trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Principles of Disagreement
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-06-02T07:04:12.000Z

Followup to: The Rhythm of Disagreement

At the age of 15, a year before I knew what a "Singularity" was, I had learned about evolutionary psychology. Even from that beginning, it was apparent to me that people talked about
"disagreement" as a matter of tribal status, processing it with the
part of their brain that assessed people's standing in the tribe. The
peculiar indignation of "How dare you disagree with Einstein?" has its
origins here: Even if the disagreer is wrong, we wouldn't apply the
same emotions to an ordinary math error like "How dare you write a
formula that makes e equal to 1.718?"

At the age of 15, being a Traditional Rationalist, and
never having heard of Aumann or Bayes, I thought the obvious answer
was, "Entirely disregard people's authority and pay attention to the
arguments. Only arguments count."

Ha ha! How naive.

I can't say that this principle never served my younger self wrong.

I can't even say that the principle gets you as close as possible to the truth.

I doubt I ever really clung to that principle in
practice. In real life, I judged my authorities with care then, just
as I do now...

But my efforts to follow that principle, made
me stronger. They focused my attention upon arguments; believing in
authority does not make you stronger. The principle gave me freedom to
find a better way, which I eventually did, though I wandered at first.

Yet both of these benefits were pragmatic and
long-term, not immediate and epistemic. And you cannot say, "I will
disagree today, even though I'm probably wrong, because it will help me
find the truth later." Then you are trying to doublethink. If you know today that you are probably wrong, you must abandon the belief today.
Period. No cleverness. Always use your truth-finding skills
at their full immediate strength, or you have abandoned something
more important than any other benefit you will be offered; you have
abandoned the truth.

So today, I sometimes accept things on authority, because my best guess is that they are really truly true in real life, and no other criterion gets a vote.

But always in the back of my mind is that childhood
principle, directing my attention to the arguments as well, reminding
me that you gain no strength from...
The Rhythm of Disagreement
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-06-01T20:18:25.000Z

Followup to: A Premature Word on AI, The Modesty Argument

Once, during the year I was working with Marcello, I passed by a math book he was reading, left open on the table. One formula caught my eye (why?); and I thought for a moment and said, "This... doesn't look like it can be right..."

Then we had to prove it couldn't be right.

Why prove it? It looked wrong; why take the time for proof?

Because it was in a math book. By presumption, when someone publishes a book, they run it past some editors and double-check their own work; then all the readers get a chance to check it, too. There might have been something we missed.

But in this case, there wasn't. It was a misprinted standard formula, off by one.

I once found an error in Judea Pearl's Causality - not just a misprint, but an actual error invalidating a conclusion in the text. I double and triple-checked, the best I was able, and then sent an email to Pearl describing what I thought the error was, and what I thought was the correct answer. Pearl confirmed the error, but he said my answer wasn't right either, for reasons I didn't understand and that I'd have to have gone back and done some rereading and analysis to follow. I had other stuff to do at the time, unfortunately, and couldn't expend the energy. And by the time Pearl posted an expanded explanation to the website, I'd forgotten the original details of the problem... Okay, so my improved answer was wrong.

Why take Pearl's word for it? He'd gotten the original problem wrong, and I'd caught him on it - why trust his second thought over mine?

Because he was frikkin' Judea Pearl. I mean, come on! I might dare to
write Pearl with an error, when I could understand the error well enough
that it would have seemed certain, if not for the disagreement. But it didn't seem likely that Pearl would concentrate his alerted awareness on the problem, warned of the mistake, and get it wrong twice. If I didn't understand Pearl's answer, that was my problem, not his. Unless I chose to expend however much work was required to understand it, I had to assume he was right this time. Not just as a matter of fairness, but of probability - that, in the real world, Pearl's answer really was right.

In IEEE Spectrum's sad little attempt at Singularity coverage, one br...
A Premature Word on AI
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-31T17:48:46.000Z

Followup to: A.I. Old-Timers, Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?

In response to Robin Hanson's post on the disillusionment of old-time AI researchers such as Roger Schank, I thought I'd post a few premature words on AI, even though I'm not really ready to do so:

Anyway:

I never expected AI to be easy. I went into the AI field because I thought it was world-crackingly important, and I was willing to work on it if it took the rest of my whole life, even though it looked incredibly difficult.

I've noticed that folks who actively work on Artificial General Intelligence, seem to have started out thinking the problem was much easier than it first appeared to me.

In retrospect, if I had not thought that the AGI problem was worth a hundred and fifty thousand human lives per day - that's what I thought in the beginning - then I would not have challenged it; I would have run away and hid like a scared rabbit. Everything I now know about how to not panic in the face of difficult problems, I learned from tackling AGI, and later, the superproblem of Friendly AI, because running away wasn't an option.

Try telling one of these AGI folks about Friendly AI, and they reel back, surprised, and immediately say, "But that would be too difficult!" In short, they have the same run-away reflex as anyone else, but AGI has not activated it. (FAI does.)

Roger Schank is not necessarily in this class, please note. Most of the people currently wandering around in the AGI Dungeon are those too blind to see the warning signs, the skulls on spikes, the flaming pits. But e.g. John McCarthy is a warrior of a different sort; he ventured into the AI Dungeon before it was known to be difficult. I find that in terms of raw formidability, the warriors who first stumbled across the Dungeon, impress me rather more than most of the modern explorers - the first explorers were not self-selected for folly. But alas, their weapons tend to be extremely obsolete.

There are many ways to run away from difficult problems. Some of them are exceedingly subtle.

What makes a problem seem impossible? That no avenue of success is available to mind. What makes a problem seem scary? That you don't know what to do next.

Let's say that the problem of creating a general intelligence seems scary, because you have no idea how to do it.You could run aw...
Class Project
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-31T00:23:01.000Z

"Do as well as Einstein?" Jeffreyssai said, incredulously. "Just as well as Einstein? Albert Einstein was a great scientist of his era, but that was his era, not this one! Einstein did not comprehend the Bayesian methods; he lived before the cognitive biases were discovered; he had no scientific grasp of his own thought processes. Einstein spoke nonsense of an impersonal God—which tells you how well he understood the rhythm of reason, to discard it outside his own field! He was too caught up in the drama of rejecting his era's quantum mechanics to actually fix it. And while I grant that Einstein reasoned cleanly in the matter of General Relativity—barring that matter of the cosmological constant—he took ten years to do it. Too slow!"

"Too slow?" repeated Taji incredulously.

"Too slow! If Einstein were in this classroom now, rather than Earth of the negative first century, I would rap his knuckles! You will not try to do as well as Einstein! You will aspire to do BETTER than Einstein or you may as well not bother!"

Jeffreyssai shook his head. "Well, I've given you enough hints. It is time to test your skills. Now, I know that the other beisutsukai don't think much of my class projects..." Jeffreyssai paused significantly.

Brennan inwardly sighed. He'd heard this line many times before, in the Bardic Conspiracy, the Competitive Conspiracy: The other teachers think my assignments are too easy, you should be grateful, followed by some ridiculously difficult task—

"They say," Jeffreyssai said, "that my projects are too hard; insanely hard; that they pass from the realm of madness into the realm of Sparta; that Laplace himself would catch on fire; they accuse me of trying to tear apart my students' souls—"

Oh, crap.

"But there is a reason," Jeffreyssai said, "why many of my students have achieved great things; and by that I do not mean high rank in the Bayesian Conspiracy. I expected much of them, and they came to expect much of themselves. So..."

Jeffreyssai took a moment to look over his increasingly disturbed students, "Here is your assignment. Of quantum mechanics, and General Relativity, you have been told. This is the limit of Eld science, and hence, the limit of public knowledge. The five of you, working on your own, are to produce the correct theory of quantum gravity. Your time limit is one month."

"What?" said Brennan, Taji, Styrlyn, and Yin...
Einstein's Superpowers
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-30T06:40:55.000Z

There is a widespread tendency to talk (and think) as if Einstein, Newton, and similar historical figures had superpowers—something magical, something sacred, something beyond the mundane. (Remember, there are many more ways to worship a thing than lighting candles around its altar.)

Once I unthinkingly thought this way too, with respect to Einstein in particular, until reading Julian Barbour's The End of Time cured me of it.

Barbour laid out the history of anti-epiphenomenal physics and Mach's Principle; he described the historical controversies that predated Mach—all this that stood behind Einstein and was known to Einstein, when Einstein tackled his problem...

And maybe I'm just imagining things—reading too much of myself into Barbour's book—but I thought I heard Barbour very quietly shouting, coded between the polite lines:

What Einstein did isn't magic, people! If you all just looked at how he actually did it, instead of falling to your knees and worshiping him, maybe then you'd be able to do it too!

(EDIT March 2013: Barbour did not actually say this. It does not appear in the book text. It is not a Julian Barbour quote and should not be attributed to him. Thank you.)

Maybe I'm mistaken, or extrapolating too far... but I kinda suspect that Barbour once tried to explain to people how you move further along Einstein's direction to get timeless physics; and they sniffed scornfully and said, "Oh, you think you're Einstein, do you?"

John Baez's Crackpot Index, item 18:

10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

Item 30:

30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.

Barbour never bothers to compare himself to Einstein, of course; nor does he ever appeal to Einstein in support of timeless physics. I mention these items on the Crackpot Index by way of showing how many people compare themselves to Einstein, and what society generally thinks of them.

The crackpot sees Einstein as something magical, so they compare themselves to Einstein by way of praising themselves as magical; they think Einstein had superpowers and they think they have superpowers, hence the comparison.

But it is just the other side of the same...
Timeless Causality
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-29T06:45:33.000Z

Followup to: Timeless Physics

Julian Barbour believes that each configuration, each individual point in configuration space, corresponds individually to an experienced Now—that each instantaneous time-slice of a brain is the carrier of a subjective experience.

On this point, I take it upon myself to disagree with Barbour.

There is a timeless formulation of causality, known to Bayesians, which may glue configurations together even in a timeless universe. Barbour may not have studied this; it is not widely studied.

Such causal links could be required for "computation" and "consciousness"—whatever those are. If so, we would not be forced to conclude that a single configuration, encoding a brain frozen in time, can be the bearer of an instantaneous experience. We could throw out time, and keep the concept of causal computation.

There is an old saying: "Correlation does not imply causation." I don't know if this is my own thought, or something I remember hearing, but on seeing this saying, a phrase ran through my mind: If correlation does not imply causation, what does?

Suppose I'm at the top of a canyon, near a pile of heavy rocks. I throw a rock over the side, and a few seconds later, I hear a crash. I do this again and again, and it seems that the rock-throw, and the crash, tend to correlate; to occur in the presence of each other. Perhaps the sound of the crash is causing me to throw a rock off the cliff? But no, this seems unlikely, for then an effect would have to precede its cause. It seems more likely that throwing the rock off the cliff is causing the crash. If, on the other hand, someone observed me on the cliff, and saw a flash of light, and then immediately afterward saw me throw a rock off the cliff, they would suspect that flashes of light caused me to throw rocks.

Perhaps correlation, plus time, can suggest a direction of causality?

But we just threw out time.

You see the problem here.

Once, sophisticated statisticians believed this problem was unsolvable. Many thought it was unsolvable even with time. Time-symmetrical laws of physics didn't seem to leave room for asymmetrical causality. And in statistics, nobody thought there was any way to define causality. They could measure correlation, and that was enough. Causality was declared dead, ...
Timeless Beauty
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-28T04:32:00.000Z

Followup to: Timeless Physics

One of the great surprises of humanity's early study of physics was that there were universal laws, that the heavens were governed by the same order as the Earth: Laws that hold in all times, in all places, without known exception. Sometimes we discover a seeming exception to the old law, like Mercury's precession, but soon it turns out to perfectly obey a still deeper law, that once again is universal as far as the eye can see.

Every known law of fundamental physics is perfectly global. We know no law of fundamental physics that applies on Tuesdays but not Wednesdays, or that applies in the Northern hemisphere but not the Southern.

In classical physics, the laws are universal; but there are also other entities that are neither perfectly global nor perfectly local. Like the case I discussed yesterday, of an entity called "the lamp" where "the lamp" is OFF at 7:00am but ON at 7:02am; the lamp entity extends through time, and has different values at different times. The little billiard balls are like that in classical physics; a classical billiard ball is (alleged to be) a fundamentally existent entity, but it has a world-line, not a world-point.

In timeless physics, everything that exists is either perfectly global or perfectly local. The laws are perfectly global. The configurations are perfectly local—every possible arrangement of particles has a single complex amplitude assigned to it, which never changes from one time to another. Each configuration only affects, and is affected by, its immediate neighbors. Each actually existent thing is perfectly unique, as a mathematical entity.

Newton, first to combine the Heavens and the Earth with a truly universal generalization, saw a clockwork universe of moving billiard balls and their world-lines, governed by perfect exceptionless laws. Newton was the first to look upon a greater beauty than any mere religion had ever dreamed.

But the beauty of classical physics doesn't begin to compare to the beauty of timeless quantum physics.

Timeful quantum physics is pretty, but it's not all that much prettier than classical physics. In timeful physics the "same configuration" can still have different values at different times, its own little world-line, like a lamp switching from OFF to ON. There's that ugly t complicating the equations.

You ...
Timeless Physics
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-27T09:09:22.000Z

Previously in series: Relative Configuration Space

Warning: The central idea in today's post is taken seriously by serious physicists; but it is not experimentally proven and is not taught as standard physics.

Today's post draws heavily on the work of the physicist Julian Barbour, and contains diagrams stolen and/or modified from his book "The End of Time". However, some of the arguments here are of my own devising, and Barbour might(?) not agree with them.

I shall begin by asking a incredibly deep question:

What time is it?

If you have the excellent habit of giving obvious answers to obvious questions, you will answer, "It is now 7:30pm [or whatever]."

How do you know?

"I know because I looked at the clock on my computer monitor."

Well, suppose I hacked into your computer and changed the clock. Would it then be a different time?

"No," you reply.

How do you know?

"Because I once used the 'Set Date and Time' facility on my computer to try and make it be the 22nd century, but it didn't work."

Ah. And how do you know that it didn't work?

"Because," you say, "I looked outside, and the buildings were still made of brick and wood and steel, rather than having been replaced by the gleaming crystal of diamondoid nanotechnological constructions; and gasoline was still only $4/gallon."

You have... interesting... expectations for the 22nd century; but let's not go into that. Suppose I replaced the buildings outside your home with confections of crystal, and raised the price of gas; then would it be 100 years later?

"No," you say, "I could look up at the night sky, and see the planets in roughly the same position as yesterday's night; with a powerful telescope I could measure the positions of the stars as they very slowly drift, relative to the Sun, and observe the rotation of distant galaxies. In these ways I would know exactly how much time had passed, no matter what you did here on Earth."

Ah. And suppose I snapped my fingers and caused all the stars and galaxies to move into the appropriate positions for 2108?

"You'd be arrested for violating the laws of physics."

But suppose I did it anyway.

"Then, still, 100 years would not have passed."

How would you know they had not passed?

"Because I would remember that, one night before, it had still been 2008. Though, realistically speaking, I would think it more likely that it was ...
Relative Configuration Space
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-26T09:25:01.000Z

Previously in series: Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics
Followup to: Classical Configuration Spaces

Warning: The ideas in today's post are taken seriously by serious physicists, but they are not experimentally proven and are not taught as standard physics.

Today's post draws on the work of the physicist Julian Barbour, and contains diagrams stolen and/or modified from his book "The End of Time".

Previously, we saw Mach's idea (following in the earlier path of Leibniz) that inertia is resistance to relative motion. So that, if the whole universe was rotating, it would drag the inertial frame along with it. From the perspective of General Relativity, the rotating matter would generate gravitational waves.

All right: It's possible that you can't tell if the universe is rotating, because the laws of gravitation may be set up to make it look the same either way. But even if this turns out to be the case, it may not yet seem impossible to imagine that things could have been otherwise.

To expose Mach's Principle directly, we turn to Julian Barbour.

The diagrams that follow are stolen from Julian Barbour's The End of Time. I'd forgotten what an amazing book this was, or I would have stolen diagrams from it earlier to explain configuration space. Anyone interested in the nature of reality must read this book. Anyone interested in understanding modern quantum mechanics should read this book. "Must" and "should" are defined as in RFC 2119.

Suppose that we have three particles, A, B, and C, on a 2-dimensional plane; and suppose that these are the only 3 particles in the universe.

Let there be a classical configuration space which describes the 2D positions of A, B, and C. 3 classical 2D particles require a 6-dimensional configuration space.

If your monitor cannot display 6-dimensional space, I've set a 2D projection of a 3D cube to appear instead. If you see what looks like a window into an incomprehensible void, try using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

The thing about this 6-dimensional cube, is that it contains too much information. By looking at an exact point in this cube—supposedly corresponding to an exact state of reality—we can read off information that A, B, and C will never be able to observe.

The point (0, 1, 3, 4, 2, 5) corresponds to A at (0, 1), B at (3, 4),...
A Broken Koan
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2008-05-24T19:04:45.000Z

At Baycon today and tomorrow. Physics series resumes tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here's a link to a page of Broken Koans and other Zen debris I ran across, which should amuse fans of ancient Eastern wisdom; and a koan of my own:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving."

The other said, "The wind is moving."

Julian Barbour happened to be passing by. He told them, "Not the wind, not the flag."

The first monk said, "Is the mind moving?"

Barbour replied, "Not even mind is moving."

The second monk said, "Is time moving?"

Barbour said, "There is no time. You could say that it is mu-ving."

"Then why do we think that flags flap, and wind blows, and minds change, and time moves?" inquired the first monk.

Barbour thought, and said, "Because you remember."