Search Ideas

But then the ease with which a criticism could be varied might have no effect on its parent. So why even bother having a notion of ‘easiness to vary’ at that point?

Even so, if a criticism gets score -10, that will push the parent theory’s score above 0.

Large overlap with idea #3783 – effectively a duplicate. You could revise that idea to include finding “a much better job that allows you the energy for research.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Or it might, who knows? An AGI, just like humans, would move around in the world and discover that metaphors are useful, so it might as well use spatial metaphors. If it did, that would be due to convergent evolution of ideas. And even if it didn’t, that could just be because the ideas didn’t converge, not because AGIs don’t have brains.

Deutsch leaves open whether ‘difficulty to vary’ is a relative scale or an absolute one.

Do I need at least two explanations to know whether one is harder to vary than the other? Or can I tell, with only a single explanation, how hard it is to vary on its own?

Choosing between explanations “according to how good they are” is vague. If I have three explanations, A, B, and C, and A is better than B is better than C, does that mean I adopt only A and reject both B and C? I assume so, but I don’t think Deutsch ever says anywhere.

The quoted statement is also compatible with adopting A with strong conviction, B with medium conviction (as a backup or something), and only slightly adopting C (if it’s still good, just not as good as the others) or rejecting C slightly (if it’s a little bad) or rejecting it very strongly (if it’s really bad).