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foodforthought
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I am a scientist by vocation (and also by profession), in particular a biologist. Entangled with this calling is an equally deep interest in epistemology (specifically the warrant of inductive inference). The kinds of scientific explanations I find satisfying are quantitative (often statistical) models or theories that parsimoniously account for empirical biological observations in normative (functional, teleological) terms.  

My degrees (BS, PhD) are in biology but my background is interdisciplinary, including also philosophy, psychology, mathematics/statistics, and computer science/machine learning.  For the last few decades I have been researching the neurobiology of sensory perception, decision-making, and value-based choice in animals (including humans) and in models.  

Now and then I get fascinated by something that isn't obviously related to my existing domain, sometimes leading to semi-expertise and/or semi-professional activity in seemingly random other domains, and occasionally leading to an outright career change.  At the moment that topic I’m fascinated by is AI-alignment, which brings me here.

I consider myself a visitor to your forum, in that my context is mainly from without. 

Social media are anathema to me, but this forum seems to be an outlier.

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2foodforthought's Shortform
1mo
1
10a quick thought about AI alignment
16d
4
2foodforthought's Shortform
1mo
1
40HRT in Menopause: A candidate for a case study of epistemology in epidemiology, statistics & medicine
3mo
2
Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
foodforthought3h20

pertinent analysis from Rand Institute:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/external_publications/EP70594.html 

“At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, human society itself was subject to a kind of penetration test: COVID-19. The virus, an unthinking adversary, probed the world's ability to defend against new pathogens. And by the end of the test, it was clear that humanity had failed.”

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Experiment: Test your priors on Bernoulli processes.
foodforthought7d10

To clarify, the ground truth P(R) is constrained to be constant over the 5 trials of any given experiment? 

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Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries?
Answer by foodforthoughtOct 11, 202550

My immediate thought is McClintock's transposable elements. AFAICT, this has only been mentioned by AI-generated lists in this thread, so to fill in a bit more for anyone who doesn't know the story: in the 1940s, McClintock observed genetic and cytological evidence from crosses of corn plants, which she argued could best be explained by assuming certain genetic elements routinely change their position in the genetic map, often breaking other genes when they insert, and restoring those genes again when they excise. For context, the discovery that genes had fixed positions on linear genetic maps that were collinear with chromosomes was still relatively new (1913), and the field of genetics was largely consumed by the job of determining these maps. Her interpretation was therefore very much against the current, and it was mostly dismissed and derided. But she was right. It wasn't until molecular biology confirmed their existence in the 60s-70s that transposable elements ("jumping genes") became widely accepted. She got the Nobel Prize for her discovery over four decades after she made it. 

I take it the reason for asking for such case studies is that singular discoveries can be exceptionally impactful, so it would be good to enrich for them. Therefore it's of interest to ask what happened to McClintock in the intervening decades. My understanding is that she was able to continue her work the entire time, despite the skepticism of the field, due entirely to the Carnegie Institute. Carnegie Institute created a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor Lab specifically for her, freeing her from teaching and administrative obligations, but more importantly, shielding her from the need for peer acceptance of her ideas (peer-reviewed grants, peer-reviewed papers). Importantly they backed her permanently and unconditionally, so that she was completely free to pursue whatever drove her curiosity, regardless of anyone else's opinion, even theirs. 

This highlights the huge impact a private benefactor (individual or institution) can have by backing individual innovators. The trick is how to figure out who is worth backing. It's only impactful if one ignores or even actively anti-correlates with the usual metrics that academia rewards; but some or even most marginalized mavericks are in fact crackpots, so anticorrelating isn't enough. One has to be confident in positively judging people or ideas to be worthwhile, without relying on evaluations by leaders and experts.

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a quick thought about AI alignment
foodforthought15d20

useful, thanks 

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a quick thought about AI alignment
foodforthought15d21

thanks for the term for this and the link

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Contra Shrimp Welfare.
foodforthought1mo12

Even if shrimp consciously experience pain or suffering, my question is, why do we think electrocution is more humane than freezing?

The idea of freezing to death sounds horrible because we are warm-blooded animals. In cold blooded animals, cooling gradually slows metabolism inducing torpor. I would have thought for a shrimp, ice slurry immersion would be a gentle method of putting them under anesthesia; sounds like that takes a minute. Do they behaviorally indicate pain or aversion?  I’m more surprised that an ice slurry kills them. Apparently pink shrimp (the kind people eat) thrive best in ocean waters between 0-8C and have been found living in -2C waters (wikipedia).

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Obligated to Respond
foodforthought1mo44

(I think part of why this goes squirrelly, in practice, is that it’s easy for a certain type of person to feel like they’re engaging in a purely one-on-one interaction, in places like Facebook or Twitter or LessWrong or wherever. Like, if one is already a pays-less-attention-to-the-audience type Pokémon to begin with, then it’s easy for the audience to fall completely out of your thoughts as you tunnel-vision on the person you’re directly responding to. But I sort of can’t ever not-notice the other monkeys watching.)

This post in general, and this comment especially, was helpful in clarifying for me why I hate social media so much. (This forum being an exception).  It seems to me that people are much less rational when arguing on social media than they are in a private one-on-one conversations, because they can't help noticing the other monkeys watching -- even if they claim the contrary. This pertains to the obligation-to-respond case and a much wider set of dynamics. 

The more aggressive-seeming sorts may honestly believe they are just purists for truth and socially oblivious. For some, this may be true. But more often I notice an interesting pattern: in public online discussions, their arguments are littered with subtle rhetorical devices (argumentum ad hominem, ad populum, ad ridiculum, ad verecundium, etc.) (in english: glib, snarky, pontificating, witty banter, etc.) -- none of which are aimed at helpfully updating their own or the other person's worldview, and rather seem to be aimed at playing to the audience. Tellingly, this dimension often disappears when same person is in a one-on-one conversation, even on the identical disagreement with the same 'opponent'. The same person can be much more constructive, rational, curious, open-minded, willing to concede uncertainty, etc. when the other monkeys aren't watching.  It is also vastly more epistemically efficient to communicate, figure out common ground, and distill differences in one-on-one conversations, without the distraction of tracking what the audience might know/think as well.  

So I'm a big advocate of this: as soon as people realize they substantively disagree, assuming everyone's real motivation is to figure out what is actually true (or at least that's the motivation we all wish to honor),  work it out in a one-on-one conversation.  You might reach agreement, or reach clarity about the root disagreement. One or the other party might decide the whole question is not that important, or other person isn't arguing in good faith, or whatever, and can choose to abandon the conversation at any time -- without worrying about how that will be perceived.   In the end, if either of you think the conversation was constructive, you can always write up a distillation of the useful bits for a wider audience. (Co-authoring a disagreement distillation seems like a genre we should especially encourage).

But while you are doing hard intellectual and perhaps emotional work of wrangling with a disagreement, having an audience is generally not helpful, and often gets in the way. 

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foodforthought's Shortform
foodforthought1mo50

PSA for people who are interested in nutrition and health, and frustrated by the level of BS in the media surrounding these topics: I find the Nutrition Diva podcast to be exceptionally objective and rational. It’s my go to place to check for an informed take on any nutrition claim or question. She does the work of looking up and reading the original research articles, checking if the experiment is well-designed, inference valid, and if the data actually support the claims, a task I normally don’t have time for myself. She is unusually clear on epistemic status (for example, distinguishing between evidence of absence and absence of evidence; articulating uncertainty rather than burying it).  And she doesn’t seem to shy away from taking unpopular stands, if that’s where the data land.

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Most People Start With The Same Few Bad Ideas
foodforthought1mo40

More generally, in the very early phase of discovery in any field, when nobody has any idea what is going to turn out to be true or fruitful, insiders of a field tend to get bogged down because they have an overly correlated set of ideas. Not only the main ideas (like hypotheses, in science) but also concepts, tools, approaches, analogies, aesthetic preferences, and background knowledge.  So a vast effort gets allocated to a tiny corner of the potential search space.  This is why cross disciplinary transplants can make outsized contributions.  

This is in tension with expertise. Amateurs and beginners by definition lack a lot of existing knowledge. This is a blessing, because they don’t “know” things all the experts “know” incorrectly,  and a curse because they also don’t “know” things all the experts know correctly. In a decently rigorous and otherwise productive field, most of what experts know is in the latter category[1].   

This leads me to a speculation: the optimal way to tap the potential contributions of field-outsiders is to pair them up with experts, or integrate them into teams of experts. That is a big investment and commitment on both parts, so a prior vetting / recruitment step is needed.

As a first step you can invite such people to participate in high level, big picture conversations on a one time or short term basis. The interaction group has to be big enough that it can accommodate a couple of wild cards, but small enough that it won’t be a huge drag on the experts to have to constantly explain basic things. That said, asking experts to explain things in plain language which they all take for granted as obvious, is often the value added. 

The outsider has to be the right sort, though. Smart enough to pick up new ideas quickly; confident enough to ask “dumb” questions or speak up in general;  articulate enough to explain their ideas to people outside their own domain of expertise; enough social intelligence to notice when it’s a good time to pipe up vs be quiet, and capacity to self-regulate accordingly.  And it takes a certain kind of creativity to be good at recognizing unseen connections or implications. 

It isn’t necessarily obvious which other disciplines have the sauce that is missing. Physics and Philosophy are often good bets. But here’s a speculation: anyone who is a seasoned expert in any completely different but rigorous and successful domain is a good bet.  (Young folks with a few years in another strong discipline also make great trainees. People who are long-established in a field that is mostly bankrupt are less likely to help than any random person on the street). 

So if you are running a workshop or conference or symposium that is not too big, where many of the participants are high-level experts within Alignment, and most others are coming up from within the field,  consider allocating a significant budget (in terms of  limited attendee slots) to inviting relatively senior people from other disciplines. Worst case, they are lost or bored or contribute useless ideas, and one slot was wasted for a few days. But if they engage well, you have a lot of information about their potential to contribute as a member of a team (hire them, collaborate, invite them to more things), and they have a lot of information about how exciting and important that might be.

Here’s the rub: people who are that senior and that good are busy and get a lot if invitations, and are selective about which to accept. So you may need to make a strong pitch explaining why alignment is an important problem and why you think their particular expertise would be valuable. The low hanging fruit is therefore to invite ones who have already expressed an interest, however tentatively. Invite pretty much all of those.

Disclosure 1: these observations are supported by my reading of history of science, my own experience switching fields, and experience in a leadership role promoting interdisciplinary collaboration in another fledgling research area.

Disclosure 2: these comments are potentially self-serving,  speaking as a relatively senior member of an outside discipline who is interested in engaging with the alignment community, but not finding opportunities to engage at this sort of level, despite the widely professed value placed on diverse perspectives.

  1. ^

    By the same token, the outsider brings with them a lot of other background knowledge, in quantity proportional to their maturity in the previous field, which is correct in proportion of the rigor of the previous field, and non-overlapping in proportion to the distance of the previous field.

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Why Artists Study Anatomy
foodforthought2mo*10

Great post. I would have liked to see the images in this post but the links all appear to be broken. If the OP is here could you repair the links?

Based on the text alone, this strikes me as right on the mark. 

An interesting bit of history: the New York Academy (which still exists, in another form) was back in the 1980s an unaccredited graduate school and the premiere training ground for classical figurative drawing and sculpture, which were otherwise in much neglect in the Art World. From what I have heard (second-hand), there were two competing schools within the Academy at the time, one group favoring "perceptual" drawing (essentially the skill of copying a 2D image, or seeing a model as a 2D image and then drawing what you literally see); and the other favoring "conceptual" drawing, the skill of understanding how objects in three-dimensional world generate the two-dimensional projection we see, and then drawing from an understanding of that underlying cause. I think the perceptual approach is typical of photo-realist painters (and most present day portrait artists), and the conceptual approach was typical of Renaissance painters.

An anecdote I love that illustrates the contrast is: apparently one day when the class was drawing a long pose the model took a break, and when she came back the pose was slightly different such that all the shadows changed. The Perceptual students complained, whereas a Conceptual student countered: actually we should change the lights every 15 minutes. Then we can see what is actually there, and draw it from a better understanding.

For an example of what drawing looks like when approached conceptually, see the drawings of Luca Cambiaso (1527-1585). (This is not an artwork; it is a conceptual study done to figure out the scene 3-dimensionally in preparation for a classical renaissance drawing or painting).
Fighting Figures by Luca Cambiaso 

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