Search Ideas

This seems more like a specific implementation of #3782 than a standalone criticism.

Deutsch’s stance in my own words:

The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. All progress comes from the search for good explanations. So the distinction between good vs bad explanations is epistemologically fundamental.

A good explanation is hard to vary “while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary.) A bad explanation is easy to vary.

For example, the Persephone myth as an explanation of the seasons is easy to change without impacting its ability to explain the seasons. You could arbitrarily replace Persephone and other characters and the explanation would still ‘work’. The axis-tilt explanation of the earth, on the other hand, is hard to change without breaking it. You can’t just replace the axis with something else, say.

The quality of a theory is a matter of degrees. The harder it is to change a theory, the better that theory is. When deciding which explanation to adopt, we should “choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.” (BoI chapter 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)

Deutsch should instead name some examples the reader would find easier to disagree with, and then walk them through why some explanations are harder to vary than others.

This is solved by actively doing some visible stuff you'd want to do anyway as an AGI researcher.

I don’t know what kind of phone you use, but iPhone keyboards have support for multiple languages. You can switch between them. Should make false autocorrects rarer.

I don’t know what kind of phone you use, but iPhone keyboards have support for multiple languages. You can switch between them. Should make false autocorrects rarer.

Humans use flight-related words even though we can’t fly. From ChatGPT:

• Elevated (thinking, mood, language)
• High-level (ideas, overview)
• Soar (ambitions, prices, imagination)
• Take off (projects, careers)
• Grounded (arguments, people)
• Up in the air (uncertain)
• Overview (“over-see” from above)
• Perspective (originally spatial vantage point)
• Lofty (ideals, goals)
• Aboveboard (open, visible)
• Rise / fall (status, power, ideas)
• Sky-high (expectations, costs)
• Aerial view (conceptual overview)
• Head in the clouds (impractical thinking)

I think that depends on the "embodiment" of the AGI; that is, what it's like to be that AGI and how its normal world appears.

Yeah maybe but again (#3693), those are parochial factors, starting points. Ideas are more important. AGI could just switch bodies rapidly anyway.

So to train an AGI, I would think it's more useful for that AGI to leverage the salient aspects that are pre-given.

You don’t “train” an AGI any more than you’d “train” a child. We’re not talking about dogs here.

2) Skepticism is too different from fallibilism to consider it a continuation.

I don’t think so, for two reasons. 1) Skepticism came long before Popper’s fallibilism.

One rule of thumb financial advisors have told me in the past is to have enough cash on hand to last at least six months without an income.

If you don’t, quitting your job right now could be a bad idea, and your first priority should be to build enough runway.

(This is not financial advice – follow at your own risk.)

You’re young. Now’s the time to take (educated, calculated) risks. Even if quitting turns out to be a mistake, you have all the time in the world to correct the mistake and recover. You can always find some day job somewhere. But you may not always be able to pursue your passion.

You describe your job as “excruciating”. That’s reason to quit.

No, see #3706. I’m open to user input (within reason). That covers creative parts. The non-creative parts can be automated by definition.

Deutsch should instead name some examples the reader would easier to disagree with, and then walk them through why some explanations are harder to vary than others.

A heuristic or heuristic technique (problem solving, mental shortcut, rule of thumb) is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless "good enough" as an approximation or attribute substitution.

None of this means a heuristic couldn’t be programmed. On the contrary, heuristics sound easier to program than full-fledged, ‘proper’ algorithms.

I’d be happy to see some pseudo-code that uses workarounds/heuristics. That’d be a fine starting point.

Maybe Deutsch just means hard to vary as a heuristic, not as a full-fledged decision-making algorithm.

Deutsch should instead name some examples the reader would easier to disagree with, and then walk them through why some explanations are harder to vary than others.

Persephone vs axis tilt is low-hanging fruit. The reader finds it easy to disagree with the Persephone myth and easy to agree with the axis tilt, from cultural background alone. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything to hard to vary.

Read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. That should give you some fuel to move forward.

If that’s too long, watch ‘The Simplest Thing in the World’

You’re right, my mistake.

Getting ideas to jibe/cohere seems like a more and more fundamental idea the more I think about it.

Agreed. There’s more to it than meets the eye. For example, maybe capitalism can be thought of as society-wide common-preference finding (#3013). Rationality might work the same way across minds as it does within a single mind. Capitalism as an expression of rationality in society.

As for virtues, I think some virtues are more fundamental than others. There are some virtues I think people should adopt. Like, rationality depends on them. But the core functionality of the mind as a whole does not. There’s a difference between creativity and rationality. Which virtues someone adopts and why and how they prioritize them in different situations is downstream of creativity as a whole.

I don’t know if activating higher virtues always resolves conflicts between ideas. But it could put them on hold for a while, yeah. If I see a venomous snake, my main priority is to get to safety (life as the ultimate value, as objectivists would say).

Or is the answer simply to apply the same process of critical examination to everything that arises, until a coherent path emerges?

Yeah, I think so.

If you have an unconcious idea that gives rise to a conflicting feeling for instance, how do you critisize a feeling?

For example, you could observe that you’re feeling sad even though only good things have been happening to you. So the sadness doesn’t make sense (at least on the surface). And then you can introspect from there.

mye

How does this happen? (Not a metaphorical question.)