Coins are easier to model quasi-deterministically than humans, is the point Jonnan was making. [ I don't think they [Jonnan] realize how many people miss this fact. ]
Well, we're assuming Omega wants more money rather than less, aren't we?
If it's sufficiently omniscient to predict us, a much more complicated type of thing than a coin, what reason would it have to ever flip a physically fair coin which would come up heads?
I don't think the vast majority of people in this comments section realize coins aren't inherently random.
the human-created source code must be defining a learning algorithm of some sort. And then that learning algorithm will figure out for itself that tires are usually black etc. Might this learning algorithm be simple and legible? Yes! But that was true for GPT-3 too
Simple first-order learning algorithms have types of patterns they recognize, and meta-learning algorithms also have types of patterns they like.
In order to make a friendly or aligned AI, we will have to have some insight into what types of patterns we are going to have it recognize, and separately what types of things it is going to like or find salient.
There was a simple calculation protocol which generated GPT-3. The part that was not simple was translating that into predicting its preferences or perceptual landscape, and hence what it would do after it was turned on. And if you can't predict how a parameter will respond to input, you can't architect it one-shot.
I'm laboriously manually Google-translating Lorenz's Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels from 1935, since I haven't been able to find an existing English translation of the complete work and don't have reliable OCR.
Rewarding passage [ boldface mine ]:
In contrast to these individually directed eliciting schemas, the innate ones are built into a complete, species-specific functional plan from the outset, in which it is determined in advance which characteristics are essential. Therefore, it only corresponds to the principle of parsimony if as few characteristics as possible are included in the eliciting schemas. For the sea urchin Sphaerechinus, it is sufficient if its exceptionally highly specialized combined flight and defense reaction against its main enemy, the starfish Asterias, is triggered by a single, specific chemical stimulus emanating from this starfish. Such triggering of a highly motorically complex behavior adapted to a very specific biological process by a single stimulus, or at least by a series of reactions, is characteristic. One would initially expect that in higher animals, to which we must necessarily attribute a material-objective grasp of the environment based on their other behavior, the object of all instinctual behaviors would also be firmly grasped. This would be considered particularly likely where a conspecific represents the object of the action. Strangely, however, a material identity of the conspecific across multiple functional circuits cannot be demonstrated in very many cases. I believe I can offer an explanation for why the subjective identity of the conspecific as an object of various functional circuits is even less of a biological necessity than that of other instinctual objects.
Even in the highest vertebrates, an object-directed instinctual sequence of actions is often triggered by a very small selection of the stimuli emanating from its object, not by its overall material image. When several functional circuits have the same object as their object, it can happen that each of these circuits responds to entirely different stimuli emanating from the same object. The innate triggering schema of an instinctual action selects, so to speak, a small selection from the abundance of stimuli emanating from its object, to which it selectively responds, thus initiating the action. The simplicity of these innate triggering schemas of different instinctual actions can result in two of them not sharing a single stimulus data that triggers their response, even though they are directed at the same object. Normally, the species-specific object sends all stimuli belonging to both schemas together. In experiments, however, the triggering schemas, which precisely because of their great simplicity can often be triggered by artificially presenting appropriate stimulus combinations, can be triggered by two different objects, thus achieving a separation of the two functional circuits directed at one object. Conversely, for the same reasons, one object can trigger two opposing, biologically meaningful reactions only with two separate objects. This is particularly common in those instinctual actions whose object is a conspecific. For example, in various species of ducks, the mother's defensive reaction can also be triggered by the cry for help of young of different species. Other caretaking reactions, on the other hand, are highly species-specific and tied to very specific coloration and marking patterns on the head and back of the offspring. Thus, it is understandable if a mallard leading her young courageously rescues a Turk's chick calling for help from danger and, in the next moment, due to the lack of the mallard-specific head and back markings that trigger further care, "unspecifically fusses" at it, i.e., attacks and kills it as a "foreign animal near its own chicks."
Re '?' react:
As I’ve increasingly noticed of late, and contrary to beliefs earlier in my career about the psychological unity of humankind [ inline link mine ], not all human beings have all the human emotions. The logic of sexual reproduction makes it unlikely that anyone will have a new complex piece of mental machinery that nobody else has… but absences of complex machinery aren’t just possible; they’re amazingly common.
[ . . . ]
If you’re not around people who talk explicitly about the possibility of asexuality, you might not even realize you’re asexual and that there is a distinct “sexual attraction” emotion you are missing, just like some people with congenital anosmia never realize that they don’t have a sense of smell.
Many people seem to be the equivalent of asexual with respect to the emotion of status regulation—myself among them.
[ — Inadequate Equilibria ]
[ earlier Facebook post introducing status-blindness concept ]
I knew you had to have some kind of magic-related rationalization for the PG-motivated preemptive redaction of Quirrell's sexuality back in 2009 before you knew ace people existed, but WoG-ing that after you learn ace people actually exist and didn't do anything wrong to be like this, doesn't feel like the move.
Possibly relatedly, can you speak on why you deleted your old "Headcanon accepted" comment under Harry Potter and the Methods of Catgirls?
1
1When visual inputs are fed into the auditory cortices of infant ferrets, those auditory cortices develop into functional visual systems.
This does not mean the auditory cortex is forming anything like the map the visual cortex would have formed, given "the same" inputs. This is not important for determining whether the cortex is, in some sense, equipotent in quantity compute per surface area, but it is important for determining whether the cortex is uniform.
for example, cats exposed only to horizontal edges early in life don’t have the ability to discern vertical edges later in life. This suggests that our capacities for sensory processing stem from some sort of general-purpose data processing, rather than innate machinery handed to us by evolution.
The brain is very plastic early in life, in the sense that axons which are not receiving feedback from Neuron X can simply physically reroute and terminate on Neuron Y instead -- which is why occipital-lobe injuries that would result in large permanent blind spots in adults do not have the same effect on young children. However, I doubt that, e.g., the auditory cortices of the aforementioned ferrets, were simply "reprogrammed" to do the same kind of horizontal/vertical edge detection that infant mammals learn to do natively. In general, if you can block it during infant development and the adult can't recover it, it's nature, not nurture.
There’s a man who had the entire left half of his brain removed when he was 5, who has above-average intelligence, and went on to graduate college and maintain steady employment.
Split-brain miracles are up to the aforementioned child plasticity plus the fact that, generally, the cortical hemispheres are symmetrically duplicated in function like the lungs. People can also survive well after the removal of 1 lung, even though the remaining lung can't change or adapt in any way [ except maybe passively hypertrophying ] to "take over" the function of the missing lung. Removing a child's entire [ occipital / orbitofrontal / temporal ] cortex -- even if you rerouted the relevant sensory input elsewhere -- would have devastating effects on cognition/personality that could not be recovered by the remaining cortical areas, just like adult injury.
Update: The new GP took one look in my ear and said, and I quote, "You have a lot of . . . infection!"
And was baffled that urgent care hadn't given me antibiotics.
I imagine it had gotten significantly worse over those few days [ it had subjectively ], as I hadn't been able to stay supplied with garlic.
I'm now on doxycycline 200mg/day; Google says ear infections are usually caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, and that this strain in America is resistant to tetracyclines around 1/5 of the time. But new GP said if it didn't work to come back and he'd try something else.
So barring further complications I seem to finally be in the clear.
New doc has been in the area for a while but doesn't look/talk like he's from around here; I would hazard a guess that's why he was a lucky roll.
In the rate-limiting resource, housing, the poor have indeed gotten poorer. Treating USD as a wealth primitive [ not to mention treating "demand" as a game-theoretic primitive ] is an economist-brained error.