Link

Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.
That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.

The discussion itself is mainly concerned... (read more)