KnaveOfAllTrades

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Years ago, before I had come across many of the power tools in statistics, information theory, algorithmics, decision theory, or the Sequences, I was very confused by the concept of intelligence. Like many, I was inclined to reify it as some mysterious, effectively-supernatural force that tilted success at problem-solving in various domains towards the 'intelligent', and which occupied a scale imperfectly captured by measures such as IQ. Realising that 'intelligence' (as a ranking of agents or as a scale) was a lossy compression of an infinity of statements about the relative success of different agents in various situations was part of dissolving the confusion; the reason that those called 'intelligent' or 'skillful' succeeded more often was that there were underlying processes that had a greater average tendency to output success, and that greater average success caused the application of the labels. Any agent can be made to lose by an adversarial environment. But for a fixed set of environments, there might be some types of decision processes that do relatively well over that set of environments than other processes, and one can quantify this relative success in any number of ways. It's almost embarrassing to write that since put that way, it's obvious. But it still seems to me that intelligence is reified (for example, look at most discussions about IQ), and the same basic mistake is made in other contexts, e.g. the commonly-held teleological approach to physical and mental diseases or 'conditions', in which the label is treated as if—by some force of supernatural linguistic determinism—it *causes* the condition, rather than the symptoms of the condition, in their presentation, causing the application of the labels. Or how a label like 'human biological sex' is treated as if it is a true binary distinction that carves reality at the joints and exerts magical causal power over the characteristics of humans, when it is really a fuzzy dividing 'line' in the spac

47Jul 13, 2014

KnaveOfAllTrades

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Meetup : Bath, UK: Agreement, practical meetups, and report from last meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Bath, UK: Agreement, practical meetups, and report from last meetup WHEN: 02 November 2014 02:00:00PM (+0000) WHERE: 5-10 James St W, Avon, Bath BA1 2BX Bath, UK will be having its second meetup this Sunday 2nd November at 14:00 in the King of Wessex,...

Oct 30, 20145

Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook

Discussion article for the meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook WHEN: 19 October 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100) WHERE: 5-10 James St W, Avon, Bath BA1 2BX I'll be hosting a meetup for Bath, UK on Sunday 19th October at 14:00. The meetup will be held at the King of Wessex, which...

Oct 10, 20145

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Related to: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided There is a well-known fable which runs thus: “Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked 'Oh,...

Sep 2, 201431

Anthropics doesn't explain why the Cold War stayed Cold

(Epistemic status: There are some lines of argument that I haven’t even started here, which potentially defeat the thesis advocated here. I don’t go into them because this is already too long or I can’t explain them adequately without derailing the main thesis. Similarly some continuations of chains of argument...

Aug 20, 201412

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

Edit: This post is obsoleted by this post; please see that one instead. MIRI are currently holding a donation-matching challenge, until Friday 15th August. You can donate and track its progress by going to the Donations page. Also, to quote the MIRI Facebook page: > Stellar, a long awaited new...

Aug 3, 201417

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Jul 13, 201447

Stock phrases

‘Stock phrases’, in the sense I am using it here, refers to established phrases (in the more common, more specific sense), noises, gestures, etc.; they form a canon of well-known signifiers for messages one might want to convey, like the verbalisation ‘I am happy’, or the gesture of nodding in...

Apr 6, 20146

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KnaveOfAllTrades

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Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

KnaveOfAllTrades

Meetup : Bath, UK: Agreement, practical meetups, and report from last meetup

Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Anthropics doesn't explain why the Cold War stayed Cold

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Stock phrases

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

Meetup : Bath, UK: Agreement, practical meetups, and report from last meetup

Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Anthropics doesn't explain why the Cold War stayed Cold

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Stock phrases

KnaveOfAllTrades

KnaveOfAllTrades

KnaveOfAllTrades

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate *for free*

KnaveOfAllTrades

Meetup : Bath, UK: Agreement, practical meetups, and report from last meetup

Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Anthropics doesn't explain why the Cold War stayed Cold

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate *for free*

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Stock phrases

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate *for free*

Meetup : Bath, UK: Agreement, practical meetups, and report from last meetup

Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook

Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes

Anthropics doesn't explain why the Cold War stayed Cold

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate *for free*

Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept

Stock phrases

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free

MIRI 2014 Summer Matching Challenge and one-off opportunity to donate for free