Search Ideas

(1) During the entire 5 seconds, your mind renders the image of the apple.

“What do people misunderstand most about crystal meth addiction?” https://www.quora.com/What-do-people-misunderstand-most-about-crystal-meth-addiction/answer/Notmy-Realname-133

Interesting read.

A discussion can get long even if each criticism is concise.

Someone who recently joined made a bunch of low-quality posts in a short amount of time.

why?

A discussion needs to be more skimmable via one or both of these:
1. hide long posts behind "read more" button
2. collapse critique chains/threads behind a "reply more" button

The UI needs to be more minimalistic. Too many buttons to click on. Needs clear primary action on every screen.

Need summaries at top of discussions. Could be AI generated.

Making a Minecraft clone with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmPfBODGuw&list=PLBGDngphGY_2ZC8eNc39yPxfc_RZDtQSN

Criticized per #4718: AIs are not "narrowly creative"; there is only creativity in the binary, universal sense, per Deutsch.

This highlights the core mystery of AGI/creativity: if it is the creation of something which cannot be deduced from existing rules (yet is still helpful, hard-to-vary, knowledge-bearing, etc.), how can it be programmed? In a sense it cannot, as Deutsch writes: "...what distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techniques that suffice for writing any other type of program." [https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence]

If the human made Move 37 for the same reason as AlphaGo, it would not be creative. Such moves are creative when humans make them because they are not deducing them (they can't due to practical limitations). If something can be deduced, it is not creative. Creativity is the conjecture of a new structure which is not derivable/deducible/implicit via existing rules of inference. All AI-generated art is implicit in the training data and model design in the same sense, so is not being made via creativity.

Move 37 was not new knowledge. It was the winning choice in that situation before the AI ever existed, because it was deducible from the game's rules and the current board state. It was implicit knowledge, already contained in the system at that time. AlphaGo made it explicit, by finding it, like a search engine, but did not create it. If you calculate the trillionth digit of pi, you haven't created new knowledge, at least not in any sense we should mean. You have simply revealed a value that was already fixed by a definition.

The fact that Move 37 wasn't explicitly in the training data or the programmers is irrelevant to its status as knowledge. This is true for pi, and for all content created by AI at the time of this writing.

Move 37 was not explicitly present in the training data, nor designed by the programmers, and is extremely hard to vary (Deutsch's criterion for good explanations). Was the move present implicitly in the design of the system and/or the training data? Or inexplicitly? Do either of these mean the discovery of the move was non-creative?

If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?

To arrive at that conclusion, you’d first need some counter-criticism anyway.

Just how ‘tiny’ is a criticism then? By reference to what principle or measure?

To incorporate some notion of decisiveness or severity, we need to be prepared to program that into our decision-making tool. I’m not aware that anyone knows how to programmatically determine the severity or decisiveness of a criticism, and I suspect outsourcing it to the user would result in the same unintended behavior we saw with the sliders for hard to vary.

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.

As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something all involved parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

Limitations

I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.

Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction. I also claim that curing addictions of the mind is an epistemological matter, not a medical/scientific one.

Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds. So that scenario reduces to a conflict of preferences inside a single mind.

Be sure to mention the title of your book so others can look it up :)

Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment.

The trouble with ‘consciously deciding’ to do something in any case is that the conscious parts of your mind may be on board but other parts may not. But that discrepancy itself need not be entrenched.

If you feel bad when you force yourself to stop doing something, you might feel bad because of the force, not because of the habit. My guess is they’re thinking more in terms of static memes.

The part about entrenched habits gets pretty close, though it doesn’t say much about the nature of the entrenchment or how to solve it.

By this standard, a random number generator has universal creativity as well, and is therefore a person. So there must be a standard for personhood other than: able to generate any possible explanation. Such as: can do that tractably.